The new SocialGO takes a fresh approach to building beautiful, socially connected websites. We believe that existing platforms force you to compromise between good design and powerful social features…. but now we are bringing you both, for the first time, under one platform.
Learn more at sgv2.com!

Our Dom was lucky enough to rub shoulders with the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, who were also attending the event. The rest of the SocialGO team were a bit too busy to attend, but were appropriately jealous and assured that Dom spoke very well indeed.

See below for some pictures.

The term “conversation marketing” first came about in the book Join the Conversation by Joseph Jaffe. Businesses conducting conversations with their customers is far from new but Jaffe wanted to look at the rapid change in business to consumer engagement brought about by the mass adoption of social media.

Traditional display advertising had been the primary channel of communication between companies and their markets. A company would begin by crafting a message which it would hope would resonate with it’s audience, building awareness over time and hopefully leading to purchase. This was a hit-and-miss approach and relied on massive scale and big budgets.

But then the social media revolution came and the internet went from being largely a read-only experience to being completely interactive. Consumers went from passively absorbing carefully edited marketing messages to creating as much content as they consumed. Jaffe offers the term “Prosumer” to describe the new generation of consumer who not only consumes content but also produces a huge amount through blogs, reviews, tweets, status updates etc.

The “Prosumer” is responsible for maintaining their own “personal brand” through their Facebook page and twitter account and consequently has an acute understanding of branding and messaging along with their own clearly defined ethics and values. Prosumers manage their following on the social networks and act as the gatekeepers to their own social graph; if they like a brands message or campaign then they will share it with their friends, if they don’t it will go no further. As gatekeepers to a brand’s potential customer, if they are not convinced, it’s game over. In old media a brand’s reach would be 90% spend/10% viral. In new media it’s minimum 50/50.

Traditional marketing rules can’t be applied to social media for the simple reason that social media is not a marketer’s platform. It belongs to consumers.
Shama Kabani

Perhaps one of the most cited examples is Zappos.com, a clothing retailer in the US who have 198 employees on Twitter. It’s truly part of the corporate culture, with employees encouraged to create accounts when they first join the organisation. Twitter is symbolic of rapid, short, synchronous and public discussion which very neatly sums up 4 of the main qualities of social media engagement….. a million miles away from the days of the carefully crafted press release.

A recent study by Penn State’s College of Information Sciences and Technology found that 20% of Twitter updates are either requests for product info, or responses to brand messages. That’s not bad going in a world of Justin Bieber.

In the UK asos.com has grown 500,000 followers on Facebook and 80,000 followers on Twitter and conducts nearly daily promotions across the social networks. One of the ways they have managed to build up this huge graph is to place “like” and “follow” buttons prominently on their website. When people ‘Like’ asos on the website, it creates a connection with the Facebook page and allows asos to market to that person going forward. Building up a large number of followers on the social networks, much like building a large mailing list becomes a fantastic asset for the business going forward, aiding in product launches, promotions and general marketing.

Managing your presence on the social networks can be as basic as logging into Facebook every now and again and responding to people’s posts about your business. But to truly maximize the effectiveness of your conversation marketing, tools such as Sprout Social can be employed. Sprout Social allows you to manage all of your conversations in one place, track mentions of your brand across multiple platforms and also use the data held in the networks to find and target prospective new clients. Sprout Social goes one step further and ranks your brand on engagement and influence and tracks all of these valuable metrics over time. Powerful stuff.

Display advertising has been through it’s own evolution too. Twitter has started charging for “promoted tweets” where brands can pay to have their tweets suggested on Twitter.com. But it’s interesting that brands are only able to pay for the first 50% of the exposure. It’s still up to normal twitter users to see that message and elect to share it with their followers. Big brand’s ability to wave a cheque book and get eyeballs is diminishing by the day. Facebook’s PPC ads play second fiddle to user generated content, taking up just 1/4 of the page with the user generated news feed taking up 3x as much. For a brand to really get exposure they need users to elect to share their message. A dramatic shift in the balance of power.

