Whilst a computer is a window onto the web and into your social connections, a mobile, be it an iPhone, iPad or Android smartphone, is your personal window. And unlike a computer it brings extra data and functionality with it. With a mobile, you can share where you are and what you’re doing, generally in a much richer way than a simple status update. This is all becoming fairly commonplace and the level of use of this type of functionality is growing inexorably. The question is, once you’ve gained access to your social network of choice through your smartphone, what is there to tempt you to do more than what effectively amount to multimedia or spatial updates?

This is the question put to business and organisations who seek to engage with users in the social mobile world. Some businesses have an easier time answering this question than others. Foursquare, for example, is a great example of a social mobile offering. Find, visit, share, rate, all a great fit for social mobile and one of the key factors behind its success (as well as the gamification). But your business isn’t Foursquare, so how do you work out where you fit in this space?

Josh Clark, a well-respected voice in the field of iPhone app design, talks about three mindsets mobile users tend to have:

• Microtasking, when a user is engaged in short periods of intensive activity
• Local, when a user seeks information about or to support them in their current context
• Bored, when the user is looking for distraction, novelty or entertainment

As Josh himself has recently pointed out, these mindsets map nicely onto Google’s categorisation of mobile information usage; repetitive, urgent and bored.

Now, social mobile can fill one or all of these categories. So we need to delve a little deeper to understand what aspects of social interaction match these mindsets.

When thinking about the different types of interaction possible through social media, I found this model by Isra Garcia particularly useful.

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 From this model there are effectively four different types of interaction:

• Connecting to others
• Exposure, viewing information and activity within your network
• Sharing information with others
• Providing feedback on shared information or on a specific topic

There is also an associated interaction that can be facilitated or initiated through social media:

•  Communicating directly with others.

When combined with the mobile mindsets different types of social mobile interaction emerge. Using this, albeit simplistic abstraction, we can start to see how organisations can understand where their business and any potential mobile offering might fit.

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 If we return to Foursquare we can see that it covers the following areas:

• Researching – what’s good in my area?
• Situational support – is there anything good near me right now.
• Reporting – I’ve found something great, or I want to review this too.
• Matchmaking – are any of my network available to join me?
• Reaching out – well, what could I do today?

Which is quite a large portion of the spectrum, particularly the local part. Interestingly if we look at the social networks themselves, we can see that Facebook covers the entire spectrum (depending upon which of their suite of services you use), whereas the professional network Linkedin, is rooted firmly in the microtasking area, with some small forays in local.

So, how is this useful? There are two aspects, understanding what situation you find a user in will directly influence how you can engage with them and what the likelihood of them wanting to engage with you is. This I will cover in a future article. The other is determining which aspects of a product or service could benefit from a social aspect. A couple of examples might help to illustrate this.

iPad video app:

I have an app that lets people insert their face over the lead character in short clips of popular films. It’s a great timewasting app, but after the initial rush of downloads, sales have stagnated. There are several aspects of social interaction we can target. Broadcasting and the flipside, consumption, would allow people to share their videos with others. If we add in reviewing, via commenting, then we cover off a neat conversion of a bored user into a microtasking (and therefore more engaged) user.

Customer reviews app:

I have a service that helps people to view and share reviews of cars. I only focused on letting people easily view the reviews database (the researching goal). This is great, but I’m missing two other goals that would help to harness the community. If I were to provide an easy route to information about “that car there” (situational support) then I add to the utility of my app/mobile site. If I were to offer the ability to review a car (reviewing/reporting) or even ask a question (conversation) then I would increase both the utility of and engagement with my app.

Or how about a real world example, Groupon. Groupon is an offers site, with the key to their success being the sharing and viral spread of deals. Currently the Groupon mobile offering lets people find offers near them and share them with their network. This is simple, straightforward and it works. However, there are a number of ways that this could be enhanced. What if the service were to recommend deals that my friends have looked at or taken up (consumption)? What about reviewing or rating deals (reporting)? For dinner deals in particular, how about the facility to invite other people in your network to take advantage of a deal (matchmaking). All of these could enhance the Groupon service. As I was putting this article together, Groupon and Foursquare announced that Groupon daily deals would now be available through Foursquare. This looks to be very much a win-win situation for both of these companies.

It’s important to stress that I don’t intend to advocate simply bolting social elements onto a mobile offering. The appropriateness and likely appeal of the social aspect should be carefully considered. For example it might be good to use a service to find reviews of local doctors, but you probably don’t want to connect to your doctor or share with others that you’re visiting them.

