Disclosure: qmpeople is a Pandia Sponsor.

Pandia: Your site has been online since 2004, but it wasn’t launched in earnest before 2008. Did you do a lot of market analysis before launching the site?

Marina Cianfarani: Yes, even though we did have clear ideas in mind for our site since the start. We have seen that many social networks had the same characteristics and lack of personality so it has been simple for us to develop qmpeople.

Nevertheless we understand that nowadays it’s crucial for anyone to know the market, actual and potential competitors and emerging trends. For that reason we initially launched qmpeople only in Italy (our country of origin) and after more than six months of 360 degrees analysis we decided to expand our initiative to the international arena.

Outsourcing

Pandia: We understand that you are a rather small company. How do you manage to keep it running. Through outsourcing?

Marina Cianfarani: Yes, we outsource a large part of our activities.

For example, we chosen our SMS gateway in South Africa, hosting solution in USA, domain management distributed across several authorities/providers thanks to a custom DNS solution, legal experts on Internet laws in Ukraine as well as many young collaborators in different parts of the world.

Pandia: Does this mean that you make active use of computing in the cloud? Will cloud computing be the key to online success for publishers and social web site owners?

Marina Cianfarani: At qmpeople we use cloud computing but we think that the most important key factor on a long time basis is the ability to fulfil the end users needs, better than competitors do. Anyway in these times of global crisis, resources are important so cloud computing can provide important resource optimization.

Language and culture

Pandia: You are based in the UK, but are clearly trying to reach large parts of the world. How do you cope with the needs of different languages and cultures?

Marina Cianfarani: qmpeople is borne as a multilingual platform to allow people from any part of the world to communicate, share interests and contents, play games and enjoy themselves.

To accomplish that task we are running our network on several localized versions of the most common languages such as English, German, French, Spanish and Russian, with native support of different time zones, currencies and languages.

Dating site?

Pandia: So what is qmpeople? The first impression is that it is a dating site. The next is that it is some kind of social web site. A bit Facebook like, perhaps?

Marina Cianfarani: Our slogan is “qmpeople – A world of friends” meaning that qmpeople is a place where people from any part of the world can meet and interact. It seems a simple and common slogan but our vision is that qmpeople will reinvent the idea of friendship on Internet.

In fact we are focusing on people who want to make new friends (not only already existent friends like on Facebook) by using a different paradigm than existent social networks. They allow people to make new friends only in a virtual way, without real interaction.

qmpeople want to solve that problem by introducing resembling real friendship activities, such as “help me” in which you can help friends in their time of need: no virtual gifts, virtual kisses and so on but real help.

The use of design

Pandia: I am fascinated by the visual design of the site. You have deliberately chosen a comic book like design with bright colors and simplistic icons. Is this a way of lowering the anxiety threshold of your visitors?

Marina Cianfarani: Yes. Social networking is almost often too serious. Sites like LinkedIn need a formal design because they are involved in business activities, but in our case we think that people would enjoy a funny and informal environment.

Pandia: This is a social networking site. Key to success in that industry is to reach critical mass as regards the number of active users. What are you doing to achieve this?

Marina Cianfarani: We are exploring all marketing opportunities to promote our initiative but we are focusing on contents and market analysis.

Discussion groups

Pandia: The site goes beyond dating. There are, for instance, discussion groups for topics as diverse as the TV show The Office and Haiti relief. But there is not much traffic in all of them. Can you tell us what you hope to achieve with these groups?

Marina Cianfarani: Groups will boost user experience thanks to several services we are going to introduce during next months. We have deployed a first beta version of them so they simply need some time to reach the same level of user interaction as other well know tools such as those to exchange off-line and real time messages.

Videos

Pandia: There is also the possibility of uploading videos. Is this a good way for contact seeking people to present themselves?

Marina Cianfarani: Videos are very appreciated by Internet users, as YouTube demonstrate. They can be a good way for people to present themselves to other users so we are developing specific applications to facilitate the submission, the internal and external sharing, and enhancing activities such as tagging.

