Emerging Media

Facebook’s Measurement Problem

Recent news of GM pulling their $10 million in annual Facebook ad spending has raised some eyebrows.  The reactions have been a mix of social media marketers defending the platform, citing problems with GM’s management and agency selection, to those that are rushing in to try to expose what may be Facebook’s greatest weakness on the eve of their IPO.  The data being cited to both support and attack GM is a hodgepodge of non-standardized social media profile fodder and a lot of stuff taken right out of the Facebook media kit.  After all, this is an industry that has blindly accepted proprietary metrics, such as the coveted Facebook “Like,” as an almost undisputed barometer of universal success that justifies almost any resource allocation in the world of co-called “integrated” marketing.

But was GM right to put their money elsewhere?

First, let’s look at the facts.  Facebook, in it’s current state, is a poorly performing ad platform just about any way you slice it.  A couple years ago, most data showed click-through-rates in the ballpark of .05% and, having seen hundreds of thousands worth of performance data since then, the reality is that it’s probably between .03% and .04% on average today.  In fairness to Facebook, this trend is pretty consistent with what most display networks are seeing, including Google, tough maybe not quite to this extent.  A bigger problem may be the ad units themselves.

In February of this year, Facebook announced a shift in the kinds of the ads that would be offered.  The company is moving away from simple display ads and focusing more on Sponsored Stories.  In a nutshell, Sponsored Stories are a way for brands to promote their content on Facebook.  That’s right.  You’re paying Facebook to drive traffic to – where else? – Facebook!

If you’re wondering why Sponsored Stories even exist, it’s because people don’t engage with brand content on Facebook.  Sure, Like numbers are through the roof for many brands and often eclipse what they see in unique visitors to their corporate sites but are those people reading or engaging with your content.  Facebook provides this metric to an extent with their People Talking About This number, which is a somewhat misleading way of identifying how many people have engaged with your content in a way that their social graph may have been exposed to your activity.  For example, someone hitting the Like button would, for most users, publish that activity to the ticker that appears besides the News Feed.  That counts as them “talking about” your content.  While people who repost your content or tag you in their own post are included in this number, the overwhelming majority of People Talking About This have just hit a Like button.

The social media marketing community is starting to take notice that some of these metrics provided by Facebook aren’t speaking directly to any kind of legitimate success criteria.  Over at Digital Marketing Works, they’re working on a social engagement index that shows engagement as a percentage of a brand’s total fans.  When you apply this formula to most large brand pages, you generally find that most brands are averaging engagement rates of around 1.5%.  If you take a brand like Home Depot, who generally provides high utility content across all social platforms, you’re looking at a brand that invests considerable resources to engage with about 10,000 of their 650,000 “fans” on Facebook in a good week.  If engagement is the real fruit of social media marketing, and I think most would agree that it is, a brand the size of Home Depot would probably have a hard time justifying the resources required to interact with 10,000 people a week.

As real data like this emerges, it becomes pretty clear that Facebook is in trouble as a digital marketing platform.  If you compare Facebook to other loyalty or CRM platforms, the results can be increasingly discouraging.  Let’s take good old, boring, not-in-the-least-bit-sexy email marketing.  Let’s say that instead of trying to secure Facebook Likes, you focused on CPA marketing to get highly engaged consumers into your email database.  If you’re able to attract a similar amount of people, a brand like Home Depot might have 650,000 people in their database and, by standard open rates of about 20%, a single email a month could be read by 130,000 potential customers.  Compared to Facebook, direct sales links and other pushes towards owned media tend to perform well in email.  Using standard engagement rates, Home Depot would need to build their Facebook Likes to roughly 2,112,500 in order to get an equal number of people to engage with their content and chances are that any pushes to owned media off Facebook would perform much worse.  Unless Home Depot can start selling Facebook Likes, it looks like they may have better options for their marketing budget.

We’re really just scratching the surface here but you can start to see a few different reasons why brands like GM are taking their ad dollars elsewhere.  In the rush to check the social media box for their equally confused CMOs, a lot of inexperienced social media marketers have been following Facebook’s lead and pumping up numbers that are either misleading or don’t directly speak to any reasonable success criteria.  Facebook, in turn, is changing their ad platform to focus more on the best performing ads by this same criteria, which is both compromising a positive user experience and pushing brands deeper into an abyss of advertising that leads nowhere.

Luckily for Facebook, they have a pretty good cushion to work with.  They have an unparalleled user base that generates an almost unfathomable amount of page views compared to any other online property.  Even if advertisers have to settle for impression based ads, there is probably enough inventory to sustain Facebook for a very long time.  While their valuation may be suspect, there is enough enthusiasm around their IPO that they will certainly end up with more cash to work with than they’ve ever had before.  The company has been forced to evolve faster than any other major Internet brand in the young history of the industry and nothing they have done to date has notably hurt their user base.

