I decided to run the top 30 brand names through it to see the “health” of each brand. The scoring system used by this tool is, great , swell, so-so, bad, and wretched. Keep in mind the findings below could very well change by the time you run the tool, hence the “realtime” aspect. I heard they are working on a plotting system so you can keep track of a terms “health” over time, keep an eye out for it.

List of 30 Brands and their associated “Health”

• Google - swell
• GE - so-so
• Microsoft- bad
• Coke - bad
• China Mobile - swell
• IBM - swell
• Apple - swell
• McDonalds - great
• Nokia - swell
• Marlboro - great
• Vodafone – so-so
• Toyota – so-so
• Wal Mart - bad
• Bank of America - bad
• Citi - swell
• HP - great
• BMW - great
• ICBC - swell
• Louis Vutton – n/a
• American Express - great
• Wells Fargo – so-so
• Cicso - swell
• Disney - great
• UPS - swell
• Tesco - bad
• Oracle - swell
• Intel - swell
• Porsche - great
• SAP – so-so
• Gilette – bad

Wanted to throw this in there since its fresh, and on everyone’s mind.

• Obama - great
• Clinton - swell
• McCain - great

Any of these findings strike you as odd? Some of them definitely line up with what I would have assumed, Wal Mart for example.

NOTE: Keep in mind Twitters target audience are mostly technical savvy folks with around 6 men to every 4 women using the service, according to MSN adlabs which predicts demographic information, thus skewing the sentiment a brand or keyphrase receives.

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Today is the third day of the conference and the theme of the day is Enterprise 2.0.  The session I am looking forward to the most is Mat Fogarty talking about EA’s use of Xpree to build a prediction market.

This conference is not a typical Enterprise 2.0 conference. It isn’t crawling with vendors, it isn’t full of analysts and consultants. Far and away, the vast majority of people here are customers. Everything from farming cooperatives to telecoms, people seem to be here to learn what the real benefits for their organization might be. That is a refreshing change that I am thankful for.

The agenda can be found here.

There is more opportunity for failure, or at best inefficiency, if validation and testing cannot maintain the required time frames in the faster paced enterprise 2.0. Any enterprise application has to be able to trust the multiple data sources that get mashed up in a composite application but many of these data sources may be outside its reach at the point of origin. iTKO addresses this issue as we shall see.

Last week I spoke with iTKO Founder and Chief Architect John Michelsen on this topic. He mentioned that when enterprise 2.0 apps were out on the fringe in the form of blogs and wikis, the testing issues were not such a big deal. Now that enterprise 2.0 is moving deeper into the enterprise, as we have discussed a good bit on this blog, the stakes are much higher. iTKO’s LISA software helps to mitigate the risks in three ways.

First, it allows companies to re-think the testing strategy. Most software testing has been done manually in the waterfall manner. The enterprise 2.0 world is moving too fast for this. Data can be brought into composition applications without sufficient testing. For example, one of their clients, a top cable provider, operates in a very competitive field. They were limited to two major application platform releases a year simply because of the testing requirements. Much of this testing is now automated through iTKO. The company has reduced six weeks of manual testing to four machine hours. They are now able to provide new functionality at a faster pace.

Secondly, iTKO helps with ongoing validation of data and the underlying business logic. Since data coming in through composite applications can change without notice, ongoing validation becomes more important. Using the same approach as it does with testing, iTKO can provide continuous validation. For example, a government agency that runs highly sensitive data from multiple sources, has iTKO re-validate it every 30 seconds. It does business logic testing by putting sample business problems into play and making sure the correct responses occur.

Thirdly, iTKO has LISA Virtual Service Environment (VSE) to simulate the real world for testing and validation when test systems are not available and testing cannot be done on production systems. For example, a major travel site had a significant performance downgrade. Virtualization enabled them to test outside the production system, discover the information source that lead to the downgrade, and correct it. To go offline to find this issue would have been impossible. In another example, a bank had only limited access to production systems for testing new functionality. The virtual version gave them unlimited access.