Help Me

Pandia: What’s the deal about the Help Me section?

Marina Cianfarani:The Help me service allows you to give help to your new friends in their time of need. It could be seen similar to Yahoo Answers, but it even allows users to ask for economical help. Yes, thanks to native PayPal support, any registered user can send money to fulfill one or more help request. Please, take a look at how the community decided to help pwilkins by donating him some money to repair his motorbike.

Content production

Pandia: To succeed in the search engines, a site needs a lot of relevant textual content. Do you try to get your members to become active content producers?

Marina Cianfarani: Yes, qmpeople is a closed platform at the moment because we think this approach would increase the user experience.

We are different from Facebook because we have no third party applications but, of course, user generated contents is very important so we are using a viral approach to stimulate our users to write lots of contents such as their statuses, comments, what they like/don’t like and niche contents on specific groups.

Advertising

Pandia: You make active use of Google Ads on your site. There is even a row of Google Ads links that could be interpreted as menu links.

I guess there are some of our search engine marketing readers that would be interested to know why you are doing this. Aren’t you just driving visitors away to other contact sites?

Marina Cianfarani: Advertising is a key factor to obtain important resources to develop our network. That can sound as a risk to drive visitors away because a lot of other social networks are currently interested in promoting their sites on qmpeople. But we think, and our experience demonstrates, that users come back to qmpeople because they love it. In other words, we don’t see the promotion of other social networks as a risk, but as an opportunity.

Pandia: What is the qmpeople secret?

Marina Cianfarani: We can summarize it like this: powerful functionality, originality and simplicity.

photo credit: ginnerobot

A World of Friends!

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Click Here for Agenda!

It may take as long as 6 to 8 months to get results from search engine optimization, i.e from methods where you rewrite and redesign your site so that the search engines find relevant content more easily and rank your pages higher. That’s a long time in a shifting market.

The solution, according to search engine optimization specialist Milind Mody, is to use Web 2.0 or Social Media Optimization techniques to get some quick traffic. In this interview he tells you how.

eBrandz

Milind is the CEO of eBrandz Inc, a New York based Search Marketing company with research and delivery centres in India.

Pandia has already presented the company and its focus on search engine optimization affiliate marketing.

Full disclosure: eBrandz is a Pandia sponsor.

On the variety of social media sites

We have written a lot about social media sites here at Pandia. These are sites where the web surfer contributes more to content creation than the web site owner, and where much of the content is based on an interaction between content creators and readers.

Facebook is a site that lets you communicate with your online circle of friends. YouTube lets you upload and comment on videos. MySpace has become a popular site for bands presenting their music, as well as for young people presenting their lives to others. Flickr is an excellent place for sharing photos. And so on.

Pandia: These sites are quite different from each other. It is possible to use one marketing technique for all of them?

Mody: I think each social media site is different. And hence the strategy to “leverage” each site to one’s advantage should also be different. No doubt there might be common elements to some of these social media sites. But there is no “one strategy fits all”.

Pandia: Should companies and others that want to make a presence on the web put up an account on all of the social networks?

Mody:Companies should first evaluate which social media sites they can use. I think they should at least include Youtube, Facebook, Twitter and Blogs as part of their social media strategy.

For B2B LinkedIn is pretty important. Then depending on their product/service they can decide on whether to have account on Flickr, Myspace etc. Then there are industry specific social networking sites to consider.

If a company is looking at blogs seriously, then having accounts with Delicious or Stumbleupon or even Digg also makes sense. It all depends on priorities. However, one piece of advice which I would give is not to start with too many different sites as you might get overwhelmed pretty soon. Also avoid social media sites which does not have significant traffic.

Handling negative feedback

Pandia: These sites require constant surveillance. You need to see how people react to your uploads and posts, and you need to do it fast, before any negative feedback damages your brand. Is it really worth the time doing this? Couldn’t you do more damage than good?

Mody: Getting negative feedback is pretty common. Many times it is how you handle negative feedback that sets you apart from your competition. If you have a faulty product or poor customer service, even the best marketing company in the world cannot help you.