The real question is whether or not Facebook will ultimately be a good place for brands.  The word-of-mouth potential of the platform is almost completely untapped but, in order for Facebook to sustain their success, they will need to find a better way to measure success and develop advertising products that address the challenges of their brand partners as opposed to just boosting numbers they’ve managed to trick them into blindly adopting.

My Experiment with Twitter’s Signal-to-Noise Ratio

It’s been a few months since I began my attempt to limit the people I follow on Twitter to 250, cutting the amount I then followed roughly in half.  The rationale was that 250 was kind of a magic number where you could actually keep the daily stream of content manageable and see pretty much everything that has been posted without investing too much time.

For many people this would be easy but I actually rely on Twitter to stay current on a lot of things that are important to my job as a consultant (and my media addiction).  I absolutely hate it when a client who’s not as engaged in my industry asks me if I’ve heard of something and I don’t even have conversational knowledge of it.  These are the bizarre nightmares that keep me up at night.  I’m not proud.

Cutting the people I follow down to 250 was a little harder than I thought.  Here are just a few of the challenges I faced somewhat unexpectedly:

  • I had a genuine fear of running into people who would be offended that I unfollowed them.  Of course this is silly but given the non-interruptive nature of Twitter, it was hard to justify that the value of removing someone was worth making a colleague or friend upset.
  • There are more good low volume users than I expected so deleting them from my stream would serve little signal-to-noise ratio benefit and potentially distance me from good content.
  • Some high volume users occasionally have great content, making the noise worth it.

That doesn’t mean that I wasn’t able to uncover some good tactics for reducing noise.  If anything, the struggle down to 250 made me a much better Twitter user and it had nothing to do with finding some magical app to parse all the content for me.

The one thing that helped me the most was learning that there really isn’t much of a reason to follow a brand or organization on Twitter.  When I looked at all branded feeds, from newspapers to consumer brands I was really passionate about, Twitter just didn’t make a lot of sense as a platform for them.  Most of these brands provided RSS feeds of one kind or another so it was generally preferable to sort them in my Google Reader, which allows both easier scanning and, in most cases, near immediate access to the content without opening new links, windows and all the other hoops you have to jump through that detract from good UX within social services.  Exceptions to this rule were customer service accounts from brands like Jet Blue and Comcast, though those were temporary follows anyway.

Once I had Twitter narrowed down to individuals it was time to look at what sort of usage behavior resulted in the most noise.  For my stream, the #1 misuse of Twitter was using the service as a public IM conversation.  In a quick scan, 18 out of 20 @ replies (not retweets) were personal conversations between two or more people with no context.  While I believe that Twitter is non-interruptive enough to accommodate some direct interpersonal public dialogue, it is indisputably a group conversation tool so if you’re not providing context for your content you’re creating noise.  People that were using Twitter consistently as public IM had to be weeded out.

Next I encountered what I would call “soft spam.”  This is content that is produced, largely by third party applications, that doesn’t offer a lot of value to a group.  The most common example of this is Foursquare location check-ins.  While many people find these annoying since they’re so rarely actionable, it’s probably worth remembering that this was actually supposed to be the original functionality of Twitter…it was supposed to just tell people where you were in case they were looking for you.  Of course, the platform has evolved and so have usage habits but I still find these kinds of tweets to non-interruptive enough and generally sporadic enough that they don’t really detract from my content stream.  For the most part, I tolerate these.

The biggest lesson I learned throughout this experiment was that Twitter has become just central enough to my media universe that I really can’t reduce the amount of people I follow to 250.

I equate this to cable television.

While I’d love to get rid of cable or reduce my bill, there are some things I love to watch and, once I commit to the platform, I naturally want to get the most out of it.  Deciding whether or not to follow someone is like deciding whether or not to add HBO.  There is a cost in adding people to follow, in the amount of content they will produce and taking the time to read/consider it, but if you don’t follow you’re at much greater risk of missing content that is important to you.  Unfortunately you have to weigh that on a case-by-case basis and there are few bundled options.

What Twitter will need to figure out is how it will exist with more users talking than are listening.  Power users, who generally follow more than 1000 users, are missing the majority of the content being posted in their streams.  Often they’re producing a large amount of content at the same time so any real utility is being lost in the crossfire.  Sure, Twitter can be a broadcast channel for a popular voice but if everyone is broadcasting and no one is listening then you’re just sending content into a void.