LISA VSE also allows you to test against applications that are not even built yet. If you know what it is going to be, they can create a virtual model for testing. This allows rapid innovation as you can see some of the potential problems before they occur. A major airline is using iTKO’s virtualization of services to increase the pace of development for their next generation, composite application-based platform. In this case they will obtaining data from their many travel partner’s applications such as hotel rewards systems and rental car platforms. Now they can test all the connections before they even occur through iTKO’s virtualization services. The use of composite applications is greatly streamlining the implementation of their next generation system. Services from iTKO allow testing and validation to keep up with this accelerated pace of development derived from enterprise 2.0. iTKO uses the term SOV or services oriented validation as a complement to SOA. It refers to the strategy of simulating the behavior of deployed software assets, and the synthetic construction of those services not in existence, that make up an enterprise SOA application.

I used to develop technology-enabled software training in the 80s and I can appreciate the need for such a service. It was very hard to develop training until it was too late because we could not see what they systems would look like and function until a few weeks before the training was needed. This virtualization should also enhance training development and provisioning training environments.

There is more on their web site including white papers, research reports, and forums. They also offer a blog, the iTKO SOA Testing & Validation Soapbox, which covers SOA testing, validation and virtualization, software quality, automated testing, and IT governance issues with John Michelsen and other iTKO executives.

Step 1. Install and setup Twhirl

Step 2. Once you have set up your new Twitter account, lock it down from prying eyes.

Step 3. Follow your fellow groupies/ co workers with their locked accounts

One of the main ways I use the internal account is to share links I find throughout the day with coworkers. It has worked great for rounding up links as well for blog posts. Some times email can get clogged so its a nice relief to share something with your coworkers without feeling the need to create an email.

Can you think of any other beneficial ways to use protected twitter accounts within your office, or group?

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- L. Gordon Crovitz, The Wall Street Journal

Ah, such idealism. Remember the movie Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, in which an idealistic senator, played by James Stewart, attempts to cut through the vested interests of a corrupt system to get funding for his boy’s camp? As he and many other idealists found over the years, cleaning out landed interests, lobbyists and special interest groups is no easy task. Trying to change the direction of government and its huge bureaucracy is about as simple as turning an oceanliner around — while battling sharks circling in the water.

WSJ’s Crovitz is pondering whether Web 2.0 could be the force that connects government closer to the people. He cites Don Tapscott’s latest work in the Web 2.0 space, which shows a lot of government interest in Web 2.0 applications.

And yes, Don does call this new wave “Government 2.0.” Don has written leading-edge books on the promise of technology and Web 2.0 (his latest being Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything).

Don is reportedly now working with the US Office of Management and Budget to employ Web-based collaboration to “reinvent government.” Project Government 2.0 posits that “If governments are to ensure their relevance and authority, they must move quickly to meet rising expectations for openness, accountability, effectiveness and efficiency in the public sector.”

Crovitz cites examples of emerging Government 2.0 initiatives, which don’t necessarily bring government closer to the people, but do appear to be mechanisms for improving information sharing across agencies:

• “‘Intellipedia’ lets 37,000 officials at the CIA, FBI, NSA and other U.S. intelligence agencies share information and even rate one another for accuracy in password-protected wikis, some ‘top secret.’”
• “‘Diplopedia’ lets State Department staff share information.” The State Department also has a virtual embassy in Second Life.

The government is famous for its inability to manage information.  If agencies and departments are able to break down some of the walls and silos and better share and process knowledge, there’s a great lesson there for organizations of all sizes and persuasions.

Ensuring more accountability from our government is now being aided by a range of technology-enhanced communities of interest. Just as an example, the prolific blogging community inside and outside the Beltway (and I’m not just talking about Wonkette) is helping to keep many causes and issues in the public spotlight. Many issues would have faded into obscurity in years gone by.

