Know your RSS from your elbow

Adam posted a few days ago about the new Starbucks initiative. An excellent post from Todd Defren highlighted some of the ways in which Starbucks will be gaining even greater customer loyalty from something that I bet some execs inside the company felt was a risky operation. To be fair, given its history and background, Starbucks is perhaps more open to this sort of project than many companies. But there would still have been the ‘wise heads’ warning of doom and destruction as people weighed in with complaints and gripes, moans and abuse.

The plan, of course, is not to encourage new customers directly but, as Todd implies, to increase existing customer loyalty. However, a serious by-product of eliciting comments from your best customers will be a raft of suggestions that will make the ‘product’ more appealing to a wider range of people. So, new customers will arrive and become loyal customers. Try mapping that process out in a spreadsheet for ROI.

I’m not sure why but Starbucks here in the UK is a second best to coffee shops like Costa and Caffe Nero. Most of the Starbucks I visit are soulless, the tables full of used cups and plates, the food unappealing, and, worst of all, the coffee generally tastes weak and has little flavour. I’ll gladly walk another half mile to reach a Costa or Caffe Nero. Both Starbucks and Caffe Nero have recently opened in my high street. The Starbucks had a head start of about three months and was packed every day. Since Caffe Nero opened, Starbucks staff walk the street with free samples to try to get customers to return. Tells you something.

However, it’s not all good news for Caffe Nero. Although I was pleased to see them opening locally, simply from the point of view of coffee quality, I was also keen to use their wi-fi service, which I’ve always been able to use ‘free’ as part of my Skype Zones subscription. Disaster struck, however, when I discovered that they have gone over to the BT enemy. No more cheap and cheerful wi-fi. Why they can’t provide free wi-fi, I don’t know. Buy a Fon, for goodness’ sake.

At the moment, there is no way to let Caffe Nero know how I feel. As a loyal customer, this doesn’t exactly make me feel great. Perhaps if I complain to a barista, I’ll get an extra stamp on my wee loyalty card. Mmm, that should do it.

Starbucks may be losing the coffee taste battle but should they install free wi-fi on the back of their social initiative, I may just have to switch to hot chocolate while working.

We love a good portmanteau, especially when it’s relevant to the web, and even more so when it’s relevant to the web and to businesses working with the web - so you can imagine our satisfaction when we had a whole new word to play with after Inside View announced it’s latest on-line venture - Sales View™.

“Enterprises are inherently social because they are comprised of relationships between employees, and among sales people, customers and partners,” said Rand Schulman, chief marketing officer of InsideView. “As social applications are reaching critical mass both in users and content, it is not a matter of if but when they will mature into becoming a core part of every enterprise application. InsideView recognizes this inevitability by introducing SalesView, the first Socialprise application designed to capture the burgeoning social data inherent within the enterprise.”

Sales View™ will allow CRM (customer relationship management) users to utilize the power of the web to deliver more information about potential customers and sales-leads, scouring blogs, social media applications and the like for the latest customer data.

I can see many businesses donning their trunks to ride this wave over the coming months - unlocking the wealth of information held by the individuals who feed social networking, blog and publish themselves on-line. The power of collaboration for whoever wants to harness it.

‘Socialprise’ represents more than just a catchy, nice-ring-to-it, word-2.0-type phrase - It represents the fact that the web 2.0 and social media applications (like facebook, linkedin, jigsaw) are being leveraged to help businesses of all sizes improve their efficiency, better understand their customer and ultimately, drive profits.

No matter what you call it, businesses embracing the social web is an exciting prospect.

What do you do when you have a spare billion dollars or so in cash and your old business of distributing free drinks coasters has come to a well-documented end? Well, you buy a rising social network, of course.

AOL - the beer-mat makers - announced today that they’re buying Bebo for £417m in cash.

Anyone get the feeling that the words ‘bandwagon’, ‘jump’, and, perhaps ‘last chance’ are relevant here?

Hats off to the Bebo team: they’ve done a great job lifting their network to such a high spot throughout Europe in competition with MySpace et al. Just for the record, my three kids all use Bebo in preference to any other social network. Whether AOL is the best fit to take things into the future is something we’ll just have to wait to find out. If my kids start to notice things working a bit differently as a result of AOL’s involvement, that’s the time to start worrying.

I mentioned Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop site last week. It comes out of beta tomorrow. Mashable’s Kristen Nicole has an interview with Guy, which you can watch on the Mashable site or below. I’m pleased to say that this blog is on the social media page at Alltop, so check it out. And then check out the whole gamut of sites that makes Alltop such a great resource.

The web is a resource that can, at times, seem miraculous in its depth and abundance. Unfortunately, that abundance can also be a major shortcoming for those of us who have to work in human years. More and more ’stuff’ - of quality that ranges from essential to mind-numbingly inconsequential - gets added at a phenomenal rate. We talk a lot about conversations at bpodr but there’s a danger of serious hearing loss unless you know how to tune out the majority of the noise.

Social networks play a crucial role in helping you to focus. Letting recommendations and tips and hints guide you through the web is a constructive way to find the bulk of what you need on any given topic. It’s a two-way street, of course, and your own recommendations help others know what rocks your boat. This is the currency of social networking.

