Earlier this week I had the fortune to speak with Charlene Li, one of the premier though leaders in the area of social computing and is a leading analyst at Forrester Research. Practically every conference I go to, Charlene is always one of the speakers there. I spoke to Charlene about her new book, Groundswell, winning in a world transformed by social technologies, which I actually had a chance to read. The book gives in depth analysis and research about new social technologies and how they are effecting businesses.

Not only does the book provide a thorough overview of the current state of social technologies and their impact but it also discusses how businesses can adapt to them. Charlene emphasizes in the book and in my discussion with her that the focus should not be on the individual technologies that shape the social web (and the groundswell) but instead on the relationships. If you know who your customers are you can target them and join the conversation using any social technology.

Charlene provides valuable data for anybody looking to get a through overview on how to adapt in this rapidly changing environment. While the book focuses heavily on larger corporations, there are also many lessons for small organizations to learn from this book. While your company shouldn’t dedicate all its’ resources to social technology and social media, these tools are extremely powerful and valuable and should not be overlooked.

Listen to my podcast with Charlene to learn how to embrace, interact with and energize the groundswell.

 

 Charlene Li - Groundswell Interview [23:10m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Earlier this week I had the opportunity to interview Mark Pincus of Zynga gaming network. Zynga is currently one of the most dominant social gaming companies on the web. Social gaming in general is a nascent industry but is gaining a lot of momentum and a lot of attention as participants are attracting millions of users to simple applications. You may have experience playing games such as Scrabulous on Facebook. That’s only one social game (not produced by Zynga).

Zynga now has the largest Texas Hold’em poker game on the web with a presence across a number of social networks including Mysapce and Facebook. Back in February we covered the launch of the Zynga gaming platform which enabled developers to leverage some of the traffic being generated by Zynga’s overall network. At the time, Social Gaming Network (a Zynga competitor), also launched their own network. Both systems ultimately provide the same thing but currently Zynga appears to have significantly more traffic.

In the podcast Mark brings up some of the statistics being generated by their network which are substantial. We also had a chance to discuss Mark’s thoughts on the future of social gaming and where this space is headed overall. There were a few points during the interview when my Skype had some hiccups but through context you can figure out what Mark was saying since it is no more then quarter-of-a-second interruptions. Hope you enjoy!

 

 Mark Pincus, CEO of Zynga [23:29m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to speak with Ajay Madhok the CEO of Equals. Equals provides a number of services but the first service they are launching is group chat service that enables you to pull in any of your friends on a telephone conversation.

In simple terms, the application is meant to create a party line and integrate it through the social graph. The party lines are created via Facebook but you can access any of your party lines via mobile as well. This is really useful and could be leveraged by tele-commuting businesses that want to easily connect their teams together.

At the time of this recording I was not ready to launch this podcast and as such the application has already launched since this podcast was recorded. The application has approximately 1,500 daily users and considering that it is a utility based application I am surprised by its traffic. The application is really well developed and designed. If you’d like to create your own party lines for free go check out the Party Line application. Below is my interview with Ajay.

Also, I will begin doing weekly podcasts on this site which you can also access via iTunes. I have some really exciting speakers lined up so stay tuned as we begin interviewing the most influential people on the social web. Enjoy the podcast! If you’d like to subscribe to our podcast go check out the Social Times podcast feed.

 

 Social Times Podcast - Equals [22:22m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download