While there are countless reasons as to their success, I believe each benefited from similar strategies that can also improve your odds of winning.

Content is King

It’s a basic business principle – if you don’t have what people want they will seek it elsewhere. So where could this content come from? Well, there are (2) basic types from my perspective:

1. Specialized
2. Generalized

If your content is specialized or concentrated around a particular subject, it has to be truly compelling to gain mindshare of potential viewers as the outlets available are astounding and growing daily.

If your content isn’t married to a particular subject then you need an abundance to create the foundation for “sticky” sessions that will have your viewers losing track of time as they peruse your library of content which you have carefully woven together using tags, keywords, etc.

Specialized content may be the easiest to acquire initially but requires a greater effort to maintain over time. Your content would have to generate enough buzz that people are constantly engaging in a dialogue either on your site or around the Internet.

Even if that were to happen, the window of opportunity is finite. Also, the time and financial costs can become exorbitant rather quickly which has the effect of constantly diminishing your rate of return making this path an unattractive one.

Generalized content is typically the complete opposite, being harder to acquire initially but requiring less effort to maintain over time. How you reduce the maintenance effort is by taking advantage of the social network which is more than willing to help you in your cause. And, due to the constant advances in modern technology, this social workforce is becoming increasingly capable of sustaining your efforts.

Recruit Social Videographers

If you build it, they will come. Everyday more and more people are discovering the massiveness of the social network. And, because of the social nature of this network, people are looking for ways to make their presence known, to participate, to have a voice, to socialize.

What you must provide them is a solid platform on which to do so. If you can make it easy for potential users to either generate content or upload existing content into your system, you are well on your way. But, you also need the capability to syndicate that content across the social network.

The more outlets you can tap the more appealing you become to your users who are appreciative for you making their lives easier. This good-will generally equates to positive word-of-mouth which can help propel your endeavor into the stratosphere.

With a limitless army of social videographers now working together with you, quantity of content should never be an issue again. All you would need to do is implement any kind of quality control mechanisms, if so desired, to keep submissions inline with your overall strategy, brand, etc. At the end of the day, you’ll have a mountainous library of content while rewarding your users with a media platform for social expression.

Multiscreen/Multidevice

Once you have content that people want to see, you need to enable them to view it in as many configurations as possible. The more accessible your content is, the greater its reach. The potential for your content to go “viral” is dramatically increased if it’s available across all the desktop browsers, as well as, available on iOS and Android phones and tablets.

Guarantee the most bang for your buck by investing the time and money necessary to extend your content library to these screens and devices. You get an additional bonus if you can also extend user content generation to these devices as well. You will be glad that you did and your users will love you for it.

Adapt to Tech Changes

Adaptability is extremely crucial to reaping the rewards of a social media strategy. You can improve your adaptability but having a firm understanding of not only how users have communicated in the past, are communicating now but how they might communicate in the future.

Future communications is not only subject to end user desires and needs but also to shifts in the underlying technology that enables these communications. Some things worthwhile to remain aware of:

1) New mediums, screens or devices available to deliver your content (eg, TVs, kiosks, etc)
2) Costs associated with the storage and delivery of your content (eg, disk space, bandwidth, etc)
3) Emergence of new video codecs or license changes in existing ones

The list goes on and on but the key is to start thinking about those things today so they don’t bite you tomorrow.

Use Twitter and Facebook to Promote

So, you’ve amassed an impressive library of content that’s steadily fueled by a sea of social videographers. You’ve made your content and content generation accessible across multiple screens and devices plus you’re ready for whatever the future holds.

Now all that’s left to do is to help your promoters promote. Not only must you integrate Twitter and Facebook for your users so they can spread the word, but you must also engage the social network through – you guessed it, Twitter and Facebook.

It’s simple. The more personable you are or are perceived, the greater your reach. Remember, this is a social network so when you “mingle” with people act like it. Don’t engage contacts like a cold, callous enterprise machine. If you do, you won’t be well received.

On the same note, you can’t be reckless either. Instead, let your corporate ethos serve you well by ensuring all communications are refined, responsive and informative yet relaxed. You want each contact to walk away with a positive experience because it’s that experience they will share with others thereby defining your social brand.

THE END

These are my thoughts and I’m sticking to them. What do you think? Post a comment or question.

At some point I’d like to discuss revenue generation as a follow-up to this article.

• L2709_Presentation.ppt
• L2709_Workbook.pdf
• FlashP2PLib.fxpl
• MAX2011MobileVideoChat.fxp
• EyeChat.fxp
• EyeChatDesktop.fxp

The last two projects are completed versions that you can use for testing or to skip ahead.

I plan to follow up with posts related to the P2P logic used in this sample application. Any questions, let me know. Thanks to all who attended!!