I now follow 295 people but I’m adding carefully.  If I post something from a third party app or bit.ly bookmarlet, I make a point to go and catch up where I left off.  There’s still plenty of noise in my stream but every source has been reviewed.  The only way to completely eliminate noise is to live in a vacuum so you’re probably better off just trying to find ways to reduce it.

Ousting Robert Scoble and the Death of the Twitterati

It’s been a tough few hours for Robert Scoble, the internet’s preeminent friend collector.

Not only have his answers on the emerging Q&A site, Quora, been voted down religiously, but the stars of the tech echochamber are now ganging up on him and labeling him the poster child for everything that is wrong with social Web services.

Before getting too deep into it, it’s important to understand why people hate Robert Scoble.  The answer may be simple jealousy.

Scoble has a tendency to jump on social services early and try to collect as many friends, followers or contacts that he possibly can, often rendering the core social functionality of those services useless and turning them into a broadcasting platform for himself.  On Twitter, his initial policy of auto-following anyone who would follow him resulted in a follower count in excess of 160,000 users (since actually listening to this many people is impossible, he’s since scaled back who he follows to a mere 30,000).

This pisses off a lot of people but the people that are the most pissed off are the ones that are doing the exact same thing.  The attention starved.  The people that worry more about their personal brand than the brand they work for or their clients. Essentially, the Twitterati.

Friend counts and other false metrics are largely responsible for the rise of the Twitterati.  In the early days of blogging, just getting comments was a badge of honor but that quickly gave way to Technorati rankings, the Power 150 and making your Twitter and Facebook follower counts as high as humanly possible.  Suddenly people who were basically unemployable could tout a false status metric, which would soon give birth to the “social media expert/ninja/guru” phenomenon.  Of course, this so-called status can now be bought on eLance by outsourcing a couple hundred dollars of work to someone in Mumbai who can build those numbers for you in a matter of weeks, regardless of whether or not you contribute anything.

Enter Quora.

Quora is often touted as a better version of Wikipedia since the user base is made up of accountable “experts.”  Unlike Wikipedia, which buries the editors a layer deep and requires a bit of actual expertise to find out what editors actually have status in the community, Quora is built on the same vanity that fuels the Twitterati to participate in other services.  You have a follower count, like Twitter, and your answers can be voted up and down, which is a great motivation to leverage your other social channels for increased status.  Eventually, Quora should build it’s search ranking and create high ranking search entries for the people that provide the best answers.

As Scoble willingly admitted and half-heartedly apologized for, he was guilty of bad judgement on Quora.  He flooded the service with answers, was guilty of over-the-top self-promotion to get votes and even was using photos and videos to get his answers greater visibility, taking an almost SEO-like approach to optimizing Quora content.  He even said that he mistakenly saw it a blogging platform as much as Q&A service.  First a Quora blog stated that the platform isn’t his “playground” and then Michael Arrington tried to refute the vanity incentive a little in his criticism of Scoble.  This is largely what is leading people to go to Scoble’s answers page and vote down each one of his contributions.

Maybe that’s a good thing.

If you are able to eliminate the Twitterati element from emerging social channels you can eliminate a lot of the noise as well and provide an overall better user experience.  Just think how much superfluous content is created for reasons of vanity or increasing false status metric.  If you look at social services that don’t reward that sort of behavior, like Aardvark and Path, you find that removing the vanity incentive results in a much leaner service.  And if you think this kind of incentive is crucial to the long term sustainability of a social service, look no further than Wikipedia to be proven wrong.

Most social platforms are so new that the ethics of how to use them are still being sorted out.  Even if the heaviest users are the biggest offenders, their behavior is reinforced by the legions that are using the services in the exact same way.  Quora is a great example of a service that is leveraging vanity to launch quickly and, looking at the early adopters, it’s working very well.  Whether or not the shortcomings that have led to the Scoble backlash will lead to an increase in more intimate social services remains to be seen.

It will most likely take a lot more time but, for those people that are annoyed by friend requests from strangers with 50,000 followers or what their social feeds clean of Foursquare location updates, the end may be coming sooner than you think.  The trick to killing the Twitterati beast is cutting off it’s head.

Quora vs Aardvark: Social Search Death Match

In the not so illustrious history of this blog, for reasons I can’t explain, posts on social search have always been the most popular.  I’ve contended for a long time that I think increasingly sophisticated SEO technology could prove to be the downfall of Google.  When brands with deep pockets effectively control organic search, I think most of the utility of Google will become quickly eroded.

For this reason, I’ve always been optimistic about social search engines like Mahalo.  Wikipedia has proven that a large highly-engaged user base can efficiently curate an unfathomable amount of content, possibly just as much as a legion of spiders powered by a siberian server farm.