The question then becomes, how do we gauge appropriateness and appeal? A great first step is to look at what similar services are doing and the level of engagement they attain. This will provide some indication of what social features might be useful and whether people will actually use them. If you have an existing product that you’re looking to socially augment, then depending upon your budget you then have a couple of options for determining which social features would be best for your product. Surveys provide a cost effective way of building a picture of the types of features people might use. Focus groups and one to one interviews can then build upon this insight.

If you don’t have a product yet, then your silver bullet is ethnography, whereby actual user needs are collected in context over an extended period of time. This is a very powerful method for understanding a person’s interaction, not only with technology, but also their environment and the people in their lives.

As part of this process you also need to consider how social features in your mobile offering link up to the rest of your communications channels and services. If the social experience is constrained just to the mobile platform, this represents a missed opportunity to widen the reach of your service. This opens up another set of questions around consistency of experience and handling of transitions between channels.

All of the above can be considered in an ad-hoc manner, but I would strongly recommend creating a mobile strategy to guide the development of any mobile offering. When coupled with a full user centred design approach, you can ensure that your mobile service or product meets the needs of your users, delivers on your commercial priorities and offers a great user experience.

This article was originally published on MyCustomer.com

How does Twitter, Search, Direct Traffic or Social Media each impact on the sales journey?  Let’s find out! As a Google Analytics Partner, last week we were lucky enough to attend the launch of an exciting new feature in Google Analytics – ‘Multi-Channel Funnels’.  It follows shortly after the release of the Version 5, allowing users to analyse the performance of marketing channels and how customers interact with them in a much more detailed way.  This new feature, will help our clients understand the sales impact of different marketing channels, and answer the age old question, where should those marketing dollars be spent?

This video best describes the new functionality

Looking at a typical user journey there are often many interactions that lead to a conversion.

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Traditionally conversions are assigned to the last click. So what was the last campaign, referral or search term that was seen? But don’t you want to know how the prior role interacted in the conversion? How do marketing channels work together in order to create sales? How much time was there between the initial and final interaction? How much money should be invested in social media compared to online advertising?

Multi-Channel Funnels brings all this data together so you can understand the impact of each visit to the website.  So now you will know the impact of a visit, even if it didn’t lead to an immediate conversion.  If your customer visits your site a few times, just to browse products before returning later to purchase, you will now be able to understand this journey. 

The funnels will consist of five reports:

1. Assisted conversions
2. Assist interactions
3. Top paths
4. Time lag
5. Path length

Let’s take a quick look at some of the reports. As you know understanding customer purchasing behaviour is one of the most important insights you can have. Using the path length report you can analyse the interactions that lead to a conversion.

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This is essentially an extension of the ‘Visit to Transaction’ report but now includes the ability to segment using either goal conversions or ecommerce transactions.

After gaining insight into the typical time between the first and last interaction, you may ask what the path actually looks like. Accessing the ‘Top Paths’ report, Google has grouped traffic into the following types:

1. Organic
2. Referral
3. Direct
4. Paid Advertising
5. Social Network
6. Email

<Click to enlarge>

This video gives a detailed walkthrough of the Multi-Channel Funnel report.

Having had a play, the first iteration of Multi-Channel Funnels is very impressive and sets itself apart from many other analytics solutions currently on the market. Even a lot of the paid-for web analytics solutions cannot compete with this and I am pretty excited about implementing this and helping clients solve a problem they have debated for a long time.
Multi-Channel Funnels currently is only available to a limited number of users but expect a wider roll out to follow shortly.  Foviance is working with some our clients already to get them involved in the trial, so look out for more news from us when we get more results and feedback.

Google Analytics is the leading free-to-use enterprise-class web analytics solution. In the right hands it will provide insights into website traffic and marketing effectiveness. It’s powerful, flexible and simple to understand, ensuring businesses are in a better position to target advertising, strengthen marketing campaigns and improve those all important conversion rates.

Of course Google Analytics can be implemented out-of-the-box, but that level of solution would not leverage the power of the data that our customers require. Over the last few years our consultants have demonstrated an advanced ability to use Google Analytics to help improve our clients’ website conversion rates and ultimately their profitability. Our detailed knowledge of implementing and using Google’s tools frequently help us to optimise the ROI of those customer brands.

