Project Nano - Friend's Hot or Not For YouTube Video

Project Nano is created to test and measure social marketing techniques on Facebook.  It is a simple website for users to bookmark, rate, watch and share funny videos.  Users are not required to login to see the videos, however they will need to login when they want to upload/comment/share the videos.   This login requirement will be changed as marketing techniques are implemented and revised.

Description:

• A site for users to watch, rate and share funny videos.

User Scenarios:

• Peter comes to the site and watch funny videos to kill time.  Peter votes "like" or "dislike" for the video.  Then the system shows the "next" button for the next video.
• Peter wants to share a YouTube video on the site.  He posts the YouTube link on the site.  The video will be queued for visitors to see.

Goal:

• To test Facebook Connect API
• To test Facebook like, comments, wall publish, friend invite (Facebook Graph API)

User Roles:

• Visitor
• Member
• Administrator

User Stories:

As a visitor,

I want to see a video. (need a randomized algorithm to decide what videos to show)
I want to vote on a video.
I want to report a video.

As a member,
 
I want to post a video
I want to see what videos I posted
I want to see my friends who have viewed the video
I want to see my friends who have liked the video

As an administrator,

I want to see the videos posted (video link, user created time, user, votes)
I want to see what videos were flagged
I want to see the users who joined (number of videos uploaded, number of videos flagged)
I want to see the most popular videos

Let ideas come to you instead of you actively finding ideas

StartupDigest -  "Members receive a curated email of the best startup events, job opportunities, and educational content in your area." You will want to sign up for mobile news, social news, launch and funding informations for startups.

The Internet Wish List - People post what they want for their own consumption and suggest ideas. These are demands. Instead of finding an idea yourself, it is easier to look for what people want out there.

Some examples from the Internet Wish List:

• I wish someone would use the foursquare API to build a cab-sharing app to help you split a ride home at the end of the night.
• I want an app that can group similar tweets so I don’t have to read the same story from 50 different sources.
• I want an app that can read me emails and blog posts while I drive
• I want an app for finding babysitters. Location- and subscription-based service of vetted and available sitters.
• I wish there was an app that helped you find parking in the city.
• I wish my phone would create an app that blocks all calls except biz calls during work hours.

Start building them today!

Marketing - Measure and Test Each Campaign

From the previous section, Spread Transparently Through Social Graph, you should be able to come up with some methods to market your idea.

At the beginning of your site promotion, you want to launch your site as a beta (Ignore the pre-alpha, alpha, etc.). Depends on your situation, you may want to limit your site to certain number of users at the beginning. You can do this by "joining only by invitation". With this smaller subset of audience, you can start testing the usability of your site.

Use the "joining only by invitation" concept and start devising tests to measure each marketing campaign. Before you start implementing the campaigns, you should have the following:

• expectation of what will happen within a period of time
• when to declare the method as a failure
• the type of marketing (see "Marketing Types" below)
• description of how to implement the campaign specifically
• the factor that you are measuring (only test one factor at a time)

Marketing Types

• how to distribute the message to people who do not know the site
• how to convert visitors to members
• how to make members to continuously use the site

Use Google Analytics and Google Spreadsheets to track data; you will need these data to make business decisions on whether to improve/continue/discontinue a campaign.

Marketing - Spread Transparently Through Social Graph

The term online marketing may remind you of cost-per-click (CPC), cost-per-impression (CPM), article writing/rewriting/spinning, social bookmarking, or posting on popular sites like ezines, hubpages, squidoo.

We are not talking about those things here.  First thing to know is that

A good idea that brings people value will self-market itself.  If the idea gives no value, no matter how good the marketing campaign is, it will fail.

The best marketing method is by "word-of-mouth". If your idea is good and useful, people will talk about it. In online platforms, the "word-of-mouth" method spreads by the concept of social graph.

You will want to aid the spread of your site transparently. We will take a look at how to maximize the distribution of your site and how to build marketing tools for users to easily spread your site.


Brand Distribution


To increase the chance of others knowing about your site, you will want to build your site in as many viable platforms as possible. For example, Facebook has more than 500 million active users. You may consider writing a Facebook App version for your site.  Similarly Twitter has over 300 million users. Of course, you will want to capture the mobile users as well since they are the ones who "carry your site" everywhere they go.

Here are some popular platforms you may want to leverage:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Myspace
• Foursquare
• Android
• iPhone/iPad
• Blackberry

Facebook - You will want to study how wall messages, private messages are shown when a user adds your app or uses your app. You do not want to make your users annoyed by constantly showing your site's messages in their wall posts.

Twitter - Think of this as SMS of the Internet; as a rule of thumb, only spread messages that give values to the users. You do not want your Twitter account to be considered as sending out spam messages.

Android/iPhone - Leverage the GPS and camera in these devices. Say you want to upload a picture for your profile in a site. Traditionally, you will take a picture using a camera, connect the SD card to your desktop, transfer to your hard-drive, and upload to your site. These smart-phones allow you to take a picture and upload to the site instantly. Build these mobile application as tools to aid the site or build them as mainstream sources of your project.

You will want to go through the feature development and diagram visualization phases before implementing these apps.


Marketing Tools/Features


The marketing tools in this section are referring to features that you can build on your site to aid users to spread information.


The following are some ideas as a reference (You will want to modify them):

• an import contact list function (email, facebook, twitter) after registration
• Facebook Connect, Google Accounts, OpenID (users hate signing up again and again on so many sites; it will be very convenient for them to be able to login using these accounts)
• Facebook Comments instead of your own commenting system (users can share comments on Facebook wall posts)
• Facebook Like
• settings page for receiving alerts when anyone comments on the user's post (receive friend's update through push notification on smart phones)

What you want to develop is the messages that will be used to communicate with users. The distribution channel through Facebook and your site's import contact list alone may be powerful enough to spawn viral spread.