Step one, of course, is finding the people you trust to give you the first recommendations. I like to think that bpodr will serve as a node in your network of trust. One of the things we’re doing is building a blogroll to point you to blogs and experts that we trust in the field of social media. We’ve deliberately not started with a long list of links: over time as Adam and I reference particular blogs in posts we’ll add the link to the blogroll. It’s a bit like building trust slowly.

Each of the blogs we reference, of course, will have their own blogroll and you can happily follow links across the web from there. Or you can always start at ‘the top’ in a category by going to Guy Kawasaki’s new venture Alltop. This does some of the hard work for you by listing the best-read and respected sites on the web for categories ranging from Cars to Music to Politics and, of course, Social Media.

I’ve just added Alltop to our blogroll, too.

Graham has been talking a lot about Social networks lately, and I can see why - it’s a massive part of the Internet’s appeal and a natural extension to how we enjoy interacting in the real world (well, that and the fact that Graham generally has a lot to say anyway). However, what is a Social Network?.

A social network is a collection of individuals who are, in some way, connected to one another. This connection usually takes the form of a current or past friendship, but can also take the form of a shared interest, shared vision, sexual preferences or anything else you care to imagine. The key component to a social network are these connections:

• Any individual can be connected to any number of other individuals,
• New connections can be found easily through existing connections,
• Your connections’ connections (?) can be easily seen.

The concept of Social Networks has been around for a long time, but the Internet has provided us with many powerful tools to connect networks and people far more easily than was ever possible before. The power of a social network is in allowing people to connect very, very easily, and then allowing those people to benefit from their network very, very easily (perhaps by introducing them to new friends, finding potential business opportunities or by finding new people to share and discuss your interests with).

These guys have done a great job of explaining social networks very clearly, it’s worth a quick look.

There are a huge number of social networks which have become very popular for connecting people. Some networks exist to connect people through friendship, other networks connect people through a niche, shared interest. some of the most popular networks are:

• Facebook
• Linkedin
• MySpace
• Bebo
• Twitter

(We’ll be taking a look at these sites in more detail soon. Promise.)

Now, you know where people are hanging out, who they are talking with and what they enjoy talking about. What would you like to talk to them about?

When the Financial Times does social networking, you expect it to do it with flair and a certain panache. However, their release of three ‘Executive Membership‘ forums seems to be taking the idea of niche a little too far. What they’re offering, in fact, is a series of exclusive clubs for high level execs. But at a cost. I don’t know the cost but Mashable is reporting a starting fee of £1700. Per annum. (It’s fair to point out that Mashable are also saying that the site can’t handle Firefox. It looks fine in my Firefox browser, so I assume the FT have fixed this pretty quickly.)

I can’t find any costs mentioned on the site but there is an application form for a brochure, which presumably contains the membership rates. I joined a network that required paid memberships before and left it very quickly. The FT are ladling on the benefits for their members in the three sectors they’ve created but I can’t help but feel dispirited by a network that uses net worth as its entry point. What do you think? Is exclusivity superior to niche? Would you want to be part of a network of financial peers only?

LinkedIn has been busy this week releasing ’stuff’. There was an updated version of their Firefox toolbar, which I installed on Friday, and now there is a mobile service.

The best part of the toolbar for me is the ability to link quickly to the LinkedIn profile of anyone who sends email to my Gmail account. There are other useful elements, of course, and you can find the full specification here.

Now there’s a mobile version of LinkedIn. The best thing about this will be accessing questions and answers on the go. I could also see sending LinkedIn invitations as a new form of exchanging business cards in meetings etc. But whatever works best for you: social networks thrive on the innovation of their users, after all.

The best way to find out about mobile LinkedIn is to point your phone to m.linkedin.com. There’s also a YouTube video from one of the lead engineers at LinkedIn, which I’ve added below. 

Mashable has just carried two stories about Facebook in the UK.

First, Paul Glazowski interprets a Guardian report that Facebook UK usage is in decline as more a reflection of poor stats, combined with winter being less ’sociable’. Facebook has seen some heavy criticism recently but I think it’s too soon to start dancing on its grave. Following on from yesterday’s debate about building or joining social networks, I would expect to see an increase in niche groupings, which may or may not coexist with larger social networks or simply break away. Federated states of social networks, perhaps.

The second Mashable story sees Kristen Nicole describe a new Facebook app called Celebration. This is being launched by Mars UK and will allow users to send each other real bars of chocolate. Well, almost. In a neat solution to privacy issues - and UK postage woes - you actually send points to be redeemed by the recipient.

I think we’ll see more of these marketing drives hitting social networks. Does it cheapen the network? Or do you think it adds value? Let me know in the comments.

Jeremiah Owyang over at the Web Strategy blog has put up a podcast and post discussion here about whether companies should roll their own social networks or exploit an existing application to create a community.

It’s an interesting debate but the conclusion, as you may expect, really comes down to what Chris Heuer of the Conversation Group defines as horses for courses. In other words, it depends…..

The danger is in creating a social network of your own for all the ‘wrong’ reasons but it’s important to remember that those wrong reasons may seem the right reasons to the people making the choices (and paying the money). If there is one guiding principle when it comes to making this choice, I think it has to be: what does your community want? As always, this brings us to the question of listening. Ask them first.