I was even more optimistic when I began playing with Aardvark last year.  It had a great user base where I was living at the time (Portland, OR) and it worked equally well through IM, it’s iPhone app and the Web.  I was continually blown away by the quality of answers and recommendations I received and often tried to stump the system.  In many cases, getting user generated answers to questions was faster than sifting through Google, Wikipedia and the IMDB, especially from the mobile app.

For the past couple months I’ve been playing with another social search service called Quora.  While Aardvark is somewhat anonymous and streamlined, Quora is big on reputation and its content structure is more of a repository than an on-demand social tool.

I consider both these technologies to be social search engines, even though they’re positioned more as Q&A services.  They’re both different in many ways yet I consider them to direct competitors since the core functionality and brand promise is the same.  So which answers your questions better?

As an experiment to find out, I posed the following question to both services: “Which service is better at delivering quality timely answers to the widest range of your questions, Quora or Aardvark?”  On Aardvark, I posted it through the Web and allowed it to be auto-tagged as “aardvark” and on Quora I posted it through the Web and manually tagged it “aardvark,” “social search” and “quora.”  I also tweeted the question on Quora since the feature is so simple and easy to use.  I’m going to give both services three hours to answer.

Before we get to the results, let’s profile the pros and cons of both services.

Aardvark Pros

  • Aardvark’s greatest strength is in it’s simplicity.  To use the service all you need to do it create an account and enter a question in any format
  • Helping your questions find answers is easy through automated tagging based on a word scan
  • There are multiple platforms to choose from that mimic the simplicity of the service
  • Depending on your preferences, Aardvark will send you questions that are related to areas you’re interested in with a fair amount of success
  • The user base is fairly broad in terms of interests

Aardvark Cons

  • This may be just my experience over the past year but the user base seems to be less active than it was a few months ago
  • You can’t really tell if the people answering your questions are qualified
  • The platform isn’t designed to allow you build relationships with people that provide the best answers

Quora Pros

  • Incredibly active tech-savvy user base
  • Questions/answers are cataloged so you can find many answers without having to query your network
  • People answering questions can often be confidently identified as experts
  • You can follow topics that are of particular interest to you
  • Quora answers will probably gain search relevance and be indexable on Google (eventually)
  • Users can organize redundant questions to streamline the content (see my results below)

Quora Cons

  • It generally take longer to get an answer
  • There is a legitimate learning curve to the interface and architecture that could keep many non-techie but otherwise knowledgeable people away
  • Many users leverage the platform for self-promotion and “friend collecting”
  • The overall user experience is considerably colder and less welcoming than Aardvark

Conclusion

While both services are extremely compelling applications of user generated content, I find Aardvark, in it’s current form, to be a more promising technology.  If we’re really moving toward a “semantic Web” then I don’t think a social search service should rely so heavily on users to tag and organize their own content.  While building a large database of answers is a noble task, the end user benefits much more from on-demand answers.  Aardvark is also moving towards becoming a platform that is accessible anywhere and requires no real Internet or boolean skills to master.

Of course, the community will ultimately decide the winner.  In many ways, Quora is a feature-rich version of Yahoo Answers that provides more vanity tools for its users.  While it may not be directly incentivizing participation, allowing users to build status, authority and – the single worst metric of influence – their friend count will push many aspiring social media mavens to pour hours into the service where their contributions to Aardvark would go largely unnoticed.

…and the results of my experiment

Now that three hours have passed since asking both platforms “Which service is better at delivering quality timely answers to the widest range of your questions, Quora or Aardvark?” I have to say that the results were a little disappointing.

On Aardvark, the best answer I got was “Quora has answers for broad topics and Aardvark has answers to specific questions,” from a man in Bangladesh.  Other answers were along the lines of “it depends on the topic but I prefer Aardvark,” which is to be expected when you ask the question on Aardvark.  The result can be summed up as a series of quick opinions generally favoring Aardvark but it should be noted that I got my best answer within an hour.

The experience with Quora was quite different.  When I posed the question, it gave me a list of questions to see if the question was redundant but nothing on the list matched my question.  A couple hours later, before getting any helpful answers, a user scolded me for asking a redundant question and redirected my question to a simpler phrased version.  The number one answer within that stream actually praised the Quora UI and included “feedback loop around vanity” as a benefit of the platform.  The best answer, in my opinion, stated that Aardvark is “aiming to be a more real time service by focusing on algorithms to keep a rapid chain of possible sources for answers in place” while Quora ensures quality by offering “reputation rewards.”

