Five Tools to Know About When Developing Software for Social Networks

Five Tools to Know About When Developing
Software for Social Networks

By Michael Fedotov, Renat Khasanshyn, Alex Khizhnyak
Abstract: Community-driven blogs and social network activities are spreading
like wild fire. To remain competitive, both industry leaders and smaller
companies are forced to promote within social networks. This white paper will
review five useful tools and five popular social media marketing campaigns.


1. Executive Summary ............................................................................................................................. 3

2. Why Social Network Marketing? ......................................................................................................... 3

3. Five Examples of Useful Social Media Tools .................................................................................... 4

3.1. Openface: Facebook + OpenSocial Development Platform ............................................................ 4

3.2. Spring Social: Social Network API ................................................................................................... 4

3.3. Facebook Photos: Integrating WordPress with Facebook .............................................................. 5

3.4. KudoStar: Contacts and Places Mashup ......................................................................................... 5

3.5. Simple Profile Specification: Universal User Profile Protocol .......................................................... 5

4. Five Examples of Effective Marketing Campaigns ........................................................................... 6

4.1. HP’s Voice Posts ............................................................................................................................. 6

4.2. Samsung’s “Defining Moment”: Community Voting ......................................................................... 6

4.3. BMW’s “What Drives You?”: Facebook Community Drawing Contest ............................................ 6

4.4. Honda’s “Power of Dreams”: Sponsored Content ........................................................................... 7

4.5. Ask.com’s “Ask A Ninja”: Partnering with Bloggers ......................................................................... 7

5. The Benefits of Social Media Marketing ............................................................................................ 8

6. About the Authors ................................................................................................................................ 8

© Altoros Systems 2


According to eMarketer.com, in 2008 the total spending on social network advertising in the US
comprised $1.2 billion, double what it was just two years earlier. In 2011, American enterprises are
expected to spend more than $2.5 billion on social network marketing.

Involving social networks in marketing campaigns is more than an
efficient way of accelerating project delivery. Social network marketing
enables an enterprise to keep in touch with its target audience directly. Social networking
More than that, when carried out thoughtfully, social network marketing
is useful for an
can inspire the audience itself to further promote and even spread the
product. Social networking is also useful because it enables an enterprise to
enterprise to easily evaluate public opinion about the product or the evaluate public
enterprise itself.
opinion about the
With the aid of third-party agencies, industry leaders, as well as
product or the
smaller companies, utilize social networking to remain competitive,
and do this in a variety of ways. enterprise itself.
This white paper will provide a review of five popular marketing trends
that involve social networks, and five tools that can be of use when
implementing an interactive marketing campaign.

In the United States, the number of unique users on MySpace alone is over 70 million. Research
carried out by Nielsen Netratings suggests that the total audience of social-oriented sites in Germany
comprises 15 million users, which is about 35% of all German Internet users (as assessed by
(N)ONLINER Atlas in 2008). In France, according to TechCrunchies, 54% of Internet users visited social
networks (such as Skyrock, the most popular social network among the French) at least during the two-
month survey period. The leading country in terms of the popularity of social networks, as a study
conducted by mashraqi.com revealed, is South Korea, with more than 66% of Korean Internet users
belonging to a social network.

Bringing together wider and more solid audiences than most Web portals could ever dream, social
networks represent unique marketing opportunities, which many companies have already recognized.

Obviously, the ability to draw the attention of so many people has great potential, and, even more
importantly, the community itself, since it is made up of friends and acquaintances, works as an
advertiser.

Engaging interactive marketing, though, is not as easy as it may seem. Naturally, most people in Web
communities feel skeptical about a product or service that is advertised by what can be described as
social network spamming. A member of an online social community has typically joined it in order to be
able to communicate with other human beings, not to have his or her personal pages meddled with by a
spam bot or an unfamiliar and impersonal member in an attempt to foist off something on them
(however good a deal it may actually be). Clever social media marketing is really about the art of
encouraging members’ participation, which is a promising niche for advertising companies and
interactive agencies.



