FreshNetworks Blog

We’ve had a new look to the blog at FreshNetworks this month, but our aim is still the same. To bring you the best posts in social media, online communities and customer engagement online. In case you missed them, find below our top five posts in January.

1. Why the retweet is a powerful engagement tool

The retweet on Twitter, and Facebook’s new ‘via’ feature are very powerful tools in these social networks. In any online community or social network, some people are more active than others. In fact, in a natural online community we would expect that out of every 100 users, only one will originate new content. The retweet provides a way for these other users to express their opinion. Say that they agree with something that others have said or just promote content.

Social media is about more than just generating new content, people play many different roles and the retweet is a way to let people do this.

2. Social media as a crisis management tool

When crisis happens, you will typically see a lot of people discussing, debating, and complaining about your brand online. Many of these discussions will be factually inaccurate, and many will be from customers who have had bad experiences. These are the types of discussions that should be responded to, and should be responded to in the right manner.

In this post we looked at a how brands can use social media when a crisis hits, but perhaps more importantly why they should be engaging people in social media before the crisis.

3. The Economist on Social Networking

At the end of January, the Economist published a special report on on social networking.Their special report on A World of Connections, provided an excellent overview of the current state of social media for those still trying to get to grips with it. You can download a free pdf of the report here. Or check out our summary of key highlights in this post.

4. Social Media Case study: Vitamin Water’s newest flavour created by Facebook fans

Vitamin Water’s latest flavour, launching in March this year, was developed and named by the brand’s Facebook fans. The black cherry and lime flavoured drink will be called ‘Connect’ and one Facebook fan, Sarah from Illinois, won $5,000 for her role in developing this new product. In this post we look at what Vitamin Water did and how they used social media to help to test and develop a new flavour.

5. Essential reading for online community managers

There are a whole range of great books out there on how social media is used and the impact this is having on society (anything by Gladwell or Shirky would be a great starting point). In this short post, we look specifically at things that help managing and growing communities online. There are many great books, articles and blogs out there and we’d love you to share your favourites in the comments below the post. But this is a good starting point and we would consider them essential reading for online community managers.

The Economist on social networking - world of connections

What joy. This week,  The Economist, every Capitalist’s favourite magazine, has published a special report on on social networking.

A World of Connections, provides an excellent overview of the current state of social media for those still trying to get to grips with it. You can download a free pdf of the report here. Or check out my summary of key highlights below.

Introduction: A world of connections

1. “Online social networks are changing the way people communicate, work and play”
2. Facebook users post over 55m updates a day. 70% of users live outside the US.
3. Social networks are superb tools for mass communication [NB the report is a bit light on their strategic use as a driver of 1-to-1 customer-to-company communication]
4. “the most avid online networkers are in Australia, followed by those in Britain and Italy”
5. Social Networks have “become important vehicles for news and channels of influence”. Indeed, they “played a starring role in the online campaign strategy that helped sweep Barack Obama”
6. To sceptics all the “talk of twittering, yammering and chattering smacks of another internet bubble in the making“. Social networks still “need to prove to the world that they are here to stay”

“This special report … will argue that social networks are more robust than their critics think … and that social-networking technologies are creating considerable benefits for the businesses that embrace them, whatever their size. Lastly, it will contend that this is just the beginning of an exciting new era of global interconnectedness that will spread ideas and innovations around the world faster than ever before.”

Facebook’s growth: Why social networks have grown so fast—and how Facebook has become so dominant

1. How the network-effect can drive lightning fast growth on a relatively modest marketing budget.
2. An openness to external developers helped create thousands of apps. These apps provide part of the service and additional reasons to spend time on Facebook.
3. Social networks have been beneficiaries of a fall in the cost of data storage and have also been “able to use free, open-source software to build systems that scale quickly and easily”
4. In a feat of technical wizardry, Facebook’s engineers “quintupled the performance of an open-source memory system called memcached, which allows frequently used data to be retrieved faster than if stored in a database.
5. Facebook Connect is one of the firm’s most important innovations as it allows members to take their social graph wherever they go on the web.