If a customer is upset about a problem and talking about it on a social media site, acknowledge the problem. And then involve your company’s management to find a possible solution. Successfully resolving the problem will only raise your company’s credibility.

Photo: Milind Mody of eBrandz

The reason companies spend a fortune on their marketing and branding campaign is to raise their credibility. Social Media sites offer a cheap and easy way to market their brand and raise their credibility.

Is it worth the risk? Definitely.

The skills of a marketing company

Pandia: All right, so let’s say that I outsource this work to a marketing company like yours. No offence, but is it really possible for a marketing company employee to understand the nuances of what goes on in a completely different industry or field of interest? Can a marketing expert relate to the production of, let’s say ice cream, or the politics of environmental protection in Brazil?

Mody: No offence taken. In fact, I agree that a marketing company employee most probably does not understand your industry nor has a special interest in your field. But the marketing company employee (lets call him the social media expert) understands how the social media work.

So lets say a business wants to establish a presence on Facebook. The Social Media expert can create your account or set up a decent business profile. Facebook apps are a great way to attract users in the Facbook community.

The social media expert can work with a business and come up with potential ideas on which the business can create Facebook application. The application has to cater to an important need of the community. Once the business agrees on the application idea, the social media expert can then develop the application and start its promotion.

As you can see from this example, a social media expert’s job is not to replace the company but to collaborate with it to come up with a suitable social media strategy. In fact, some people used to ask the same question about search engine optimization: How will a SEO employee understand my business and how will he know our audience and which keywords we want to target? But Social Media experts (just as SEO experts) cannot replace the domain knowledge of a business.

Culture

Pandia: Social media sites have their own cultures and tacit rules for communication. How do you train your staff in mastering these cultures? And do you in any way help your clients understand the social skills needed over at, for instance, YouTube? I would guess the traditional media experts in the companies you are serving may have some difficulty in understanding the interactivity of social media, given that they are more used to the linear approach of print media.

Mody: As far as our staff goes, we pick people who have a natural interest and talent for social media. Hence Social Media Marketing comes naturally to them. We of course give them a general outline of Dos and Don’ts.

Regarding our clients, we first evaluate their social media accounts. After that, we give them potential strategies we can use. Once the client approves, we start working on achieving our goals. As far as YouTube is concerned, as long as you stay away from hateful or abusive comments on other people’s channels, you are OK.

And you would be surprised at the amount of flexibility the traditional media experts have. They consider us experts in our domain and hence do not interfere in our ideas or approach. If they have any questions, we talk or discuss. But at the end of the day, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are too big for them to neglect.

Quality

Pandia: Let’s say a company decides to go all the way. It decides to post videos at YouTube, photos at Flickr, music at MySpace. Admittedly photography, movie production and audio recording has become much, much easier in this digital age, but there is still the danger that the company uploads some low quality material. What is a company to do to make sure that they are not making fools of themselves?

Mody: Unless a company is targeting teens and young audience, I would not advice Myspace marketing.

I strongly believe that one video is equivalent to a thousand pictures. Hence I recommend YouTube to almost all of our clients. Yet I would not advice clients to make their own videos. If they do want to go that route, there are sites like Animoto where one can create a slideshow video. But I would not recommend that. A video should have message, royalty free images (your company’s own images are even better), royalty free music, a voice over and live actors if possible (stock footage if live actors is not an option).

Let me give you an example. If someone comes to us for creating a video, we give them two options. The first option is without script and voiceover. This costs $199 per 60 to 90 second video. Here is an example of this kind of video.

And then the second type of video is where we have a script (which is approved by client) after which we create a video with a professional voice over. We also include stock footage in such a video and charge $325 per 60 to 90 seconds, like this example movie.

Note that these videos are not viral. They are like 60 second ads. A business has to sell itself in these 60 seconds. And we ask our clients to upload these videos on their home page. It should help them convert their traffic better. As you can see, the production quality of a video costing $325 is fairly decent.