Perhaps the biggest question here is whether or not people need to be incentivized to share knowledge freely online.  As a closer look at the Twitterati or any friend collector on any social network will show, “reputation rewards” are often an empty promise.  While Robert Scoble may have achieved some notoriety for his high friend counts on every social service he participates on, most real industry leaders exist completely outside this bubble.

If this kind of rewards system is necessary to ensure the success of the platform, Aardvark will have a tough time surviving.  However, if usability and overall user experience is really the mark of a successful technology then Quora probably has a little work to do before it becomes a clearly dominant platform.

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The Global Super Bowl

FIFA_World_Cup_trophyWhile I may like baseball (or hockey, basketball, tennis, football and most winter olympic games) better than soccer, I can never help but get dragged into the excitement around the World Cup.  It may have been a little easier when I lived in New York where it was easier to see a Brazilian match in a bar full of Brazilians but, even though my World Cup viewing parties now consist of only a few friends in my basement with bagels and mimosas, I still find myself again drawn to the game.  Maybe it’s the global hype or the melding of politics and sport, I’m not sure.  What I do know is that I will be spending countless hours consuming all things World Cup in the next few weeks and have my share of afternoon hangovers to prove it.

Outside of the game itself, the World Cup is also the largest sports marketing of any year, dwarfing even the Olympics.  How big is the World Cup?  The World Cup finals averages over 700 million viewers compared to just over 100 million for the Super Bowl.  In fact, you could combine the viewing audiences of the Super Bowl, Winter Olympics, Summer Olympics, World Series, NBA Finals and Stanley Cup Finals and you’d still come out with a smaller audience than the World Cup.

So if the World Cup is so big then where is the competition for funniest World Cup commercial or consumer generated campaign to create the ultimate World Cup Doritos spot?  Unfortunately, it’s not that simple.

For starters, there’s no centralized way to reach people.  There are dozens of sites that cover the tournament, with Fifa.com garnering only a fraction of the traffic ESPN.com gets in an average month.  Similarly, broadcast and print sources are all over the map.  S

o how do you become THE brand of the World Cup?

One trick is to pick channels that reach global audiences with a message that is universal enough to appeal to anyone who is interested in the event.  Global localization is generally one of the easiest ways to throw your money away.  I can’t even tell you how many clients I’ve seen blow through huge budgets on multi-language localization only to see traffic to secondary market sites dwindle away to next to nothing.

So who can actually pull this off?  Let’s look at two competitors: Nike and adidas.

The Nike Write the Future spot (developed by Weiden + Kennedy) might be one of my favorite marketing videos of all time.  Not only is it a masterpiece of video editing and creativity using Nike’s top athletes (including some non-soccer players) but it also does everything that most other World Cup marketers have failed to do.  First and foremost, it’s about the sport so language is almost irrelevant in it’s success.  Secondly, it’s globally referential without alienating any region.  It’s also been distributed on multiple global video sites, garnering more than 15 million views on YouTube alone so it eliminates the barrier of most World Cup media.  The video captures the essence of the World Cup better than FIFA can in it’s own marketing materials and thereby weaves the Nike brand right into the event in a way that makes it seem completely organic (even though Nike is comparatively new to the game).

Adidas, who has been involved with soccer for significantly longer than Nike, attempted a similar effort with their Cantina 2010 spot.  Launching a short while after the record setting Nike spot, adidas had a lot of catching up to do to gain SOV.  Unlike Nike, who is singularly focused on athletes, adidas is more comfortable being a hybrid sports/fashion brand and they choose their talent accordingly.  While the spot did feature soccer stars like David Beckham, it also featured artists and pop culture figures like Snoop Dog and French house music band Daft Punk.  Most importantly, the spot was set in a scene from Stars Wars.  Put all together and it’s a pretty entertaining clip but the connection to the World Cup is weak.  Additionally, the range of talent almost works against the initiative, leaving a degree of uncertainty as to what the main point of the video is.  It comes off as one of those ideas where “going viral” was the strategy and the creative concept.

Looking at a different industry with a less direct connection to the game, Budweiser also got into the mix with their Bud United campaign.  The campaign is a Real World style reality show served on YouTube that takes 30 fans from different countries and puts them in a house in South Africa together.  There are a lot of ingredients to success at play here.  By featuring fans from different countries, Bud widens the appeal beyond the United States and the connection to the World Cup is obvious and strong.  Using YouTube as the platform and destination has it’s strengths and weaknesses since the platform is technically global but it’s an external engagement for Bud, which prevents prospective consumers from exploring the brand on a deeper level.  All the footage is also in English, which gives the creative a somewhat less genuine effect, although sub-titles would be a tough sell with Bud’s primary consumer.