Becoming certified with the GACP programme has been a great way for Google to see how good we are technically, and how we are able to develop and implement complex code. We track and profile our clients’ visitors, analyse their purchasing behaviour, examine drop-offs and then use that information to improve customer experience.

We went through a detailed certification process with Google which resulted in a conference session in which we were drilled and examined in granular detail about our every usage of Google Analytics. Now it’s been officially recognised that we’re at the leading edge in analysis we can show our certification to our clients, inspire confidence within their own teams, and tell them exactly how and why we achieved it.

Other than being able to share our GACP success with clients and differentiate ourselves in competitive markets, the main benefits to Foviance is a much more direct relationship with Google. We enjoy greater access to resources and support teams as well as closed developer forums. We’ve been very pleased to discover how strong the community between certified partners is, and the willingness to share solutions and reach out to peers with problems. Being this much closer to the development of Google products and tools benefits our consultants as well as our clients.

As a customer experience agency our GACP status really sets us apart from the rest of the market – this certification is typical of full service agencies only. We’re delighted to have been acknowledged by Google for all our hard work with Analytics, and are already finding new ways in which our consultants and our clients will benefit in the future.

According to recent figures from the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB), the trade body for digital marketing, the total spend on mobile phone advertising in 2009 rocketed by 32 percent year-on-year to a new high of £37.6 million – and all that despite an overall contraction in the advertising sector in 2009.

Two of the biggest names driving this hike in interest in mobile advertising are Apple and Google. Apple launched iAd, its mobile advertising platform, following the acquisition of Quattro Wireless for $275 million. Google is similarly bullish, investing $750 million in its own AdMob. So that’s more than $1 billion investment by these two giants of the marketplace, and a pretty good indicator to potential advertisers that this isn’t a fleeting opportunity.

Before joining the mobile advertising bandwagon, potential advertisers need to try to understand mobile better as a platform. If possible they should gauge the value of applications by tracking their usage. Before the iPad was launched, a firm called Flurry Analytics – a developer of a leading smartphone application analytics and monetization platform used by more than 30,000 applications across iOS, Android, Blackberry and J2ME – enabled developers to include code in their iPhone apps to track usage. With this help brands could breakdown exactly what users were doing within their apps and how often. A bit like Google Analytics on the desktop, this data wasn’t personally identifiable but was very useful as guidance.

Unfortunately for Flurry and app developers alike, Flurry’s analytics were blamed by Apple CEO Steve Jobs for ‘outing’ IDs of new tablet devices on the Apple campus that turned out to be the secret iPad in testing. Jobs said at the time: “We learned some company called Flurry had data on devices that we were using on our campus. It was getting developers to put software in their apps that sent info back to this company! So we went through the roof. It’s violating our privacy policies! So now we’re only going to allow analytics that don’t give our device info.”

Apple felt obliged to change its terms and conditions for tracking software. Developers must now sign up to stringent restrictions of third-party tracking libraries unless tracking is explicitly obvious to end users. What does this really mean though? Most websites already use non-personal tracking. Are our mobile phones considered to be more personal devices, with more questions raised over tracking of information on them, especially any locality information?

If rich information capture from mobile devices was permitted, either specifically through raw cell tower information or by other boundaries, advertising networks could undoubtedly put it to good use. The Apple iAd platform can already enable developers to put targeted interactive ads into apps, that with permission can look through iTunes histories and study behavioural information to enable tighter targeting. Google’s own ad model can employ Google maps to present ads to users depending on their location. Theoretically all of this would be ‘opt-in’ from a customer point of view, but it isn’t impossible for permissions to be bound up in general terms and conditions. Regardless, Apple currently believes its apps should be explicit about intentions to track behavioural information, using location-based services and permitting targeted advertising.

2010 is already the year of mobile, and that’s largely because mobile manufacturers and service providers are getting so much better at understanding what consumers really want. Debates will certainly be raised over what is good for them – do we all want targeted business ads while walking city streets, and shopping vouchers sent to us as we walk through the doors of a shop? Arguably the offline world is moving this way anyway, thanks to pervasive loyalty and travel cards. Even Facebook has been in hot water for targeting ads based on profiles at one time, but it’s obvious to most that this is a trend on the cusp of acceptance by many, so long as an acceptable balance can be struck between benefits and privacy.

