There’s a great article out on Clickz.com summarizing two reports recently published on mobile social media.  It’s well worth reading. Unsurprisingly, the US is behind Europe when it comes to social media on phones, and teens and University-aged students are the most active users. ABI Research reports that the audience for social media on mobiles is approaching 50 million members worldwide and is expected to reach 174 million in 2011.

Another interesting article on Clickz.com lists Social Media as one of the top 10 trends driving Traffic and Sales in 2007.

My client, ShoZu, has been nominated in the Crunchies Award as Best Mobile Start-up.

This award is co-produced by TechCrunch, Read/Write Web, VentureBeat and GigaOm.  Major sponsors include: Adobe, Microsoft, Sun and a few venture funds.

Please head to the voting link, http://vote.crunchies.techcrunch.com/ scroll to the mobile category and vote for ShoZu.  You can vote once and day, so please take the time to vote as many times as you can!

Voting ends January 10. The awards will be announced January 18.

With all my talk in earlier blogs about the benefit of companies employing a social media strategy, I thought that it would be a good idea to review a product that enables companies to build their own social media empire.  Yesterday, I had the opportunity to see a demo of a great new product from Social Platform LLC: Social Platform Enterprise 1.2.  Just released last week, this product does what it says on the tin- it is a highly extensible, modular platform which allows enterprises to build a customized social media infrastructure – complete with integration into key social media sites like Blogger, Live Journal, WordPress, and soon, YouTube and Flickr.  The platform effectively allows companies to develop a social networking hub for their constituents.

Social Platform Enterprise is highly customizable and integrates well into existing systems.  Social Platform and their clients work together to tailor a solution to meet business goals – i.e.: identifying features, branding, integration points, etc.  With the current release of Social Platform Enterprise 1.2, the average implementation usually takes between 30-60 days and costs about $15,000 for a basic site. Clients typically pay about $1,500 month for hosting and services.  The resulting product is a unique, scalable, hosted, managed social media solution, which allows an organization’s constituency to interact with each other and the organization in a more meaningful way.  The code and presentation layer are separate, so clients can make edits, using almost any HTML editor.  In the future, President and CEO Eric Schlissel tells me that they’re planning to release an “Express” version of the platform in Q1 2007, which will be an out-of-the box solution for customers who are looking for a less customized solution that is easy to set up without consulting expertise.

One of the biggest selling features of this platform is the openness and its ability to integrate well with existing systems and popular social media sites.  The plug-in architecture and open API, combined with the fact that modular software updates are included in the cost of the product, mean that that the platform is scalable and can grow with an organization’s needs.  Plus, Google Analytics is incorporated so that clients can measure what levels of traction their social media efforts are producing.

There are several other key advantages of Social Platform Enterprise 1.2 including:

• The ability to integrate community, ratings, and rewards: create member profiles and member groups and conduct polls of specific groups of constituents. Offer rewards to members for their participation in forums or their evangelism on other websites.  The ability to allow for member rankings.
• The ability for members to communicate and collaborate. Clients have the option of integrating content management systems, wikis, member-to-member messaging, and target communication channels (which allow client to speak to members with a specific profile. E.g. a certain number of reward points)
• Security features are built in, and clients can decide which level of security they want for their social media sites. There are automatic security updates, a secure admin area, and the possibility for secure sign on for users.  Plus, because the resulting sites are hosted and managed by Social Platform, there is a private hardware and a private network

In the next rev of the product, Schlissel expects several improvements including:

• Payment Options for All System Features
• Ecommerce, Auctions, Classifieds
• Expansion of Web Services
• Integration of Third-Party Software
• VOIP, IM
• Widgets

To see the results of Social Platform in action, check out one of their first clients: Omotion.  If you’ve got any comments on Social Platform, please post a comment on this blog. The demo looks good, and I’m eager to hear feedback from others who have interacted with Social Platform generated social media sites.

*Note: I don’t get paid to endorse products. I just review new social media products as I see them, when the opportunity arises.

A couple of weeks ago, I got an email from a concerned dad regarding my post, “New MySpace Lawsuite Ignites More Questions: ‘Who is Responsible For Safety of Kids On-Line?’.”

One thing that is also going on and I think will get much much worse with time. People taking someone’s picture and pretending to be them. You can create a bad situation on many levels like that. My son is 13 and a neighbor kid put his picture on there with his name and zip code. He declared he was “gay and proud” and “horney as fuck#$”. This can be devastating to a 13 year old, or anyone else for that matter. I am on day four of trying to get it removed. Imagine if someone puts a picture of your child in front a predator and lures him in. A whole new way of creating crime and it wouldn’t be near as hard as one may think. We MUST come up with a system to handle this and MySpace has to respond to problems much fast than they do. Four days + is just ridiculous.