Twitter’s transmitters: The magic of 140 characters

1. A key difference between Facebook and Twitter comes from the nature of relationships that underlie them. “On Facebook, users can communicate directly only if one of them has agreed to be a “friend” of the other. On Twitter, people can sign up to follow any public tweets they like”
2. The most prolific 10% of Tweeters account for 90% of all tweets
3. Another big difference between Twitter and Facebook is in the kind of content that gets sent over their networks. Facebook allows people to exchange videos, photos and other material, whereas Twitter is part-blog, part e-mail [I disagree with this. On the surface Twitter looks like a text tool, but many tweets link to videos, photos or other media].

Social Networks making money: Profiting from friendship

1. When it comes to turning users into profits, social networks face two issues. Firstly, users are taking part to spend time with friends, so they do not pay attention to ads. Secondly, brands are nervous about appearing alongside unregulated comments and other content.
2. Click-through rates are low, but the amount spent on adverts is increasing despite the recession.
3. In part this may be because Marketers recognise the value that personal recommendations can have on buying behaviour. And social networks provide an opportunity for viral marketing.
4. During 2009, Facebook turned cash-flow positive on revenues thought to be in the region of $500m.
5. Games, virtual gifts, premium services and search rights are becoming an important part of some social networks’ revenue streams

Social Media for Small Business: A peach of an opportunity

1. They cover the well known Kogi BBQ social media success story and mention that according to Razorfish 44% of people follow brands on Twitter  for deals [NB the methodology used in this research was rightly brought into question by Susan Braton in a recent DishyMix podcast]
2. Social networks can provide a great launchpad for startups thanks to their reach.
3. This article then randomly veers off into social gaming. A subject that deserves it’s own dedicated piece. But you can’t have everything.

Internal social networks: Yammering away at the office

1. Social networks are being used to break down internal barriers in the corporate world.
2. Informal conversations they allow can be a catalyst for creativity and new ideas.
3. “The networks are also a great way to capture knowledge and identify experts on different subjects within an organisation”

Recruitment in a social world: Social Contracts: the smart way to hire workers

1. Social networks, such as Linkedin and Xing help firms cut search costs
2. Business social networks help improve the efficiency of the labour market
3. They have also made recruitment more transparent as recruiters go onto social networks to check up on candidates ahead of making an hire

As an aside, if you’re interested in social media for recruitment here are a few relevant posts from our sister company, FreshMinds Talent:

How to use Web2.0 for recruitment
Social Media and the forefront of the job market
How to imporve your Linkedin profile

Privacy in social media: Privacy 2.0

1. Privacy could be the Achilles heel of social networks. Users could decide to start reducing what they are prepared to share with the world online.
2. Social networks have been developing privacy controls that give users the ability to edit what can and cannot be seen. However these are often hidden away within sites and social networks are making blatant attempts to encourage more sharing of data not less.

The Future of Social Media Towards a socialised state

1. Social connectivity could become ubiquitous
2. Mobile adoption will fuel future growth in social networking
3. Facebook says that mobile users of the site are almost 50% more active than regular users
4. Geo-networking apps may be the next big thing [unsurprisingly, the Economist can't resist a fleeting mention of Foursquare, the social network tipped for big things in 2010]

Conclusion

It’s great to see social media and social networking getting reported in such depth by mainstream media. This Economist report is not exactly cutting edge when it comes to social media insight or analysis. However it does provide a great base level for the 99% of the business world who do not spend their days glued to Tweetdeck.

Even if the above is not new to you, I recommend you read the report purely for a lesson in good business writing. As ever, The Economist delivers on elegant prose that neatly and efficiently flows from point to point.

Was there anything in the report that leapt out at you?