L2709_DSMVCA.zip

The business world today is much more empowered; empowered to act and react to dynamic changes often the moment they occur. For your organization to reap the benefits of the social media phenomenon, you must adapt and become more flexible in how you engage your customers, partners and community. To do so involves cultivating social connections that focus on solving business and customer challenges rather than the traditional PR techniques of selling your prospects on just how great you are.

Now that you’ve established the need for a social strategy there are a few things that should be done before you actually devise the strategy.

A) Help the CEO formulate a social media strategy team that will include internal leaders and managers spanning the entire organization.

The social team’s job will be to help create the strategy and oversee its implementation. As internal buy-in is critical to overall strategy success, the choices made in team selection are extremely crucial. Remember, you can’t build success on a rocky foundation.

Once the team is assembled, it wouldn’t hurt to…

B) Conduct a session with your company’s executive team where you explore social tech’s ability to and success in transforming organizations.

Be sure to fully explore how the same and more can be realized by your organization. Once the seeds have been planted and the bosses are on board, you can start building out your strategy. And because you’re building on a solid foundation, you should really be able to maximize your competitive advantage by following sound principles catered to your unique value position. Does this guarantee you’ll be the next Facebook or Twitter? No, but it will guarantee a much better fate than just blindly approaching the socialsphere, hoping for the best.

Based on a recently published Forrester Research report, Social Business Strategy, there are four key ingredients to a successful social business strategy:

#1 Know Thy Neighbor
There’s no way that you can create value through social engagement if you don’t truly understand who your employees and customers are, as well as, how they use social technology. According to Forrester, 62 million US adults visited a social networking site at least monthly between 2007 – 2010 representing a 50% increase in social networking usage.

#2 Define Your Goals
What do you expect to achieve by becoming more social? Do you want to improve customer perception? Increase customer sat? Increase sales? Whatever the case may be, get specific, associate each goal with a strategy and detail the steps to achieve the goal. Once that’s established, review what emerging social technology trends make the most sense in support of accomplishing your goals.

#3 Weigh the Pros and Cons
Determine which of your goals has the greatest output (return) for the least input (investment). Don’t get caught up in ego. Realistically assess the risk, effort and complexity of each goal/strategy so you can formulate the clearest picture of which ones should be pursued and which ones to abandon. If a project requires a high investment with very little return, it should be tossed. On the other hand, if you discover a gem of a project that essentially costs nothing to implement but yields untold riches, be smart and fast-track that one.

#4 Pick the Right Tool for the Job
You’ll likely need a myriad of services to support your golden social strategy so choose wisely. Explore all your options whether it be SaaS, PaaS or even IaaS. Determine which ones integrate with your existing infrastructure the best. You ultimately want your technology selection to be the icing on your well baked plan.

I’ve personally found success with this approach and feel that it can effectively be applied to a variety of operational/strategical models. How about you?

RELATED RESOURCES
http://www.forrester.com/rb/Research/social_business_strategy/q/id/57541/t/2

• Cost savings (e.g. lower taxes, cheaper labor, etc)
• Quality improvement
• Reduced time to market
• Capacity management
• Risk management/mitigation
• Scalability

During the late 90s and early 00s, there was a definite boom in offshore outsourcing a/k/a offshoring where mega-corporations were able to take advantage of large resource pools in lower cost economies due to an extremely disparate gap in wages that existed between the industrialized nations seeking to outsource and the developing nations providing the services. It was not uncommon to see companies like HP outsource their entire customer support operations to call centers in Hong Kong, Shanghai or Bangladesh. When planned effectively, those kinds of strategic business decisions have shown the potential to reap generous dividends on a relatively low-cost investment.

In the US, there has always been mixed emotions/views on outsourcing. Opponents claim it leads to job displacement, especially as it relates to offshoring. Supporters argue that offshoring actually lowers prices thereby yielding a greater overall economic benefit. Regardless of the position taken, the decision to offshore often carries its own set of consequences and repercussions that must be accounted for and dealt with such as:

• Physical distance (ie, geographic proximity, time zones, etc)
• Quality of service
• Language/cultural barriers
• Security issues
• Governmental policies/restrictions

Considerations like these coupled with the recent global economic downturn and the proliferation of cloudsourcing have cooled the heels of the once agressive business strategists to take a slower, more stable approach to offshoring in particular and outsourcing in general. This change in landscape, attitude and strategy has given rise to alternatives like nearshoring and as a result, has seeded socio-economic growth in neighboring countries like Brazil, Chile, Canada and Mexico.

What makes nearshoring appealing is that it allows an organization to mitigate several of the concerns/risks associated with offshoring while still reaping the benefits that an outsourcing strategy provides. By providing increased flexibility for organizational alignment, nearshoring can be an effective means to increase ROI.

