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The Need for the 4Cs Social Media Framework

Over the last year, I have had to explain how social media works to diplomats, defense officials, and academics and students focused on fields as diverse as international affairs, management and sociology.

I have found that first-timer find social media confusing because of two reasons.

The first reason is the excessive focus on specific social media tools. Many first-timers are introduced to social media via specific tools. Many ’social media experts’ who are practitioners rather than thinkers also focus on specific tools. Since social media encompasses many different types of tools, and each tool has specific characteristics and a steep learning curve, a toolkit approach can quickly become overwhelming. Blogging (Wordpress), microblogging (Twitter), video-sharing (YouTube), photo-sharing (Flickr), podcasting (Blog Talk Radio), mapping (Google Maps), social networking (Facebook), social voting (Digg), social bookmarking (Delicious), lifestreaming (Friendfeed), wikis (Wikipedia), and virtual worlds (Second Life) are all quite different from each other and new and hybrid tools are being introduced almost everyday. Mastering each tool individually seems like a lot of work and a lot of people give up even before they begin.

I just signed up for Google Latitude and so should you.

It’s a cool new mobile social networking service from Google that displays the location of your GMail/ GChat friends on Google Map. Latitude lets you choose to let Google detect your location, set it yourself, hide it, or sign out of it.

Here’s the announcement on the Google Blog and the Google Mobile Blog and here’s the official launch video that explains how Latitude works –

Predictably, the announcement has set Techmeme on fire.

Sarah Perez at ReadWriteWeb wonders if Google has validated mobile social networking or killed all the competition.

Katherine Boehret at The Wall Street Journal tests Latitude for a week and finds that it’s fun but imprecise.

Brady Forrest at O’Reilly Radar thinks that not integrating Latitude with Orkut may make it difficult for Google to add photo, video and event functionality.

Scott Gilbertson at Wired Epicenter wonders why “Google is launching its own homegrown location-broadcasting service just weeks after killing off Dodgeball, a very similar location service Google let languish in private beta mode.”

Gabe Riviera at Techmeme puts together a list of the 50 biggest stories of 2008 and it’s all about Google, Yahoo. Microsoft, Facebook and Apple.

I didn’t blog about even one of these stories, and, in retrospect, I would have blogged about only one story: Google indexing its one trillionth URL.

I’m not saying that these aren’t important stories, just that they are too mainstream to be of interest to me. I want a Techmeme for stories about how social media and mobile are changing media, business, government and development. Does anybody know where to look?

Tim O’Reilly draws parallels between Google, Walmart and MyBarackObama.com to argue that the real value of web 2.0 is in “the use of the network as a platform to build systems that get better the more people use them” and not in harnessing explicit user contribution –

I came to see just how closely MyBarackObama.com emulated these ideas of the real-time enterprise in accounts of the Houdini project, a bold program in which poll watchers eliminated the names from voters who had actually made it to the polling station from the “get out the vote” call lists.

MyBarackObama.com definitely harnessed explicit contribution, providing a platform for volunteers to organize and host local calling parties, to blog, or perform other campaign activities. But ultimately, Obama’s ground game–old fashioned precinct-level organizing, amped up to a new level by an army of distributed volunteers armed with mobile phones and coordinated via a web application–was the key to his victory. The “explicit” social media elements of MyBarackObama.com paled in impact compared to the development of a next generation electronic nervous system, in which volunteers were trained, deployed, and managed by a web application who used them, in John McMullen’s memorable phrase, as “souls in the great machine.

Simon Owens at Mediashift has a great post on the rivalry between the blog search engines by Google and Technorati, but it was this paragraph about the difference between static search and live search that caught my attention –

But perhaps trumping all issues is the blog search engine’s still-ongoing quest for monetization. People use blog search engines much differently than they use regular ones; rarely will you find someone using Technorati to search for an electrician or where to rent an apartment. It’s because of this fact that keyword search advertising — an enormous moneymaker for Google’s main engine — has been unsuccessful on Technorati.

“Blog search is very different,” (Technorati CEO Richard) Jalichandra said. “Blog search users are wanting to find content; they’re not necessarily looking for a plumber… With blog search people are really interested in looking for conversations or participating in conversations and it’s a very different reason for searching.”

Twitter CEO Evan Williams has also talked about the difference between live search and static search to explain why an AdWord like search advertising model won’t work for Twitter.

