Webware

Retailers have a love-hate relationship with social media, according to a study set to be released next week.

The E-tailing Group, which specializes in retail sector trends, surveyed 117 companies--from small to large--to assess how retailers and brands view the social Web.

The biggest concern among respondents is that consumers will "trash their products in front of a large audience," according to E-tailing Group. At the same time, companies very much want to partake in the social Web.

Ninety-three percent of companies surveyed said they are seeking greater customer engagement through social-media efforts. And 76 percent want to use social networks to "mobilize advocates through word of mouth."

"Brands are especially worried about negative comments hurting a brand, but they also know that they need to go social. That's why they're using Facebook and Twitter with some success," E-tailing Group spokeswoman Lauren Freedman said.

Of all social media, Facebook drew the most interest of respondents, followed by Twitter. Tying for third place were customer reviews and blogs. Viral videos took fifth.

Eighty-six percent of respondents already use Facebook Fan pages to deliver a social experience to their customers. Only 1 percent of those companies have no plans to deploy a Facebook Fan page.

Sixty-five percent of companies are using Twitter as a tool to market their brands. However, 9 percent said they don't plan to open a Twitter account or market their brand through it.

Fifty-five percent said they allow customer reviews on their sites and feature blogs. And 50 percent have used viral videos.

Company marketers aren't testing the social waters just for the fun of it, though.

"They don't want to do this unless it delivers the return on investment that their companies are expecting," Freedman said.

Still, it's not Facebook or Twitter--the two social tools retailers are using most often--that companies expect will help them increase sales. Instead, customer reviews take the top spot.

According to the study, about 85 percent of respondents believe customer reviews across the Web are a great way to increase sales. They reason that consumers listen to their peers. By comparison, just 33 percent of companies believe a Facebook Fan page can increase sales.

Looking ahead, the E-tailing Group sees social adoption continuing to grow in the marketplace. Twenty-five percent of respondents expect that companies will be "much more aggressive" in the social arena. And 50 percent said companies will be "more aggressive" in the next six months.

"Quick adoption of social networks is a guarantee over the next six months," Freedman said. "That's mainly due to movements to social brands by the competition."

In other words, no company wants to be left behind.

(Credit: CNET)

Despite being a fan of Zagat's restaurant surveys, I've never been overly impressed with the mobile applications for Windows Mobile Smartphone and PocketPC, BlackBerry, and Palm.

Regrettably, Zagat To Go '09 for the iPhone and iPod Touch ($9.99 per year) isn't markedly different.

The components to a great mobile app are all there--venerable content, click-to-call, a Web site link, OpenTable reservations for some restaurants, and search and sorting filters--but the whole is somehow less than the sum of its parts.

Stability is a major concern, the app cries for an in-app browser, and Zagat To Go calibrates your location twice every time you open it, a repetition that quickly wears thin. Providing advanced search options to find, for instance, sushi restaurants nearby for under $30 would make the app immediately more winning.

iTunes App Store reviewers have also thoroughly picked a bone with the app over a "cheesy" link to other apps created by Zagat's mobile publishing partner, Handmark, and "frustrating," "misleading" information about the cities and countries covered. It's true that Zagat Survey is strongest in metropolitan US cities, with passable international coverage in the UK, Italy, and France, and some world cities, like Tokyo, Toronto, London, and Rome. Handmark should more explicitly list those cities to minimize the backlash.

It's also true that Zagat To Go will best serve the foodies who want to "cut through the garbage" found on Yelp's and Urbanspoon's iPhone apps and be funneled to finer dining. Big-city diners dedicated to Zagat's yearly survey have in this iPhone app a slightly more economical and much more convenient and interactive option than toting the book with them on travels near and far, or viewing the cramped mobile Web site from the Safari browser.

Update: 12/2/08 at 3:40 PM. Handmark commented in an e-mail that a new release being submitted to iPhone's App Store for approval today will request location access upon launching the app for the first time. A button on the main search screen will let you manually update your new location.

LinkedIn on Thursday announced the launch of LinkedIn Surveys, a service from the LinkedIn Research Network that allows market researchers and investors to access the site's 30 million professionals for market intelligence by creating a survey, and either opening it up to the entire LinkedIn community or targeting a select group.

In order to increase the number of members participating in the surveys, LinkedIn will allow those who participate to choose from a variety of rewards, including gift cards from Amazon.com, Starbucks, or Best Buy. For those that don't want gift cards, LinkedIn is also offering participants the opportunity to make a donation to charities.

LinkedIn Surveys is different from the company's Answers service. Instead of asking the community just one question, as users can in Answers, Surveys is designed specifically for market researchers that are trying to target a specific group of professionals on LinkedIn that will adequately represent the entire population.

"LinkedIn overcomes quality and authenticity issues that other sample providers face," said Dan Shapero, director of business services at LinkedIn. "Because of the public and self-policing nature of LinkedIn, members provide deep and accurate profile information, and they update that information constantly."