If companies want to go the next step, they can also produce virals for brand awareness among their target audience. The worst thing a company can do to their image is to upload sub par stuff. Why do that when the cost of professional video is affordable ?

Social media vs. search engine marketing

Pandia: To what extent does social media marketing relate to traditional search engine marketing? Does such exposure also create more leads from the search engines, and in what way?

Mody: I love the fact that we can add the word “traditional” ahead of search engine marketing. A few years ago there was nothing traditional about it!

Coming back to your question, I think there are synergies between social media and traditional search engine marketing or search marketing. For example, if a company is successfully blogging, it can attract a lot of incoming links. This in turn helps its link popularity and ranking.

In fact, if a company is thinking of creating a Facebook app, spend some more money and make sure that this application works on Web pages also and can be embedded on any website. If you link back to your website from a HTML code within the application you get links from all website which display your application. Some social bookmarking websites pass link juice and hence can be important.

Also, research shows that users like companies which provide help or support through social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter. This can help improve your website conversions.

Blogging

Pandia: It has been argued that blogs are excellent social marketing tools, as they also quickly indexed by the search engines. Unlike the traditional company web site, blogs are updated often, and posts can be optimized for a large number of keywords. Who should write these blog posts? Should they be personal, signed by company employees, and to what extent should the communication people control and edit this material?

Mody: I think for blogs to be effective they have to be written by company employees. Some of these posts can be written by the management of a company. These posts have to be a little personalized because people have to relate with the blogger. In a bigger company, the communication people have control over the material. Unless it is the CEO of a company himself who is blogging.

Pandia: Do you help companies write blog posts, and if so, how do you go about doing that?

Mody: Most clients do not have resources, time or expertise to write blogs. We do market research and competition research on what are the interesting topics in a client’s niche. After that we provide them with a few ideas. We can also provide an initial draft of blog post. The company executives can then use that as a starting point for their blog.

Once the blog post is written, we submit it to various bookmarking sites and social news sites like Digg and sometimes industry specific sites. We can also target a few other industry blogs and ask them to be included in their blog roll and return them the favor.

In some other cases, the writer who has written the first draft of blog post can be also used to go and post reasonably intelligent post on other related blogs. This can drive traffic back to our client’s blog.

Twitter and Facebook

Pandia: Twitter has become extremely popular. Microblogging, writing short messages commenting on what’s happening right now, may give a company some exposure. Many companies seem to just feed their blog RSS feed into Twitter and leave it at that. Is this an OK tactic or should companies appoint dedicated twitterers with the responsibility of publishing a few tweets daily?

Mody: I don’t think feeding blog RSS feed into Twitter will work. Companies should appoint someone internally (who tweets regularly) and give him/her responsibility of publishing a few tweets daily.

The tweets should be interesting. Not only that, the tweeting team should look at tweeting as any other networking tool. They should be searching for experts in their domain and start following their tweets. If someone starts following your company account, you should send a direct message thanking for following your tweets. Even better if you can offer something like a free whitepaper download or a free sales consultation.

Pandia: The same problem applies to Twitter as many other types of social media. Given the quick pace of publishing, how do you avoid making mistakes? We have heard of a few companies that have published comments or responses they have regretted.

Mody: I think the social media team should be taught the basics of social media etiquette. They should focus more on quality rather than quantity of conversations. The social media team should listen to the community and devote proper time to the medium. If they do make mistakes, involve the management of the company and quickly apologize for the mistake and move on.

Pandia: How should one go about getting readers at sites like Twitter and Facebook? Are there good ways of making a presence on one site help getting more readers on another?

Mody: Twitter and Facebook are hugely popular and a lot of people have an account on both these websites. In terms of strategy, there are tools which allow you simultaneous posting on both sites. But in terms of networking, you have to search and add users manually.

I think a company should have “Follow us on Twitter” and “Become a fan on Facebook” options on their home page and contact pages. This way, people will have a choice where to connect with a company.

I don’t think there are simple and easy ways to leverage your presence on one site help get more readers on other. Maybe in your Facebook page you can have a Twitter application to give them access to your Twitter page.