Eventually, business strategists may shift back towards insourcing as some analysts suggest. This will especially become true as the once developing nations become more industrialized and the labor cost savings increasingly diminish. Would that signal the death of outsourcing? Hardly. I believe outsourcing is here to stay and will see increased/decreased implementation as market and economic conditions dictate. What do you think?

The Internet that we’ve become accustomed to will soon cease to exist. It’s fast-approaching that point where it can no longer exist as it does today. This is due to the fact that we’re running out of addresses under the current Internet Layer protocol, Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4). IPv4 is responsible for relaying data across the Internet from source host to destination host based solely on their addresses. IPv4 uses 32-bit (2 to the 32nd power) addresses and can support 4.3 billion devices connected directly to the Internet.

Normally, 4.3 billion would seem like a massive number but with the proliferation of Internet-hungry devices, that number has become almost entirely consumed. As it stands now, less than 5% of IPv4 addresses are left unallocated to the regional Internet registries, who in turn issue them out to network operators. These network operators are then responsible for issuing them to their service subscribers. Think about that for a second, 5% of 4.3 billion. That leaves only 215 million addresses left to issue before IPv4 reaches its end. Experts expect the free pool of IPv4 addresses to be depleted in a matter of weeks. So, it seems that we’ve pushed IPv4 as far as it can possibly go and we did so in only 30 years. Without diminishing the incredible nature of that thought, what will happen once that eventual day finally comes? Will we no longer be able to surf the Net, check email, buy movie or plane tickets? Hopefully not. That’s what IPv6 was created to prevent.

IPv6 defines a new addressing method that’s infinitely more robust than its predecessor. It uses 128-bit addresses which supports a virtually unlimited number of devices (2 to 128th power). In other words, it will take a LOT longer than 30 years to exhaust those many addresses. We’ll have enough addresses to issue our future extraterrestrial networks on the Moon and Mars.

To get planet Earth ready for the mandatory switch to IPv6, the Internet Society is sponsoring World IPv6 Day on June 8, 2011. This global trial requires participants to support native IPv6 traffic on their main Web sites on that day. Google, Yahoo and Facebook, along with leading content delivery networks like Akamai and Limelight have all committed to the IPv6 trial. In order to participate in the trial, these companies must commit to running a dual-stack deployment which will allow IPv6 traffic to run alongside IPv4 traffic without utilizing shortcuts like DNS whitelisting. Until now, content providers like Facebook and Google have been supporting IPv6 via dedicated addresses separate from their main traffic-heavy sites.

These companies aren’t the only ones that believe change is eminent. Recently, the US Military started nudging its IT vendors to begin supporting IPv6 on their public facing sites. And, in September of 2010, the Office of Management and Budget mandated federal agencies to support IPv6 in dual-stack mode on their public facing sites by the fall of 2012.

The ball is definitely in motion to transition the world to the next version of the IP protocol. Hopefully this trial will prompt content providers, ISPs and manufacturers to start their transitions to IPv6 as soon as possible. As someone that’s ultimately responsible for technology and IT at my company, I am definitely excited to smoothly transition our internal and external operations over to IPv6.

To view the demo in its own window, click here.

Some GIF, JS and PNG files also had the wrong extension. Once I realized that was the issue, I made use of this handy little tool, Renamer, to allow me to run a batch rename on the contents of the HTML folder which holds all the template files.

After the file names were fixed, it was just a matter of adding the images that were missing from the default theme and the generated docs were finally legible. Next step, create a custom theme using the default as a base and make these docs a little prettier

We work on a lot of cool and interesting projects and our office is located in one of the best places in the world, Venice Beach. If you want to learn more about the job offering, click here.

1. an 8GB memory upgrade kit
2. Official D-I-Y Instructions
3. Open work area
4. Screwdriver (the Husky HD-74501 works perfectly)

With all the necessities acquired, you can prep your MBP for surgery…

Once the bottom lid is removed, it’s time to remove the old memory…

With the memory slots clear, there’s nothing left standing in the way of the max out. Installation is super easy and should go without a hitch. But, if like me, your hand slips on insertion of the final upgrade chip (top) and you push the chip too quickly and it becomes wedged, don’t panic.

Just remove the little black pressure stabilization post which is likely what the chip is wedged against. Once you’ve done that, the chip should be easily removable. Click the thumbnail for a closeup view.

Once you have both chips firmly seated, you can replace the cover and reconnect all your cabling. Reboot and you should be greeted with the following after selecting About This Mac

1. For Eclipse, go to Eclipse -> Preferences -> Java -> Installed JRE
2. For Flash Builder, go to Flash Builder -> Preferences -> Java -> Installed JREs

Then, edit the selected Java VM, adding the following value for the Default VM Arguments field
-d32

This just forces the JVM to default to the 32-bit version. Once that’s been done, that error message should be no more…