So far, LinkedIn has conducted surveys with six market search firms, including Phoenix Marketing International and OTX. Among those polled were IT managers, finance professionals, and government employees.

Although the company's executives wouldn't disclose how it will monetize Surveys, they did indicate that the service will provide LinkedIn with another line of revenue to complement advertising and its other sources of income.

Webware survey, 491 respondents.

On the one hand, I agree with Dave McClure and his bombastic post, Fear is the Mind Killer. He's right. Start-ups are by nature risky. Even in good times, when venture capitalists are spreading money on entrepreneurs like farmers spread manure, they expect only a few roses to bloom. The rest of you? Weeds. You're going to get lopped off--by competitors, your investors, or your own incompetence. That's part of the fun.

But a healthy amount of fear is a good motivator, and I have to part with McClure on one thing: there are some entrepreneurs out there who aren't afraid enough. And I have numbers.

In a quick and admittedly unscientific poll on Webware, I asked entrepreneurs to answer two questions. The practical question: "How long will your cash last?" The state of mind question: "How freaked out are you?"

If we accept that the economic downturn we're in now is going to last a year or more, then the numbers don't add up in all the start-ups' favor. Only 30 percent of 491 respondents (as of noon on October 11) said that they have two or more years of money in the bank or are cash-flow positive; 49 percent checked off either the six months or the three months-or-less box. That's a problem.

Webware survey, 524 respondents.

And here's the kicker: Only 33 percent of the 524 respondents to the state of mind question indicated they are "worrying about revenue and payroll." Thirty percent are "looking forward to grabbing share while other companies falter." That's my kind of entrepreneur, provided they have the powder to fight that war. According to this poll, most of them don't.

It's the group that has six months of money or less and that isn't freaking out that is in real trouble. We are heading in to a stalled economy. It will take time to get the engines turned back on and running again. Companies can survive, of course. People will still be buying food and gas and sending their kids to school and investing in their homes. They'll still work and play.

But CEOs who didn't prepare for this downturn, and who have only six months of financial runway ahead of them, should be worried. Or maybe not worried; that's just an emotion. But at least working on a different operational tactic than they have been, and certainly not "confident they are on the right track," as 33 percent of the respondents said they were. There is a degree of uncertainty about when and how the downturn will hit Web companies, though. One CEO I talked with is preparing for the worst. As he said to me last week, when we were talking about his revenue projections and his customers' outlooks, "The fact that we haven't heard a lot of bad news yet doesn't give me comfort."

Some start-ups, like Seesmic, are announcing cuts now, and we'll be hearing a lot more stories like that in coming weeks. A little later on, hopefully, we'll also start to hear the stories from companies that have changed their businesses to do the real work of servicing the needs of their customers that are working through this new reality, and that are doing more than just hunkering down for the long winter. They are always opportunities, and there is always room for aggressive business. But a little more fear might help more start-ups survive.

This post was updated at 8:06 PM PT to add comment from Bebo.

Remember that controversial study awhile back that pegged Facebook as having the worst performance out of major social media sites? Get ready for controversy, because a new one just came out that puts youth-oriented Bebo in the top, er, bottom spot, with Facebook pulling in a rather respectable ranking.

Representatives from Pingdom, a performance monitoring software company, posted a blog entry on Tuesday with the results of a study that monitored how much downtime 14 major social networks experienced between January 1 and February 25. Bebo, which is most popular in the U.K. and Ireland, clocked in a total of 12 hours and 28 minutes of downtime. In second place was Microsoft's Windows Live Spaces, with seven hours and 25 minutes of downtime recorded, and Friendster came in third with six hours even.

"More than 12 hours of downtime in less than two months is a lot, and it could possibly be caused by the new open application platform that Bebo launched in December, allowing third-party developers access to its platform, Facebook-style," the Pingdom blog post read. "It could be putting more strain on Bebo's systems than they anticipated."

Bebo representatives did not outright deny the downtime statistics, choosing instead to highlight the site's recent rapid growth and popularity of its developer platform. "Bebo has hit an all-time high in pageviews, capping off a favorable January, as reported by ComScore," a statement from the company read. "Last week, Bebo broke all previous pageview records and has recently enjoyed record-setting demand for two major initiatives launched at the end of 2007. To date, 400 media partners have joined Bebo's Open Media, and 1,300 applications are now available through Bebo's Open Application Platform. Our system is fully operational."

Pingdom monitors sites by regularly calling them up with automated "pings." "Downtime" is defined as when a site is unavailable, produces an error message, or takes more than 30 seconds to load.

Facebook and MySpace.com did comparatively well in the survey, with Facebook reportedly experiencing one hour and 35 minutes of downtime and News Corp.'s MySpace only 25 minutes. But the best performance came from Yahoo 360, more a Web of profiles than a social network proper, which clocked in only five minutes of unavailability.

Messaging site Twitter, whose frequent downtime has become somewhat of a Silicon Valley punchline, was not included in the survey.

