Social networking, and social media specifically, have been painted as the new marketing landscape for businesses to engage with their communities of customers wherever they congregate.

In my view, we’re starting to hit a ceiling of discussion versus execution and practicality.

I believe that we’ve theorized enough. There is certainly no shortage of “experts” who can point to “why” Social Media should work for business and improved communications, however, there IS a shortage of people showing others “exactly” how to do it, how to measure it specifically, and which tools of the trade work most effectively for individual campaigns.

It’s time to divide the market of Social Media experts so that we can grow as a group of doers, not just thinkers.

While I will always look to the future to help others evolve, I will also share what I learn and what it means to PR, marketing, sales, and business branding. This way the information can be analyzed and redeployed within – specific to the goals and culture of the company and the team.

Jonathan Crow of ThinkFree recently conducted “The Great Social Experiment” where he tested and practiced the art of social networking as a strategy for helping his company join the conversation and in turn, evaluate its business implications for doing so. The goal was to examine whether his engagement would increase both ThinkFree’s and his professional network, gain market intelligence both on product as well as the industry as a whole, and expand the company’s market outreach.

Basically, Crow, like many other marketing professionals, are trying to find out how Social Media can help businesses grow and whether or not conversations have real world business benefits. A side note, I would add, is that I wonder if his participation also affected and contributed to his personal brand.

Now, ThinkFree is an interesting company to profile because at the end of the day, it compete s against Microsoft Office, Google Docs, as well as other hot Web 2.0 companies. No easy task indeed.

ThinkFree offers an online/offline office suite that is completely compatible with MS Office. The company also created a Social Network of its own, ThinkFree Docs, which is basically a community built around discovering and sharing documents and building a network around content and content creators.

His first step was to jump in.

Crow targeted the following networks:

ThinkFree Docs?
digg
del.icio.us?
Facebook?
Pownce?
Technorati?
Reddit?
Twitter?
Jaiku?
Newsvine?
Flickr?
Plaxo Pulse?
StumbleUpon?
Yahoo!360?
MySpace?
Friendster?
LinkedIn?
hi5?
orkut

While some of Crow’s targets are right on, others are secondary or even tertiary for accomplishing his goals – just by knowing the culture of each community from experience. However, this is his experiment, so what he learns is important to everyone else who may or may not have jumped in yet and to what extent each community applies (or doesn’t) to their business. He represents many who are actively seeking ways to engage and/or how.

Crow points out, “It feels like I just went into a single’s bar and shouted, ‘will somebody be my friend!’”

He continues, “Who is listening and are we talking in an echo chamber? The answer has been a little mixed. Yes, I have met new people, and am having new conversations. Is it as much as I was expecting or hoping for? No. But the lesson I am taking away from this is that if you do want to build new contacts that can help you, and that you can help, it takes time. Social networks are not a magic formula…Like in the outside world, it takes time to get to know people and develop relationships that can lead to meaningful action. I guess I fell into the trap of looking at these resources as a commodification of friendship. And, we really need to break out of that mentality – myself included.”

Jonathan’s observation is perhaps one of the most common realizations of any good and optimistic marketer. And, this is exactly the point where the Social Media market and its practitioners start to fragment.

Jonathan however, is already a lot further along than most. He’s engaging and writing about his experience. He’s calling out to others to examine his participation and to offer advice, insight, and feedback so that he can engage more effectively.

Many companies and Social Media consultants dramatically underestimate the resources, time, dedication, and passion it takes to engage and cultivate relationships across multiple communities. It’s just not the same for any two networks.

However, Jonathan participated and contributed to the communities he wished to engage genuinely. He did not sit on the sidelines; he shared, learned, observed, and also emerged with real world feedback.

For example, in part three of his series, Crow discusses the different classifications of social networks he observed during his experiment and offered advice for business professionals looking to also jump in.

Aggregators
These pull together feeds from other profiles and sites, keep track of what you and your contacts are doing. Great examples of this are: Flock (as I mentioned already), Plaxo, and Pownce. Somewhat Frank has a great list.