What each of these campaigns demonstrates is how much of a challenge global event marketing can be online.  While it’s easy to say that Nike is coming out ahead, they also have the fewest challenges in this kind of environment due to the positioning of their brand.  Measuring true success for campaigns like these has to be limited to region-by-region as the objectives vary so widely from market to market.  Can the same creative market your brand to emerging markets with limited brand recognition and your primary markets where you are a household name?  If you’re only targeting your primary market in the US, is it smart to dedicate so many resources to a sport that still has only a relatively fringe fan base domestically?

And you thought beating Brazil was the toughest challenge of the World Cup?

Why the Twitterati Hate Google in Their Social Media

6a00d8341c145e53ef0112790a542928a4-800wiThere is a clear disdain for Google’s tiptoeing around social media from some of the the sector’s most voracious consumers.  First it was Google’s acquisition of Blogger, which had already fallen out of favor with pro bloggers due it’s limited feature set and widespread use for link farms.  Then it was Google’s Open Social, which was criticized for being poorly launched (despite the fact that it may have paved the way for Facebook Connect and future manifestations of the push towards true data portability).  But now Google has moved onto sacred earth with a new technology that dings Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook, even though it branches off a platform that few associate with social media.

Earlier this month, Google trickled out Google Buzz, a simple but powerful microblogging tool, to their 50+ million Gmail users.  While the echochamber first lit up with excitement over a new way to broadcast your spontaneous musings and quips, the Monday morning venture capitalists all chimed in the following day with their various criticisms.  UI bugs, privacy concerns and social redundancy…oh my!

Of all the criticisms leveraged, I think the most telling was the one from noted Twitterati and “friend” collector, Robert Scoble, who said:

They are infatuated with real time flow (items flow down my screen) but unlike FriendFeed they didn’t give you an option to turn that off. For users who are following a lot of people, like me, that makes Google Buzz unusable.

Scoble is one of a group of social media users whose influence is gauged by the amount of friends or followers he collects.  As of writing this post, Scoble has 115,555 followers on Twitter, where he follows 17,815.  If it sounds unmanageable, you’re right.  If 17,815 people tweeted only once a week, you’re looking at roughly 9,976,400 characters of content a month that you need to keep track of.  That’s the equivalent of reading War and Peace four times a month.  That doesn’t even take into account the high percentage of those Tweets that are links to more wordy conversational references.  Certainly it isn’t hard to imagine that Scoble would have trouble keeping up with this volume of content without fairly advanced filters in place, which are not part of the Buzz feature set at launch.  Even if you assume that Scoble has more friends than the average person, which has been roughly estimated to be around 150, it’s pretty clear that these number represent something that has very little to do with friends or colleagues.

The Twitterati use social media less as a social tool than a personal branding tool.  They operate under the simple principle that a wider net catches more fish.

Google Buzz wasn’t created for the Twitterati.  In fact, it almost goes out of it’s way to marginalize them.

Buzz is a tool built for genuine networks of friends and colleagues.  In order for someone to be in your email network on Gmail, you would’ve had to exchanged emails with that contact, which is significantly more intimate than adding someone as a friend on a social network where limited personal information is being disclosed.  People guard their personal emails as closely as their phone numbers in many cases and if every social network exposed your personal email by default you would probably see a significant drop off in the use of some of these social utilities.

The result is a refreshingly organic social utility that provides a new level of conversation with a group of people you might actually know and care about.  I’ve made a point not to directly seek out any friends aside from what Google suggests to me or people I know that have been flagged as following me.  The result is a low to moderate amount of unobtrusive content from people who I’ve invited to my home, had beers with or told jokes to.  You know, friends.  Not someone from second grade who I never haven’t tried to talk to for 30 years or someone who wants to get a job at company I worked for, just people I know and like.  I also get to manage this content in a place I already go to find out what is going on in my friend’s lives on an intimate non-public platform.

That said, there is still room for improvement.  Some friends who hate social media but still use email have tried Buzz and quickly been turned off by the new layer to the platform they already liked.  While this is hardly a statistically relevant sample size, I do get the sense that there are more barriers that need to come down to bring the utility of microblogging to people that may have reluctantly graduated from postal mail to email.  Social networking has built a healthy stigma among the sketpical, and for good reason.  Your friends aren’t always your friends and your followers don’t always follow you.  Google may be revolutionary in creating one of the first social utilities that is really designed for your friends.

That may take some time though.  Gmail isn’t currently the most used email platform but it’s gaining on the competition.  In order to dictate the rules of social networking to make it more intimate, Google will need to make their platform the standard for one-to-one communication.  They don’t have that kind of power today but they’ll be closer tomorrow.

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Builidng the Next Media Empire

26065-communitylI was asked to participate in Nokia’s Ideas Project this morning and it struck me as a good opportunity to talk a little about something I’ve been working on.

