Virtual Event Social Networks – The Next Evolution For Online Communities

Getting your target audience to repeatedly visit and engage in a niche online community running on Jive Software, Cisco Quad, Salesforce.com Chatter, Pathable, Drupal, Liferay, or other social software platform is challenging — even with great content and a terrific community manager. With some exceptions, unique visitors, repeat visits per user, and behavioral engagement metrics have a tendency to plateau or at best trend slightly upward within a band.

Now consider something disruptive — a complementary online experience that can penetrate and engage the same target audience as your social software platform but that periodically produces comparatively huge spikes of online audience for 1-2 days. I’m talking about virtual event platforms. These software platforms let organizations create large online gatherings – kind of like a Webex meeting on steroids – for internal meetings, conferences, exclusive briefings, product launches, lead generation, online learning/training, job fairs, and more. What if you could periodically drive spikes of online audience like this into your niche online community? You might wind up with site analytic reports that look kind of like the chart below, and that ramp audience penetration and engagement for your community much faster.

Additive, Synergistic Technologies
No matter which piece of the combined social-virtual solution you start from, integrating the technologies yields business benefits and improvements in audience penetration and engagement that are greater than the sum of the parts. Online communities running on social software are vivified by the energy and sense of “happening” of a virtual event. Streaming video presentations that contain unique, well-curated content, wrapped in persisting social activity streams may be the magic formula for increasing audience penetration and engagement, collaboration, learning, and loyalty to the community.

The synergy is just as strong when flipped to start from the virtual event side. Generating social activity streams that are based around the participants, presentations, documents, chats and virtual spaces of a virtual event environment would not only increase participant engagement during the live days of the virtual event, but provide a more viable platform for building 365-day virtual business communities. In general, the confluence of the technologies makes sense because communities naturally coalesce into events, and events naturally disperse into communities. Events are simply the Super Bowl culminations of communities where audience spikes.

Today’s Loosely-Coupled Social-Virtual Integration – A Starting PlaceFirst steps toward social-virtual integration already have been taken by both social software and virtual event vendors.

On the virtual side, features like real-time chat, messaging, buddy lists, vCard exchange, attendee roster, and people search arguably represent social functionality. But they lack the activity-stream-based view of Enterprise 2.0 social software — follower/following capability and real-time streams of activity by people and entities you are following.

Virtual event platforms rode the wave of social API integration, and many now incorporate Twitter hashtag widgets, the Facebook Livestream social plugin, and elements of the LinkedIn Platform API into the virtual environment. Industry leader INXPO was among the first to market with an integrated “social suite” offering these features thanks to the insight of product marketing director Dennis Shaio. Intefy and Ustream both provide similar, less feature-rich, ways to mashup live streaming presentations and Twitter hashtags. A great example of one such Intefy-powered hybrid live-virtual event was Event Camp Twin Cities. Cisco Systems’ CiscoLive is a 365-day hybrid-virtual-social community for Cisco engineers that runs on the INXPO platform. Although it lacks the Enterprise 2.0 social software UX of, say, Cisco Quad or Jive, it pulls its audience back in via regularly scheduled pulse virtual events containing freshly curated content. Q&A sessions integrated within the webcast presentations, real-time chats and Twitter hashtags provide the collaborative interaction between attendees and subject matter experts and between attendees and other attendees.

One startup deserves credit on the virtual event side for taking the convergence of virtual and social software to the next level — Bellevue, WA-based startup Social27. With Social27 it’s possible to follow attendees in the virtual environment and view social activity streams on their updates. Social27 is a startup social CRM agency that has developed and shipped a cloud-based SaaS virtual event product. The company’s founder and CEO, Ike Singh Kehal, positions Social27 in the “enterprise social computing” space. The company offers both a virtual event product and an Enterprise 2.0 collaboration platform, and appears to have fused elements of the two. It looks like a harbinger of things to come.