Connectors
These sites connect people, groups, networks, make suggestions based on profile information. The best example is LinkedIn, but obviously Facebook, and MySpace.

Feeders
These sites feed data that is then used in other sites. Typically media based, examples would be YouTube, Flickr, Google Maps, iLike and ThinkFree Docs.

Publishers
These “sites” are where people come for their entertainment or information. Twitter, Jaiku, and obviously YouTube, ThinkFree Docs, Flickr, etc.

His advice:

1. Start with the sites that best do contacts.

2. Connect with others. Expand your network

3. Get your aggregator sites going.

4. Publish away. Get involved. Don’t spam!

Crow’s experiment continues and it is both a looking glass into real world obstacles and a crystal ball that will reveal where true opportunities reside and in turn, will define and shape realistic expectations and associated metrics.

Crow summarized, “In the end my expectation of social networking bringing thousands of friends and generating enormous buzz was obviously misplaced. What I found is that it requires just as much effort (maybe even more) as blogging, newsletters, and traditional PR tools (such as email;), but as a marketing manager you need your company to be included in the conversation wherever that conversation occurs. Increasingly those conversations are happening in social networks. It is not an either or proposition. You have to go through traditional channels and these new tools.”

Jonathan is not alone. He has many peers who are wondering what to do and to evaluate if their engagement is on track.

He believes that there’s something in this story for everyone, and I think he’s right.

Therefore, Crow has created a roundtable of those active in the Social Media landscape to offer feedback, commentary, constructive criticism, and advice for the good of all marketing. Those joining the conversation are Chris Brogan, Aaron Brazell, Cathryn Hrudicka, Doug Haslam, and me.

The discussion will be based on several questions posed by Jonathan:

1. Did I devote enough time to the exercise? More to the point, where should social networking be placed in terms of marketing priorities? Does this change for companies that are more or less mature?

2. How should we be judging the outcomes from social networking activities? Are there tools you recommend?

3. Is social networking the right tool for the tests I created? Are my expectations of social networking in line with what it can do? What is social networking best geared to address?

4. How much of getting social networking to work is the contacts you bring with you? How aggressive should one be in reaching out to new contacts? Should I, for instance, try to befriend Chris Anderson even after I have composed a note meant to appeal to what he is interested in?

5. How can I build better mechanisms into the framework to increase feedback?

You can follow the conversation here.

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Watch my Kyte.tv channel today at about 2 p.m. — we’ll be chatting and putting up photos and other stuff while there. I’ll also be filming an interview for ScobleShow. TechCrunch has the details on the new Facebook app and other Kyte stuff.

Speaking of ScobleShow, this week we’ve put up a few interesting videos. Here’s a selection:

First, you’ve probably heard of Sonos (Mike Arrington has one in his house) but you probably haven’t seen one demonstrated. So John MacFarlane, CEO of Sonos, comes over and demonstrates one for us and talks about its deal with Pandora.

Then, in a continuing series on Work 2.0 we get a look at ThinkFree’s latest online office service and talk with Jonathan Crow, director of marketing there.

The world of media mashups is growing rapidly and we get a look at MixerCast. Highlight video here. Demo and interview with the CEO is here.

Finally, something for the developers, a look at Apatar, which lets you move data around between Web services. We also have an interview with the CEO and Founder.

See ya this afternoon.

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If anyone else suggested Google should get together with ThinkFree before this article I wrote in September 2005, I’d like to hear from them because that would be some mighty fine prognosticating and it deserves some attention.

The chatter has been heard in various corners and dark alleys of the Internet, that Google and its hoard of cash, equivalents, and marketable securities could be applied generously to ThinkFree, which has offices in Korea and the US.

ThinkFree would give Google what many have predicted – a viable and potent alternative to Microsoft Office that could give Steve Ballmer and Ray Ozzie a bad case of the Rice Krispie spewies over their breakfast tables.

