As well as adding to what we’re doing, we’ve been taking some time to learn by talking to a lot of businesses, organisations and people about their use of social media, something that’s proving fascinating and very revealing. It’s certainly changed our ideas on not just what social media is but also where it’s going, the main finding of which we thought we’d share here on the blog. In true social media fashion then, here’s this month’s top three learnings about social media for businesses.

1. Social media is not new and it’s not all about Twitter and Facebook.

At the Dell B2B huddle someone asked Microsoft, Dell and Intel representatives what their most successful social media channels were. Blogs and Forums were the answers, oh and they’ve been doing it for the last decade or so. No mention of Facebook or Twitter, no follow your customers where ever they are approach, instead provide useful information and tools for your customers in a place where they can find and use them. It’s not new and it’s not rocket science.

2. This is here to stay, not being social now involves more risks than being social for most businesses.

This is not to say that all companies must have a forum or Facebook page, but it does mean that companies should and will benefit from having a social media strategy. The process we’re seeing is the listen, participate and build model. First listen to what is being said, then engage carefully on external sites where your customers are. Finally create a home for your conversations and customer engagement, a place where people can easily find you and interact with your brand and services. Not creating a hub will be the equivalent of not having a website; your brand, customer information and customer advocates will have no home in the social media landscape.

3. Customer facing staff are skilled at talking to customers, lets start there.

It’s easy to get carried away about transparency and the opportunity for everyone in a company to become client facing. However, the reality is quiet different. We socialites enjoy talking to and meeting people but that’s not the case for everyone. Way back in most people’s career decision there was a choice between being a people person or not, it’s important for social media advocates to remember that. Companies are making a big effort to adapt to social media, as are their staff but lets not ask the impossible. Starting with people who have customer facing skills is a more sure way to achieve results and promote social media uptake in business circles.

Apart from developing the site we’re in lots of conversations regarding new initiatives and with the help of Stuart Witts we came up with the idea of a speed helping event for May or June. The exact format isn’t decided but for now what we’d like to do is get together 8-10 social media consultants and around 20 small businesses for an evening of rapid fire getting and giving help. It’s going to be a great opportunity for small business owners who are wondering about social media to get some first hand advice from some of the UK’s leading experts on the subject, before deciding whether to take the plunge and get further involved.

We as a company can speak from personal experience about the value participating in the Twitter community has delivered so we’re keen to see more small businesses benefiting from this new and exciting opportunity. The event will be free and if anyone would like to register their interest in taking part they can mail us at speedhelping@cofacio.com or tweet us on @cofacio. We’ll be posting more details shortly here on the Cofacio blog.

For those not fully familiar with social search it’s about harnessing user-generated information to help people find what they want, it’s not new online and is age old off-line where for most of us asking for people’s advice is second nature. Approaches vary and for simplicity we can briefly split them in to three separate areas. First there’s reordering or amending algorithmic search results with user input, example proponents of this are Sproose and more recently Zakta. Secondly, there’s the option to incorporate relevant updates, tweets or reviews into your search results, something Google and Bing announced recently. Thirdly there’s the ability to find people as opposed to pages who can help you find what you’re looking for, this is the approach that Aardvark and we at Cofacio have chosen to adopt. The three approaches are complimentary so while the first and second method help us define the ‘what’, the third approach might be seen more as identifying the ‘who’ we need to know

So what’s the big deal with social search? Well when Eric Schmidt claimed recently at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo Orlando 2009 that how to rank real-time social content is “the great challenge of the age”, in my opinion it’s not so much a sign of where he thinks things are going in the future but more a recognition that traditional search no longer works for an increasing amount of the web’s content, namely user generated information on Twitter and social networks. Finding stuff is one thing but where one search engine really wins over another is in relevancy, so while Google or Bing can incorporate tweets, updates and customer reviews, the problem they face, and as Schmidt points out, is how can they rank them, how can they break through the noise and make them relevant? It’s this problem that practitioners of social search are trying to resolve, and I would argue that it’s an area where we can take 3 key learnings from Twitter and tweeters.