LEGO is a brand that many people are very passionate about, a brand people love and we’ve written before about how they use segmentation to engage their consumer base from children to enthusiasts in an innovative way. Now they have continued their innovative approaches to engagement and embraced social media. In a big way.

They have launched LEGO CLICK, an online community that brings together innovators, designers, artists and creative thinkers to develop new ideas related to toys. The site is designed to bring together ideas in written form, images and videos. They want to capture and catalogue ‘lightbulb moments’, ideas that are relevant to toys and to the market LEGO serves.

Unlike other ideas communities, LEGO CLICK does not (at least not yet) allow users to rank and rate the ideas. It merely allows you to suggest your idea or to share ideas that you see and like or are interested in. What makes this site particularly interesting, though, is its use of Twitter, Facebook and Flickr as a way of generating content for the site and promoting participation.

The LEGO CLICK community is a great example of the hub-and-spoke model of social media engagement. Users can contribute their ideas by tweeting with the hashtag #legoclick. They can contribute images by tagging their Flickr contributions with the same tag. And they can suggest ideas by video by tagging on YouTube in the same manner.

This is an interesting use of social networks to drive content to a community. In parts it is not dissimilar to the California Governor’s use of Twitter to harvest ideas for MyIdea4CA in 2009. It relies on contributions from users of other social networks and then brings them together in a single hub where different types of content from different sources meet.

What will be interesting to watch as this site develops is the amount, and the relevance of content that is created and added to LEGO CLICK. Currently there is a lot of content being dragged into the site that is discursive about the concept rather than the kind of ideas that the site is designed to harvest. It is getting a fair bit of content that is more like this particular blog post than an idea of lightbulb moment. This is one of the real problems with using tagging and a feed from other social networks to populate any site, but an online community in particular. You could end up with a lot of irrelevant content.

One of the things that MyIdea4CA did, and that it will be interesting to look for as LEGO CLICK develops, is to use rating and even commenting in the community as a way of sorting and prioritising ideas. The most popular or interesting ideas are likely to get the most votes or comments. And so these will rise to the top on the site, leaving the less relevant comment much further down.

But even without this kind of feature, LEGO CLICK is an interesting site and itself an innovative use of social media. Really driving the hub-and-spoke engagement model. Now we just need to watch to see what happens.

Read more of our Social Media Case Studies

Vitamin Water’s latest flavour, launching in March this year, was developed and named by the brand’s Facebook fans. The black cherry and lime flavoured drink will be called ‘Connect’ and one Facebook fan, Sarah from Illinois, won $5,000 for her role in developing this new product.

The competition was interesting and unique in that it used Facebook fans to develop all aspects of the product:

• Choosing the flavour – over the summer Facebook fans were able to monitor and add to buzz about different flavours. The more chatter about a flavour online, the higher it was rated on the Facebook page. And by mid-September the most ten talked-about flavours were put to Facebook fans for them to vote for their favourite. This is a good example of using a community to help sort and rank ideas in a co-creation process. Fans couldn’t create their own flavours from scratch, but could influence the top 10 flavours and then vote for the best.
• Designing the packaging – when the flavour had been selected (in October last year), the Facebook fans were able to use the app to design the packaging – the look and feel, the blurb and colours used on the label. Fans could collaborate with up to two more Facebook friends to develop the packaging and the final winners were chosen by a panel of experts.
• Naming the product - alongside the packaging and look-and-feel, Facebook Fans were asked to name the product. The team who created the winning name would be given a prize of $5,000.

This is a great example of co-creation and working with your customers and fans to help to develop your product. Using experts from the brand at critical input stages – choosing the original flavours that could be shortlisted and then selected, and reviewing and agreeing on the winning product design and name. The community was used to help shortlist and select the flavour to be produced, and to create a range of options for the design and name of the product itself. Many brands would be anxious of allowing consumers to create a product like this, but at every stage the brand and consumers were playing different roles and doing different things. It is true that some of the best and most intelligent people don’t work for your company (whoever you are) and so working with them in a controlled but creative way like this can have great results.