Here’s an interesting thought exercise then.

Vishsh Kumar and Christopher Rhoads at WSJ report that Google wants its own fast track on the web –

The celebrated openness of the Internet — network providers are not supposed to give preferential treatment to any traffic — is quietly losing powerful defenders.

Google Inc. has approached major cable and phone companies that carry Internet traffic with a proposal to create a fast lane for its own content. Google has traditionally been one of the loudest advocates of equal network access for all content providers.

Separately, Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. have withdrawn quietly from a coalition formed two years ago to protect network neutrality. Each company has forged partnerships with the phone and cable companies. In addition, prominent Internet scholars (like Lawrence Lessig), some of whom have advised President-elect Barack Obama on technology issues, have softened their views on the subject.

The contentious issue has wide ramifications for the Internet as a platform for new businesses. If companies like Google succeed in negotiating preferential treatment, the Internet could become a place where wealthy companies get faster and easier access to the Web than less affluent ones… (and) choke off competition.

I’m all set to submit MobiChange to Google’s Project 10^100 (see my earlier post on Project 10^100), but before I hit the submit button, I want to ask for your help in improving the idea. So, here is my complete submission. I’ll be grateful if you take out ten minutes and tell me what you think about it.

- The name of the idea: MobiChange

- The category of the idea: Community

- The idea in one sentence: An open-source mobile social networking platform, accessible by voice and SMS, designed to support local communities and help mobilize social change.

- The idea in more depth: Communications technologies play an important role in development by enabling better economic decisions, building capability at both the individual and the institutional levels, and having multiplier effects across economic sectors. The mobile phone, by the virtue of being the only truly accessible and affordable communications technology available in many developing countries, is increasingly being seen as the key to bridge the digital divide and unlock the economic potential of developing Asia and Africa.

Google is inviting innovative ideas that will change the world and help the highest number of people. The initiative is called Project 10^100 (10^100 is a way of expressing the number “googol,” a one followed by one hundred zeroes) and Google has committed $10 million to realize the selected ideas —

Here’s how it works. You submit a short description of the idea (and maybe a video) by October 20th, under one of eight categories (community, opportunity, energy, environment, health, education, shelter, and everything else). Google will put up a selection of hundred ideas for public voting and shortlist the twenty most popular ideas. Finally, an advisory board will select up to five final ideas and Google will use an RFP process to identify the organization(s) that are in the best position to implement the selected ideas.

So, Project 10^100 is not a social entrepreneurship venture fund — it is meant for people whose desire to see their idea being brought to life is bigger than their desire to bring it to life themselves. I know how powerful that desire can be — because I feel it (suffer from it?) myself — and I applaud Google for tapping into it.

I’ll be live-blogging all weekend from the TPRC Conference at George Mason University.

The first panel is about to discuss Jonathan Zittrain’s book ‘The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It’.

Jonathan Zittrain’s book is about how the real power of the internet is its open, generative, innovative nature and how closed appliances like iPod, iPhone, TiVo and XBox are threatening to lock it down.

The panel is moderated by Philip Weiser and members of the panel include Gigi Sohn, Scott Hemphill, Maureen Ohlhausen, Pamela Samuelson, Christopher Yoo and Link Hoewing.

The panel is mostly focusing on the regulatory responses to closed application platforms and the possibility of a ‘malware-triggered Internet 9/11 crisis that will inspire an Internet Patriot Act’.

I believe that closed appliance based application platforms are important because they give companies the financial incentives to foster innovation. However, the movement from a closed application platform to a open (source) platform is almost inevitable, as we are seeing in the case of iPhone and Android. So, there’s an innovation curve in play here, with closed application platforms creating new markets followed by open application platforms opening up the market.

Quick Summary: How will Google’s Social Graph API tie up with the earlier released Open Social API to enable social data portability across social networks?

Google’s just released Social Graph API promises to make public information about the social relationships between people on the web easily available and useful.

The API lets developers of social apps discover the social relationship data (”me links” and “friend links”) for their users embedded in links, blogrolls and social profile pages based on the the XFN (XHTML Friends Network) and FOAF (Friend of a Friend) labeling systems.

Watch Google’s Brad Fitzpatrick explain the Social Graph API in the video below –

Given Google’s terrible track record on the Open Social API, it’s probably wise to not go gaga over the Social Graph API, but here are my top of the mind thoughts on it –