This article was writtern as part of the Foviance July/August Newsletter

When the graphs are going up and to the right, people are generally happy. Life feels fine when there’s good growth in the right kind of metrics and despite the tough economic trading conditions over the past 18 months, the digital economy has generally been doing OK. Here in the UK spending on online advertising grew by just under 5% in 2009 compared to 2008 with spend on Search up by just under 10%. Whilst that isn’t the kind of stellar growth seen in previous years, the indicators are positive. Business confidence amongst advertisers is higher than it’s been previously and we’re continuing to see growth in the active online audience (up 10% vs. a year ago), some of that being driven by the growth in population of social networking sites such as Facebook.

But is “good” good enough? We all know that graphs that go down and to the right are generally bad news, when is good news really good news? Trends in looked in isolation are useful (after all “a trend is a friend”) but they’re much more useful when you have some context to compare them against. Most of us operate in a competitive environment and so it’s useful to know how we compare against our competitors, so we can put that trend into context. Whilst we generally have relatively easy access to our own data, getting data on competitors can be a bit tougher. The availability of that data is also very dependent on the type of industry you are in, the market that you are in, the size of your own digital property and the size of your competitors. So it can be difficult to generalise about how to get competitive benchmarking data but here potentially are a few avenues worth exploring.

Commercial services
There are a number of commercial services available in most markets around the world that provide data on the traffic and customer profile of different websites. Companies such as ComScore and Nielsen NetRatings create panels of users and monitor their internet behaviour. Their reports provide detailed information on a site’s traffic patterns and visitor profiles so it’s possible for example to compare say the reach and frequency of visitors to your site against those of your competitors. Some companies, such as Compete and Quantcast, use hybrid methods to collect their data and estimate a site’s traffic. Hitwise aggregates data from ISPs to build up a profile of the market and can use that data to provide raking reports on traffic to different websites in your category.

The commercial model varies from each provider of these services. However the good news is that in some cases you can get access to some limited data for free. However, there are also a number of other free services which may be useful.

Free services
Data on the internet is being aggregated all the time, all over the place and in some cases you can hands on it for free. Tools such as Google Trends for Websites, Google AdPlanner, Alexa and others all enable you access reports on website traffic and visitor profiles on your competitors and compare them to yours. The way that the data is collected varies from service to service and it’s worth taking the time out to understand (as much as you can) how the data is collected and how the reports are created. You need to be aware of the potential limitations of these types of services particularly if you are dealing with websites with relatively low traffic volumes. Caveat Emptor! – even if it’s free.

In some cases you may be also get some benchmarking data as part of the service offered by your web analytics vendor. In this cases you won’t be able to see your competitors data in detail but you will be able to compare your own performance against a group of similar websites to your own.

Do it yourself
In the examples above the data that you can get is mainly looking at traffic volumes, visitor profiles, search behaviour and the like. You can also go out and collect your own information on your competitors. You can use additional research techniques such as surveys, focus groups and usability testing to find out how you compare against your competitors in different ways. It won’t be the quantitative data that we’ve already looked at but it will be customers’ opinions about how you compare and can be enormously insightful in helping you to evaluate your competitive position. Again this type of research needn’t cost the earth. You can get benchmarking data from customer surveys like 4Q and low cost remote testing methodologies are being developed all the time.

As we come out of the recession and the market begins to accelerate, it’s always good to ask yourself whether good is good enough. You can do that by keeping an eye on what’s going on around you. How you do that will depend on your circumstance but hopefully there’s a few ideas here.

Anyone else miss this? In January this year Google announced that hackers had managed to steal information from their computers, but they were pretty vague on the details of what was actually stolen. It has recently been revealed that the hackers managed to get their hands on something pretty significant: Google’s password system, called Gaia, which controls access by millions of users worldwide to all of Google’s web services, including email.

The company claims that no passwords were stolen but I can assure them that at least one password was: mine. Earlier this week I logged into my Gmail account to discover that a considerable number of strange email messages had been sent out to numerous contacts in my address book during the previous night. These emails consisted of a random name in the subject line and a non-descript hyperlink in the subject. This link, predictably, took the unsuspecting user to a rather unsavoury website peddling knock-off Viagra. Many of those who received such an email were savvy enough to recognise it as spam and immediately deleted it. But others were not, and there ensued embarrassing conversations about the mechanics of both spam email and erectile dysfunction medication…neither of which I particularly wanted to explain to my mother.