I’m sending Dan, the runner up a $25 certificate for being the first to send in an entry

I’d first like to start off by saying that for many marketers the concept of engagement within social networks is limited to starting a Facebook group or developing a profile page. I’m assuming this is due in part to instant gratification (after all, a quick group and profile can be developed in less than an hour), and in part to a misunderstanding of social networks themselves.

So, I’ll start with the first step to developing a social network engagement strategy: and that is a social network analysis. This should be tailored for each client, because it provides research and rationale that then determines the strategy for engagement. This analysis should answer the following main questions:

1) What networks are my target audiences interacting within?

2) What is the level of interaction my target audience is having within these networks?

3) What conversations already exist about our company? Within which networks?

4) What type of interactions do users have within each network?

5) What are other brands doing?

While these are just 5 of the many types of questions that should be answered in an engagement analysis, they are perhaps the most important ones because they rule out a cookie-cutter approach to social network engagement and will force you to think more strategic about the appropriate networks to choose for engagement.

For instance, for one client with a target audience of women, this type of analysis found a valuable, and very engaged audience within lesser-known niche networks. Even more interesting, was that our analysis revealed the interaction of our target audience within these networks was stronger than the interaction of our target audience within Facebook and MySpace; while the majority of this audience weren’t quite content creators in the blogosphere, they were within these networks by frequently writing articles, commenting in groups regularly, publishing polls, and even microblogging on a daily basis.

In my opinion, I would argue that this engagement strategy determines the success of your involvement within social networks by helping understand and determine the particular networks of the most value to your target audience and your company.

If you’ve conducted this type of research, what have you found? Were you surprised at the value of particular niche networks, or overwhelmed by the amount of networks to research? Feel free to share your thoughts , we can certainly learn from all of our experiences.

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Using Google - here are Chinese Tweets being translated into English

So with Tweetscan and Google, any newsroom can get breaking news - the network is here right now!

David: “I think that the good ones (bloggers) are helping to expand democracy and give more people access to the political process.

Jon: Do you think there is push back? Is there a sense that people are accepting the new medium? Or resenting it” Or just looking at porn? What do you think is going on?”

David: “ I can’t speak to the last one…but blogging has become part of the political process (he elaborates)

Jon: “Is there a fear that they are using it as a Trojan horse? (he goes on to express the concern that people may be getting paid behind the scenes to blog on topics)

David: “This came up in the 2006 campaign… Sock puppets in the term for people who just repeat (the party line). But you know blogging is like a personal relationship and you learn over time who is just feeding you what they get (off the party web site) and who is authentic.“

Jon: “ You see this is the thing about blogging. Any of the criticism about it… They say oh this person hasn’t been vetted or this work hasn’t been vetted, but the work speaks for itself. I do not know how you can be negative about something that is just…It is like saying I don’t like these writers because it is just writing (elaborates) If you find someone you like you follow them. I do not understand why there would be push back.”

David concurs that blogs have become mainstream and Jon agrees says that some bloggers are just as good as the mainstream journalists.

I sat through some of the early “wars” between political bloggers and mainstream press in panels during 2004 and 2005. Now blogs are an accepted channel as we can see everywhere. Blogging came to the forefront of attention during the US Presidential election of 2004, as both sides used it. Blog was Webster’s word of the year in 2004 and bloggers were one of ABC News’ “People of the Year.” Then the business world caught on. Fortune Magazine named blogging in the top ten business technology trends for 2005 and the Harvard Business Review included business blogs in their list of breakthrough ideas for 2005. Blogs made the cover of Business Week in 2005. Now the issues that came up in political blogging are coming up in business blogging to no surprise.

