Mike Sommers is the Senior Vice President of Product Management with KickApps, a leading social media platform company. KickApps offers a "Social Graph Operating System" and a suite of social networking and user generated content applications that plug into it. Get a taste of what Mike has to say and register for the conference to meet him in person.
What does "brandologie" mean to you? "Change we can believe in" or "Yes we can"?
“Yes we can,” for sure! Doesn’t that make you feel like you are in control of your own destiny? That you are personally involved in the challenges and the successes that lie ahead? As a brand, aligning your interests with the interests of your customers is key!
What does KickApps mean by a "Social Graph EngineTM"?
The "Social Graph" is generally defined as a representation of a person's online identity, activity and relationship to other people, media and ideas.
Different social graphs are designed to create and collect different types of data. Facebook, MySpace and Google social graphs are fed with data collected from those general purpose social networking portals. By contrast, KickApps Social Graphs are designed to collect contextual data that is specific to each of our customers’ audience, content and activities.
By deploying KickApps, you will create a social graph of your site's audience. This data is associated with your users’ registration, public and private profiles, commenting around editorial and user-generated content, media tags, friend and group relationships and all other site activities. The net result is a deeper understanding of your audience, enabling you to deliver more intelligent content, ads, and other things, based on the nature of your business and your relationship with visitors to your web site.
How do you get people to participate in a social networking application for a company like Kraft?
How you get people to participate in any social network is totally dependent on objectives of the brand. Are you trying to generate page views? Are you trying to learn about (or influence) your customers’ buying habits? Are you trying to provide tech support in an open forum? Are you trying to sell them a new product? Are you trying to get them to vote for you? Each of these objectives requires a slightly different approach in terms of getting people to engage with your brand online. Also you have to consider the online behaviors and habits of your customers. Are they tech savvy? Are they on Facebook and Twitter? Once you’ve answered these questions you are most of the way to figuring out how to reach these people and get them to do things for you using the social media tools that are at their disposal today.
Both the Obama and McCain campaigns had social networking applications. How do you think this will impact future political campaigns?
KickApps actually powered John McCain’s social network at www.mccainspace.com during the 2008 campaign, so I have quite a bit of insight into just how powerful social media can be in terms of connecting with and energizing a constituency during a presidential campaign. That said, I don’t think social media is going to change anything fundamentally in our political structure. Really, what social media brings to the table is a few more tools that politicians can use to connect with their constituents, and vice versa. If it’s true that a politician’s main purpose in life is to serve the needs of their constituents, I can’t think of a better time to be a politician than right now… it’s so easy be connected to (and informed by!) the people that support you.
To learn more about Mike Sommers:
http://www.mikesommers.com/
http://www.linkedin.com/in/mikesommers
http://odeo.com/episodes/23736905-Mike-Sommers-KickApps-com-SVP-Prod-Dev-All-About-Web-2-0-Development
http://www.crunchbase.com/person/mike-sommers
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment