August, 2008

 This week Inc. ranked Duo Consulting number 2748 on its annual ranking of the 5000 fastest-growing private companies in the country. The Inc. 5000 is the most comprehensive look at the most important segment of the economy – independent entrepreneurs.

The 5000 companies that Inc. recognized reported aggregate revenue of $185 billion and median three-year growth of 147%.  Perhaps the statistic we are most pleased to be part of is the one that identifies the 826,033 jobs created since our collective group of companies was founded.

Receiving this placement recognizes Duo Consulting for its solid performance providing web content management and development services. For the past several years, Duo has experienced tremendous growth throughout the entire organization. This is due to our successful execution of complex projects and growing reputation among high visibility leading government and not-for-profit organizations, progressive businesses and professional services firms. In the end, it is our clients success that dictates our own.

Complete results of the Inc. 5000 including company profiles and a list of the fastest-growing companies that can be sorted by industry and region can be found at www.inc5000.com.

It seems like a new social networking site pops up every other day. They aren’t trying to compete with Facebook or MySpace. Instead, these new social networks aim to be the Facebook of their niche. Here are just some of the more recent examples that I’ve come across:

Currently in preview mode, BusinessTravelConnexion.com is American Express Business Travel’s B2B social network for the corporate travel industry. The site will have online discussion boards, hot topic polls, product development councils, blogs, benchmarking ability, and a whole host of other features. Of course, they hope it will be “the Facebook of corporate travel.”

CookEatShare, which just launched publicly in June 2008, calls itself “a Facebook for home cooks and professional chefs.” Besides the obvious function of being a repository for recipes, CookEatShare also lets chefs upload cooking DIY videos, and hopes to foster interaction between home cooks and professional chefs. While it sounds promising, there already are many well-established cooking/recipe sites. It seems that the ability to interact with professional chefs will be a key differentiator – time will tell if the chefs actually want to interact too.

The most high profile new niche social network so far has to be SportsFanLive, started by a former CBS and Yahoo! Media executive. Although it is targeted at super-passionate sports fans, the site will not just be a general place for sports fanatics to meet each other. Instead, each user can customize SportsFanLive to feature his/her favorite team. FanFeed allows fans of the same teams to share articles with each other, while users will be able to find out if anyone is congregating at the local pub to watch a game with FanFinder. Skeptics say the market for sports sites is already saturated, while others think this may be, yup, the Facebook of sports fans.

From a consumer’s point of view, I think social network fatigue is definitely kicking in. Even with niche social networks that target specific interests, there’s only a certain number of social networks you can join before you burn out. And even if you do join 15, or just 5, social networks, how active can you really be on each one? The value that these social networks add to users’ lives has to be so great that they will be willing to go through the hassle of setting up a profile, connect with others, and most importantly, return to the site constantly.

That last point is important to advertisers, who value the ability to target the specific demographic they know are on these social networking sites. In 2007, BusinessWeek wrote about how advertisers are willing to pay “double-digit figures for every 1,000 times their ad is viewed” on niche social networking sites, versus the less than $1 norm on other general social networking sites. This year, Mashable reported that 8.2% of the $920 million spent in 2007 on advertising within social networks went to niche sites. For 2008, “it is estimated that spending will increase to $2.1 billion, and the take for smaller networks will rise to 10%.”

So far, advertising on general social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace hasn’t seemed to produce the results that some advertisers had hoped for. Do they really think that it will make a difference if the ads are more accurately matched with users’ interests? Apparently so.

One of the speakers at this year’s Web Content Conference proposed that Web 1.0 was about connecting people to content, Web 2.0 about connecting people to each other, and Web 3.0 will be about connecting content to people. While everyone feels differently about “Web 3.0,” and some think we should just do away with the versioning altogether (the Web is the Web is the Web), it is undeniable that content is important and will be even more important as the Internet continues to evolve. Google’s Dick Costolo talks about “hypersyndication” - a world where all content is shared, remixed, socialized and distributed everywhere. For that scenario to be possible, there has to be quality content.

Even media conglomerate Time Warner realizes the importance of quality content - its strategy is now to focus more on “content creation.” According to Time Warner’s new CEO, Jeff Bewkes, “in a digital age, content becomes more valuable, not less, because it’s becoming cheaper to deliver.”

As the headline of the New York Times article boldly proclaims, “content is back.”

At around 8:00pm on Friday the pages started coming in.  A new automated SQL-Injection attack was bringing one of our servers to its knees.  The server wasn’t vulnerable to the attack, but the act of having to process so many invalid requests was putting significant load on the processor, and was filling ColdFusion’s running process limit, preventing legitimate requests from having time to run.

Ordinarily this becomes a night-killer for me.  I’m already out, on my way to dinner, and now I’ve got to go home to deal with this issue.  But tonight I get to try something different.  I’ve had an iPhone since around Christmas, and it’s a nice little device, despite a few shortcomings.  But what I’ve always wanted was a way to actively manage a server without the hassle of carrying around a laptop.  With the release of WinAdmin for the the iPhone, I’ve got it.

I was able to connect to our company’s VPN, remotely log into the desktop of the affected server, download and install the free version of ISAPI_ReWrite, and block any URL’s containing the offending SQL injection code.  The processor utilization dropped dramatically, regular pages were being served in a timely manner, and I was able to continue on to dinner.