Newspapers are dying.  This isn’t breaking news and this isn’t something that makes me happy but it’s a reality.  There are some, like Walter Isaacson, that offer simple solutions, like micropayments for content, but this doesn’t account for the extreme competition in the media right now.  Yes, I may be willing to pay a couple pennies for an op-ed by Paul Krugman but I can get the other 95% of the New York Times’ content for free somewhere else.  It’s an excellent organization that produces an amazing caliber of content but I can’t fathom how they can support their company on ad revenue and little else five years from now.

Broadcast media is in the same boat.  I now watch more Hulu than cable TV.  If it wasn’t for live sports, I would have absolutely no reason to keep cable.  Sure, I’m a techie guy and not everyone has the time or energy to hack Boxee into their Apple TV but soon they won’t have to.  This fairly simple technology will soon be built into your televisions and you’re going to have a tough time justifying why you spend $70+/month on 500 channels that you’ve never watched (if you don’t already).

I admire people that have seen media trends coming down the pipe and been proactive enough to play an active role in defining them.  One such person is Jason Calacanis.  Calacanis saw the growth of blogs and started Weblogs Inc, which was later sold to AOL.  Anyone who took part in online media in the late 90′s and early 2000′s saw that there was some serious growth coming but it took someone like Calacanis to come along and create a network of blogs that was (and is) an attractive enough media property to become a mini new media empire.  To date, I don’t think anyone has built a stronger network of blogs, with Nick Denton’s Gawker Media probably being the only one that comes close.  It has been less of a question of vision than it has been of initiative.

I see content aggregators as the next big trend in online media.  I’m not talking about Digg or RSS readers either.  I’m talking about editors managing feeds of external content within small localized affinity communities.

For example, anyone who has ever bought a house can tell you how difficult it can be to find accurate timely information.  There are hundreds of specialized sources for national news and a few generalized sources of local news.  Newspapers are great for local information about real estate but they aren’t on-demand or tailored to your situation.  Broadcast media can be helpful in finding out about news that shapes the mortgage markets but you have to wait for the information that pertains to you.  Why isn’t there one site in each city that aggregates all this information for you with some basic social networking features to allow you to engage in a discussion within this local affinity group?

I’m also a pretty big sports fan.  Most of my favorite teams are in New York, where I grew up, but I’ve also recently become a fan of the Portland Trailblazers, who play a few blocks from my house in Oregon.  Luckily there is a site that aggregates all the news for the New York Rangers, so I’m all set there, but what about the other teams?  I want to read about the Jets and the Yankees but I don’t want to have to sift through articles about the Knicks, Mets and Giants just to find them in New York newspapers.  I also don’t want to wait around for ESPN to deem them worthy of covering in their national broadcast or Web site.  I don’t even want to think about personally skimming all the blogs that cover cover the Yankees either.

Why can’t I get the media I need in one place without being at the mercy of an algorithm that is inferior to human editors in every possible way but speed?  And why can’t I engage with a community of people just like me instead of becoming a fringe voice on some media property that doesn’t consider me one of it’s core constituents?

Well, I don’t think there is a good answer to any of those questions anymore and that’s why I’m building a series of local community based content aggregators.  I’m creating places where local people with specific media interests can get their content with the only preferences for the sources determined by community ranking.

I’m not looking to automate the role of an editor either.  Editors will still oversee content and make sure it is presented in a way that makes sense for their stakeholder groups but this will be a lean staff and never grow to rival the economic burden of a news organization.  Nothing will change about the way news is organized apart from the simple fact that 95% of the content will come from external sources.

So where do you get your entertainment listings, sports news and real estate information once your local newspaper goes under?  Hopefully I will have the answer in a few more months.

Yes, that is my Big Idea.

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The Antidote for the Social Network Bell Curve

plastic-man

There is a lot of talk today about the growth of Facebook and how it is outpacing many of its peers, such as LinkedIn.  Yes, Facebook is a phenomenon and its growth is impressive but is Facebook really any different from Friendster and MySpace or will it experience the same bell curve that they did?

For starters, let’s look at how MySpace overtook Friendster.  Friendster was the first social network to really get traction in the US and Generation X embraced it.  Like many sites of it’s day, Friendster had trouble scaling to meet demand.  The site would often freeze and the overall speed was making it increasingly unusable.  On top of that, Friendster was slow to add new features so the market was ripe for MySpace, a social network where anything goes.

MySpace allowed people to hack their layouts and do just about anything you could do with HTML within its pages.  On top of that, it was a responsive site with fewer barriers than Friendster.  The shift was swift.  Within six months you could see Friendster’s growth tapering off and MySpace shooting towards the sky.  A star was born and MySpace was the new king of social networks.