And for the more than one million Fans of of the Vitamin Water Facebook Page, they feel like they have had real involvement in the development of the new product. That’s one million people who feel ownership of this product. One million potential purchasers when it launches.

Read more of our Social Media Case Studies

Last Wednesday, illusionist, Derren Brown, correctly predicted the winning number in the National Lottery live on air. Quite a feat. But one he achieved with 100% accuracy.

Between the Wednesday live prediction and the Friday explanation, social media sites were awash with theories and conspiracies explaining what had happened. From discussions on Twitter to videos on YouTube. Most of these suggested a slight-of-hand or other such trick. The real answer was much more interesting. Brown cited ‘crowdsourcing’ as the magic behind his impressive prediction.

The explanation was actually quite simple, at least on face value. He got 24 people to collectively predict the numbers using crowdsourcing, The Wisdom of Crowds.  The theory that together people can more accurately resolve a problem or reach a decision when working as a group than when operating alone. Whether you believe this explanation or not (and there are certainly those who are sceptics), the use of crowdsourcing in this mass-media entertainment show highlights the widespread understanding and acceptance of this tool.

We’ve written before about the power of co-creation for businesses and how working with your customers to crowdsource new products and ideas for your organisation can produce better ideas and better products than you might have developed internally. From creating t-shirts (in the case of Threadless), encyclopedias (in the case of Wikipedia) or maps (in the case of OpenStreetMap), using crowds to solve problems has proven to be very successful. In a business-environment it can be incredibly effective.

The most intelligent people probably don’t work in your firm, and so if you can find them and let them work  with you to solve a problem you will often get the kind of innovation that you just can’t get internally. This is where online communities such as Innocentive come to the fore. They allow companies to ask the community to solve a specific problem or issue and reward them (in this case financially). Community product design is used in such cases to provide extra support and input either when internal resources don’t have  the time or the ability to solve the problem.

So whether Derren Brown’s crowdsourcing explanation holds water or not, it is clear that  there is a lot you can do when you get people to work together in a community to solve a problem.

If you missed the show, then you can watch it (at least in the UK) on 4OD.

One powerful use of online communities is to help get new ideas into a business; taking advantage of the fact that many (if not most) of the best ideas for your business are likely to come from outside, from people who don’t work for you. There are some well know examples of businesses working with consumers on co-creation in this way: MyStarbucksIdea and Dell’s Ideastorm being among the most well known.

Most of these sites use a similar process: people can join the community and then suggest their own idea, comment on existing ideas or vote for the ideas that they think are best. The best, most commented on or most voted for ideas are then responded to by the brand. They are an effective way for businesses to get ideas into their business and, more importantly perhaps, of showing customers some of their internal decision making and letting people who buy the product understand more about, and even influence, the processes by which it is made.

Like any good online community, such ideas sites work best when they work with other social networks – interacting with people on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, in forums and blogs. Going to where relevant people are and harvesting their ideas, encouraging them to come to ideas site and add their thoughts. This hub-and-spoke model of social media engagement is a classic and successful way of engaging people online, and a recent ideas site has gone one step further and integrated this model into its functionality.

Last week, Californian Governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, announced the launch of MyIdea4CA.com, an online community to harvest and evaluate ideas for the State of California. The site has much of the same functionality that we have seen elsewhere: the public can suggest, comment on and vote for an idea. The difference with this site is that the ideas are submitted in the first place not by signing up for the site, but by posting the idea on Twitter with the hashtag #myidea4ca. You can even sort your idea by adding an additional category hashtag; so if your idea is about education you use #myidea4ca #edu. The site then pulls in all of these tweets using search and allows you to sort, read, comment on and vote for them.