The Social Software Side
On the social software side, first steps toward social-virtual integration have been taken by Cisco Quad, which integrates Webex online conferencing into the Enterprise 2.0 environment, and by the Brainshark app in the Jive Apps Market, which lets participants create, manage, deliver and track on-demand multimedia presentations from within the Jive social platform. Such online conferencing tools lack the feature functionality of a full virtual event platform, but they’re a step toward wrapping online meetings and gatherings in social software UX and activity streams.

Engage365.org, a niche online community running on the Pathable social platform, regularly launches live streaming webcasts with thought leaders via an embedded UStream player on its site. Participants can start a native discussion thread about the webcast by simply clicking the “start a conversation” button at the top of the page, and that threaded discussion will persist on the native Pathable platform. Alternately, participants can Tweet about the webcast using the webcast’s Twitter hashtag.

BrazenCareerist, a career social networking site for people in their 20s, has also injected a form of virtual event into its activity-feed-based social platform. To be sure, BrazenCareerist’s Network Roulette events which have been described as “an online speed-networking service that lets young professionals build their network” are a unique departure from the experience of the commercial virtual event platforms. But BrazenCareerist CEO Edward Barrientos credits these virtual events with driving new waves of audience penetration and engagement into the BrazenCareerist online community.

Where It Needs To Go
What’s the end game for engaging an online audience with a combined virtual-social experience?
The roadmap probably lies in tighter integration between the unique content of virtual events and the social activity streams of persisting online communities. To give users the maximum opportunity for engagement, they should be able to follow, share, comment on and rank any entity in the virtual environment – including other participants, webcasts, documents, chats, blogs, and user-generated content uploads like YouTube videos. Each participant, content entity and group in the virtual environment should generate its own feed which can be subscribed to by any member. Feed posts should link directly to the virtual event content asset or profile of the user that is mentioned. These features exist today in social software platforms like Saleforce.com Chatter. Extending such features to virtual event content would drive engagement during the live event days, catalyze a high volume of crowdsourced social discovery of that content, drive a wave of viral sharing, and launch true social-virtual platforms into the marketplace as a competitively differentiated 365-day collaboration solution. It would be particularly effective for driving audience penetration, loyalty and engagement in niche communities with relatively small numbers of unique visitors per day/week/month.

Virtual-Social-Mobile
Needless to say, any evolutions of a virtual-social combined solution need to go mobile. Social software platforms like Jive and Salesforce.com Chatter, as well as virtual event platforms like Social27, already have mobile versions of their apps. Online conferencing apps from Cisco Webex and other vendors also have mobile app versions. Putting emerging virtual-social communities on smartphones and tablets is another essential in expanding their audience reach, engagement, and frequency of touch.

What You Can’t Measure You Can’t Improve

Leading commercial virtual event platforms have strong integrated metrics. Social software platforms are beefing up their reporting with social media monitoring tools, as Jive did when it acquired Filtrbox. A social-virtual combined solution needs to track and report on behaviors on a per-user basis across both the virtual event and social software user experiences. The aggregate metrics would give a more complete view of each participant and be more actionable than either social metrics or virtual metrics on their own.

Have you used or considered using platforms that combine virtual event and social software? What has been your experience? How do you see the fusion of the technologies evolving?

Choose The Right Mobile App Development Framework

If your business is looking to develop its first mobile app, deciding which mobile application development framework to build it in, and what skill set you’ll need from developers, can be tricky with so many types of development frameworks emerging. Here’s a breakdown of some basic types of frameworks, with a few leading examples of each, and a look at some of their strengths and drawbacks to help you make the right choice for your business’s app:

Native platform mobile app development frameworks. The iOS (Apple) platform and Android (Google) platform are the market leaders. Developers write code using the native tools of the platform. iOS developers use the iOS SDK, Xcode IDE, Objective-C, Core Animation, Core Graphics, Accelerometer and Cocoa Touch UI framework. Android developers use the Android SDK, Eclipse IDE with ADT plugin. Android apps are written in Java, or via plug-ins, can be written in a variety of languages including C,C++, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Ruby On Rails, Scala and Scheme.