From “From the Frontline“:

The BBCs Rory Cellan-Jones wonders whether Twitter has come of age with the earthquake that struck Sichuan province in China this morning,

Let’s see, as this story unfolds, whether this is the moment when Twitter comes of age as a platform which can bring faster coverage of a major news event than traditional media, while allowing participants and onlookers to share their experiences. link

I didn’t know anything about the earthquake until I picked up on a (private) tweet from Rebecca Mackinnon in Hong Kong. A quick blast through Twitter using Tweetscan and it soon became clear the Tweetsphere was abuzz with chatter and information sharing about the earthquake. It also became clear news was coming out quicker on Twitter than by more established means. Some pictures appeared on Flickr within an hour of the quake. Meanwhile Robin Hamman points me to a tool that automatically translates what Chinese Twitterers are saying about the earthquake.

There is more - Here is Reuters telling the story of how Dave Winer broke the Virginia earthquake story on twitter.

At about 1:37 pm, software developer Dave Winer asked the Twitterverse: “Explosion in Falls Church, VA?” (Perhaps not coincidentally, Winer is a well-known blogger and podcasting evangelist). A flurry of posts, or “tweets,” followed, as users reported rumbles as far away as Alexandria.

The mainstream media entered the fray at 2:33 pm, with radio station WTOP reporting ground rumblings throughout Northern Virginia, citing a possible earthquake. Officials also told the radio station that the rumblings were part of construction blasts at nearby Ft. Belvoir, which had been scheduled for later in the afternoon as part of a new building for the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency.

Twitter users continued to pile on, pointing out data from the Maryland Geological Survey and adding their own commentary. Twitterer DataG wrote: “After the ‘Falls Church explosion’ event that was covered on Twitter, I saw the value in having a Twitter account at-the-ready.”

By 2:56 pm — nearly 90 minutes after Winer’s initial alert — WTOP had the official word from the U.S. Geological Survey: A not-exactly-massive 1.8 magnitude earthquake with an epicenter near Annandale, VA.

The “Falls Church Incident” was earthshaking only in the most literal sense, but it is an interesting proof of concept that news can be broken on Twitter. Reuters is looking at ways to use Twitter in the newsroom, although our feed is currently under renovation.

Twitter - the new AP - no cost - high impact (Thanks to Scoble for the links)

But there are signs that blogging and social media is restoring the original values of America. Here is how “The Other Paper” is describing the work that WOSU is doing to spark the Bloggers in Columbus to life as a real force in the city:

A civic divide is growing in Columbus. For the past decade or so, ordinary people have become less inclined to call their political representatives or drive all the way down to City Hall to personally lobby government officials.

But a community of tech-savvy, affluent white kids say they’re picking up the slack. Columbus’s bloggers believe they’re furthering democracy, improving the economy and advancing humanity—all without missing Grey’s Anatomy.

Ranked as the No. 8 most active blogging community in the nation, an estimated 10 percent of Columbus inhabitants regularly pounded the keyboard in 2007, offering up online commentary themselves or consuming somebody else’s, according to Nielson Media Research.

If you’re among the remaining 90 percent, all this probably seems like a colossal waste of time.

In fact, according to the bloggers themselves, they’re saving the city.

“The need for two-way or conversational media is more vital than ever,” said Jeff Johnson of the Urban Infill blog.

Johnson compared his medium with what he called the “doomsday” style of the mainstream media. Traditional outlets simply report troublesome news, he said. Bloggers, on the other hand, “have a propensity for uncovering solutions,” he said.

When bloggers get together, “We create ideas. We create a vibration that this city is thirsting for.”

There are problems that just cannot be solved by the “authorities”. Will the school system reform itself? How will the mortgage crisis resolve iself? How will the middle class and the working poor cope with higher oil prices? My bet is that these kinds of issues can only be resolved by communities working with each other.

Here is how they are helping with the Mayor’s plan for bringing back streetcars:

“These are the kind of people who will make Columbus great as we move forward,” said Mike Brown, spokesman for Mayor Mike Coleman.

“This audience is important to the mayor, and he is paying attention,” he said.

Nevertheless, the mayor is eager to capture the hearts and minds of the demographic that lean toward blogging, Brown said.