Using Twitter in this way is a great way to increase the number of initial ideas submitted to the site, lowering that initial barrier to engagement by using a place where people already are (Twitter) to bring them and their content to a new place (MyIdea4CA.com). If you want to comment on, or vote for, ideas you still need to do this on the main ideas site, but to submit an idea you do not.

This certainly will help California to get more initial ideas, removing that barrier and allowing people who want give an idea to use Twitter to do so. The danger, of course, is that people who are not on Twitter are excluded from taking part. Whilst the Twitter population continues to grow, it is still far from a mass market tool and so restricts, perhaps quite significantly, participation in this ideas forum.

Of course, that could be said of many online communities and other ways in which organisations engage customers, stakeholders and the public online. But by mandating that all ideas must be submitted via Twitter does exclude a large proportion of online users in California. Whilst the use of Twitter is a great and fantastic example of how and online community can work with social networks to maximise participation, it is better if there are multiple ways of allowing people to engage. Let some people submit ideas via Twitter but allow others to submit them on the site in other ways.

A cardinal rule when you are building and growing an online community is that technology should be invisible. You shouldn’t put technological barriers in the way of sharing ideas. Whilst the use of Twitter on MyIdea4CA.com is a fantastic example of how organisations can engage people through this site, as an online community it is missing out on the opportunity to engage more people in different ways.

Some more reading

• How organisations can use Twitter – some ideas (freshnetworks.com)
• MyIdea4CA shows both the power and limitation of opening up to the crowd (thisisherd.com)
• The Governator Live From Twitter HQ Today. Has His Twitter Service Already Gone To Pot? (techcrunch.com)
• EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: Schwarzenegger Launches Twitter Powered MyIdea4CA (mashable.com)
• Crowdsourcing Ideas: Apparently Marijuana Is All California Needs (cloudave.com)

As we’ve written before, right now, in the current economic climate, it’s a great time for brands to innovate. In fact it is those brands and organisations who innovate now who are more likely to be on a faster growth trajectory when the economy starts to improve.

The big question for many organisations is exactly how to innovate, how to carve out the time needed to think about the future and how best to work on new ideas, how best to co-create. Whether you are doing an offline event or working in an online community, there is a lot of commonality in how to build a great innovation process. This presentation from Guy Kawasaki at Cisco Live last week presents ten steps to great innovation.

The steps are summarised below but you should really watch the video to see how Guy presents and explains them. There’s something that everybody can learn here, and so it’s Required Reading at FreshNetworks this week.

1. Make meaning
2. Make a mantra (not a mission statement)
3. Jump to the next curve
4. Roll the dice
5. Don’t worry, be crappy
6. Let 100 flowers blossom
7. Polarize people
8. Churn, baby, churn
9. Follow the 10-20-30 rule
10. Don’t let the bozos get you down

Image by Darren Hester via Flickr

The promise of co-creation is that getting customers involved in the innovation process, and letting them inform the design of new products, will mean that you develop a product that is better suited to their needs and will ultimately perform better in the market. Of course, it is not always this simple. Often customers don’t know what they want. They can’t necessarily articulate how they would design the ideal product, nor can they say what is wrong with the existing product. They may never have articulated what they like nor what they dislike, but this doesn’t mean that the product isn’t perfect.

Over the weekend, the New York Times looked at this very subject following revelations from ex-Google visual designer, Douglas Bowman. In an unusual move, Bowman explained on his blog the reason he had left Google. As the New York Times discussed, his description of the design process at Google raises a number of questions:

Can a company blunt its innovation edge if it listens to its customers too closely? Can its products become dull if they are tailored to match exactly what users say they want?

Bowman’s suggestion is that that answer to all of these questions is “yes”. That Google relies too much on data, as a proxy of customer input, and not enough on design skills alone. As the New York Times article report:

Mr. Bowman’s main complaint is that in Google’s engineering-driven culture, data trumps everything else. When he would come up with a design decision, no matter how minute, he was asked to back it up with data. Before he could decide whether a line on a Web page should be three, four or five pixels wide, for example, he had to put up test versions of all three pages on the Web. Different groups of users would see different versions, and their clicking behavior, or the amount of time they spent on a page, would help pick a winner.

