ChrisScott.org

Just a quick one.

I came across this post a couple of weeks ago (and just got round to following it up): http://shankman.com/i-will-never-hire-a-social-media-expert-and-neither-should-you/.

Basically, @petershankman is very much against the “Social Media Expert”. His argument is based upon social media being just one component of a good marketing stratergy – and not so alien or complex as to need a dedicated expert on your payroll:

Social media is just another facet of marketing and customer service. Say it with me. Repeat it until you know it by heart.

While I do see his point of view – and do agree that social media should be considered part of a broader marketing effort (even if it’s the main part) – I think he (and a staggering amount of commenters) have missed the point. It does sound like something a social media expert would say, but…. they don’t get it.

The point is this: social media isn’t just used as a soapbox to shout from. Unlike many other marketing channels, social media makes it incredibly easy to listen.

Let’s compare it to another “facet of marketing”, email campaigns. What do we learn when we send out a marketing email? Maybe we get an inbound lead – if we’re lucky. Then, we learn that the particular prospect who responded really liked our message. However, we’ve learned very little about all those who didn’t. And aren’t they the more important ones to listen to?

True, you could argue that potential customers might email you to tell you about their requirements and expectations and the preconceptions they have about you. I’m sure it happens. Not often, though.

Using social media, on the other hand, one just needs to do a quick search on Twitter and they can see potentially huge numbers of opinions expressed about them. Combine that information with some clever analytics and a marketing organization has a huge amount of usable and very valuable data to hand.

You could still argue: you don’t need an expert to search on Twitter, which is all Peter asserted. True, you don’t, but that’s only the most obvious use of social media outside of the normal scope of marketing channels. What about automating reactive messaging (as lots of big brands now do already)? What about feeding positive trends, being discussed about your competitors, to your R&D team? What about personalizing how a visiter sees a Web site based upon the publically available information about their likes and dislikes (as idio does)?

What if you don’t know how you could use social media to imprive your business stratergy? Well then, I’d say, you need to hire a social media expert.

I recently saw a tweet quoting TBL, talking at Profiting From The New Web (which I’m very sad to have missed!), which went along the lines of: don’t develop apps, use open standards.

It’s a very interesting instruction. One I used to agree with…

Purely from a technical point of view it is difficult to argue with the logic. Being able to develop once and still create Web applications which work well on many devices – with different hardware features, screen sizes, etc – is very possible using the latest iterations of Web standards.

HTML5 allows developers to produce rich and interactive graphics and animations in their pages using the Canvas element. One can handle streaming media (fairly) effectively using it. Persistent client-side storage is even available, which can be used for offline applications, amongst other things. The very brilliant, and now widely supported, CSS level 3 specifications make it really easy to accommodate different devices and screen sizes by using Media Queries – an excellent example of that is colly.com (play with your browser window size or use your phone/tablet).

All of those technologies are very interesting in their own right but for the purpose of this post I won’t delve into the mucky details. If you are interested, or feel you need to brush up, I recommend following the excellent @DesignerDepot on Twitter.

The important point here, and I assume (which may be a dangerous thing!) the key point for the Open-Standards-over-native-apps argument, is that Web sites built using modern Web standards – running on a modern browser – have the potential to be just as feature rich as any native app.

That may not be quite true: to the best of my knowledge HTML/javascript does not support device specific features such as compasses and native buttons. So in that regard, apps have a slight edge. That said, I don’t think there are any huge gaps in the functionality available through the standard Web technologies. Certainly there are no insurmountable ones.

I do see one bit problem for the Web standards supporters, though. One big difference; one thing that Apple – and the others – offered which so far Web applications have failed to match. Micro-payments.

I’m sure there may be many people who disagree with that statement, but here me out.

Firstly, the importance of micro-payments. Whatever the difference in the functional capabilities of Web applications and native apps, Apple’s App Store essentially created an industry – or at least a sub industry. It was probably the first to market it’s applications as apps and certainly the most successful. 10 million apps have been downloaded and the App Store’s revenue in 2010 reached $5.2 billion. The median revenue per third party app is $8,700 – according to Wikipedia (and source) – and there are more than 300,000 apps available, equating to a $2.6 billion market for the app developers themselves. No doubt, then, this is big business. And (as big a fan as I am of FOSS) that kind of potential revenue has been the main driver in the success of the app movement, driven many software innovations in the name of competition and, most importantly, created an environment for entrepreneurs and developers to benefit financially from their creations. I would say – in my opinion unquestioningly – that the success of the App Store and its contemporaries is primarily down to a no-fuss micro-payment system where users feel safe and comfortable and not under pressure when parting with $3.64 (on average) of their hard earned cash.