Zendesk.com, a service which allows for the management of email support tickets has recently started supporting Twickets. A twicket is a tweet which the company can migrate into a normal support ticket, escalate through the company as a normal email support ticket would and then reply to the customer. Mailchimp, a newsletter marketing company is integrating more and more social feature which allow it’s newsletter operators to use social graph information to better understand and converse with it’s audience. These are all examples of how conversational marketing is influencing and enhancing a raft of existing services.

Many companies elect to embrace social media but sometimes their hand is forced. GetSatisfaction.com is a fantastic service which allows anyone to create a unofficial support forum for a brand. When the unofficial community gains momentum the company has no choice but to engage their customers inside the GetSatisfaction community. It’s the same across all of these platforms, if the company isn’t proactive and responsive then the community will fill the void and, depending on the company, this can have varying results. Microsoft on GetSatisifaction would be a good example of a company that has dived in, with 500 staff helping nearly 5,000 customers. A few years ago it would have been unthinkable for a company like Microsoft to allow their engineers, staff and product managers to talk on open forums but today it’s unavoidable.

The emergence of location based services particularly through Gowalla, Google, Facebook Places and of course FourSquare is the latest way to make a connection with a business or brand. Today, it’s still a fairly basic transaction where you go to a physical business and “check in” to tell your friends what you are doing. The incentive either being prestige “I checked into Harrods” or some sort of reward such as points (and soon discounts). Whilst the transaction is rewarding for all parties, the long term benefit for the business in question is that they have that all important link back to the customer which they retain. Much like the “Like” button on the Asos site, the check-in is a connection the business can leverage going forward.

Search is still the main driver of sales online with most purchases still starting with a search. Even this is not immune to the growth of the conversation. Google has started ranking results based on relevance to you and your social graph and recently started highlighting links which links your friends had shared in search results. Social is going to play an increasingly important role in search over the next few years, in particular if Facebook decide to launch a search engine (which seems entirely logical). If your business and brand is not executing it’s social strategy well, then it will cost you in the long term.

Social media is uncontrollable, unpredictable and very viral. This is great when things are going well but if your brand is in trouble then social media will spread a negative message just as fast as a positive one and little can be done to stop it. Domino’s Pizza had a crisis when two employees posted a video on YouTube abusing delivery food which subsequently got 1m views overnight. It could have easily destroyed the brand, if it hadn’t been for the CEO jumping on YouTube the next day and issuing a heartfelt apology. Most social media disasters can be averted if responded to quickly and quite often your company will get more value long term out of handling a disaster well, than a success. Authentic, quick responses are they key to keeping the community happy.

At SocialGO we help people create their own social networking communities for their brands, businesses, interests and local areas. It’s surprising to see the amazing variety of applications of our software and how people are nuturing communities in niches that we never even knew existed. We are working on the Your Square Mile project at the moment, part of The Big Society, empowering people to improve their local neighbourhood. Although politically motivated (rather than commercially), it’s a great example of using social networking technology to engage stakeholders (local citizens) in a dialogue about what they would like to change. In one of the pilot projects, we are already seeing changes happening at the local level.

As an entrepreneur, there is a golden opportunity in the next 5 years to use social media better than most to really build your businesses. You don’t need big budgets to engage people in a meaningful conversation around your brand and it can bring huge rewards.

What are you waiting for?

This funding will financially underpin the business and allow us to create a fantastic new platform as we move our businesses into it’s next phase. The application of social networking to group and business websites is still in it’s infancy and we are working hard to make these powerful tools more accessible to a wider audience with the help of our existing customers.

A few screenshots of the new platform :

French politician Dominique de Villepin is using SocialGo to mobilise supporters and communicate with them, though you wouldn’t know it is an off-the-peg solution.

The basic paid-for set up is impressive, the design is slick, and the dashboard easy and intuitive to navigate. It allows the user to vet material and moderate conversations as well as providing facilities to upload photos and video. There is even the capacity to monetise your web presence….