HTML5 and JQuery mobile application frameworks for multi-touch web apps that run in the mobile device browser. SproutCore, JQuery Mobile, and Sencha Touch are three of the leading tools. These frameworks create HTML5 browser-based (not-native) mobile apps that cleverly emulate the multi-touch UX of native apps on Apple and Android touchscreen devices. Since they’re HTML5 and browser-based, these mobile apps will run in the browser of Apple, Android, even Blackberry Torch devices. An HTML5 app is one of a couple of options you have to write once and run everywhere.

Cross-Platform native mobile app dev frameworks. PhoneGap and Appcelerator Titanium are two leaders. Also referred to as “wrappers” for creating hybrid web-apps, these open source frameworks essentially wrap a web application inside a native application that can be distributed via the native app stores for iPhone, iPad and Android. The hybrid web-mobile app approach is another alternative to let you target multiple platforms with a single codebase. A wrapper also makes it possible to build mobile apps for app store distribution using developers who haven’t mastered native platform languages and tools like Objective-C and Cocoa Touch. Developers use their existing web skills with JavaScript, HTML and CSS to code the application, and the framework compiles most of the code into a native iPhone, iPad or Android app.

Rapid mobile app development frameworks. AppMakr and Mobile Roadie are leading tools. AppMakr is a browser-based mobile app dev framework that makes it super-fast to create an iPhone app from existing content such as an organization’s YouTube channel, blog posts, and other social network feeds. Such apps can be created and submitted to the Apple App Store or Android Market in a matter of hours.

The Big Questions
Organizations are trying to figure out whether apps developed in write-once-run-everywhere frameworks can really hold their own next to native apps. When planning a mobile app strategy, having single codebase that reaches users on any platform is the end game – user base, cost savings, time-to-market, simplicity, and maintenance all would be optimized. No organization gets excited by the prospect of developing an app for iOS, building it again for Android, and then paying once more to code a web app. But for some app requirements doing all three can turn out to be the only viable route to market, for now. One thing is clear. When it’s launched, the app has to perform well enough to win a critical mass of user adoption.

In cases when it’s deemed necessary to write the app three times for Apple, Android and Web, organizations next turn to the question of which platform to target first, and where the web app should rank on the roadmap. No one wants to get the sequence wrong.


Strengths And Drawbacks
A friend involved in developing the beautiful PBS iPad app met me for lunch and we discussed the strengths and weaknesses of the various mobile app dev frameworks. Our talk echoed the conclusions of dozens of developers answering questions about mobile app dev frameworks on public forums like Quora.

The HTML5 and JQuery mobile app dev frameworks are on the right track, and they’re okay for building a simple browser-based multi-touch mobile app with a simple UI that doesn’t need to tap into the platform’s native features. However, for apps with more sophisticated requirements, or the need to deliver a flawless user experience to acquire users, many developers find that these platforms aren’t mature enough yet. To illustrate, my friend showed me a demo of a browser-based app developed in SproutCore for a television network rival of PBS. The emulation of native touch apps was pretty cool. Its buttons were touch activated; its menus loaded similarly to menus developed in Xcode and Cocoa Touch; it imitated iOS’s gestural page navigation; and it copied the bounce of a native iOS app when you scroll up at the top of a page.

Using two iPads, we literally set the SproutCore app on the table side-by-side with the PBS native iPad app to compare. Several UX differences became noticeable. Gestural transitions, smooth in the iOS app, were jumpy and exhibited a weird flutter in the browser app. Buttons, which changed state when touched in the iOS app, remained unchanged with no visual cue when tapped in the browser app. Menus, which loaded instantaneously in the iOS app, exhibited a performance delay before opening in the browser app. The bounce at the top of the page wasn’t quite the same. It can be frustrating, my friend said, for a UX perfectionist when the write-once-run-anywhere frameworks don’t give you access to the platform’s native UX capabilities. For an organization like PBS with a brand reputation for high-quality video content, launching with a flawless and beautiful UX was identifed as critical to maximize user acquisition. Despite the cost, hiring native iOS developers was the right strategy for getting the app onto the iPad. Now that it is released, the app has received stellar user ratings and reviews.