After a successful Web Content 2008 in Chicago this summer, we are bringing Web Content to Florida for the first time ever. This is your chance to be a part of the exciting Web Content conference series! Here’s what you need to know:

• Theme: The Impact of Social Media on Web Marketing Strategy
• Date: February 17-18, 2009
• Location: Sheraton Sand Key Resort (Clearwater Beach)
• Submission Guidelines
• Submission Deadline: August 15th, 2008

Still not sure? Here’s more information about the Web Content conference series and testimonials from this year’s conference. Feel free to contact Michael Silverman (msilverman@duoconsulting.com) or Scott Abel (scottabel@mac.com) with any questions.

Last week, I attended a brown-bag lunch on social media organized by the Association Forum. While we started the discussion talking about blogs and various other social media, the conversation soon gravitated to the pros/cons and dos/don’ts of corporate wikis. And if the Society for Information Management’s Advanced Practices Council (APC) study is accurate, it’s no wonder: the study predicts that by 2009, at least 50% of organizations will use wikis as important work collaboration tools.

The APC identified 7 strategies after surveying more than 160 “active corporate wiki users.” I’ll focus on integration and culture.

Integration
I know I’ve already talked about integration in my last two blog posts, but I can’t emphasize this point enough. Just like you wouldn’t hire someone and then seat them in a faraway corner, separated from everyone else, new media has to be fully integrated within the company for it to truly be effective. As the APC report states, the wiki should be integrated as “one of several important tools in an organization’s IT collaboration architecture.”

Culture
One of the APC’s recommendations is to understand that “wikis are best used in work cultures that encourage collaboration. Without an appropriate fit with the workplace culture, wiki technology will be of limited value in sharing knowledge, ideas and practices.”

At Duo, collaboration is one of our core values. To facilitate collaboration, we started an internal wiki two years ago. “At first, I thought only the tech guys would use the wiki, but I’m amazed at how quickly everyone in the company embraced it. Now the project managers use it regularly… and the wiki has become a repository of shared knowledge, great for troubleshooting issues,” said Jason Priestas, a senior developer.

For companies where active collaboration and open sharing of information is not so much a part of the work culture, a fellow participant at the Association Forum brown-bag lunch recommended some ways to make wiki use a habit. For example, instead of simply answering questions over email, people can be incentivized to direct each other to the wiki instead. The APC also suggests assigning a champion to each wiki.

Interestingly, the State Department has its own internal wiki, Diplopedia, a resource that contains biographies of political and business leaders, reading lists and even instructions on how to order lunch. It may surprise some that such a top-down organization is actively using grassroots technology – especially technology that allows anyone to change entries. But according to Noam Cohen, “Diplopedia does not allow anonymous contributors, so bad actors could be tracked down.” Such safeguards have, so far, successfully prevented people from “committing career suicide,” as Mr Johnson from the State Department’s Office of eDiplomacy puts it.

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To learn more about wikis and how to implement them effectively, come listen to the wiki master and evangelist, Stewart Mader, give his keynote address at the Web Content Conference 2009 in Tampa Bay, Florida! Mader is the author of Wikipatterns: A Practical Guide to Improving Productivity and Collaboration in Your Organization and founder of Wikipatterns.com.

I’ve been harping on the importance of fully integrating social media tactics with your company’s marketing strategy and business goals for awhile now. This week, I came across two examples that illustrate my point.

Apparently, Cartier is the first luxury brand to market itself on a mainstream social network – MySpace. My first reaction was: why MySpace?! It’s interesting that out of all the social networks to choose from, Cartier had to choose the one that had a reputation for being: creepy, sketchy, sleazy, and full of perverts, pedophiles, predators and porn. The article talks about how Cartier had to police the people who were friending the brand in order to “respect the brand’s objectives” (if you have pictures of yourself drinking beer at a party, sorry, you can’t be a friend of Cartier). Again, why MySpace?

Taking a step back – why market on a social network in the first place? How does that fit with Cartier’s business goals or branding strategy? It’s true that the current recession has hit luxury brands hard, with people cutting down on spending across the board. Even Louis Vuitton advertised on television for the first time. But is having an official presence on a social network to reach a younger audience worth the risk of diluting the brand? (Unofficial fan pages created by users are a different story for another post.)

At the other end of the spectrum, there is Threadless, a company that grew organically from an online community and is built on a social network. Users submit their T-shirt designs, vote for their favorites, and those favorites are produced and sold. Unlike most retailers, Threadless doesn’t have an inventory problem – and why should they? The T-shirts that are produced are the ones the community has already indicated a desire for. It is the pipedream of every retailer – to be able to know beforehand exactly what consumers want.

In the case of Threadless, the social network and community aspects are so fully integrated into the company that “the Threadless brand is not the shirts but the community experience,” writes Max Chafkin. Jeff Lieberman, quoted in Chafkin’s article, goes so far as to claim that “to say it’s just a T-shirt company is absurd. I look at it as a community company that happens to use T-shirts as a canvas.”

Not every company will be able to achieve the level of integration of social media that Threadless has. In fact, most probably won’t. The point is that social media tactics need to be part of something bigger – part of the business strategy and goals, and part of the company’s culture, from top to bottom.