Integrating Facebook and WordPress is not as hard as it first seems, as a plugin is available for WordPress called “Facebook Connect by Adam Hupp”.  The plugin simply requires you to create a Facebook application, and then copy and paste the API key and Secret code into the plugin. The plugin takes care of everything else.

The Facebook Connect button once clicked allows the user to login to My11 by simply entering the Facebook credentials, and automatically become a member of the My11 community with ease. Not only can they login using Facebook, but if they are already signed into Facebook, they will automatically be logged into My11.

We didn’t stop at easy login though.  Site members can also post to their Facebook wall when they create a team or join a mini-league.  Weekly and monthly scores are also posted to users’ walls.  My11.com has already seen a substantial increase in referral traffic from Facebook due to these features.

If you would like to see how we can increase site membership and referrals from Facebook to your site, please contact us today.

Mark Zuckerberg looks on while Todd Chaffee and team build the Six Degrees application

MIKAMAI was honored to participate in the Facebook hackathon this past weekend in London, with Facebook executives including Mark Zuckerberg, Brett Taylor, Ethan Beard, and Christian Hernandez stopping in to check out progress, judge the applications, and give some insider tips.

A hackathon is where developers work into the night to come up with a quick solution to a difficult problem.  Hackathons have been part of the Facebook culture from the start in Mark’s dorm room at Harvard where he launched Facebook.
Our goal was to build the Six Degrees application which shows how you are connected to people outside of your personal network.   To learn more, check out the video below of Todd Chaffee presenting the finished application to Facebook executives.  The response to the application was great, with Mark Zuckerberg offering tips on how we might handle large numbers of users once the application becomes popular.

Facebook also hosted an event for the press and big brands the following day, covered in this article on the Guardian Website where you can read about why Mark Zuckerberg thinks that personalisation of the web is creating a new wave of opportunity for companies using social media to “build products around people”.

A big thanks to Karl Bunyan, the original developer of the Six Degrees application who gave us permission to re-launch it using the new Facebook Open Graph API.  Keep your eye on Karl’s latest project Join The Company, which will be a sure source of interesting applications in the near future.

One of the best parts of the event was the opportunity to work with developers outside the MIKAMAI team.  In addition to Todd and myself from MIKAMAI, we had Dave Nattriss, Tom Fletcher, and all the way from Milan, Italy, Pier Gorelli of Insana.

With all those new faces the event was social, fun, and most of all we got the application built.  Just as invaluable was getting the inside word directly from Facebook executives about future direction and their vision of how brands can create a personal and social experience on the web .

And stay tuned for a link to the new application once we put on the finishing touches!

Enjoy.

If you’d like more complete coverage of the Twitter Developers Nest #7, head on over to Mobile Industry Review where Ewan Macleod gives complete coverage. And be sure to check out his fantastic presentation on the mobile industry which you’ll find in the same article.

Another big thanks to PayPal X for providing the beer and pizza and I should also give credit to Olivier Blanchard and his Basics Of Social Media Roi which inspired me to attempt this. Finally, don’t forget to check out Twitter Developers Nest London

Buzzreader is back with a brand new design. I know an online reputation monitoring service is not mainly focused on graphic design. Nonetheless, an appealing website is necessary to be competitive. Buzzreader has a blog and you may want to take a look at their Playboy brand analysis.

Here you can see a research about how people deal with electromagnetic pollution

and a tag cloud about FIAT, the most discussed automaker on the internet.

They offer their monitoring service both in English and Italian.

They’re friends of us. Keep an eye on them =)

1) To foster deeper collaboration.  Healthwarehouse.com (symbol HEWA) is a leading mail‑order pharmacy based in the USA and licensed to sell prescription medications in 43 states. They started using Social Media to handle requests from customers who were using Facebook and Twitter to contact the company. According to CEO Lalit Dhadphale, “we were using Twitter for external purposes only, but as we interacted with customers, we realized there was potential internally as well.” So some employees started using Twitter for internal company communications like tracking the number of orders. The convenience of using mobile devices has resulted in an increase in overall communication and greater collaboration between employees that respond immediately to a Tweet as opposed to an email that can be left ignored in the inbox.

2) To help new employees become a part of team. Even the most socially confident of us get a little anxious about being accepted by a new team, and most of us will go through this experience more than a dozen times in our careers. Imagine logging into the company social network and seeing a wall full of warm welcome messages, each with the sender’s clickable picture next to it. As well as being able to the check out the photos from last month’s company rafting trip everyone keeps talking about. And if you are following the advice from the next point, new employees will be picking up on your company values as they are doing this.