It is hoped the updated version of SocialGO will attract a new and interested potential client base, while making the current base of users more inclined to renew their subscription….

Chairman, Dominic Wheatley explains: “Version one was a pathfinder product to establish two things. First of all would people use this sort of product to create social networks and then second would they pay for it?

“Here we are today with more than US$100,000 of income a month and rising from a zero in just 20 months.”

It was during 2007 that Wheatley met Alex Halliday and Steve Hardman who had started work on a niche social network and immediately saw the potential.

“I asked them if they could create a website that would allow anyone to create their own social network using the engine that Alex had built. They said they could and it marked the birth of the idea.”

Wheatley is quick to point out that this is far from a one-man-band. The entrepreneur provides the business know-how, strategic vision and access to the capital markets.

Veterans of the tech sector will remember Wheatley from his previous exploits.

He was the founder of and driving force behind Eidos who was there at the dawn of personal computing and gaming.

His company spawned classics such as Football Manager and Hitman, but Eidos is probably still best remembered for bringing us Lara Croft, the buxom heroine of Tomb Raider.

The programming and creative side of things is overseen by SocialGO’s Alex Halliday, a self-proclaimed geek who Wheatley likens to Zuckerberg two or three times during our conversation.

At 25 Halliday is AIM’s youngest chief executive.

Read the rest of this article by Ian Lyall on Proactive investors

http://www.proactiveinvestors.co.uk/companies/news/25159/primed-and-ready-for-take-off-socialgo-targets-the-facebook-generation-25159.html

FOX News’ resident Social Surfer, Samantha Badger aka SamOnCam has done a feature on SocialGO for FOX news. The media has cottoned on to the fantastic opportunites SocialGO provides savvy internet users, regardless of how experienced they are. “Whether you have a playgroup with your kids’ friends or a business with a growing number of clients, creating a personal social networking site can be a great way to communicate with your group members or customers!”

Click here to see the video

See the original article on www.foxcharlotte.com

We are excited. After a year of hard work on our new platform, we are fast approaching the point where you can get involved. The SocialGO Version 2 platform has been the primary focus of our development team for the past six months, it is the result of our 3 years experience and thousands of pieces of feedback from our customers.

When we started SocialGO, social networking was a niche category of website in its infancy. Fast forward 3 years and social is no longer a niche, but an integral part of everything we do online. Customers expect the services and sites that they use to be social. It has become a layer in most experiences, on mobiles, games and in applications, and we at SocialGO only see this adoption accelerating.

When we started our Version 2 product, we didn’t look at making another “social network maker”, we looked at making a platform which could power websites in the modern social age. We looked as much at where we are going as where we have been and think that SocialGO Version 2 is going to be a unique platform delivering people the power, flexibility and connectivity to create connected, social websites for their businesses, groups and interests.

Today, we are pleased to announce that the preview site is going live at http://sgv2.com. This site will run in parallel with the existing SocialGO platform as the service goes through it’s beta phase. Feedback will be collected and the featureset fully rolled out, tweaked and adjusted. The beta program is unique in that people who recommend others to register will gain priority access.

We expect to allow people to start creating sites on Version 2 in February with existing premium customers being amongst the first in to preview the platform. As it becomes production ready, we will offer a migration tool for existing customers to move their data over. More details on this will follow in the coming months.

The Version 2 platform marks a big technical leap forward for SocialGO, giving us the power and flexibility to create a cutting edge service. We look forward to helping you create beautiful, rich social websites on V2 for the businesses and projects that you are involved in.