You may argue that these micro-payment systems already exist on the Web; Amazon’s payment system – including 1-click – and Paypal could be seen as successful examples, amongst many others, no doubt. However, the argument which I’m contesting is not that Web-based systems are a better alternative to native apps but that open standards are… Amazon is no more open than Apple or Android. Google App’s – while very much Web based – doesn’t use a payment system which is compatible with any of it’s competitors or described in any specification (W3C or otherwise). In fact the W3C did look into this very issue in the 1990′s, although due to lack of uptake of micro-payments (how wrong they were) the working group was closed.

Anyway, to conclude this (now rambling) post…. it’s all well and good to plug open standards but, until the big issue of payments is resolved with an open standard, a healthy applications market – and hence the competitive pressures which have built pushed the boundaries of mobile software to what it is today – could not exist without closed systems and APIs.

Ok. So in the last post I was talking about how I created an RDF graph to describe myself and found that I’d entered into a huge rambling geekfest about the design of the FOAF vocabluary. So, I decided to cut all of that out and post it here separately. For context, it follows directly from having created this RDF document. If your interested read on…

From that experience, of creating my own RDF graph, I had only one hiccup: using the FOAF vocabulary, while it is relatively simple to define a group (such as the company which employs you) and list its members (in that case, staff), it seems impossible to do it the other way around. Essentially, you cannot say “I work for OpenText” but can say “OpenText employs me”. I do understand why this is, though: it is fairly standard for predicates to assume ahas relationship not an is one (#me has foaf:name Chris, not is foaf:name Chris), and standards are essential for Linked Data to work.

You may think that the problem described above sounds pretty irrelevant (you may be right: read on), so let me run through my thought process:

Imagine two graphs, one describing me and one describing OpenText. In the OpenText graph there is a list of employees (as there is on Freebase) which include a reference to my graph. You could, then, search (for the purpose of an example) for the weblogs of OpenText employees fairly successfully. If, however, you were using my graph, you couldn’t find a list of colleagues of mine because I couldn’t add “Chris is employed by OpenText” to then graph and, hence, the two could not be connected.

Someone obviously agreed with that assessment as I discovered the RoleVocab vocabulary on the FOAF wiki. I used that vocab in my person profile document to assert that “Chris has a role in the organization OpenText”.

With hindsight, I think that might have been a mistake, though. My mind-frame was trapped in the resource – the me. Perhaps I should have been thinking about the whole RDF graph. Why couldn’t I include a separate resource about OpenText which only included my employment? Well, because the domain of the foaf:member property is foaf:Group and the foaf:Organization type is a direct subclass of foaf:Agent. Essentially, the foaf vocabulary is saying that you can only be a member of a group and not an organization. Personally, I think that the most semantically correct way around this issue would be to make foaf:Organization a subClass of foaf:Group or, failing that, foaf:Organization could be added as a second rdfs:domain property of foaf:member…. I may make the suggestion.

In the meantime, I’ve also added an OWL Object Property to the top of my RDF document which describes the predicate”employee”, as in “OpenText has employee Chris”.

So: apologies for the geeky and rambling post and please let me know your thoughts on the whole “Group has member Person”/”Person participates in Group” conundrum.

That’s right. About a fortnight ago I decided it was about time to practice what I preach (well, specifically what I was due to preach at last weeks excellent ePublishing Innovation Forum) and get myself onto the Semantic Web. For those new to the concept of the Semantic Web, I’m talking about creating an RDF graph which includes a resource describing me.

So, without further ado, here I am:

http://chrisscott.org/about/card#me

The document at the end of that link is a FOAF Personal Profile Document. As you can see, the URI above includes the fragment “me”. This is a fairly important part of the Linked Data concept as it allows one of the axioms, that the URI is dereferenceable, whilst also identifying a resource, “me”, which can be used to link the graph to others. So, if you are curious, take a look at my personal profile and check out the “me” resource – it’s pretty simplistic but a good starting point.

So, how did I go about creating my personal profile on the Semantic Web? Well I started with a step I urge everyone to do: I signed up to the Opera community. You can do the same here. Once you’ve done that you can go to your profile and click on the “FOAF” link on the right hand side of the footer:

My profile page in the Opera community.

That’s the quickest and easiest way to get yourself represented on the Semantic Web but for me Opera do not give you enough control. For example, I cannot use the foaf:weblog predicate to point to this blog, only the one which Opera host for me (that said, they do support the rdfs:seeAlso predicate so my private personal profile is referenced by my Opera one). For that reason, I took the XML generated for my Opera community profile, tweaked it a bit and uploaded it onto this domain.

Give it a go! I’d love to hear how people get on…

NB: I ended up going on a bit in the draft of this post about the FOAF vocab design and got a bit technical, so I’ve seperated that content off into this post.