Troy’s email points to the downside of the self-policing society we’ve created on-line.  For the most part, “self policing’ seems to work. Take Wikipedia as an example… Remember the post I wrote on Sinbad’s reported death and re-birth?!  But, what if you’re a 13 year old kid that’s being bullied, and the false information is being written about you?  Enduring even 24 hours of torment caused by libelous comments written about you must be a misery.  And, if you’re 13 and being bullied, unlike Sinbad, it’s doubtful you’ll have a group of people (besides your family) willing to stand up to defend you.

I’m happy to report that I heard back from Troy this morning.  After 2 weeks of trying (no doubt very hard), he finally had the libelous comments about his son removed from MySpace… And, he only had to contact the (gasp) FBI!

I finally have an update. In short, the post has been removed and it took just under 2 weeks to get done. After numerous emails to MySpace and lack of enthusiasm in local law enforcement I contacted the FBI branch that deals with internet crimes. Within 24 hours of sending the FBI an email MySpace suddenly took an interest in my situation. I am not 100% on if the FBI helped or not but I expect they did, probably with a simple email. My advice to someone in this situation, stay persistent and don’t give up/educate yourself to applicable policy at the website your having trouble with.  And don’t be afraid to use this website: ic3.gov.

I find it sad that it takes a note to the FBI to get this sort of thing sorted.  I agree with Troy.  There needs to be a better system in place to counteract libel on-line and to handle complaints of identity theft or photo mis-use on large social networking properties (especially where 13 year olds are concerned).

Check out the post I wrote on SocialMedia Networks’ blog about how social application developers can maximize their advertising revenue returns.

I recently wrote a post on SocialMedia Networks’ blog about how corporations are using social networking platforms to replace or suppliment their intranets.  In this post, I raise questions about how companies will use social media sites to their advantage and what this means to those of us who want to use social networking sites for personal reasons.  Check it out here.

I recently wrote a post on SocialMedia Networks’ blog about the importance of creating user intent when developing a social application.  Creating user intent ensures that beyond getting a large number of installations of your social application and seeing it spread virally, that you’re creating a reason for people to use your application regularly. If people use your application regularly, you’ll increase the amount of advertising inventory you’ve got available to sell to social advertising networks and therefore increase the amount of revenue you can earn through advertising on your social applications. You can read the post here.

In addition to consulting for SocialMedia Networks and Covered Communications, I now consult for ShoZu Inc., the leading provider of mobile social media services that connect mobile consumers with their online social networks, personal blogs, photo storage sites and other Web 2.0 properties from their mobile phone.

ShoZu allows users to engage with social media from their mobile phone, making it easy for them to keep in constant contact with preferred social networking services from the handset.  ShoZu is a light weight, mobile application that allows users to publish photos, videos, comments, status updates, blog postings and more to their favorite online sites …in one click or less. With it, you can:

• Publish to multiple sites with one click (pictures, video, metadata, geotags, etc.)
  
• Subscribe to content feeds
  
• Blog
• Make new friends
• Discover new communities
• See what friends are up to
  

ShoZu already works with most of SixApart blogging solutions, including Vox, TypePad, and Live Journal.  (My colleague “Jambo” at ShoZu is a fellow Voxer, and you can check out ShoZu’s blog here).

ShoZu also works with Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, WordPress, BBC, Kodak Easy Share, and a ton of others (click here for the full list).  And, the app is pre-loaded onto a ton of mobile phones.  ShoZu just released a new version ShoZu 3.3, which is available for download from your mobile browser or by clicking here to go to the self-provisioning website.

I’m working ShoZu to bring more social networking properties on board.  If you’re a social networking site that would like to integrate with ShoZu, please email me.

Testing Mobile Vox from my Treo 750v (unlocked)… The app is very easy to use, but I wish you could take pics not only from your phone but from your Vox and Flickr accounts too. You can’t choose size or positioning of photos or spell check either, but it’s still a great app… stable and user friendly!  I also couldn’t figure out how to hyperlink, but hey… That’s what computer editing is for.

This is a pic I took at the recent Killers concert in San Francisco.

SocialMedia Netoworks just hit the 1000 mark, with over 1000 Facebook applications per day running on the Appsaholic network and making money for 3rd party developers.  Check out teh lates blog post I wrote on the topic at: SocialMedia Network’s Blog.