Axero Pulse » software platforms

Social Software For Online Marketing Of Events

Tim Eisenhauer — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 18:23:28 +0000

Taking Businesses Events To The Web A Whole New Way With Social Software

Conferences, exhibitions, seminars, conventions and other events are an inherent part of the marketing world and continues to be something businesses rely on heavily to engage their customers, demo their products, kick start discussions, interactions, reach out to people and gather leads for their business. A big concern for CMO’s however was the rising costs of organizing and hosting such events and with growing competition from more cost effective online sales leads the effectiveness versus cost of these events was often questioned.

The global recession didn’t help this plight and we saw more cutbacks on large corporate events. Still, a lot of these business events have years of brand building put into them and are still popular among people. In the technology world alone, names like CES, SXSW, CEBIT and other strike a chord with hundreds of thousands and similarly many businesses have managed to host successful events of their own year after year. While marketers don’t see the usefulness of the events fading, there is a greater pressure to drive more results from these efforts and social software may be one of the best solutions yet.

Social networking software platforms tuned into business use can closely work in conjunction with an offline business event like a conference. While these events are organized to bring people and the business together and interact, social software provides a virtual platform to much the same. When used together, that’s when their synergy is really brought out. A webinar with a large software company in the virtualization space brought out some interesting points on how they managed to extend a very popular annual conference of theirs to the online world. Their goal was to take the conference which lasted a few days online so that the discussion and community around it could continue the discussion around their technology area all year round instead of restricting it only to the few days the conference was in session. Another challenge they had was extending the value of the event that was held to others who could not physically make it to the event and the need to expand the community.

By migrating their static conference website to a social networking driven community website fully equipped with collaborative features like wikis, discussion forums, groups, resources, and more, they managed to turn it into a space where attendees as well as those who couldn’t make it to the event could sign in and continue to benefit from the event. Members could log into the community, access content and material distributed during the event, interact with other members in the community, share experiences and knowledge, interact with experts and thought leaders in the field, attend online sessions and really keep the spirit of the event alive all year round.

Some of the takeaways they managed by extending the event website to build a community are:

Managed to include a member registration process with a detailed member profiling as one would find on social networking sites. This allowed them to profile their customers and partners better and gather more detailed information which is a great resource for sales and marketing.
Built an online resource for content within their field from all the documents gathered during the conference as well as online sessions, discussions, forums and more which could be used by members much beyond the actual event.
Were able to hold several expert sessions and online events throughout the year keeping a wider community engaged at a fraction of the cost of a physical event.
Were able to expand the community and extend the value provided to customers and partners during the event to those who couldn’t make it and drive more traction from the original event.

This example can be extended to just about any business event and highlights what can be achieved by replacing a static event website with a social software enabled one which can help deliver more from a business’s offline event marketing. A simple solution, but one that can take events to a whole new level.

Moores Law And The Evolution Of Social Software

Tim Eisenhauer — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 20:11:18 +0000

Remember those days not too long ago when we used to stay on the edge of our seats in anticipation of the next processor that would roll out of Intel or AMD that would make the last generation of pc’s and laptops look like snails? Or when storage companies would launch the next drive that would seem so huge that we would wonder if we could ever fill them up? Moore’s law has reigned supreme in 1965 and the prediction that the number of transistors on a chip will double about every two years is remarkable. Till more recent times that is. Gordon Moore is probably surprised to see how difficult it’s become to keep at that rate in recent times, in which chip manufactures are hitting a slowdown of sorts. We’ve always depended on hardware advances to carry us through the huge growth in information that has become so much a part of our everyday lives — and now many believe we’ll have to turn some of that focus towards the software.

Social software in particular seems to be going through much of the same path as hardware did in the earlier days and at the same mind boggling speed. The need to have a virtual “space” or software that aids in collaboration has been around much longer than most would believe. As long back as the 1940’s with the Memex as Christopher Allen’s insightful article “Tracing the Evolution of Social Software” points out. According to the article:

“A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.”

Since then we’ve seen hypertext, information exchange, groupware, business suites, forums, discussion boards, web portals, blogs, and the social networking sites that almost every one of us is on today. Through every phase from the start, what has been consistent is the growing number of users that have adopted these technologies with every passing year and the immense growth in the volume of content and information that is exchanged and consumed through this software. Considering that Facebook had crossed 100 million users last year, and then taking into account how many of these users use the platform for over an hour a day, the amount of data the software has to support is immense by any standard. What’s interesting to note is that it’s not just social networking sites like Facebook that need to keep up with the growing demand. Businesses all over the world, with employee strengths ranging from a few hundred to tens and hundreds of thousands are relying on social software for their business communication and collaboration infrastructure — and the information being exchanged is growing rapidly every year.

Now, considering that the hardware technology is not growing at the rate that Moore was confident will continue through the end of time, a lot of emphasis will fall upon the developers of social software to carry us through the evolution of information exchange, amidst the hardware, that will soon seem to become a limiting factor. All this is well and good on a macro view, but how does all this affect the average social software buyer or user?

When we buy or decide to use social software for our businesses, many of us tend to make decisions that fulfill our current requirements, ignoring the trend at which our information needs are advancing — and ignoring how Moore’s law also applies to social software. We tend to forget that although a particular software works well now, it may have to be customized and tweaked to support what’s expected of it along the way and into the future. All of the large scale social networks have been overhauled and modified considerably from time to time to scale with the growth — and the same applies to even the smaller networks.

Service-oriented architecture, or SOA, which software platforms like our own Communifire is based on, is seeing an increased support among developers who understand the need to leave room for enhancements and new components to be added on in the future. Back in 2005, InfoWorld published an article titled” IBM exec: Impending death of Moore’s Law calls for software development changes,” where the company emphasized SOA and said:

“Continuing with IBM’s SOA push, Booch introduced a demo of “SOA Integration Framework,” which is intended to provide for a set of services at the developer’s disposal when building an SOA. Still a research project and not an actual product, the framework generates a WSDL for a service and allows the developer to search for appropriate business components.”

While we continue to use social software we need to learn from its evolution, and remember — even software can become obsolete quickly. It’s important to think ahead and consider the factors that offer you room to scale in the future. Users will continue to grow; usage of social software is also going to continue to grow, as is the immense volume of information that will need to be handled.

Is your social software up to the task?