V2 is about allowing people to create Social Websites, but the term “Social Website” may be unclear to some, so here is a brief overview of how we at SocialGO define it :

1. Container : This is the core of your website. The look and feel, the privacy settings, the domain name, the navigation, the templating engine, the internationalization system, the user registration system…. Imagine a nicely decorated house with no furniture in it and you are pretty close. The Container in V2 is extremely advanced and will offer unparalleled flexibility going forward.
2. Content : The Content is pretty self explanatory. It’s the text, photos and videos that you publish and share on your website. In V2 we have tried to make the publishing of content in the form of a revolutionary “posts framework”, as simple and flexible as possible.
3. Community : The community is the “Social” part of The Social Website. It’s the ability for people to not just read the content on your site but respond, share and contribute to it. Websites in 2011 are about conversations with your visitors, about allowing them to share content with their social graph and easily use their existing identities on Facebook and Twitter to participate without filling in a 20 field signup form.

One of the most important shifts in our V2 platform is the change in structure of social websites. For a long time, social networking websites all looked the same with a tab for videos, a tab for blogs, a tab for photos and on every other platforms customers are still being pushed into this mold. The innovation in the social web has seen huge growth in social applications that are a million miles away from this. With our Version 2 platform we want to break down these barriers and allow end-users to create contemporary social websites that resemble their unique audiences, rather than….well let’s be honest, MySpace in 2007.

We are not going to do this entirely on our own. We are working with some fantastic partners including WooThemes, WordPress’s largest and most popular theme developer. Adii Pienaar, founder of WooThemes spent time with us at SocialGO HQ this summer to help with the development of our new V2 theme engine. We plan to make some of WooThemes’s most popular themes available on the SocialGO V2 platform, starting with Canvas during the beta program.

We will continue to post more information on V2 during the next few months. For updates please :

• Register for beta at http://sgv2.com/
• Follow us @socialgo
• Like us on Facebook.com/socialgo

This article from the Economist website explains the UK government’s hopes for the emerging digitial media startups in the East end of London.

“The entrepreneurs in Silicon Roundabout stress the unique draw of the east of the city, with its bohemianism and relatively cheap rents, for young, creative workers. “If we were in west London, we would be a completely different type of business,” says Steve Hardman, the co-founder of SocialGO, which helps clients build their own online communities.

The spontaneous rise of Silicon Roundabout might have persuaded the government to leave well alone. Instead, David Cameron recently unveiled a plan to support it. As well as tinkering with the legal framework in which such businesses operate—by creating updated “entrepreneur visas” to bypass ill-judged new immigration restrictions, for example—the government has persuaded technology titans such as Google and Cisco to invest.”

Read the full article here

http://www.economist.com/node/17581635?story_id=17581635

Steve Hardman gave a speech on the challenges facing software startups in the United Kingdom.  The audience of 300 people included the British Prime Minister, London Mayor, investors, entrepreneurs and the media.

Above: SocialGO Co-founder Steve Hardman speaking at the launch of the East London Tech City

Immediately following Steve Hardman’s speech the Prime Minister, David Cameron, took to the stage to announce the Governments major new initiative, the East London Tech City, which is intended to encourage the development of a local software industry to rival Silicon Valley.

Above: Prime Minister David Cameron speaking at the launch of the East London Tech City

Following the speeches,  Alex Halliday spoke to the national media about the type of initiatives the British Government could implement to fast track the development of a local software industry.

Below: SocialGO’s Alex Halliday speaks to the Channel 4

Click here to watch Alex Halliday’s interview on CNN.

The 3 sins of running an online community

“If you build it they will come. This is probably the best known online community fallacy. The premise is that if I roll out a given technology set (blogs, forums, wikis, etc.), users will automatically appear and congregate, forming a robust community. This can be attributed to the lure of “social software” that companies repeatedly bite at, as opposed to seeking to extend or create value for their customers.

Once I’ve launched it, I’m done. Many communities launch successfully, only to fade out and disappear. This is due in large part to a failure to assign ownership of the community and to have a strategy that lasts past “launch.”

Bigger is better. The assumption here is that the overall size of a community is indicative of its success. This is challenging for most community managers and businesses to understand, as it is contrary to what they’ve usually been told.”

These three examples can cause a network/community to fail.

Understanding the community life cycle can help you avoid making these mistakes. Follow the link below to find out more about the ‘community life cycle’ with its rules & best practices.

Original Article Here