This kind of user-input into the design process is what many think of when they think of working with their customers on new product development and design. They think of presenting a number of options to customers (or indeed to potential customers) and then asking them to evaluate each one and choose the one they prefer (or in this case to take their use of a particular design as a proxy for this choice). Of course, this is not necessarily the best way of co-creating with your customers.

Rather than asking people what they think about a particular set of designs they prefer (or which they use most), you can often get a more useful level of insight by engaging with them. Don’t ask them about solutions to a problem but observe what they discuss and say about the problems themselves.

Imagine you are a company designing kitchen equipment. You could involve your customers in the design and innovation process in one of three ways:

1. Ask them what they want – ask what new equipment, tools or gadgets would make their life in the kitchen easier or allow them to do new things
2. Ask them to choose between a set of prototypes – present a set of potential new products to them and ask them to choose which they want.
3. Ask them to talk about what they do in the kitchen, what equipment they use and what problems they have

The last of these is most likely to produce the most insightful outcomes. Rather than asking people to get involved in the actual prototype products themselves, or to tell you what they want, get them involved further up the innovation funnel. Engage them and talk to them about what they use in the kitchen – what makes their lives easier, what would they like to be able to prepare and cook but can’t. Don’t talk to them about the equipment that, you hope, will solve their problems. Talk to them about their problems themselves.

By watching what people do you can then interpret this and begin a design process based on this information and this engagement. Then, rather than just presenting three options to people of potential new designs, you can approach them based on what they have discussed before: “there was a lot of discussion about x, here are some ways we think we could help with that. What do you think?”

This kind of engagement is where online communities really come to their fore. They let you engage your customer in a sustainable way. You can get to know them, their lives and the problems and challenges they face. It isn’t just a short-term process to “do some co-creation”, rather it is long-term engagement that fundamentally changes the way you innovate and develop new products.

Customers sometimes do not know what they want. It’s a fact. They do, however, know how they use what they have, the problems they face and the things they would like to be simplified. Understand what they do know rather than forcing themselves to make choices about things they don’t.

Some more reading

• Design: it’s not all about you. (designmind.frogdesign.com)
• Design Or Data? Ex-Googler Spills All After Landing At Twitter [Design] (gizmodo.com)
• Google designer leaves, blaming data-centrism (news.cnet.com)

In my last post, I mentioned that we were delighted to have made the top 20 of UK Marketing Blogs. I also listed and reviewed the blogs ranked 11-20.

Below is the list of the Top 10 UK Marketing Blogs.  At the end of this post is a useful link. It lets you subscribe to a single feed (or email) that pulls out only the best posts from the Top 20 list.