To keep in touch with the customers, inform them about new
products and the company’s achievements, and receive feedback,
many companies maintain one or several corporate blogs. Blogs
Did you know that in
are also a great means of search engine optimization. Another terms of audience
popular technology of social media marketing is creating a user size, there are several
community around one or several of the enterprise’s products. As
the community expands and becomes, to an extent, autonomous, it Super Bowls every day
can carry out some of the functions that are otherwise laid on the on Facebook,
staff. And of course, a presence on popular social networks, such
as MySpace and Facebook, is becoming a must for any vendor
MySpace, and
looking to keep abreast of the times. YouTube?
In order to make good use of the potential that social marketing
possesses, one has to implement effective methods of social
marketing. The campaigns described below have managed to do that and achieved impressive results.

Recently, a number of new social networking tools and platforms have been developed or announced.
Some of them can be useful to an enterprise while conducting their social network marketing campaign,
while others provide an insight into the trend’s future.

3.1. Openface: Facebook + OpenSocial Development Platform
http://groups.google.com/group/openface

When developing a social network application, one has to decide on
a platform. Typically, one would waver between Facebook, the most
In South Korea,
popular social network application development platform used by
more than 66% of over 35,000 applications, and OpenSocial, a strong alternative that is
Internet users featured on many popular sites, such as MySpace, Yahoo!, Ning,
Salesforce.com, Netlog, Friendster, Hi5, etc., guaranteeing an
belong to a social application’s interoperability between them.
network.
The dilemma is caused by the fact that the two APIs require
completely different application architectures. To develop a
Facebook application, a developer has to be proficient in PHP (or Java), JavaScript, FBML, FQL, Mock,
and AJAX. OpenSocial, on the other hand, is based on HTML, JavaScript, and the Google Gadgets
framework. Understandably, creating an application that supports both Facebook and OpenSocial is a
time- and effort-consuming task.

However, the challenge is not an unsolvable case, claim the developers of Openface, a PHP framework
designed for building applications that run on Facebook and OpenSocial platforms. Openface is a set of
libraries that you add into your PHP application that enable the same codebase to run within Facebook,
Bebo, and OpenSocial containers. Using Openface is supposed to help a developer create an
application that can be run on both Openface and Facebook, in the amount of time it takes to develop
an application on just one of the platforms.

3.2. Spring Social: Social Network API
http://code.google.com/p/spring-social



The Spring Social project provides a Spring MVC Framework-based API for developing social
networking applications. Currently, only Facebook is supported, but OpenSocial support is expected in
the future.

The aim of the project is to simplify Java-based social application development and deployment by
providing a consistent, reusable, and well-documented set of Spring MVC components. This is
particularly helpful because there is a fair amount of confusion these days regarding Facebook API and
the request model imposed on Facebook applications.

3.3. Facebook Photos: Integrating WordPress with Facebook
http://tantannoodles.com/toolkit/facebook-photos/

Facebook Photos is a solution for integrating Facebook with
WordPress-supported blogs. With the aid of Facebook
Photos, users can insert photos that they have uploaded to
their Facebook account, directly into their blogs.

After the plug-in is installed, users can see all their photos
(including those they have been tagged in) available on
Facebook in an additional tab when writing or editing posts.
The plug-in can also resize photos instantly.

Facebook Photos is based on the Facebook Developers
Platform.

3.4. KudoStar: Contacts and Places Mashup
http://www.kudostar.com/

The concept behind KudoStar is highly innovative: creating a mobile
social rating system that will connect one’s contacts and favorite
places. Both people and places accumulate “KudoScores” (ratings
that can be both positive and negative). Based on the Google Android
mobile operating system, KudoStar also provides images, sounds, and
videos for the entries, and makes use of Google Maps to help locate
added places.