Security experts will tell us that this kind of experience is a wake up call for frequently changing your passwords and so on, but I do all that already; my passwords are strong and impossible to guess, I change them frequently, never write them down or share them with anyone. I’ve created a number of Gmail accounts over the years, for various work and personal purposes, and although I know of many people whose accounts have been compromised it’s never happened to me before. I’ve done all the things Google’s security page advised me to do after I reported the incident but my confidence has been shaken. I know in my logical mind that this was most likely a random one-off event, could have happened to anyone, but despite all the reassurances I still have this niggling concern about the security of my account due to the scale of the data theft from Google’s computers. Faced with the reality of being hacked, I realise now how much I took for granted the veneer of data integrity; I believed Google, like any large corporation and uber-brand, to be a paragon of security. Perhaps even more than others given the physical and virtual lengths to which they will go to reassure users their data is protected . Much like with doctors or pilots, I need to believe that those in whom I place my unmitigated trust are deserving of it…the thought they may be fallible is unnerving to say the least.

Call the Hyperbole Police of you must, but this is my most personal of personal data, my holiest of holies. I guess I was lucky that whomever it was that accessed my account only sent out a few dozen seemingly innocuous spam messages…I can’t even begin to imagine what might have happened had their intentions had been more malicious.

We’ve previously mentioned the browser wars and the Microsoft anti-trust browser case, and this week sees the initial limited roll-out of Microsoft’s “web browser choice screen” for European users. In a nutshell, the European Commission ruled that bundling Internet Explorer (IE) with the Windows operating system was a big no-no and forced Microsoft to give users the choice of which browser they wanted to use.

Accordingly, as of today, a ballot screen can be downloaded via Windows Update (or automatically downloaded if you have this set up in XP, Vista or Windows 7) which will ask users to choose between Chrome, Firefox, Safari, IE and Opera as their default browser.  Microsoft are calling the initial roll out a “test” of the choice screen, which will be followed by a full roll-out in early March.

So which browser will you choose? What will the market share pie chart look like this time next month? Will the anti-corporate outrage deliver big wins for the little guys? Or will people just keep doing what they’ve been doing? Presumably people who care about this sort of thing are already using their browser of choice so, no biggie, and those who don’t care…well, they probably still don’t care. My guess is that there may be a little shuffling of deck chairs, with IE losing some ground to the other browsers, but ultimately I’d be surprised if we saw a dramatic shift in any direction.

Still, anything can happen in the wild and wacky world of the interweb, so I’ll make sure to have the brown sauce on hand if the time comes to eat my words…

The big news this week, is the event at Google headquarters to demonstrate their much hyped operating system on Thursday, which promises to be the first major confrontation in the new browser war which was triggered by the release of Google Chrome earlier this year.

The relationship between the major players in the online world has always been described in overtly bellicose terms, but in the continuing fight for online supremacy, the battle ground has shifted from the traditional Battle of the Browser, to a fully-fledged global World Wide Web War. Google is making a bold move in challenging Microsoft’s OS dominance, but the old war horse still has some fight left, as evidenced by Microsoft moving in on Google’s search dominance with Bing and their deal with Yahoo.

The interweb is a moveable feast and the fight for innovation and market share is changing the way we think about computers and the Cloud. The lines between hardware and software, platforms and applications, browsers and OS are becoming less distinct, largely thanks to the efforts of the major players – Microsoft, Google and Apple – to trump each other. This time around, however, it appears the ultimate goal is not simply to have the most-downloaded browser, but to create a whole new paradigm for how we use the internet.

Like all software, the trick to increasing your user base is to build a good product – if it’s usable then people will use it. Duh. Love them or loathe them, MS make a perfectly good browser; whether it can be considered “the best” depends on your perspective (or your loyalty). But at the end of the day when it comes to browsers the rules of engagement have changed. Earlier this year the European Commission sent a Statement of Objections to Microsoft, outlining their belief that “Microsoft’s tying of its web browser Internet Explorer to its dominant client PC operating system Windows infringes the EC Treaty rules on abuse of a dominant position” in an attempt to get IE unbundled from Windows or force Microsoft to bundle other browsers with their OS. Notably, Windows 7 now ships in Europe without IE, which needs to be downloaded separately. The EU, it seems, is a PC…they talked and Microsoft listened. Time will tell what impact, if any, this has on European usage stats for IE.

