Facebook As Investment: No Replacement for Facebook But Pureplays Will Fade

Facebook As Investment: No Replacement for Facebook But Pureplays Will FadeFacebook As Investment: No Replacement for Facebook But Pureplays Will Fade shows how the fading importance of social networks is the threat—not competitors. In Part One of the Facebook As Investment trilogy, I argued that Facebook had a signifiant trust gap with users that would inhibit its ability to monetize its most unique and valuable assets, and that the trust gap was recently compounded by its “IPO irregularities.” In Part Two, I’ll take a different tack and analyze the investment prospects of Facebook-the-platform. Part Three advises executives on how to isolate their social business investments from Facebook business risks.

In its favor, Facebook will not have to worry about being “displaced” by another social network the way that it displaced MySpace. In the near term, this lack of competition will give the company some breathing room. However, a more daunting threat awaits, the end of the social network pureplay, but that is 3-5 years out.

Nonetheless, the fate of pureplays should be top-of-mind for serious Facebook investors: to produce the fabulous returns that […]

B2B Executive’s How-to Guide to Social Business

B2B Executive’s How-to Guide to Social BusinessThe B2B Executive’s How-to Guide to Social Business is an executive primer on developing B2B relationships much faster and cheaper.

If you have been on several “social media” platforms as a firm or individual for some time but feel that you’re barely scratching the surface, this guide will help you boost your results significantly because: its goal is to help you develop B2B relationships more efficiently, instead of “selling” yourself and it shows you how to use B2B-oriented platforms in concert to increase leverage. If you would like some background on the profound distinction between “selling” yourself and focusing on relationship, “Social Business Disruption of B2B Sales & Marketing” crystallizes it in 8 minutes.

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WSJ Take on Google+ Epitomizes Market Myopia & Opportunity

WSJ Take on Google Plus Epitomizes Market Myopia and Opportunity reveals how conventional wisdom misunderstands Google+ and how to take advantage of the situation.

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Most people have the whole “web 2.0 thing” sorted out by now. They have accounts in LinkedIn for business, Facebook for personal and Twitter for I-don’t-really-know-but-I’m-on-it. They also know that Google “doesn’t get social” as the search behemoth has littered carcasses of failed ventures around the web.

Alas, as I have argued here and in conference presentations since Google+ launched, this misunderstanding is completely understandable—and wrong. Most interesting here, it elevates opportunities and threats for market participants.

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Google+ Disruptive Potential Reflected by Conference Audiences

Google Plus Disruptive Potential Reflected by Conference AudiencesGoogle Plus Disruptive Potential Reflected by Conference Audiences summarizes insights from audience reactions to Google+ presentations. CSRA launched the Executive’s Guide to Google+ because we thought it had significant disruptive potential for many of our clients, and our recent conference appearances (link to presentation below) have only underlined two of Google+’s unique attractions: your competitors don’t understand it and Google is managing it as a completely different animal, not a social network. Here I’ll share audience reactions to my recent Google+ presentations at public social business conferences and private corporate meetings.

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Using Social Networks for National & Global Recruiting and Sales: Three-Stage Adoption Model

Using Social Networks for Recruiting and Sales shows how firms can increase quality of recruits and sales leads while cutting costs.

Using Social Networks for Recruiting and Sales: Alumni-Driven Adoption ModelSocial networks can help organizations, whether commercial, nonprofit or government, to significantly improve their efficiency in business processes like recruiting, sales and service. This is what we call “Enterprise Process Innovation” because, by using social networks to create and nurture relationships with alumni, your employees can diminish the time required to accomplish tasks within these processes. It’s well known that most alumni, former employees, move to firms that are related to your business (adjacent in the value chain) or complementary in some way. Yes, some move to competitors, but they are usually in the minority. Social networks, by significantly reducing the cost of having relevant, quality conversations, make robust employee-alumni networks actionable as never before.

All organizations (I’ll use “firm” to denote for profit, government and nonprofit) have business processes that benefit from relevant insight and introductions from other people: insight about the situation of the prospect, where the best sources of new […]

Enterprise Adoption of Social Business 2010—Three Technologies to Watch

In this second installment of the Midyear Update, I’ll outline three social technologies that are potential game-changers, and give general guidance for what you can do to evaluate their relevance to your business this year. I’ll decipher them and explain why you need to care about how Geosocial applications are transforming retail, how “federated identity” enables customers to log in to Web 2.0 sites with their Google, Facebook or Twitter credentials and how Web 3.0 slipped in the back door while most executives weren’t looking. [update: the third installment gets personal]

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Are Geosocial Apps Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt & Brightkite Ready for Prime Time?

If your business involves physical locations, geosocial applications represent a tantalizing possibility: people can talk about their presence and experience at one of your locations and, potentially, friends of their friends that have the same interest (or thirst). It adds long tail digital grease to conditions on the ground at a retail location. […]

Web 2.0 Single Sign-on Update: Federating Friends with Facebook Connect and Google Friendconnect

Pithy insights on major Web 2.0 transformation driver: reflecting on the significance of Facebook Connect and Google Friendconnect, which offer Web 2.0 single signon services […]

Social Networking Conference: John Ploumitsakos on Consumer Trends

Google’s John Ploumitsakos discusses marketing and advertising trends among social networks and big brands […]