Using Screwed up Things in Public Area as an example, here are some Facebook messages that can be used as wall posts:

• There are x number of strange things at Richmond today.
• There are x number of strange things {around you|in your neighborhood |at you school}
• Peter saw something strange in Richmond.
• Peter can't believe his own eyes in Richmond.
• Peter's curiosity level is raised to 8
• Ridiculous things that happened around Peter today

To summarize, if there is one thing you need to remember for marketing, always remember the following:

A good idea that brings people value will self-market itself.  If the idea gives no value, no matter how good the marketing campaign is, it will fail.

Location Social Networks With Recommendation Services

Foursquare - recommends locations to users that they should visit based on their past activities, to-do-lists, what's popular at the moment

Bizzy - rate a location by check-outs; local business recommendation engine based on the favorite places of people

Ditto - sharing your intent to do something instead of what you’ve already done (What you plan to do VS Foursquare's what you should be doing)

Google Hotpot - Rate places and add friends to get personalised recommendations whenever you search for places on Google

WHERE - location recommendation based on user's saved mobile location and where they like to go

Hashable - track your relationships by check in with people; exchange business cards, track meetings, calls

Bnter - a way to frame and share your conversations on the internet; by founder of Textsfromlastnight.com

Domo - iPhone app for sharing interests and connecting with people around you for events, meet-ups, parties

Whrrl - social location-based game to get people out into the world trying new things; share recommendations of things to do and places to go, earning "influence points" when you try new things and successfully inspire others to try things

Application Visualization - Express Your Site Through Diagrams

After the feature development phase, you will want to translate the user stories into diagrams of how your site will look like. You do not need to use Photoshop to make appealing mock-ups of the site. The focus should be at how the features will layout (user experience).

For example, in the edit profile page, aside from the navigation, header, and footer, there will be a table with username, address, first name, last name,  email, etc. After you draw out the scratch, you will want to review it with your researches and user stories again; and then revise the diagrams.  

The goal here is not the visual appearance. It is more about the business decisions of what to put and what not to put.  Storing unnecessary information can use up more space in your database, for instance.

Here are some guidelines of how to design the diagrams:

• draw the sequences of the pages (how a user can navigate through the site)
• think if the data/item is really necessary in the page (ex. if you do not need to store the home address, do not put it in the profile page)
• minimize the number of steps/pages that the user needs to navigate in order to use your feature
• do not put anything anywhere on any pages if it doesn't make any sense or the presentation is awkward; study how other sites do it (use your reference sites from the research phase)
• label each page (editprofile.html, register.html, homepage.html)

Check the page diagrams at this page for some examples

http://www.symfony-project.org/jobeet/1_4/Doctrine/en/02 

You will want to read this. It has a good example on how to write user stories and draw diagrams. Start reading from "The Project Pitch".

Lastly, although blurry, here is an example of how the layout may look like:

Feature Development - Defining Features in Terms of User Roles

As a business owner, it is vital to have a common "language" that you can communicate with your developers.  In the feature development phase you will define the features of your site through user stories.

Let's take a look at the following idea.


Screwed up Things in Public Area - By Kenneth

User scenario:

1. Peter was walking at Robson street.
2. He saw some naked guy walking on the street.
3. He sent that message out using his iPhone.
4. People who were around them and were on this application were alerted.
5. They went and found this naked guy.

Idea:

Share screwed up things you saw/experienced real time in your location.


Motivation:

• Real time reporting is a big trend.  Usually, people who are alerted of the news are unable to see the event because it’s passed.  Now with GPS reporting, at least people who are close by can come and see it.
• People want to share surprising things/events real time with their friends
• People want to know what kind of things are happening around them - in this case, location.

The example above contains the description of the project, a user scenario, and some reasons why users may use the site.  The example above should be self explanatory.

User stories are defined into user roles.  Each role will be allowed to do different things.  A typical site will have user roles like administrators, visitors, and members.

You will want to define each user feature as specific as possible.  Your developers will translate these user stories into features.  And they will most likely come back to you with questions.  As a business owner, you will need to guide them.  The documents/informations you have collected in the research phase will surely help you with that.

Here are the user stories for the above project.

As a visitor (not yet a member)

I want to submit a story by location.

- location is defined as

• zip
• address
• longitude and latitude
• GPS

I want to view the most popular stories. (popularity defined as total number of combined votes)

• total number of yes and no votes over a period of time
• total number of comments
• total number of yes votes
• total number of no votes

I want to view the most popular stories near me.

- "near me" is defined as

• within x km radius of where I am - gps mobile phones
• in my city (set in profile page) - PC

I want to view the popularity of any comments.

• number of thumbs up VS number of thumbs down
• good solution VS bad solution

I want to view the popularity of any stories.

• number of votes for yes
• number of votes for no

I want to register on the site.

• ask for only user name and email as step 1; send email verification; if clicked, continue to set password and default city

As a member (extends visitor role functionalities)

I want to view the stories that I have submitted.

I want to comment on any stories.

I want to view the posts I have posted a comments on.

• bookmark when a post is voted or commented on

(optional) I want to view the posts I have voted on.

(optional) I want to view the comments I have voted on.

I want to vote on rather a post is a epic or not.

• “epic” VS “fail”
• “You made by day” VS “Not worth mentioning”

I want to change my password.

I forgot my password.

I want to change my profile information.

I want to set my default city.

I want to see my ranking. (Statusphere)

• points and badges system

(to be expanded later) I want to use the site using my mobile device.

I want to flag a post.

As an administrator

I want to enable/disable a post.

I want to enable/disable a user.