KudoStar will support both mobile devices and popular social networks
(Facebook- and OpenSocial-based) in an ambition to unite a multitude
of users worldwide and spread the data collected to this audience.

Kudostar is currently under development; a public alpha is expected in the near future.

3.5. Simple Profile Specification: Universal User Profile Protocol
http://code.google.com/p/simpleprofilespec

Simple Profile Specification (or SPS) is an ambitious project oriented toward the future of the Internet
and social networking. Its developers aim to create a simple and universal user profile protocol, allowing
transferability and automatic updating of user data on all blogs, social networks, etc. that support it.

Today, many users have a dozen or more accounts on different sites and have to manually edit their
profiles on all of these sites every time they change their e-mail address or want to update personal
data, such as marital status. In the context of this situation, SPS represents a very promising



prospective trend, allowing both private users and social network marketing-aware companies to
minimize their effort.

4.1. HP’s Voice Posts
One of the first industry-leading companies to recognize the trend, Hewlett-Packard has introduced
Voice Posts—editorial segments served up as audio files on blog sites. HP is positioned as the sponsor
of the series: their logo appears under the audio file, next to a label that reads: “Voice post technology
sponsored by HP iPaq 510.”

The idea of communicating with audio files instead of e-mail
has caught on fast, finding support with thousands of bloggers
and turning out a huge win for HP. Voice posting has already
been implemented into the popular group blog Boing Boing
and many blogs by acknowledged independent authors, and,
although HP has no relationship to or influence over the
content of the voice posts, the company was the first to
benefit from the technology.

References to HP have spread rapidly with the growing
number of voice posts covering most subjects and audiences,
grabbing the attention of millions of readers.

4.2. Samsung’s “Defining Moment”: Community Voting
Samsung decided to enter the game with an interactive
campaign oriented toward a specific audience—sport fans.
Visitors and passionate sports bloggers were invited to
identify the “Defining Moment of the Weekend” during the
NFL season. Writers from the SportsBlogs Nation sites,
ArmchairGM, and PROTRADE, as well as visitors,
submitted their choices for the most important match-up of
the week, and readers voted on the “defining moments”
they liked best.

In the first 48 hours, one in five visitors to the site
participated, either by submitting their own “defining
moment” or by voting on the moment they liked. The
encouragingly high level of user engagement proves that
with their “Defining Moment,” Samsung made a smart
decision.

4.3. BMW’s “What Drives You?”: Facebook Community Drawing Contest



One of the most creative interactive marketing campaigns to date, “What Drives You?” offered
Facebook users the chance to use the Graffiti Wall application to create their own art inspired by the
new BMW 1 series. The five winners were awarded model BMW Art Cars based on the styles of
important artists, such as Andy Warhol, Sandro Chia, and Roy Lichtenstein.

As a result, in just a one-week period, more than 9,000 drawings were submitted, 500,000 votes were

given, and about 3,000 people became fans of the contest.

BMW brilliantly managed to draw public attention to their new BMW 1 series in what Dave Morin, Senior
Platform Manager at Facebook, called “one of the most brilliant social media campaigns” he’d seen in a
long time. The campaign was amplified with exposure in the press and on many blogs.

4.4. Honda’s “Power of Dreams”: Sponsored Content
Honda took a different approach and decided to concentrate on advertising while raising public
awareness. This led to the company’s sponsoring three special sections of Boing Boing, called "The
Power of Dreams." Tapping into Boing Boing’s tag cloud, Honda featured unique content on the three
key themes in its positioning: innovation, safety, and environment. Honda managed to connect the
brand with an authentic conversation about the themes core to its identity, and, at the same time, have
thousands informed on achievements and events related to the topics.

This explains why the “Power of Dreams” click-through rates were five times the industry average.
Another achievement that signifies the campaign’s successfulness is the Boing Boing-sponsored page
th
ranking 6 (right after honda.com) in Google search results for “Honda Power of Dreams.”