“Many of them are young, creative professionals. He loves the energy.”

One reason Coleman might love the energy is that bloggers have embraced his pet proposal: streetcars. The online community has been more supportive than the public at large for the mayor’s plan, which is now stalled, to run a streetcar line between Downtown and campus.

Many bloggers have put “My blog supports Columbus Streetcars” icons on their websites. RetroMetro’s Paul Bonneville has launched Columbus-streetcars.com, the “unofficial citizen support site for the Columbus Streetcars.”

I think in 2008, the pips will begin to squeak. Higher food and energy costs will begin to fracture how we all live. Where I live on Prince Edward Island in Canada, the average wage is $26,000. Half the people live in rural settings and have to have a car/truck. We have a 6 month heating season. Many are hanging on by their finger nails right now.  I am sure that large parts of America are in the same situation.

I think it will become clear soon that we will have to re-design nearly every aspect of how we live becuase the design we use now assumes affordable energy prices.

Social Software may well be at the heart of how we do this re-design.

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The wikipedia defines an Enterprise portal, as “a framework to provide a single point of access to a variety of information and tools.” But then defines Portal (fiction) as, “a magical or technological doorway that connects two distant locations.” As I witnessed some old style portal implementations run into the millions a few years ago without yet working I was not sure which definition was correct. What I have now seen that with some enterprise 2.0 composite applications, the single point becomes an intelligence integrator and not simply a doorway.

The conference site said,

“Portal technology has changed dramatically during the ten years I have been chairing this event. During this time period, portals have evolved from simply replacing intranets to embracing all aspects of enterprise computing for delivering and sharing business content both inside and outside organizations. To reflect the important role portals now play in the enterprise, the IIR Portals, Collaboration and Content conference has been renamed to Enterprise3.”

This is a good move and I am sure it will be a good conference looking at the program. It is coming up soon, May 19 -22 in San Diego. Apologies to the conference but it is late on a rainy Friday and I could resist these comments. Have a great weekend.

Kottke has put up a nice little micro site that cycles through some favorites, although a better thing to do would be to follow Mike_FTW who’s spouting some doozies.

Here are some screens from the Kottke site.

What do you think? You have any? add them to the comments and maybe we’ll print some up

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Google

Yahoo

What does that say about Yahoo’s branding?

Amazon

BMW

LOL!

If you want to see other brands added just twitter them to Noah at heyitsnoah

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An Exercise in Social Media Optimization: The Obama Gun Mailer

As if this post needs more attention, but I can resist giving one more link to Andy’s post. Andy shows how a social media techie can get national attention by using a subject that is newsworthy, such as the Hilary Clinton/Barrack Obama runoff. The post says pretty much says it all and gives all of the case-study necessary details.

$500 Contest Post: Online Profiles That Offer Back Links

This site is offering $500 in cash for the person who lists the most social media sites that offer backlinks other than the ones they already have listed on the post. Good Luck!!!

Social Media Mafia- Get Involved

This post by Colin Walker promotes another social networking site for social media peeps such as ourselves, called the Social Media Mafia. (Oh metaphors. We use cocktail party, others use mafia.) There are so many social networking sites out there, but this one wins my award for the week due to Colin’s eerily true comments about the resemblance in social media marketing to the mafia. Too great. You gotta wonder if Colin had to promote this as part of his debt to “the family”….

Five New Twitter Tools You Should Know

This is probably an old post to some of you, but I just saw it this week. In my own opinion, Twitter in and of itself is really only an okay program. It’s really the tools like these five that make it useful to people.

Tools for Engaging in Social Media

Brent Csutoras gives some good reviews of the major social media “must-haves”. What I enjoyed more is that Brent listed great plug-ins, because we all know that knowing which plug-in to use is oh-so-important to our sanity and management of our days.

