Here at Collactive, we believe in reciprocity, and so listen and respond to our customers and to this dynamic fast changing social media market.  I am glad to be with such a team of professionals that work hard to research and study, and reflect their knowledge of best practices learned, to develop a better product for us.

So with this enthusiasm, I’d like to share with you just a sneak preview of Collactive’s latest product release. With that key component of social media in mind, fostering long relationships, we’ve incorporated the blogosphere network into our product pipeline. We’ve also added additional features that enhance our customers’ user experience with our service.

Coming full circle, these developments and more are our way of reciprocating back to the community and nourishing the relationships with partners, customers and colleagues.

As much as we enjoy the ability to contribute to today’s top news online through Digg, StumbleUpon and our other exciting Web 2.0 sites, we can’t ignore the fact that most people are still ignorant to the power of their online vote.

Now, with Yahoo exposing online voting to its large member base, I believe we’ll start seeing more and more “regular” people participate in the conversation. I don’t know about you guys, but I’m glad. I warmly welcome the normal human beings into the arms of our geeky party. Welcome Yahoo!-ers.

Michael Arrington covered the launch in detail on TechCrunch. I agree with Michael that “Digg-like” is probably the closest definition we have for the new service. Still, looking closer at what is provided in Yahoo! Buzz, there are some significant differences between the two services. Some of those differences are related to the fundamentals of what I believe is the essence of social media: giving the power to the community.

For example, the new service doesn’t have any of Digg’s cherished networking capabilities: no friends, no shouts or any inside conversation with like-minded individuals… in a way - Yahoo! Buzz allows people to vote, but doesn’t encourage them to talk about it with their friends. Another difference is the editorial influence on what “makes it to the top” - only a few pre-approved individuals can contribute content to the site. Finally, the order of Yahoo! Buzz’s popularity list appears to not be based purely on user votes, but also takes into consideration some other mystic, hidden values (perhaps in that they are closer to Digg than I originally suggested…). All in all this weakens the ability of Average Joe to make his mark online.

Does that mean Yahoo! believes in a more controlled environment? I hope not. I think the real value of the service, and hence the chance of it to succeed, lies in empowering the users to take control, to contribute content, to vote up or down, to communicate with each other and let the conversation prosper. I hope this is a short rest stop for Yahoo! in their important work of bringing social media to their members.

In either case, I salute them for already taking a huge step forward.

I took the liberty of summing up two points from the paper, along with my own thoughts:

1. It’s not about awareness, it’s about engagement. Getting people to know you exist is not enough. You need to engage with them and build up a conversation. The great thing about social media is that the conversation goes all ways: if you both talk to your audience and listen to your audience, they will also talk and listen to each other - about you! Why does this matter? It matters because in hard times, consumers are less open to outside messages. But, they remain open to messages from their peers.

2. It’s cost-effective and it’s measurable. With the right strategy social media campaigns can give you an exponential return. With the right metrics and tools to track them, it’ll be easy to see the results. This makes social media the one piece of your marketing budget you really need to stick to.

It is in times of financial uncertainty and belt-tightening that tough choices are made. These choices will undoubtedly shape the form of the media markets in the years to come.

This is not the first time Digg has found itself on a collision course with its own users: back in May the removal of stories linking to cracked HD-DVD codes caused an all-out user revolt. While the long-term effects of this week’s algorithm change and user outrage remain to be seen, the dynamics of the Digg-Digger relationship make for a fascinating story. Definitely a story for the textbooks of tomorrow’s schools.

Social media presents unique opportunities to engage in word-of-mouth marketing, the most trusted form of marketing today. However, there is very limited data on the actual business results gained from such activities – making it almost impossible to calculate and analyze market-wide ROI. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs)’s special data disclosure obligations provide a unique opportunity to study ROI for social media engagements.

Many NGOs actively engage in social media, especially on YouTube. Therefore, the average view count of an NGO’s top videos provides an excellent indicator for their social media success and visibility. This information is easily obtainable from YouTube.

All NGOs have a major business goal – increasing their fund raising efficiency. Due to federal laws, the fund raising efficiency of every NGO is in the public domain. Collactive has partnered with Charity Navigator, the largest charity evaluator in the States, to receive this information.