1. It doesn’t all have to be about the quality of the search result

When Stephen Fry talks about Twitter being social and the almost inherent need people have to be social and interact with others, this is a very important lesson social search needs to take on board. Up to now the debate has focused on the quality of the results and while it’s important to look at which method produces the most relevant results, we shouldn’t forget that collaborative social search offers further benefits that go beyond simply finding an answer. Asking other people or searching jointly is social and can be fun, and by engaging with other people as we look for things opportunities arise for cooperation. Searching with other people also helps you think through problems in different ways and allows for distributed cognition which improves cognitive processing and concept formulation. Following this through, social search solutions need to think about how people want to interact when searching, it’s adding another layer on top of the standard search experience.

2. It doesn’t need to be behind registration, people will happily search for things on an open platform

When we first sat down to look at how people would share searches we assumed that people wouldn’t be prepared to search for things openly on the web, in my mind Twitter has proved this theory to be incorrect. There’s stuff people would be wise not to discuss in public but many of the things that we look for on an everyday basis we will happily share, what’s more, we’ll happily give advice in public as Twitter has also demonstrated. What this means for social search is that we are no longer limited to solutions that leverage the knowledge base of your network, but instead we can now look to leverage the knowledge of anyone on the web. Users are not used to, and shouldn’t need to, log in to perform a search, that’s the result we found when we launched a prototype of Cofacio back in April 2009. In a similar way, the way people search on Twitter would suggest that we don’t need to display lengthy profiles and give over personal information in order to interact with other people on simple topics such as which is the best fish and chip shop in London or which play is worth watching in the West End.

3. Ranking people or people’s comments requires a different approach to how you rank a web page

Choosing whose advice to take or who to listen to on a certain topic is something quite personal, every person will have their own criteria and method for doing this. Ranking people on the basis of the amount of other people who follow them, which is similar to ranking pages on the amount of other pages that link to them, seems overly simplistic. On Twitter I’d argue that it’s a person’s behaviour, what they tweet about, as well as our assessment of their credibility based on follower numbers and their reputation that’s important when deciding whether we should listen to their advice on a particular given subject. Social search then needs to come up with ways in which the community can recognize individuals as experts on specific areas by using both explicit and implicit ratings. Other people’s opinions are important but how that person behaves is also key. This recognition system would then guide users with regards who they should listen to without limiting their ability to judge for themselves.

Concluding, there is one thing that was said at the 140 conference in London which is key, Twitter is about people, and with the rise of social media the same can be said of the internet, it’s going to be more and more about people. The result is that search engines developed to find us information and products are no longer suitable tools for this growing social web. You cannot scrape people’s profiles as if they were goods on a shop shelf and you cannot rank people as more or less relevant as if they were information. In light of this, if search companies want to be useful in this new era of the people’s web they need to reinvent themselves to some extent, I would suggest that they need to think more about people’s behaviour online, and for me there’s no better place to start than with Twitter.

Recently we ran a survey to ask users how they’d describe Cofacio to their friends and were very pleased with both the response and what people said. Here are a selection of our favourites, if you’d like to add some more then please comment below.

How would you describe Cofacio to your friends?

• A clever search networking thingy

• Sticky search

• Get other people’s opinion on something rather than google’s thoughts

• A people search engine

• A knowledge website

• A good way to find out about things that you can’t find elsewhere on the internet

• A way to get answers to your questions that your friends may not know

• A site that puts you in contact with others looking for the same as you

• Somewhere to discuss search options and discuss what you are looking for

• As a search engine and as a tool to find others searching for similar things

• A place where you can find what you are looking for based on what major websites and other people with similar interests to yours say, creating a trusted network with time

Thanks to all those who took part and we hope these prove interesting reading, we certainly enjoyed seeing how other people describe Cofacio. Oh, and as a side note, Google is none to sure if in Family Fortunes the host said our survey says or our survey said, can anyone help us out on that?