From Mining the Web to Inventing the New Sciences Underlying the Internet

This is a video lecture by Usama Fayyad of Yahoo! on data mining and how it’s beneficial to social media. Kinda long, but you can skip the 10 minute intro and then scroll and listen for what you want to know more about (Minute 10 to 20 is kind of background info. Brian’s opinion is that you can fast forward to minute 28 for the meat.)

Gaining Subscribers Through Social Media: Is It Possible?

Steven Snell gives some great tips on how to convince people to subscribe to your blog. (And by the way, it did convince me to subscribe to his :))

20 Take-Aways from SMX Social Media

Scott Clark gives a list of 20 points of interest from the SMX Social Media conference. Most of these are points to live by when dealing with clients. I especially like the “Advertising Agencies don’t get it, for the most part.”

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60 Fashion Designers
100 Painters/Photographers/Sculptors
40 Filmmakers
Visuals by INSTA-ACTION (www.insta-action.com)
LIVE screen-printing by SAN FRANPSYCHO, bring a shirt or booty-shorts
Live Painting

Music by:
Dirtyhertz (www.dirtyhertz.com)
Taj (www.djtaj.com)
LARON (http://www.myspace.com/laronakaswan)
DJ SHON (gossip/cat club)
Russell Vargas (www.myspace.com/russellvargas)
KRIS (www.myspace.com/baydabreaks)
Dave Madix (www.kingkeymusic.com)
SCHATZ AKA Founder of Chillin’ Productions
+ more

When: Saturday May 10, 2008 from 8:00pm-2:00am
Where: Mezzanine (444 Jessie Street, SF) www.mezzaninesf.com
Must be 21+ ID
Cover: $7 at the door

For more info about the show go to:
www.chillinproductions.com

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I adore “The Peoples Condiment“, and I also love the new T-shirt model, hawt! A relative of Joe’s maybe?

The fancy mustachio is especially interesting as it uses some printing innovations like gold foil for the chaps monicle and some fuzzy suede ink for the fur.

It says exclusive for Barganist readers but i’m sure you can use it as long as you promise to read it some time

thanks Mad Finn

Can you do better? I’ve got $100 threadless bucks that says you can, email photos to me at karl dot long at gmail with the subject line “douche competition”.

UPDATE:

As it turns out a friend of mine is organizing a group to do Bay To Breakers (an annual drunken fun run in SF) called “The Running Of The Douchebags” and for some reason has invited me.

and our first contestant is Dan with 20 popped collars:

Another amazing entry from Emma from the Daily Distraction blog, I love the before and after shots, and BTW these guys got 25 polo shirts on and wrecked a few.

BTW I just got an email from Whit at Attus Apparel and they are going to send the winner a couple of their polo awesome polo shirts as well to make up for the ones people have stretched out

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Dirty Coast these are some t-shirts from New Orleans with some heart, they’ve got some great designs and none of them are what I would consider the kind of lowest common denominator tourist crap that you would often associate with a party/tourist town. Great stuff guys.

I particularly like The Dirge, the tagline of course “we put the fun in funeral”

Also check out the Dirty Coast blog.

Thanks to Lori who posted this in the comments

I agree Lori.

If you want to win a $25 Threadless gift certificate be the first to answer this question in the comments. What town was this picture taken in and how long after Hurricane Katrina do you think it was?

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Well I went to a Kentucky Derby Party on saturday and one of the guests had this awesome bulldog in a polo shirt. Actually turns out the shirt was from Old Navy, who would have guessed.

Look at that pudum

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Pictures to come, but after two days closed, we’re racing on client work, and getting ready for Thursday’s big social media marketing seminar and Friday’s Blog Carolinas. Hope to see you there. Busy week!

~Jim

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Interesting video/interview with the Threadless founders. Tara (blogger at HorsePigCow) put the video together and has written a book recently called the Whuffie Factor about businesses that are succeeding by leveraging web2.0/social media and of course the community. Threadless is probably one of the best examples of a community driven company.