As much as I deplore any anti-competitive behaviour and abuse of power by market heavy-weights, I have to wonder whether this move was even necessary. I’ve had a version of IE on practically every computer I’ve ever owned but I’ve rarely used it, as in my opinion it’s not a particularly good browser: it’s bloated, doesn’t conform to open standards, and discourages stable customisation. Despite claims to the contrary, Microsoft are not renowned for rapid response to user complaints about their products.  Of course, this could be said of any competitive company, but it’s when things get anti-competitive that it becomes problematic. There’s an old adage: “You reap what you sow”, and it’s interesting to see IE losing market share to an upstart like Google who built their empire with free software, and the phoenix-like Firefox, the vengeful son of Netscape Navigator, a product Microsoft arguably helped to destroy.

I, for one, am greatly anticipating Thursday’s announcement. Professionally, it heralds a significant shift in the landscape of user experience and human-computer interaction. Personally, I love a gimmick and am always an early-adopter of new software particularly when it’s free. I’ve been using Chrome since it first came out and I love it, not simply because it’s gimmicky but because it’s a great browser. It was developed in direct response to well-known complaints about deficiencies in existing browsers. It’s fast, customisable, responsive and solid. Google clearly want people to use their products so they’re investing a lot of energy (and presumably money) in understanding what users want. If the uptake of Chrome, the simplicity of Gmail, and the impressions of WAVE are anything to go by, the Google OS promises to be a cracker.

Of course, operating systems are a completely different beast to browsers or search engines. The definition of “best” is subjective to say the least and as developers have gradually come to realise the importance of a good customer experience, a “winner takes all” mentality diverts attention away from what should be the real goal of any software vendor: making a better product. Sure, you can actively kill your competitors’ product through monopolies or prohibitive patent licence fees or frivolous law suits, but why not put all that energy and money into your own product and kill them by making it better than theirs? That way, in the words of those great peace-makers, Hot Chocolate: “Everyone’s a winner, baby…that’s the truth.”

Since the advent of the internet, the ways in which people choose to communicate have changed dramatically. With the evolution of social media, these changes have accelerated even faster.

Changes in online communication affect the fundamental ways that people interact with each other. Social aspects now dominate a large proportion of internet content which is tagged, classified, reviewed and commented on by people all over the world. Increasingly people are seeking out this type of content on the internet.

Social media has revolutionised consumer interactions with companies and brands. One of the first changes brought about by social media was its impact on consumer voice. Social media empowered consumers and provided them with a voice that would be listened to by other consumers. Dialogue also opened up between consumers and businesses and as a result, consumers now expect a more personal relationship with businesses in the social media arena.

In a recent McKinsey Report, 87 percent of executives report using Web 2.0 applications to communicate with customers. Of these, over half use Web 2.0 technologies to encourage customer participation in product development, a similar proportion use Web 2.0 to enable customers to communicate with each other. Consumers are becoming increasingly familiar with the process of interacting with strangers who share a common interest. For a business to be successful within this environment they must interact honestly and show accountability.

According to social media marketing statistics for 2009, analysed by Nielson Online, social networks and blogs are two of the most popular online activities, even more popular than personal email. Through social media, people are systematically expressing openly what was previously deemed to be private information. For instance, it’s very common for social networking users to advertise personal information such as political views, religious views or sexual orientation.

An individual’s personal and professional networks share the same online realm and are laid out for other network members to see. This often highlights the disparity between how people represent themselves to and communicate with the different social groups in their life. Indeed, there are now measures in place on social networking sites to segregate these groups, for example, separate out colleagues, family and friends, and only show each group information that is appropriate to them.

One-to-one private email conversations are now publicly communicated through social networks and it’s even possible to be updated on a friend’s activities without ever having to communicate with them directly. Users of sites such as Facebook or Twitter are becoming used to receiving very detailed notifications of their friends’ lives, including those with whom they may have no offline contact. Conversations with strangers are also becoming common through applications such as flyChat, an iPhone based network that allows the user to randomly send and receive messages from people all over the world in order to build networks.

Another newcomer to the social media scene is Google Wave, due to be released later on this year – its purpose is to ‘unify’ communication on the web. It combines email, web chat and instant messaging to enable people to have ongoing conversations with others. Conversations can at the same time be synchronous and asynchronous due to the ability to see conversations in real time, but also to be able to leave a thread and return to it later. It features the ability to replay conversations and to easily distribute files.

With new technologies entering the market all the time, the ways in which people communicate with each other both personally and professionally look set to continue evolving.

Back to July /Aug newsletter

The course runs for one day in central London on Tuesday, August 18th 2009.

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