There's been a lot of hype around Google's announcement this past week regarding OpenSocial, a new open Application Programming Interface (API) for connecting to social networking applications such as LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING.  Together, these companies represent around 200 million users, so the potential audience for social networking applications built on this API is substantial and the user base is growing rapidly every minute.  In fact, as soon as I watched the well planned and scripted campfire video, I sent an email to my brother who had sent me the link exclaiming, "Wow, this is huge!"

And it really is significant, but it needs to be put into perspective.  It's definitely important for the work my company is doing with Member Crossing, because our goal, in part, is to bring the conversation back into the organization.  But, to understand the power of Google's OpenSocial API, you'll need to know a little about what has happened with the aforementioned Web 2.0 applications, and by Web 2.0, I'm referring to the general use of the web as a medium for conversation, where conversation is used in the broadest sense of the word.

Hundreds of millions of people have flocked to social media applications because of the ease of creating community and sharing information.  I may blog later on the nature of some of these tools and how members of your organization may be using them, but the fact that members have left the confines of many organizations and taken their conversation to some kind of virtual third place should be a wake-up call, especially to organizations that thrive on providing avenues for connecting and sharing information.

Well, don't be hard on yourself if you're feeling as though your organization is late to the party.  Everyone's in the same boat right now, and this new social media phenomenon, while it is clearly past the toddler stage, is not yet ready to enroll in kindergarten. 

Issue for Organizations Re: Social Media

• Data Islands - One of the main pain points for early adopters of social media tools is the fact that each new tool that comes along creates its own little data island.  Contacts I've made through del.icio.us are separate from my Ning contacts which are separate from my Facebook contacts which are...you get the idea.  And it is this issue that we believe will draw many members back home once their organization has adopted a social media strategy which fosters an engaging community.
• Branding and Ads - When evaluating social media sites for possible use by the organization, many executives have discovered that these tools are difficult or impossible to brand.  In some cases, the tool may support branding but generate revenue through the use of ads which can cause the solution to appear unprofessional.
• Inconsistent Interfaces - It is possible to connect to some of the social networking sites and to create applications which integrate with the site; however, up to this point, these applications were specific to each social networking site and creating a social media application that worked with all of the major sites was expensive and required continual maintenance.
• Too Narrowly Focused - While some tools are heading in the right direction, such as Ning, many of the current social media solutions excel at only one or two aspects of social media.  The next breed of solutions will need to integrate these experiences into one solution.
• Integration Challenges - While some tools have offered their own integration interfaces or APIs, these integration points are usually one-way.  For example, developers can use the del.icio.us APIs to retrieve bookmark data related to a user, but they can't send data back the other way and show organization specific information inside of the del.icio.us interfaces.  The major social networking applications do not provide extensibility points to allow for true integration with a CRM or an Association Management System (AMS).

Since an association exists for the purpose of acting as a trustee to their community regarding the venues to facilitate connections and conversation and managing the artifacts that result when these connections are made and the conversations occur, it is essential that association executives pay careful attention to these pain points and more importantly to the gap that exists between the current venues for community and conversation and those being offered through today's social media sites.

The problem for many association professionals is that their members are often finding the traditional avenues for group communication to be too restrictive, in some cases because it takes too long to share the thought and in some cases because the political structure of their organization restricts access to publication channels.  (Don't get me wrong.  There's nothing wrong with these traditional channels for connecting and sharing.  They just need to be augmented with some of the new technologies which help to increase the level of engagement.)

In light of this, members of a variety of organizations have taken their community, and their conversation, to other networks, and this trend shows no sign of slowing down.  At Member Crossing, we identified this a few months ago as one of the biggest problems we are trying to solve with the development of our new community software. 

Bringing the Party Back In House

An association professional I was talking with the other day likened their current problem to a party where the members of the party break up into factions and leave to take their individual conversations somewhere else.  Some go to Starbucks, their favorite third place, while others head off to a local diner to hang out for a few hours.  The issue, she said, is how do we bring the party back in house?

Here are a few things your organization may want to consider when moving in this direction: 

• Develop a Social Media Strategy - What is it that you want to achieve using social media over the next 5 years as an organization and what specific, measurable steps can you take to get to this point?  Some of the first steps may involve purchasing or creating the tools which make it possible to achieve your goals. A vast majority of associations we've worked with still rely on technologies such as member directories and listservs as their main electronic venue for member connections and conversations. 
• Be Open To Change - Be open to changing organizational structures in order to accommodate the new demands that current advances in technology have placed on your organization.  If you are an association executive or professional, you'll find the work of the five co-authors of We Have Always Done It That Way to be challenging and provocative and enjoyable all at the same time.
• Support and Connect to Existing Conversations - Find ways to tap into the conversations that are occurring out in the wild world of Web 2.0, and actually draw the conversation back into the fold, not to create another walled garden, but to ensure the future accessibility of the conversation and to increase its discoverability for your members.  This process will require constant innovation on the part of your vendors and staff who are responsible for managing your social media initiatives.  This may mean purchasing or building an integrated social media solution which is designed to be engaging and relevant (to encourage the conversations to stay in house and related to topics of interest to your members) as well as open and extensible (to allow reaching out and connecting to communities that have developed outside the officially sanctioned tools of your organization).

The first two bullet points are up to you and your organization, but connecting to the existing conversations is where Google's OpenSocial API fits in. 

Up to this point, an organization has been left to develop their own proprietary means of connecting to existing social media applications.  A diagram of this dilemma that many organizations face might look something like this:

 
With OpenSocial, developers are able to create solutions based on the API which will work within existing social media sites and applications.  To go back to the party analogy, it's like the local diner and StarBucks and a majority of other popular gathering spots agreed to place gadgets on each of their tables which would allow patrons to stay connected with other members of the party where they all originally met. 

Or, to show this concept in terms of the graphic shown above, OpenSocial provides a standard way for social media solutions designed for an organization to have a presence in the major social networking sites and applications.

Specifically, the OpenSocial API currently opens up the following types of information within each social media tool which chooses to implement the API:

• People -- information about individual people and their relationships to each other
• Activities -- ability to post and view updates on what people are doing
• Persistence -- a simple key-value data store to allow server-free stateful applications

The Google documentation provides a few more details and examples that may get your creative juices flowing.  It was thrilling for us to begin thinking through the possibilities this opens up for organizations.

So, OpenSocial will probably not create wide-spread peace around the globe.  That's up to you and your organization.  But, it does open the door to some amazing new possibilities for organizations who want to have a presence out on the web where their members are gathering by the millions to connect and share valuable information, information that at some point, we would love to see managed in-house and made available, in whole or in part, through any of the social media tools our members are using. With the right social media solution for your organization and with Google's new OpenSocial API, that goal is much easier to achieve!