Via recruiting expert Shally Stackerl, the pros and cons of sites like LinkedIn, Spoke, and Plaxo .

This post was written by David Teten, source: Pros and cons of online networks

I’ve recently talked with a few people about ‘social commerce‘—the idea that our online business activities will both reflect and in part be driven by our personal social network. My coauthor Scott Allen recently did a market research study on “Transactional Trust in Social Commerce”, which provides some context on this.

For example, many people would prefer to buy a used car from a friend or a friend of a friend, rather than a stranger. The social context is particularly important, in my experience, when purchasing services as opposed to products. Why? Because the quality of a service varies wildly depending on the motivation and context of the service-provider.

For example, my wife and I are currently evaluating some contractors to do some renovation for us, and a contractor who lives near us and knows some of our friends socially is less likely to rip us off than someone who is a stranger.

Amazon has a primitive version of this functionality, in that I can see that people who like book A also like book B. I’ve also seen quite a few startups who are working on various variations of, ‘What is an efficient way to buy stuff from friends as opposed to strangers?” See for example www.stylehive.com and www.thisnext.com. This was supposed to be a significant part of Tribe’s business model, and some of the local services directories (e.g., Yelp, LinkedIn) are also trying to leverage the fact that you trust your friends’ (or friends of friends of friends) recommendations.

I see several advantages of socializing commerce, in general:
1. Higher likelihood of truth in advertising. The friend is less likely to lie about how lemony the used car is, because he knows that interacting with you is a repeated game, not a one-time game.
2. Reduced purchase cost because of fewer intermediaries. By buying a car from a friend, you don’t have to pay a dealer’s markup.
3. Reduced costs of identifying the right product. Friends (or friends of friends) tend to have similar tastes. If my friend is (like me) a city dad with a child, then my friend is also likely to have a car to sell me that suits the needs of me and my family.
4. Helping out your friends/your community. No one does a business transaction unless he/she derives some benefit. You’d rather that your friend gets the economic benefit of selling a car than a stranger.

So does it make sense to use online networks to make commerce more social? To evaluate against the criteria I listed:

1. Higher likelihood of truth in advertising. Possibly also true online. However, online we already have measures of reputation that are not dependent on me knowing someone who knows the person in question: eBay’s reputation functionality, Rapleaf, etc.
2. Reduced purchase cost. I think in most cases this doesn’t apply online, and in fact the purchase cost when buying via a social network can be higher because I lose the advantage of a broad seller base competing with one another. In addition, somehow the intermediary (e.g., Amazon, eBay) has to make a markup. If I’m buying something online anyway, then I’ve got access to a shopping comparison engine which will lower my purchase cost to the bare minimum.
3. Reduced costs of identifying the right product. This is likely true, but only for a small number of products. For many products, my friends are not necessarily more knowledgeable about the product category than Cnet.com—so I should really just buy what Cnet recommends, not what my friends are buying. The one advantage of buying what my friends recommend is that, if conforming is my goal, this helps me to conform. If everyone else pays a premium for an iPod or Treo 650 then clearly I must buy one too.
4. Helping out your friends/your community. To some extent this is also true online. However, I doubt it’s a big motivation for many people.

Research from the likes of Forrester, Resource Interactive and Morgan Stanley is also beginning to focus on a new generation of consumers they term the Millennials (aka, “Generation Y”) who range in age from 18-26 years old. Their buying patterns differ from prior generations. The Millennials exceed the Boomers in size, distrust media and have little to no affinity for brands. As opposed to earlier generations, they value their peers’ advice and validation: therefore, CNet recommendations are less valuable. Jeff Leventhal, CEO of Spinback, observed, “this generation is the largest consumer group to date and will shift the commerce paradigm.”

It’s clear that many people like doing business with others in their community, or with others to whom they’re interconnected. Think how many offices have an internal email list for people to sell sporting tickets, TVs, etc. Think of the bulletin boards with things for sale that you’ll see in many churches or synagogues.

However, if you are already doing commerce online as opposed to face-to-face, I’d argue that in many cases it’s irrational to make your commerce decisions dependent on your social ties. In most cases it’s more rational to just buy things via a comparison shopping engine (Shopzilla, Froogle, etc.), particularly when buying a commodity good that could otherwise be found in a few block radius.

The good news for the startups trying to do something in this area: first, many people are irrational and will prefer to buy via a social intermediary, even if they get a worse deal. And second, for certain types of purchases buying via a social intermediary can be more rational, especially when the item is a not a common good, but rather a unique or collectible item. Used cars are the most obvious example, because there are so many ways in which the seller can deceive you about the true value of the product. If you’re a Pez dispenser collector, fellow members of your community can also turn you on to an impulse purchase which you would not have searched for yourself on Shopzilla, but which you are excited to buy because a trusted peer refers you to it.

Feedback welcome.

This post was written by David Teten, source: Social Commerce: Do you want to do business with your friends?

Back in 2002-3, Scott Allen and I started work on a book about online networks and social software, what today people call Web 2.0. It’s a great sign of the now-mainstream acceptance of these technologies that Time magazine’s Man “Person of the Year” is “You”—and discusses all of the technologies we cover in the book and the Thevirtualhandshake.com website.

It also sells more copies of Time magazine than writing about the other most influential men of the year: terrorists, the leaders of countries with nukes, and other more depressing (but very important) news.