There are definitely clear distinctions between the consumerist Web 2.0 services in play out there, versus the tools and services businesses are adopting. When technologies or services are taken behind the firewall, their purpose and requirements change, which is to solve business problems.

It’s worth noting, however, that in recent years, starting with the PC, we have seen a lot of consumer technologies percolating into the enterprise. As a recent article in Knowledge@Wharton observes, the lines keep blurring — “the boundaries between corporate and consumer technologies are beginning to disappear.”

As Christian Terwiesch, a professor of operations and information management at Wharton, put it: “We have observed a convergence of technologies between these two segments [consumer and corporate] because the user needs have been converging. For instance, workers are demanding that corporate technology — say a search tool within a company — be as user friendly as Google’s popular search site.”

In fact, the article notes, in a few years, as predicted by Gartner, at least 10% of all information technology
spending will reside with employees (for laptops, iPhones and the like), and they will customize at least 90% of the technology they use at work.

Beyond gadgetry and online videos, the article goes on to make a very important observation as well: “the line between personal lives and work has blurred.” Employees often perform personal tasks — like watching the latest popular video on YouTube or shopping at Amazon.com — at work and they frequently complete corporate tasks at home on their own time.

Perhaps, as Clay Shirky is saying (cited here by Jim McGee), the organization as we know it is disappearing. Yes, there are still formal government regulations that define the legal status of an “employee” and how many hours are worked per week and so forth. But thanks to information technology and networking, organizations can function more effectively as confederations of entrepreneurs/service providers than as rigid, hierarchical 9-to-5 entities.

There are issues, of course. Security, for one, can be a real show-stopper. Many companies are not comfortable — and may even have legal issues with — with the idea of data and processes being taken to offsite providers. These are issues that have to be worked out.

However, the boundaries between consumer-business technology and work-life have blurred to the point where there’s no going back. Just as continuing education is a personal initiative that is in every company’s best interest to foster, the knowledge and value being gained through “consumerist” social networking and computing will only come back to enrich productivity and spur motivation within the enterprise.

I love this new shirt from Busted Tees, delicious irony.

I have also written about how a number of firms have provided a means to integrate social software (aka enterprise 2.0) with traditional enterprise applications. Now Awareness, an enterprise social software platform, has taken things the other way by allowing for the integration of their business oriented social software platform with the consumer web platform, Facebook. They are doing this to combine the robust business oriented capabilities of their program with the networking capabilities of Facebook to allow firms to build better communities, primarily for business to consumer communities. I think this is a smart move and a good use of Facebook for business out in the consumer web.

Many of us know what Facebook brings to the table for groups and communities. It certainly has become the dominant player in this space so we are on it because our friends are. I am a member for that reason, as well as its enhanced social networking capabilities. Awareness comes to the table with a single architecture for all forms of user-generated content (e.g., text, video, photos, etc.) that operates in a uniform fashion across all forms of social media (e.g., blogs, wikis, discussion groups, forums, mashups, etc.). User-generated content is also captured and stored with profile information about the user who generated it. This allows you to gather content through any channel (e.g., blog. wiki) and share it thorough any other channel, while retaining the context of the author who generated it.

These are clearly not capabilities within Facebook but they are capabilities that are very useful for a business oriented B2C community. Awareness builds a branded Facebook application for each customer. The resulting Facebook application is unique to each customer’s community. The benefit of having an Awarness-powered Facebook application is that it “extends” their community into Facebook and they can use Facebook’s viral marketing tools. I asked Eric to elaborate on this. He made several points:

1. You are in complete control. You establish the rules for the community dynamics – moderation, security, permissioning, etc. – and you can change them as your needs evolve. You can control who can do what, who can see what, what content is appropriate or not, etc.

2, It’s your content, and you can use it anyway you want. You can mine the content for valuable trends and insights; you can analyze participation metrics; you can access it via APIs and reuse it elsewhere as they do