Minnov8

Unless you’ve been living under a rock in 2008, you’re likely aware that social media use is exploding, as are the number of companies and organizations wanting to market to we users. But both our use of the dizzying array of social media services out there, as well as the tools and solutions for companies to use to manage their brands, connections to people and communication with them, are remarkably crude at this point.

One key trend Minnov8 is closely tracking in 2009 — especially when it comes to Minnesota startups or companies involved in it — is in the area of social media aggregation along with social marketing, analytics and communication extensions to existing products and services.

If you’re one of the accelerating number of people that are always-on, always-connected, and  participating all over the ‘net — or are an organization trying to figure out how to get online, be socially connected, and in a position to build an audience, community or ecosystem surrounding the space in which you’re involved — than trying to ‘herd the cats’ and get them to behave (either your social media participation with your digital stuff left all over the place, or a company trying to figure out how to reach influencers in some given category and reach out to them while measuring the impact of their effort) is an incredible challenge and coordinating and orchestrating either of them seems impossible!

The good news? Many of you reading this are already using a wide variety of emerging aggregation tools and you’re trying to figure out what approach works best for you as this space evolves. Minnesota companies, who understand that millions of people participating online is a meaningful place to be as a marketer, are looking at ways in which to herd their cats. Fortunately for both sets of needs, new tools are proliferating and there are many thought leaders working hard on methods to make our use and management of increasing social participation online significantly easier to manage in 2009.

Yahoo's MyBlogLog Service Enables a Participant to Aggregate Multiple Social Media Services

Several developments occurred in 2008, gained traction in 2009, and are poised to make big inroads this year. Ones like OpenID, a “single sign-on” for all of your Web applications, social media sites and social networks are key, but others that are promising to make our social connections more portable are emerging:

• Google’s OpenSocial: A set of common application programming interfaces (APIs) for web-based social networks, so that applications developed using the OpenSocial APIs will be interoperable with any social network system that supports them. Some critics point to the limited adoption so far and its capabilities
• Facebook: They created their own application platform that developers can use and have eschewed the Google OpenSocial approach
• “Friend Connect”: In competition with OpenID, Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect were both introduced to leverage the huge mass of users already using their respective platforms
• DiSO Project: DiSO is a project that today is focused on the WordPress platform, but the people behind it (and many others) understand that, “Social networks are becoming more open, more interconnected, and more distributed. Many of us in the web creation world are embracing and promoting web standards – both client-side and server-side. Microformats, standard APIs, and open-source software are key building blocks of these technologies. This model can be described as having three sides: Information, Identity, and Interaction”
• Cliqset: is “a social development platform designed to enable an open mesh of innovation and creativity across the social web. Acting as the system of record for your social identity, Cliqset empowers developers to build socially aware applications that create, share and define your social data on behalf of you, enabling a social experience unlike anything that exists today“
  
• Open Mesh: Though that title is used in several different contexts, Marc Canter (founder of MacroMind that became Macromedia and now founder of BroadbandMechanics) has a concept of all of the elements that need to come together to form a holistically coordinated and orchestrated mesh of online services. Makes my brain hurt just trying to absorb it though.

Along with infrastructure pieces like those above are hosted Web applications that have positioned themselves as your “social graph aggregator” or what your content participation is being referred to more frequently as: “lifestreaming“. The objective of these applications is to bring together all of your online digital stuff in one place, including your friends stuff, and provide you with better opportunities to connect with others using various social media services that exist today as well as those not yet invented:

• The Flock web browser whose approach is to be a browser-centric aggregator of all your social media services
• Friendfeed and even a Firefox web browser add-on for it called “MySocial 24/7“
• Plurk, who says that they’re, “A really snazzy site that allows you to showcase the events that make up your life, and follow the events of the people that matter to you, in deliciously digestible short messages called plurks“
• SecondBrain: “Secondbrain makes it easy to manage all your social media, bookmarks and files in one place. Organize everything in your library, follow your friends’ updates and discover good content“
• …and many more.

Lastly, on the company-needing-to-connect with social media participants side, we’re seeing an acceleration in analytics tools and, as I suspected last year, a major enterprise-class vendor entering the social media services and analytics space:

• There are several social media analytics startups doing very interesting work and with solid approaches: Collective Intellect; Radian6; Techrigy; ScoutLabs, Visible Technologies, Cymfony, and Keenkong
• Last week, Salesforce.com released their Service Cloud, that has as this stated value proposition, “The Service Cloud is the next-generation platform for customer service. You can tap into the power of customer conversations no matter where they take place. Harness know-how from the right experts, whether they’re on a Web community forum or having a dialog on Facebook. Suddenly, you’re part of those conversations.“  With a relatively inexpensive price and several key features like customer relationship management; campaign management; along with hundreds of 3rd party applications in their AppExchange facilitating bolt-on capabilities that extend the Salesforce platform.

Minnesota companies and startups are also seeing this social media coordination and aggregation trend and are beginning to capitalize upon it:

• Target, General Mills and Best Buy (the latter doing much more with Remix, Giftag and other initiatives) are in the early stages of dabbling in social media
• OnePlace, a team collaboration, project management and personal productivity, recently added Twitter-like communication capabilities called “TeamCentral” for their collaborative offering with significant management capabilities of it
• Cullect, is an offering that helps you find and share the relevant, important stories from your huge array of news and blog feeds. They also created a branded URL shortener for MinnPost, a very important tactical requirement for many social media uses like Twitter requires, enabling MinnPost to make it easier for social media participants to link to their articles
• Tumblon, a site for parents of young children that helps them track their children’s development and, most importantly, understands that giving these parents the power to publish (either private or publicly) through an easy blog publishing for family and friends is an imperative in today’s social sharing world.

You’ll see more and more approaches to leverage all of these infrastructure developments, hone the aggregator/lifestreaming methods, and make it easier to collect and deliver all of your digital breadcrumbs. If you’re a company looking to market to, or connect with, social media participants, the ways to do that with superior analytics tied to campaign and customer relationship management will continue to accelerate and make it simpler to enter and leverage the social media space.

Of course, that doesn’t do anything about you collating and delivering stuff of value that your friend, family or future connections might care about (see my personal post, “It’s the Value, Stupid” for more) or that companies identifying discussions and people using social media — and deciding on how to enter into conversations with them, engage them in crowdsourcing, or build an audience or ecosystem around their company or products — still needs to be done properly, ethically and above-board by organizations using them. But the opportunity will be there and the tools and solutions to do so in a meaningful way will be yours for the asking as they continue to evolve and emerge in 2009.