3) Because your company has no values. At least according to much of your staff. Try this experiment: casually ask ten random employees something like the following. “I’m curious what you think the company’s values are. No problem if you don’t know and there are no wrong answers.” I’ll save you the time. Most will draw a blank and the rest have got it wrong. Why should you care? Because changing it will save you a lot more time. Employees with a clear understanding of company values have the confidence to act independently and to make decisions with less management input. You can use a social networking platform to better communicate these values and, maybe more importantly, to allow employee participation in the conversation. Employees that have a say in company values are more willing to live by them.  Express Employment Professionals, the fourth-largest staffing company in the U.S., recently launched an internal blog to replace the company newsletter. The goal is to provide a more interactive way of sharing company news that will encourage comments and questions. Some other ways you can use a social media platform to communicate values:

• - Publish stories that praise employee actions aligned with company values and allow employees to rate and comment on these stories.
• - Conduct informal on-line polls or contests about how a particularly difficult customer incident should be handled.
• - Update your status. Answer the question “What are you working on today?” on a regular basis to show your activities and priorities reflect the company values.
• - Use it to preach. Some people just need to be reminded what the team agreed to. If you do it in a humble way they will appreciate the reminder. Quicker than a staff meeting and no need to buy any pizza.

4) To identify critical paths of communication. Many custom social media platforms allow you to look at the social graph. Who is connected to whom and even more importantly, who is communicating on a regular basis. If all communication between the shipping department and the legal department only ever goes through Sally you could consider getting others involved to avoid a communication breakdown when Sally leaves the company.

5) Because it’s fun and addictive. One way to get employees off Facebook is to ban it. But then you aren’t allowing them to build up the social capital we all need in order to be successful in our professional and private lives. And as reported by the Chicago Tribune , fifty-eight percent of teens say the freedom to use social networking sites at work could influence their future job decisions. So consider giving them access to Facebook and LinkedIn while also providing a more interesting alternative: the company social network. If you do it right your employees will feel like they are playing on Facebook while they are actually learning the little details about all the people who are making the big things happen at your company.

6) So they don’t do it first. As news came out that BusinessWeek would be sold, long time BusinessWeekreporter Steve Baker set up a private Ning network to keep current and former employees in the loop about what was happening with the sale. BusinessWeek was eventually acquired by Bloomberg in October 2009, yet the alumni private social network still remains. With tools like Ning that make creating a social network as easy as the press of a button you aren’t going to stop employees, especially those worried about big changes, from forming their own private social networks. But if you already provide a social networking platform for employees you reduce the need for them to create their own. In other words, what is stopping you from going to Ning and pressing that button yourself first?

7) To create a “Reciprocity Ring” as described by Clara Shih in The Facebook Era. The more people in your network the more chance you have of finding someone who can help you with a small favor that allows you to complete your project. You probably will not help that same person back, but you will help someone else. This circle of people exchanging favors is a reciprocity ring. Using email I am limited to my address book. And I have to shoot out a spammy email to everyone with the annoying “Does anybody know someone…” With a social network I can instead search the entire company skill set and even verify the person’s expertise by searching for relevant wall posts and conversations. So I go to the Java expert who is really answering all the questions, not the accountant who wrote a couple of Java games in his free time. This creates new value within your company because the cost of helping someone is usually much less than the benefit it provides. There is also the nice side-effect of the stronger social bonds created between employees that exchange small favors.

8) You will make more money. I guess I could have included this first, but I couldn’t resist including the bottom line as, well, the bottom item. According to a survey by Towers Watson, a leading global consulting firm, “companies that are highly effective communicators had 47 percent higher total returns over the last 5 years compared with the least effective communicators” and “more than half of highly effective communicators have increased their use of social media for employee communication”.

Are you one of the smart companies using or planning to use social media for internal employee communication? What motivated you? Anything from the list above or something completely different? Or are you one of the companies still not convinced? I would like to hear from both sides as well as hearing from employees about their experiences at companies using social networking for employee-to-employee communication. All comments are welcome below.

All the latest videos and slideshows are available on the official blog.

You may want to listen to Todd Chaffee of MIKAMAI speaking at 00:34. Enjoy the video.

A photographer took some pictures of MIKAMAI office and staff on a snowy December morning.

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London, W1F 9PY, UK
Phone: +44 786 826 0229
Email: hello@mikamai.com

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