Focus on Microformats

A number of sites have recently implemented a new breed of pre-filled registrations. This idea is called portable social networks. It enables one social networking site to access the public profile data of another via the use of microformats.

As the concepts of social media extend into the design of many modern sites, the addition of user profiles and friend lists are becoming common. It’s a relatively simple process to mark up your site so that they can become part of this exchange of data.

If you’re not yet familiar with microformats, they ‘re documented at http://microformats.org/wiki/Main_Page Most social media sites follow a common architecture, which contains a profile page for each user . The foundation is to mark up all your user information on this page with hCard microformat. if the information is fragmented there’s and include pattern that enables you to glue it all into one hCard.

Where you have additional pages containing other useful user information, such as a friend list, you should add the XFN rel=”me” attribute to any link. This will tell a parser that the linked pages are also about the user.

<a rel=”me” href=”../nareshsadasivan/friends/”>Friends</a> Often, friend list can be so long that you need to use pagination and break them into several pages. You should mark up any pagination links with rel=”me next” or rel=”me prev” . Although XFN can describe relationships well, it lacks the richness of hCard. The microformats community has now started promote the use of the joint hcards XFN design pattern for marking up friend lists.

When using icons without text , the alt attribute can be used to define the formatted name of the friend. You may have to create mapping between your site’s own relationship values and XFN. If your system doesn’t differentiate the strength of a relationship, use the default value rel=”acquaintance”. There are now sites the pull together information from multiple online identities across the net, so it’s also good  practice to add the rel=”me” to any link to an external profile.

Surf and turf

Does honesty pay on the internet, or are astroturfers deliberately ruining online advertising?

Honest comments have saved me a fortune over the years. They’ve prevented me from buying a vacuum cleaner that had a tendency to explode, steered me away from a nice-looking holiday resort where, it turns out, the streets are paved with lager louts’ vomit, and they’ve stopped me from buying games / softwares that won’t work on my particular hardware. However I ‘ve stopped trusting the net. Part of the problem is fanboys- the utter tools who post detailed reviews of things they haven’t seen. heard ,used or played six months before they even go on sale – but more often than not the problem is astroturfers, the people with a vested interest in trying to mislead the rest of us.

Thanks to the unfair cyber laws and practices in India, which criminalises deliberate attempts to mislead people both online and off.

Astroturfing and other irritants exist because internet users are bunch skinflints . Every single attempt to persuade punters to pay for web words has failed because people simply won’t pay, and they don’t expect advertising to fill the gap when AdBlock Plus does such a good job. That’s why the ads get more aggressive in their attempts to evade the ad0blockers, and it’s why content get perverted with product placement and links to purchasing pages instead of actual information. It’s also why frims pay the astroturfers to ruin things for rest of us.

Stop building communities and start joining in

The internet is changing the way smart companies sell to their customers.

Traditional corporate ad-speak sounds lofty and unapproachable online, especially when the rest of people are talking with human voices. There’s also been a huge shift in the balance of the power . Think how quick and easy it is to fire off an email to customer services when a product doesn’t deliver. Now think how many more people you could reach in the same amount of time by changing your Facebook status, posting in your blog or adding a review on Amazon. Your potential audience as a consumer is huge and you can strengthen or damage the reputation of brand once considered untouchable.

Smart online marketers have realized it’s time to start talking with, not at their potential customers. After all, the customers are communicating with each other-why not join the conversation? Community marketing isn’t new of course; it’s been a buzzword of the last few years –right up there with “user generated content”. It’s only recently been knocked off its perch by the term “Web 2.0”, but all of these ideas are backing up a fundamental shift in the distribution of power.

Owing an online community has become a holy grail for many companies. What could be better than having a community at your finger tips? A group of users, passionate about your product, talking to you and each other? Communities can connect customers old and new, provide support and advise and give essential feedback to the mothership. It’s thereto applauding you when things go right and, if managed well, support you when things go wrong. It opens up the conversation and say that you, as a company, are listening.

For long time now, it’s been assumed that if we build it, they will come. The general feeling has been that customers aren’t doing much online when left to their own devices, so they’ll be thrilled to hang out in a new community all about a specific Ice Cream, phone or washing power.

Several years ago, perhaps this was safer to assume, but things have changed. Before you think about building a new branded community, just look around at the huge number of passion based group that exist already. There are groups for everything from professions to illness to hobbies. There are cluster of people talking with knowledge and genuine passion about so many things, and this potentially includes your product.

Your branded community now has all this to compete with. Are you sure you can drag enough users away? Perhaps the challenge now is not how to coax people into your online world, but how you can fit into theirs. How you can join in their conversation and bring with you an interesting voice from the inside.

Before you crash into these brave new worlds, put in some legwork. It is not simple as turning up shouting “Hi! I’m from X company! Our Product are awesome!” You’ll be appreciated more for fitting in than standing out, so sit quietly for a while and observe. What value can you add to the conversation? Can you genuinely help? The power of large company listening to a single consumer is immense-never underestimate that.

Think too about the huge number of social platforms on offer. If Facebook is where your target audience hangs out, go hang out there too. Start a Twitter feed to put human voices to your team, or setup a group on Flickr and let people show the product they’ve bought. Show them what it’s like in your warehouse or share hints of the new things you’re working on.

If you must own a community, don’t be afraid to start small with a blog. They’re accessible, easy to join in with and simple to setup. When it looks like a little community is starting to develop, expand the offering, adapt and change.

Most of all, don’t forget to comment, encourage and give feedback. Genuine connections are what make communities tick, but you can’t connect until you and your company start acting like a real human beings and joining in.