TechWag

: Image by Getty Images via Daylife

The first two weeks of a social networking project are critical to make sure you are being found in all the places that you needed to be found. The other interesting part is how quickly spammers and scrapers will seek out your site and start pulling content. With the first two weeks of the social networking project at CityU of Seattle completed, here is what the Good, The Bad, and the Ugly comes out to look like.

The Good

Google Links – we are showing 838 back links after two weeks, mostly due to FriendFeed, Technorati and Social Median. Some assorted blogs, twitter accounts, and other systems are also back linking, but the majority of back links are coming from open social systems that are easily incorporated into Google. Bing shows 58 back links, Yahoo shows about 700 back links to the web site which also follow the same pattern of social systems that are easily incorporated into the search engines are providing the most back links to the new web site.

FriendFeed – we chose to link to a number of groups (this should be under bad, but also has a positive spin) and individuals who are respected in education, technology, and social media because that is the focus on the programs we are teaching at CityU. The positive response is that individuals are more likely to friend back, where joining a group has provided no real benefit in terms of generating people visiting the site.

Twitter – on one article we wrote about a controversial subject (Are US Grads Employable) got picked up by one person on Twitter, which caused a small bump (57 visitors in a day rather than 20) in visitors while the controversy was going on. Building on that while maintaining an educational viewpoint proved to be difficult in that the needs of the social networking plan precluded building on the controversy and focusing on the core message.

Being on message – since this is a company web site, we want to make sure that we are on message for the audience that we want. Being on message is being accepted by everyone and they understand it, appreciate it and are following the on message guidelines.

Hosting – Amazon web services where we host the system out on has performed flawlessly even under tested load. We have also been able to doge outages with the AWS service, unlike other service providers that we looked at. AWS has been brilliant and is giving the maintainers of the system real world experience in managing systems in a cloud computing environment.

The Bad

Social networking in General – while it has added to the general idea of back links, it has generated little traffic outside of twitter and a controversial subject to write about. Without traffic there is little conversation on the web site.

Conversation in general – one of the goals of the project was to start a dialog with teachers, students, and other group members. Two weeks has generated little conversation, but spammers found the site very quickly once the site was registered with the various search engines. From there spam has far outstripped any idea of conversation making designs for the web site. Askimet in this instance has been great.

Contact information – the contact information was an unobfuscated e-mail address, which has given rise to an increase in spam on our e-mail servers and in the POC e-mail address. While we want the contact information to be used and used by students and potential students, spammers are sending at least 10 spam e-mails a day that are showing up in the mail box, and over 100 a day that are being trapped by the spam server at work.

The Ugly

The feedburner + FriendFeed tie in has so inflated the RSS statistics that they are meaningless. While the FF/F combination shows that there are 443 subscribers to the web site, I only know of two subscribers to the web site, and only 14 subscribers in FriendFeed as of this morning. This gives a false sense of exceeding engagement targets and should be considered meaningless for engagement statistics.

Spammers – it was phenomenal how fast spammers found the site and started trying to dump in porn, drugs, and SEO marketing. The first spam started showing up within 24 hours, and the floodgates opened once we registered the site maps with Microsoft, Google and Yahoo. We are averaging over 20 spam comments a day on the site.

Scrapers – we were picked up by a scraper in Argentina and while we will be able to leverage the Page Rank that they have, this makes for a true test of transparency in the program. Everything on the site is CC 2.0 Share + Attribution, which they do, which is great; the problem is more one of image rather than anything else. Can we afford or do we want to be associated with a web site that is a known content scraper, even with the potential Page Rank benefits.

For two weeks we have had over 200 visitors, which is good, but the downside to this has been that we are failing to engage with the audience in the way that we want. We are also making the assumption that the audience will start engaging with the blog entries and pages as they see fit. What is ending up happening now is a matter of engaging the right group of people who need the information the most and focusing on the target audience rather than the random audience that social networking presents to us. The social networking part of this is great and working as desired, the core audience though is being missed, and we need to focus now more on the core audience, students and instructors in the technology programs at the school.

The initial reaction has been great outside of spam and scrapers, but getting the word out the core audience is the next big step. I’ll post another update when we hit one month old and let you know how it goes.