4.5. Ask.com’s “Ask A Ninja”: Partnering with Bloggers
As a part of its re-branding campaign, Ask.com
partnered with video blogger Ask A Ninja. Nine
episodes were rolled, at the end of which the Ninja
invited his viewers to go to Ask.com and enter a
proposed made-up word. After doing so, the viewers
would get the definition of the word via a custom video
skit by the Ninja.



The campaign achieved immense success. In the first 20 hours, one out of every twelve viewers of the
Ninja’s “Ninja Sayings” video skit went to Ask.com, queried “ninjuice” (the proposed word) and watched
the bonus video. While a conventional banner delivers a click-through rate of about 0.5% (and of
course, not everyone who follows the link actually tries the service), “Ask A Ninja” achieved an
impressive 8.3% rate of conversion.

Implementing social media technologies into marketing is as
In 2011, American much a challenging task for an enterprise as it is rewarding.
9,000 drawings and half a million votes with BMW’s “What
enterprises are expected Drives You?”, a fantastic conversion rate of 8.3% with
to spend more than $2.5 Ask.com’s “Ask a Ninja,” and every fifth visitor participating in
Samsung’s “Defining Moment” are only a few examples that
billion on social network illustrate why social media marketing makes sense. Tools,
marketing. such as Openface and SpringSocial, can boost the efficiency
of carrying out a social media campaign by helping cut down
on the time required for implementation.

High requirements for ROI and product delivery time motivate vendors to refer to third-party specialists
to conduct their social networking campaigns. Did you know that the company behind HP’s Flickr-based
“Resolutionaries” campaign is Altoros, a software delivery acceleration specialist headquartered in
Western Massachusetts? The same company is also behind the Openface Framework, which allows
developers to create social media applications that run on both Facebook and OpenSocial.

The most important benefits of social network marketing are as follows:

 It accelerates project delivery.
 It is a great way of getting more people to know about your product, as social networks unite
huge audiences online.
 It helps to evaluate public opinion on the product.
 It reduces the effort required by an enterprise’s own staff to promote the product by having the
community do this, and virtually brings this effort to a rate of zero if a social media campaign is
outsourced to a third-party agency.
Over the past few years the role of social networking in companies’ marketing activities has increased
significantly. But, as social networks continue to grow steadily, uniting millions of users worldwide, it
looks as though today is only the beginning of the era of social network marketing. Being a part of this
trend has grown from a promising option for an enterprise into a must, in order to stay competitive.

Michael Fedotov is Technology Evangelist at Altoros Systems, Inc. and has been working as a
freelance journalist for a number of IT-related periodicals since 2003, covering next to all aspects of IT,
and specifically software development, in an abundance of articles. He has taken part in several
scientific conferences and provided services for many more participants creating their presentations. He
also has experience working as an interpreter and is currently studying Japanese.

Alex Khizhnyak is Chief Evangelist at Altoros Systems, Inc. and co-founder of the Belarus Java User
Group. Since 1998, he has gained experience as an author, editor, media specialist, event manager,



conference speaker, and blogger. So far, his education background combines IT, programming,
economics, and journalism.

Renat Khasanshyn is the founder and CEO of Altoros Systems, Inc. Mr. Khasanshyn speaks
frequently at a wide range of events, and most recently was selected as a finalist for the 2007 Emerging
Executive of the Year award by the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council. Prior to founding
Altoros Systems, Mr. Khasanshyn was VP of Engineering for Tampa-based insurance company,
PriMed, Inc. Mr. Khasanshyn is a co-founder of the Belarus Java User Group and studied Engineering
at Belarusian State Technical University.

Altoros Systems, Inc. is a global software delivery acceleration specialist that provides focused
outsourced software engineering and testing services to interactive agencies, software product
companies, and information-driven enterprises. Founded in 1999 and headquartered in Western
Massachusetts, Altoros has representative offices in Tampa, Florida. It manages a software
development center in Eastern Europe out of its offices in Minsk, Belarus. For more information, please
visit www.altoros.com.


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