As for the wrappers (the cross-platform native mobile app dev frameworks like PhoneGap and Accelerator Titanium), the requirements of the PBS iPad app ruled them out as well. The app needed custom APIs (to access PBS’s streaming media content via the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud). The team wanted to utilize UI-Web-View to embed HTML in specific areas of the iOS native app to create server side views. Requirements like these aren’t easily accommodated via a wrapper, my friend said. You’re in a box with these frameworks and you’re stuck with their developer tools. Titanium boasts capabilities to access the camera and other hardware on the device, which is impressive. But again my friend’s team found it more flexible developing with Xcode to access the native hardware.

Obviously, rapid mobile application development frameworks like AppMakr didn’t make the cut for my friend’s project. Their focus on compiling mobile apps for App Store distribution quickly from existing YouTube channels, blog posts, and social media feeds disqualified them as tools for a more ambitious app. Still, you have to credit AppMakr. For something so simple, it has attracted customers including Whitehouse.gov, Newsweek, and social media guru Seth Godin. All launched AppMakr apps and got their social content “mobilized” and packaged for the App Store in a matter of hours.

Not every mobile app has the sophisticated requirements of the PBS iPad app. But looking at the different mobile app dev frameworks through the lens of its tough requirements is instructive in sorting out what kinds of apps they’re suited for.

Native Platforms And Web – Getting The Order Right In The Roadmap
Platform preference of your target users, budget, timeframe, business objectives, the coding skills of your existing developers, and special requirements for UX and API integration – all may drive the sequence of Apple, Android, and web development. But for organizations seeking mass adoption of their mobile app, the critical factors are: (i.) maximizing total addressable audience, and (ii.) launching with a UX that will engage users. The roadmap decision often results from an optimization exercise performed on these two factors.

HTML5 web apps represent the maximum total addressable audience. Even though discovery of web apps can be an issue because they lack the powerful distribution channels of the native app stores, in theory HTML5 web apps can be used by anyone with a mobile brower based on Webkit or Chrome. That means Apple, Android, even Blackberry Torch. What’s not maximized on web apps is UX. If an organization reasons that initial user satisfaction has to be optimized in order to drive user adoption, establish brand quality, or differentiate from competitors, it may choose to do its initial launch with a native platform app despite the smaller addressable audience compared to a web app. The platform they choose to make a big splash with UX more than likely will be Apple iOS. Compared to iOS native apps, my friend said, Android apps feel like Microsoft. Developer Ish Harshawat echoed this in a Quora discussion, calling out Google for doing a poor job of communicating to developers the best practices for user experience and design. The result is a lot of the apps that started with Android as the look and feel seem kind of haphazard in usability, he said. Android 3.0, codenamed Honeycomb, introduces a completely new user interface suitable for tablet devices, but it remains to be seen how much this shifts the UX equation.

Android’s burgeoning growth, which recently surpassed that of Apple, has made big headlines in recent months, but organizations need to distinguish between growth numbers versus the current installed base of the two platforms. Nielsen figures show in the past six months Android became the top choice of consumers buying smartphones. 40.8% of smartphone buyers chose Android devices, versus 26.9% who opted for an iOS smartphone or 19.2% who preferred a Blackberry. NPD Group research put Android at a sizzling 44% of U.S. smartphone sales in the third quarter of 2010. To date, 85 competitors have lined up against iPad, and most of them will run Android. However, in installed base the iPhone still leads with 28.6% of the market compared to Android’s 25.8%..

By the time my friend’s team started with PBS, the PBS organization already had launched an iPhone app, which all agreed was the right first move. The question was what the mobile roadmap should look like going forward. Following their own optimization exercise on UX and addressable audience, the team decided to do a native iOS app for iPad first, an HTML5 web app next, and native Android smartphone and tablet apps after that.

It was the right choice for their organization. What mobile strategy works best for you?