This post was written by David Teten, source: Man of the Year: You (and youtube)

There’s a new site up called MySpaceForBusiness.com. On the surface, it looks pretty much just like MySpace, and that’s a good model. I like the concept. But I won’t be joining.

Why not?

Simple: blatant trademark violation.

This is Trademarks 101. First of all, to their credit, I will note that they do have a disclaimer at the bottom of the page that they are in no way associated with MySpace. But this business name clearly creates confusion and they certainly benefit from that confusion.

It’s one thing to use a trademark in your domain name when it’s clearly offering supplemental services, e.g., MySpaceLayouts.org, though even that is a gray area. You can even use it in your tag line, e.g., “Like MySpace…for business”. The smartest thing to do is just get permission, like I did for LinkedIntelligence.com.

Anyway, it doesn’t matter if MySpace is now a big impersonal corporation, it’s still just bad business to violate your neighbor’s intellectual property. I suspect they’ll be receiving a C&D letter sooner or later.

This post was written by Scott Allen, source: MySpaceForBusiness? Or MySpace for business?

OK, I put up with the numerous bugs, the frequent nondescript error messages, and so on, but tonight I tried to just click on the Groups link in MySpace and got this, repeatedly for the past half-hour or so:

Hey Rupert… how about throwing a couple of extra million into fixing the infrastructure!!!

This post was written by Scott Allen, source: The Real Problem with MySpace

For this blog and for Brain Food, We are looking for an email service that can convert our blog posts into both daily and weekly mailings. Services like Feedburner can automatically convert each blog post into an email. And a company like Constant Contact (and its many competitors) will take our mailing list and send out mailings.

However, Feedburner won’t let us upload our existing mailing list into their system, no doubt because of anti-spam concerns. And Constant Contact does not have a facility to automatically allow us to convert each blog post into a mailing to our whole list there. We’re currently using Mailman to address this problem, but the problem with Mailman is we are running it locally, and that makes our server liable for spam complaints. Also, Mailman usually puts each blog post into an attachment, instead of into the body of an email.

The ideal service would automatically create a weekly newsletter, including the most recent blog posts. It would also allow easy editing for readability – say, excerpts from the best 3 recent posts and subject links to the rest of them, plus some heading text. The About.com subject guide newsletters are examples of what we’re looking for. It would also include all of the unsubscribe/other reader functionality that Mailman and Constant Contact offer.

Does anyone have a solution to this dilemma? We’re happy to pay for a service that will work for our needs, which are common among blog publishers.

This post was written by David Teten, source: Where is the perfect tool to convert blogs to email?

One of the major themes of The Virtual Handshake: Opening Doors and Closing Deals Online (see Chapter 16) is the need to preserve ones corporate and personal virtual reputation. I’ve long thought that there was a need for a business that would be a personal PR agent, which would monitor what’s being said about you and destroy any negative information.

That business has been launched: ReputationDefender. What I like about the model is that I think it addresses a real concern that people have (or should have). 10% of Internet searches are for proper names; you are being evaluated every day online. ReputationDefender’s main competition will be the same competition that PR firms have: people providing the service in-house instead of using an outside provider.

An interesting question they’ll have to address as they scale is verifying the identity of the person using the service. If I say that I want to monitor the activity of my child, who verifies that that person is my child? And this is a great tool for stalking and identity theft (as are ZoomInfo and many other online network services): perhaps I fill out a form indicating that I want to monitor the online activities of a certain individual, who may not be me personally. Verifying that a given credit card ties to the name of the person being investigated is an obvious way to verify identity, but of course large numbers of credit card numbers are stolen every year.

I agree with Pete Cashmorethat it would be preferable to offer a very basic automated tracking service for free to get people into the system - “entering your credit card details is a massive barrier for the casual visitor”. After all, people can easily use any search engine/blog reader to view discussion of their name across the net.

More here and here.

Overall, I’m positive on the company’s prospects.

This post was written by David Teten, source: ReputationDefender Protects Your Online Reputation

Given Nitron Advisors is in a reasonably competitive industry, I’m very interested in tools like http://competitio.us/. The basic idea is that it’s a tool for companies (or investors) to keep track of their competitors’ actions and features.

I’m not sure it’s got enough differentiation to be a sustainable business, but as a customer, I like it.

Via Techcrunch

This post was written by David Teten, source: Track your competition online

I enjoyed speaking at lunch at two Vistage regional conferences this past week, in New York and Chicago. (As background, Vistage is the world’s largest CEO membership organization based on revenue.)

You can download my two presentations here:

+ Chicago Conference: How to Accelerate Your Company with Web 2.0 Technologies

New York Conference: Seven Free, Easy Steps to Accelerate Your Business with Web 2.0 Technologies. I have also attached the New York handout below in HTML format.

Feedback welcome!

Seven Free, Easy Steps to Accelerate Your Business with Web 2.0 Technologies

Ch = Character

Co = Your firm’s Competence

R = Relevance of the other company

S = Strength

I = Information

N = Number of companies

D = Diversity

Value of Your Corporate Network = D * ∑^N_n=1 (Ch_n * Co_n * R_n * S_n * I_n)

And one more resource:

This post was written by David Teten, source: Slides from Vistage CEO Conference this week