Facebook, Twitter and Youtube Marketing.
Hourly rates $15 to $25.

You might remember Nsyght as a bookmark based search engine from when I wrote about it back in 2008. It was down for some time and is now reborn as a web client that allows you to aggregate, share, and search your social graph in real time.

How does it work?

If, like me, you belong to a large number of social networks and sometimes struggle to keep up with all the info, Nsyght collects, organizes, filters and searches information from Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Vimeo, Stumbleupon, Flickr, Last.fm, and Delicious. It is not meant to replace social networks, but to enhance them.

You don’t need to re-friend people on Nsyght. (If you are the kind of person who knows what it means, you might like to know that it uses the APIs of the services to channel your comments and conversations between Nsyght and the other services you use.) The effect is that Nsyght acts as a kind of social dashboard that organizes and displays discussions around content to and from the original sources so you can see it all in one place.

You don’t have to sign up to use Nsyght, you can login with your Twitter or Facebook account.

What does it do?

Nsyght is a powerful tool. Here are some of the things it lets you do:

• Easily retweet or share things you find with your friends on other social services
• Updates appear and are posted in real time
• View videos and images inline
• Be notified via email when someone replies to you, even if the reply came from twitter
• Keep track of discussions among your friends and see the replies in threaded form

Powerful search

For Pandia’s readers, the search related aspects of Nsyght are probably of particular interest. Nsyght brings a lot of information from a lot of sources together in one place and what makes this a user friendly tool and not just too much information is search.

And there are some real search benefits here. First of all, you can search across all the services you use in real time, i.e. fresh info, updated in real time, from all of your friends across multiple social networks. You can filter by user, type (video, photo, discussion, news, audio), service, tag, keyword, and even all of the above.

You can also search for information from a single a user, or even your own posts. This can be convenient if you are looking for a link you know you posted to someone, but you just can’t remember when you posted it and on which network.

Nsyght lets you view and filter what they call your personal fire hose: See all the info from all of your friends in all of your networks, then filter to see just videos, photos, discussions, music, or even news posted by your friends. A pretty powerful tool.

Lastly, on Nsyght, related posts are displayed as discussions in threaded form. These discussions are searchable by keyword or topic.

Brand new features

Nsyght got new funding in December and this has vitalized the development and the team keeps adding new features. The most recent additions include follow support. This gives you the ability to not only follow someone from Nsyght, but chose which services you see from that user.

Now you also can “like” things you find on Nsyght (e.g. adding a thumbs up on Facebook or a star on Twitter) and chose to syndicate this to Facebook or Twitter in a variety of ways.

Another new feature is Boxee support. Boxee http://www.boxee.tv/ is an application for your TV that allows you to watch net videos on your TV. On Nsyght it allows you to watch videos posted by your friends on your TV.

In their own words

We had a talk with Geoffrey McCaleb, CEO of Nsyght and he uses this metaphor to explain his efforts:

- We’ve admittedly come to the realtime aggregation party a bit late. All the beer is gone, and a lot of our competition is already passed out in the corner. But we believe pretty strongly that the problem is still there. Social data is exploding at an exponential rate, but while Google and Bing do a great job in indexing the entire fire hose in real time, it still doesn’t help you discover things from your own circle of trust. Relevancy is still very much driven by familiarity, and who are you more familiar with than people you know?

Google recently launched its own social network effort, Buzz. What does McCaleb think of competition from the giant of search?

- We don’t see Buzz as competition but as yet another service to partner with. Buzz has an amazing install base to build upon, but fundamentally I don’t think Buzz is looking to solve the same problems that we are. So look for Nsyght to offer Buzz as an option in the not so distant future.

And what does the future hold for Nsyght? McCaleb explains:

- Our primary goal is to allow people to weave their extended graphs from all the services they use together, so if in the future there is some hot new social network that becomes popular, they won’t have to make that awkward “should I stay or should I go” decision, the kind of tipping point that happened when everyone realized their friends were “giving up” their MySpace accounts. With nsyght, you can have the best of both worlds.

SMX West: March 2-4
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