In the next several months Wikipedians, or the authors of the content found on Wikipedia will be the subject of a worldwide survey to find out about people's posting habits on the immensely popular online encyclopedia.

The Wikimedia foundation, which operates Wikipedia is employing Netherlands-based UNU-MERIT to conduct the research that aims to figure out not only who Wikipedians are, but how much they're contributing to the site. The survey is also designed to find out why people are coming to Wikipedia, and the identify the types of users who go from casual browsers to site contributors.

User identity goes farther than just browsing habits, though. The survey's creators are trying to unearth the real identities of Wikipedia authors, something that Wikipedia alternative Citizendium has already solved by requiring its users to use their real names as part of the editing process. In the past, user anonymity has been one of the key points of contention regarding responsibly and the efficacy of rule enforcement in Wikipedia's user community.

A portion of the survey results are to be released at this year's Wikimania, which takes place in late July, with a more conclusive report later this year.

On Thursday, Web site-monitoring firm WatchMouse released the results of a study about the performance of 104 social-media sites--social networks, blogging communities, bookmarking sites, and the like--and boldly deemed them to be overall "slow and inaccessible."

WatchMouse used its "Site Performance Index" (SPI) methodology to track the reliability and load time of the sites in question; this figure is computed by calculating the time needed to call up a site's home page and applying a penalty for each failed request. Lower is better: an SPI of 500 is considered good, whereas the Utrecht, Netherlands-based WatchMouse considers over 1,500 to be indicative of "a seriously negative user experience."

According to the study, social networks in general are not particularly reliable: 51 of the 104 sites surveyed came up with SPIs of 1,500 or more, and only six small social networks were awarded with SPIs under 500 (Faceparty, Tagged, ASmallWorld, Flirtomatic, Rummble, and StudiVZ). At the top of WatchMouse's blacklist was Facebook, which it assigned a whopping 6,629 SPI. That was the worst ranking out of any of the sites surveyed--even microblogging service Twitter, whose frequent downtime has become a punchline of sorts. (WatchMouse assigned an SPI of 1,467 to Twitter.)

Facebook has not yet issued a response to the study.

Many of the other poorly-performing social media sites aren't exactly household names, like Searchles (SPI 5,856) and RateItAll (SPI 3,370). Music-based social networks tended to come in with disconcerting indexes, perhaps because of the amount of streaming media hosted on many of them--Last.fm, acquired by CBS Interactive last year, had an SPI of 1,837; the fast-growing Buzznet was assigned an 1,868; and Mog had an index of 1,911.

But according to WatchMouse, many of the highest-profile social networks didn't perform all that badly. MySpace, which had a famous outage in the summer of 2006 when a heat wave crashed its servers, clocked in a rather respectable index of 923. Business network LinkedIn came in with a 1,006. The youth-oriented Bebo achieved a score of 912. And Google's Orkut, third-string in the U.S. but dominant in countries like Brazil and India, had an enviable index of 564.

WatchMouse is only one company, however, and every study's methodology has limitations--just look at the controversy over traffic monitoring statistics. The SPI is based on home page load time and reliability rather than individual pages on a social network--it's monitoring, for example, Myspace.com rather than Myspace.com/whinyemoband. Other performance monitoring firms would likely show different results on a similar study. We've contacted a few for comment.

One of the best examples of everything that's right about this whole Web 2.0 thing is WuFoo, the service that makes creating a Web form -- and collecting data from it -- about as simple as dreaming up a few questions. Recently I heard about a similar site, AskItOnline, that is being designed for the somewhat different job of collecting data from surveys.

I wasn't going to write about AskItOnline just yet since the site is still in closed beta and many necessary features haven't yet been built. But I saw it pop up on Del.icio.us, and it got a link on e-Hub. It turns out that a lot of people are interested in what this site promises to deliver.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

I got access to the beta and communicated with its builder, Kaitlyn McLachlan. What I saw was a work in progress -- with much work yet to be done. The form designer is the most complete feature, and it's encouraging. It's very much like WuFoo's designer, although there are some specific question types that WuFoo doesn't have. For example, you can set up big grids of matrix questions like you often find on consumer surveys.

But there's more to a survey than forms. Specifically, running a good survey means getting the right people to answer it, and then doing analysis on the results beyond just counting replies.

I don't get the impression that AskItOnline will offer much in the way of helping you create "panels" of people distributed across whatever population you're trying to survey. "We'll cross that bridge once we get to it," McLachlan wrote to me. I hope she gets to it soon, since without this feature, respondents will be self-selected, potentially skewing survey results badly.

On the other hand, when it's released to the public, AskItOnline should offer solid reports, statistics, and analysis. McLachlan told me, "We will have everything from simple statistics to extremely advanced statistics and reports." I'm looking forward to trying those features.

I like how AskItOnline looks right now, and what's being built could be extremely useful. But running a truly representative and reliable survey is not a simple business, so I hope that the simple-above-all-else Web 2.0 design aesthetic doesn't trump good survey science.