That would supersede the work accomplished by Google’s Spreadsheet developers, as well as the integration duties engineers performed to make the Writely acquisition function nicely under the big G label.

A competitive company does recognize when a need exists to fold a weak hand, especially when there’s a chance to get a better one next round. Those who may see it as a Microsoft killer will miss the true benefit Google could gain, as another potential revenue stream.

Doing that will require Google to offer true support for ThinkFree, should it be acquired and repurposed for the SMB market. Support can be expensive for the provider, which is why so many companies, new and old, have been driving support initiatives to newsgroups and websites.

Google would have to find a happy medium there, to provide enough handholding to get clients up and running without creating an onerous expense that eats into earnings. They should be able to accomplish that.

There’s another reason why a Google acquisition, performed with plenty of fanfare and buzz, would benefit the search advertising giant. In Asia, South Korea is a very valuable market. Google’s first foreign-language blog was in Korean, so it’s obvious they respect the country’s tech-savvy userbase.

Bringing ThinkFree into the arms of the Googleplex could be a significant win in the hearts and minds of those users, provided they respect the ThinkFree brand and emphasize how important an acquisition will be to an already-dominant firm.

Google has only enjoyed a slim piece of the Korean search market. Investing in and publicizing a Korean technology asset to the world could help Google gain a stronger foothold than the one it has now, assuming they can better match the Google experience to Korean search expectations too.

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A trio of podcasts from JavaPosse hit the syndication streams in March. The first two focused on author Bruce Eckel, whose 4th edition of “Thinking in Java” hit bookshelves last month.

JavaPosse’s latest podcast arrived online yesterday. The hosts discussed a variety of topical Java issues, from the Balthaser patent on methods of delivering content to users with Java and other technologies to speculation on Google’s possible purchase of Java’s creator, Sun Microsystems.

The podcasters open the show, after the humorous theme song, with a discussion of ThinkFree, the Java-based productivity suite. They call it a service aimed at Microsoft’s Office Live, but actually ThinkFree predates Office Live, and Microsoft doesn’t look inclined to place Office online.

It’s an interesting approach to discussing what’s what in Java. Non-programmers won’t get the approach, but the sufficiently geeky should enjoy listening in on the informative, informal style JavaPosse uses in their podcasts.

The quartet of Tor Norbye, Carl Quinn, Joe Nuxoll, and Dick Wall venture beyond Java in their near hour-long shows. They mentioned the latest Mac mini debut and Ruby on Rails in the recent podcast.

Also, the merits of an AJAX toolkit from IBM are fodder for discussion, so it is not all NetBeans and RIFE being served at the Java Posse chuck wagon.

IBM made an effort at podcasting in 2005. The company posted eight podcasts from mid-October through December on service-oriented architecture and Websphere, after which the series ended.

Give the Java Posse credit for keeping the podcasts coming. Users can subscribe to their RSS feed at their website, or through iTunes or Odeo.

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Could This Be The Google OS?

The Inquirer reckons people should be skeptical of the claims made on a Chinese web site, a translation of which shows screenshots of the purported Google operating system (WebProNews also provided coverage of the so-called “Google OS”).

It’s not an unprecedented concept. Realm Systems recently unveiled a USB drive containing a Linux server, complete with fingerprint identification. The BlackDog server runs Debian Linux and contains flash memory for storage. A Linux or Windows XP workstation and an open USB port would be all someone needs to use the system.

The alleged Google OS would allow its users to make use of hosted applications, like Gmail and Google Talk, instead of containing them on the 2 GB USB drive. A productivity suite would be needed; perhaps Google will use some of its new stock issue proceedings to buy ThinkFree, which makes an online application suite capable of saving documents in Microsoft formats. Google could use a calendar application as well. Not to mention a browser.

At one point when Netscape was the top browser, it was thought to be the gateway to commoditizing the desktop and making the underlying operating system irrelevant to the way people would work on a computer. Microsoft crushed Netscape out of existence and nearly got broken up by a federal court for doing so. Maybe Google could avoid that fate.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.