Comparing the social media visibility and fund raising efficiency data of 192 national NGOs, shows that organizations with high social media visibility are 27% more efficient in accomplishing their fund raising goal than organizations with low social media visibility.

For the full results of this study, please download it here.

A dash of color. Feel a bit constrained? Need some creative freedom? With the new the latest Collactive system upgrades you can customize alerts sent to your Collactive Network even more. Alerts can now include rich text, images and even video thumbnails!

Even more effective community management. We all love to get more supporters, but managing a community is a challenging task. A new dashboard, more reports and practical tools make working with your Collactive Network a breeze. It’s easy to see how many users registered, to set up your landing page or to decide how to promote your Collactive Network.

Log in and see these and many more exciting new features!

The general public been invited to submit questions for the upcoming CNN/Politico debates in LA. For this purpose Politico opened a section on their website where anyone can both submit and vote for questions.

GI-Net mobilized their Collactive Network of supporters and asked them to vote for questions on Darfur they had posted. The results were astounding: the questions rocketed into ranks #2 for both the Democratic and the Republican debates.

This is especially true when talking about my supermarket shopping habits - without preparing a list I can wander around for hours, end up with a cart stuffed to the gills only to find out when I come back home that I forgot some unimportant items such as milk.

Discovering social media is a bit like deciding which country you want to take your next vacation in - there are plenty of countries out there, each with its own culture, landscape and different mix of people. It’s all about what is right for you and the issues you care about. Having a presence on Facebook, MySpace, Digg or any site that pops up in the news won’t necessarily increase your sales leads, donors or supporters - much like taking the Eurostar and crossing Europe at 186mph doesn’t mean you’ve actually been to Europe.

Having the right presence in the right network however will get you there. And by network I don’t mean choosing Facebook over MySpace (or vice versa). Or Digg. Or YouTube. These sites have such big communities that in each of them you can find a group of people that care about what you do and the issues you’d like to promote. But it takes time, planning and most importantly - patience. You can’t learn all the local customs in a week (although having a travel guide does help ;).

Picture this: the citizens of New Oceania live happy and fulfilling lives. New Oceania is a proud democratic state - in fact, a direct democracy - and as such holds regular referendums. Lively debates surround the election process. When the time comes, citizens go to the polls and enter their votes into New Oceania’s advanced computerized voting systems.

But, something is amiss in New Oceania. The computerized voting system has been designed to prevent abuse of the state’s direct democracy. Some voters are blacklisted, others are counted twice or even more. Sometimes, bills are discarded altogether after just a handful of opponents leave the polling stations. All of this should be fine as it serves the goal of preserving the state’s voting system. The problem is, nobody knows how it works.

In a blog post over a year ago Scott Karp wrote, “A “democracy” that has to forgo transparency in order to avoid becoming undemocratic has already ceded its democratic ideals.”. This holds for the fictional New Oceania and it also holds for the subject of Scott’s piece and of my own allegory. Don’t get me wrong, I love Digg. Like many other Diggers, I would love to understand how I am being measured! Participating in one of the most exciting and enjoyable social experiments on the web could be made better if it was a little less shrouded by obscurity.

In the computer security field there is a concept called Security by Obscurity. Any security expert will tell you that if this is your only defense - if the secrecy of your algorithm is all that protects it - your time will eventually run out. The bad guys will steal it and exploit its weaknesses instead of the good guys analyzing it and ensuring, in a community-wide effort, that it is inherently secure. I believe that social media security should not be based on obscurity either.

1. Comment more. Keeping up with blog reading, commenting and writing takes time. A lot of time. How do I keep up with where I’ve commented, what I wrote about, when I wrote it? It takes some effort. This year, I will take more time to blog, listen and converse.

2. Answer the phone more (sorry Rohit, but I’ve got to disagree on this one - perhaps it’s my upbringing that prevents from not answering!) The great thing about social media work is that you meet real and interesting people. A natural consequence of meeting them on social media sites is that you have a lot in common. This year, I want to converse more with the people behind the profiles, avatars or submissions.

3. Befriend and be a friend. I’ve been spending time recently on Digg reaching out to friends and getting to know them better. It’s a tricky task that requires you to walk the line between network building and just plain procrastination. This year, I want spend just the right amount of time giving my social network friends the attention they deserve.

Happy New Year!