We’ve all dreamed about what we could do if we were able to foresee the future and most of us I guess would probably make ourselves rich and then work to avoid oncoming disasters in that order. So when Google announced recently that it could do just that, predict the future, it made us really sit up and take notice.

The news relates to the latest release of Google Insights which forecasts what will be searched for in the future, based upon past and current search trends. In Google’s own words Insights means that marketers can now plan future campaigns more effectively, allocating budget and resources appropriately. A compelling argument considering that everyday millions of people tell Google what they’re looking to purchase.

And it’s not only marketers who stand to benefit. Given that we also search for information on health issues, public services, transport links and education. The information we generate could potentially be used by governments to help predict economic activity and plan budgets more effectively, meaning everyone gains.

From our perspective then, full marks to Google as Insights is further evidence of them adhering to their stated intention of sharing information, the importance of which should not be underestimated. Though as a final thought, we would suggest that it’s equally beneficial when people publish there wants and needs in a more open and direct manner, something inherent in what we are doing with Cofacio.

http://cofacio.com/related-searches/Is-there-a-band-playing-at-the-Cofacio-launch-party/7608.htm

http://cofacio.com/related-searches/roald-dahl-books/7304.htm

http://cofacio.com/related-searches/Does-anyone-know-what-next-years-car-registrations-are-going-to-be/6785.htm

http://cofacio.com/related-searches/sink-mats/8273.htm

http://cofacio.com/related-searches/How-to-train-children-to-become-addicted-to-computer-games/7756.htm

150 is the number of humans in a group that will function and thrive as a community, and according to Robin Dunbar’s research it’s all related to the size of the neocortex in our brains – other animals function better in smaller groups because they have a smaller neocortex. Both Dunbar and Gladwell reference an interesting organisation called Gore Associates, famous worldwide for their water proof breathable fabric (and in this house their bendy toothpicks). Reading about Gore really inspired me, in Gore there are no bosses, or job titles, everyone is just ‘an Associate’. There isn’t really any top-down strategy (and definitely no powerpoint or white boards). The way Gore works is to build a plant that is big enough for 150 associates and then they get on with being a successful business. Maintaining the plants with under 150 employees means that managing the company strategy and ethos is more effective – it’s managed by human relationship and peer pressure, not by top-down instruction (or even company songs).

Cofacio right now is rather smaller than 150  but we have been influenced by this story and hope to reflect it in our ethos and in the way the website community works (12 is quite important too).

I’m not sure why the flight’s been delayed but I’m in good company because neither do the airline’s office staff and I’m fairly sure that if I asked one of my fellow passengers they wouldn’t know either, but then I can’t ask them because I don’t know who they are either. Someone knows what went wrong with the plane but I don’t know them and I don’t know anyone that does, so I’m not in the know which leads us to Cofacio and the reason we created it.

Cofacio is designed to bring people together and promote cooperation through the use of social media. We want Cofacio to help people to be in the know by connecting them with the people and organisations around them. The great thing is that this is already happening. Were the airline I’m flying with to follow the example of the Piccadilly Line on Twitter at http://twitter.com/tubepiccadil (instead of charging for an information text service) then they’d have been a better flow of information and everyone right know would be a lot happier. It’s a great example of how sharing even the simplest information at very little cost to oneself can make a real difference for many others, why leave others in the dark if you have the the ability to help them?

We know that social media is making it possible for people to share information and collaborate on a scale, and with an ease, never experienced before. We believe we are at the beginning of a period of change in how people, companies and organisations share information, interact and cooperate. We plan to be part of that change and we invite you to join us.

If you’d like to help us out too then please tell your friends a little about what we are up to and direct them to our pre-launch page.

You can find us on Twitter, and Email, or  by telephone on +44 203 417 6308. (Skype, Facebook and LinkedIn coming soon).

It’s all about the conversation, and we’d love to hear from you!