Integration with Social Networks; What , Why & How

While debating this topic in the car yesterday with Chris on the way back from Charlotte, NC Chris, always the practical one, asked "Why do this, what is the point?". My immediate answer was "If some VP of Marketing wants to pay me to open up a new marketing channel then I'll take his money and implement a solution." Which I admit was pretty weak.

I am not too good at the vision thing. When some new concept is thrown out there I usually ignore all the noise until I see a solid application of it. Then I try to cut through the spin and the BS spouted by the wannabes trying to be part of the "next big thing" and find out what is it all about.

What is it? Why do it? How do I implement it?

So I decided to do a little more home work and come up with a better answer. One that would satisfy Chris.


The What

To enable any website to incorporate their own little mini social network among their own users and to have the capability of Identity Mapping to allow users to hook into the big Social Networks like Facebook and MySpace.

For example: When a user signs-in to your site, present a summary of their profile from Facebook. Query Facebook and MySpace to present your user with a list of their friends with upcoming birthdays and ask if they would like to send birthday e-cards, order a gift or send flowers.

The Why

It all comes down to getting the best return on investment out of the Marketing budget and helping your company to sell more product/services/widgets/stuff/dual-phase-inter-wobblers:

• Learn more about your consumer to design better campaigns
  
• Get feedback as to how your brand is faring or how a campaign is operating
• Find new ways to sell your product or service; create special offers for each individual much like Amazon does.
  

The How

The main players in the Social Networking space are opening up by providing open source APIs. Facebook has aleady announced this.

Here is a quote from Bob Bickel
"We see the Facebook API and the Open Social API becoming the two standards for Social Application development over time – just like .Net and J2EE became the standards for web applications around the turn of the century. Ringside allows any website to build Facebook and/or Open Social applications today that will run on both your website as well as Facebook and the large Open Social websites like MySpace, hi5 and others."

Essentially Ringside is providing an abstraction layer to existing Social Network APIs. If you need to get going with implementing this kind of functionality for your company Ringside is saying "Start here".

Once you have your shiny socially aware website I think you will need to consider Business Intelligence tools to help you understand all that data you are collecting.

And you may also need to integrate with your internal systems to further enhance your site's capabilities. For example, customer self service functions that enable your users to tell you about changes of address, telephone number and other data private held by you on behalf of your customer.

James
Atlanta
June 2008

Application Integration with Social Networks

A former colleague of mine called yesterday to talk about a new idea being proposed by Ringside Networks.

These guys were the power behind Bluestone and JBOSS. My friend's thinking is that these chaps are two for two and if they think this is a good thing to invest in then it is worth a close look.

It certainly is a cool idea. They have come up with an application engine, the Ringside Social Application Server, that is designed to add a social context to a web application. The idea is to make your web site more of a community thing. So, for example (taken from Ringside's web site), if you sold running shoes then you could provide functions for your sites users to organize and take part in events or find a training partners of similar skill & experience in the same area.

It strikes me as a new concept in sales & marketing. Social networking sites represent a new way to reach a large group of people who are actually interested in your products or services and will come to you.

Ringside estimate that there are 67 million users of social network sites and that advertising from search engines can only take you so far. They propose that the smart companies will leverage social networking for more targeted marketing. They also estimate that there are approximately 19,000 applications leveraging the Facebook API alone.

The key fact about this new push for an open source social networks application server that strikes a chord with me is that the idea came from a real, business driven need. The original authors were paid to create a social context for the running shoe company described in the example above. They then set about creating a more generic engine that could be quickly implemented for anyone else.

What would turn me off would be to hear that someone dreamed it up and decided to make it. I am not a fan of "build it and they will come". I much prefer to see that an idea has real business value. The fact that someone has already been paying for services to implement this idea tells me that it does.

The next thing to discover is whether or not there is value in integrating these applications with back end systems be they legacy or contemporary. With our ability to expose legacy business functions as services, for example as web services, and a range of options for communications (HTTPS, JMS, etc) it should be easy to integrate with the Ringside Social Networks Application Server.

James
Charlotte, NC
June 2008