UKs Top Social Media and Marketing blogs

1. Russell davies – of the Godin style, Russell delivers a wide ranging mix of interesting annecdotes, tips and thoughts. Covering interactive marketing and much else besdies.
2. David Airey – David is a self-employed graphic designer from N.Ireland based in Scotland. His excellent blog covers all manner of graphic and logo design topics.
3. Chris Garrett on New Media – Chris has focus on blogging and social media. This is a great blog to follow with many practical tips on imporving your web presence and social media impact.
4. NevilleHobson.com – Neville brings a PR and Media Communications background to business, technology and social media issues. He also published a regular podcast: For Immediate Release
5. Blogstorm – The UKs top Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) blog. Great if you’re interested in social media’s impact on SEO. Patrick Altoft, who writes Blogstorm, clearly gets around. He also contributes to the next blog in our list …
6. E-consultancy’s Internet Marketing Blog – E-consultancy is well established as the UKs leading publisher and events company dedicated to all things internet. They have a good range of bloggers covering topics like: e-commerce, online advertising, social networks & online communities and search marketing.
7. Talent imitates, genius steals
   - Faris is Chief Technology Strategist at Mcann in NYC. So he brings an advertising and branding bent to this excellent blog. OK, so you spotted he’s in NYC, not the UK. But he’s a Brit and if you doubt that (and you’re new to Social Media) then this Slidecast of his is well worth a listen
8. adliterate – “dedicated to providing radical thinking for the brand advice business” I think that means advertising. The blog covers the future of advertsing and the marketing communications industries. It’s a favourite of bloggers, I often notice it at the top of blogrolls. And it’s well worth cheking out this blog showcasing the new T-mobile advert
9. Crackunit – This is Ian Tait’s blog. In his spare time he co-founded Poke, one of London’s top digital agencies . Crackunit covers “the space between the Web and Advertsing”. Favourite post? I guess it has to be Donk
10. Only Dead Fish – Neil Power Perkin is Director of Marketing and Strategy at IPC Media. Neil says his blog is“mostly about advertising, social media, communications, with a healthy dose of culture and design. And the odd post on chickens.”

repeated from my last post:

Get the UKs top marketing blogs in one feed

Just in case you want it, I have created an RSS feed that combines the best posts from this list of Top 20 UK Marketing Blogs. Here’s the feed. Or subscribe by email.

I’ve used PostRank to pull out only great feeds from a blog. 10-20% of the posts from each blog make it into the great category. So you won’t get snowed under.

Ranking the top UK Marketing blogs

I have used the ranking from AdAge. It’s the best ranking I am aware of. But there is no perfect measure of best blogs. Are there any blogs you think ought to be on the list that aren’t?

After spending yesterday morning at Plug and Play, the Web Mission 09 team spent the afternoon meeting with some Silicon Valley investors. Each firm had a five-minute slot in which to pitch their idea. It certainly felt rather dragon’s-den like, with the key difference being the entrepreneurs on Web Mission 09 tend to be running businesses which are already successful and have clients, products and traction in their market.

The highlight of the pitching came from Simon Campbell of ViaPost. He went for a full-on re-enactment of Steve Ballmer’s famous “I love this company” speech and it certainly got some attention.

That evening we had a night off from formal events. I managed to get tickets to see Gavin DeGraw play the Great American Music Hall. It’s a lovely venue and proved to be a great night out. Oh and if you’re a DeGraw fan, you can hear his new album early on Spotify, the web’s best music service.

This morning was one of the most discussed sessions of the week: a full day at Oracle getting an insider’s view on their Enterprise2.0 developments and plans. Highlights included finding out about Beehive, Oracle’s Collaborative Enterprise Platform, an insight into their Social CRM offering and one-to-one meetings with the Global head of M&A.

Beehive is a central plank in Oracle’s social and collaboration strategy. It provides enterprise customers with team collaboration tools (blogs, discussions, tags and wikis) and tools for synchronous collaboration (conferencing, presence, instant chat and voice chat). They are pitching it against a host of Microsoft tools and claimed that a deployment for a 5,000 person firm would save a company 54% on hardware costs and 70% on software if buying Microsoft.

I had to rush back early to San Fran. I’d left it a little late and decided that rather then wait for a cab I should walk to the train station. Crossing over yet another 5-lane dual carriage-way I noticed a sign to San Fran and decided, for the first time in 15 years, to see what would happen if I tried to hitch a lift back to the city. Within ten seconds a car stopped for me.

By co-incidence it was driven by a software developer who built the Imbee, a Social Network for kids with strong parental supervision capabilities. Even more of a co-incidence, Imbee, like our own community platform, is based on Drupal, the open-source modular framework and content management system. So we spent a happy 35 minutes discussing the 100,000 strong Drupal developer community. He even dropped me off at my door. Thank you.

Read all of Charlie’s WebMission 09 blog posts here.