Viral Social Media Campaigns
Darren Barefoot, Capulet Communications
Methodologies for traffic generation
- Flash embeddable flash games, with editable action script, open source / customisable viral advertising
- Build your social network (e.g.: Corkd) from alpha users, let them use their own workflow services
- Use third party API’s
- Viral video contests
Go where the users are
- Be honest, transparent and authentic
- Humour works – Alanis My Humps parody – coopted the language of the media – and leveraged celebrity
- Microblogging – twitter
- Second life is currently too little return on investment – corps do gain headlines through use, and cost is negligible
- Editable social media returns to Tim Berners Lee’s original concept of web
Voice 2.0
- Hotmail’s use of email sig advertising itself led to massive uptake
- Voice 2.0 services – use network effects, open platforms, mix voice and IP telephony
- Voice 2.0 companies highly nimble, change business plan often
- Old Operators are slow, limited API’s (except BT), hard to integrate
Differences from Traditional telephony services
- People phone people => People phone apps, blogs etc
- 1 to 1 => 1 to many
- Geographically specific => Global services
- Calls happen, then end => Calls live as downloads
- Calls are for talking => Line between call and SMS blurs
Voice 2.0 Services
- Freemium business model – small percentage of users paying for premium service
- most users pay nothing
- Biggest problem is last three feet – need for a headset
- expense, corporate peripheral restrictions and technical ignorance
- Privacy service – hides your real number
- can have multiple numbers
- time limited / disposable numbers
- passes caller ID on
- Configurable ruleset allows only certain calls through
- Jangle reversed – one number redirects to other numbers based on ruleset
- Uses phones as portable microphone for web chat and recording
- Non real time chat
- Super easy podcasting methodology
- Language learner groups spontaneously formed
- Music Industry voice blogging and comments
- Artists / Labels pay to phone in updates from tour etc
- Fans respond with voice comments
- Builds artist communities
- Saynow can also make profit on call ins
- Religious communities using to keep up with congregation
- Voice player catcher widget for social networks
- Banned from myspace
- Preferred voice comment partner with Bebo
- Send voice mails
- Group voice mail, ideal for activity groups – twitter needs groups!
- Receiver end voice mails complicate the equation
- no standard amount of beeps, delay after connection, menu navigation buttons
- pinger attempts to workout if it has connected to voice mail
MySay
- Service run by Rococo
- Similar to pinger – Twitter for voice
- Group voice messages
- Face difficulties with European mobile tariffs (highest in world), voicemail etc
- Twitteresque stream of voice snippets on front page, social elements
- Financed by main Java Bluetooth business
Problems & Goals
- Loss of caller ID on journey through IP networks, SMS delays (up to days), answering services
- Ruby on Rails, allows super quick prototyping (hours not days)
- Goal: Revenue from sponsored content
Panel Discussion
- Irish Elections are organising a blog bar for the elections
- Linking up with bloggers around the country
- Panel is Tom Raftery, Sean O Sullivan, Darren Barefoot, Karlin Lillington (Thanks Damien!)
Rough notes
Q – How to make money from social web?
- Tom – Internal blogs, customer communications, internal wiki’s and podcasts, consultancy!
- Darren – Freemium model
- Karlin – Someone needs to build customisable social apps for premium small / med business users
- Adverts more valuable on top rung sites
- Darren / Sean – Opportunity to simplify implementation for open source software web applications
Q – Getting readership / viewership
- Sean – a blog grows interest in a product or site
- Tom – controversy is a short term viewership spike
- Frequent posting, tagging, link to other sites, read and comment on others, integrate social networks, web2.0 flickr style applications
- quarterly round up of best posts
- Karlin – Be in early, get slashdotted (increases google rank), put up hard to find content
- e.g.: transcripts of Irish TV shows
- not focused on hits – different perspective – rare posts with great interest
- Darren – People can tell if you’re hit fishing. Be original and creative and hits will come
- What about necessity for preexisting celebrity / media crossover
RSS Readers lock in readership and reduce dependence on publishing schedules
- comments are missing
- possibly a needed addition to feed readers
- Darren – long tail of fame
- is fame a finite commodity?
Some users will happily email but never comment
- lack of technical comfort – barriers to entry
- nb: there is no comment link in wordpress – link says No comments or X comments
- fear of privacy
- mental models differ – lay people use anchors to comprehend technical concepts
- may not understand ‘blog’ or ‘comments’, but understand email and web
Recommended book on social media – A Group is it’s own worst enemy – Clay Sharkey
Semantic Web for Social Media Sites
Uldis Bojars, Digital Enterprise Research Institute
Sem web = layer of structure on top of existing web
- Structured data, can be provided from social sites / wiki’s etc and integrated
- easy integation of data – RSS, FOAF
- Resource Description Framework (RDF)
- allows description of objects and their relationships
- subject, predicate, object
SIOC – semantically interlinked online communities
- Online community sites are information rich but disparate & often poorly infexed
- SIOC connects blogs, forums (boardscape, blogosphere equivalent for boards), mailing lists
- Blogs, boards, mailing lists and usenet link via hyperlink or quotes
- SIOC creates metasite – connects multiple accounts, conversations
- Usergroup => user => role
- Post => Forum => Site
- Allows a variety of queries and user interfaces
- Plugin available for wordpress + RDF reader
- SIOC explorer – explore data
- Timeline view of RDF data
- aggregation of posting and commenting identity accross sites and over time
- FOAF systems – similarity to real word relationship maps is determined by structure of community and method of data aquisition
Microformats address singular descriptive task in markup or RDF
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- can find common vocabulary
Provision of false data can distort reputation and create false relationships
- need to rank sources
Google is a machine which grows increasingly efficient at reading human readable text and inferring connections
- SIOC unlike tagging and folksonomies relies on preexisting data structures
Gareth Stack 
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