Of course, the very flexibility that made MySpace attractive was also a contributing factor in limiting it’s user base.  The site was bought by Fox and everything from the ads to the custom layouts to the interface itself became too loud and low brow for many of the more desirable demographics.  Some users’ home page customizations would actually hurt your eyes to look at and no likes to have a co-worker sneak up on you with some risque online dating ad on the screen.  The ground was fertile for Facebook.

Facebook began as an extension of a school yearbook and you could only get an account if you had a valid college email address.  This barrier was quickly dropped but that didn’t mean that Facebook would become the free-for-all that MySpace was.  Facebook would allow customization but only to a degree and they would keep their interface fairly lean to not only speed up the site but also it wouldn’t alienate your parents.  It was a nice enough cocktail that Facebook would gain popularity as quickly as MySpace and overtake their biggest competitor just as MySpace’s traffic was beginning to flatten.

1So what happens next?  If the cycle repeats itself, Facebook will begin to flatten out and a new kind of social network (maybe Friendfeed) will take over.  Right?

While Facebook will certainly begin to flatten out soon – probably in the next 12 months – they’re learning from history and taking steps to avoid extinction.  For one, the company is hyper-aware of user experience.  When the site started to feel like it was getting taken over by third party applications, they changed the interface and gave application developers less of an incentive to take over your personal feed.  They also launched Facebook Connect, a fascinating new technology that enables a degree of data portability and gives Facebook users the right to take their profile out into the Internet and use it in new ways.  It’s pretty clear that Facebook is more concerned with adapting to its environment than it is with extracting value out of every page view.

So what is the antidote to social network extinction?  Maybe it’s as simple as putting the emphasis back on user experience and being flexible enough to adapt to the changes happening on your network and in the industry as a whole.

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The Best in Online Media 2008

manI originally started writing this the last week of 2008 but I hurt my back snowboarding (actually putting stuff in a locker before snowboarding) so I got a little sidetracked.  So, without any further ado, I present to you my completely unheralded list of the best of my little online media world:

Best Blog Covering Social Media

Mashable

This was a tough category this year but what sets Mashable apart is how they made their blog truly social.  You can say that their social network was a bit of a flop but the editors actively engaged their audience and even went on an international road show to connect with people face-to-face.  There was no better place to keep up with the explosive growth of platforms like Twitter, Friendfeed and others of their ilk.  The post volume seems just about right for the space they’re covering and it’s rare that I learn about a new social media technology through another source first.

Best PR Blog

Shannon Paul’s Very Official Blog

Some may say I’m playing favorites because I’m a hockey fan (Shannon works for the Detroit Red Wings) but I don’t think there’s another PR blogger out there that consistently produces as much good content as Shannon.  She has an extemely holistic view of PR, as is evidenced in her posts on the importance of SEO and why PR needs to focus less on the media.  You rarely get any echochamber posts with Shannon and she spares you any Godin-esque generalities that you will never be able to apply in your actual job.  That’s not to say that the choice was easy.  I still find tremendous value in Geoff’s Livingston’s Buzz Bin as well as Brian Solis’s PR 2.0.  To be honest, Steve Rubel still deserves an honorable mention for his Delicious links alone.

Best Online Tech News Site

Silicon Alley Insider

This probably isn’t your choice if you want your tech news unbiased but Henry Blodget’s SAI is one of the best places to go if you like context with your news.  Unlike TechCrunch and the myriad of other tech news sites out there, SAI reports with an iron fist and isn’t afraid to call someone out repeatedly on poor business fundamentals.  It’s a high-volume blog but that doesn’t mean that they’re all inclusive.  If your business doesn’t ripple outside of the Twitterati then the SAI probably doesn’t have much use for you.  I’ll give TechMeme the runner up award in this category since it has become the spark point for much tech writing and could very well be the publishing model of the future.

Best Analyst Blog

Web Strategy with Jeremiah Owyang

The impact of social media has really left most analyst firms reeling.  With his dedication to complete transparency and hands-on approach to his analysis of all social technology, Jeremiah Owyang has been a big part of making Forrester the only analyst firm that matters in regards to marketing in this media environment.  Anyone who has seen Gartner’s Hype Cycle on social media trends can easily see how far behind Forrester’s competitors are.  The only competition in this category for me was also from Forrester for Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff’s Groundswell, although I find Jeremiah’s insights to be significantly more focused.

Best Online Social Technology

Twitter

I could try to be clever here but Twitter’s impact was unmistakably huge this year.  While some of the more technologically savvy have tried to move to Friendfeed at various times of the year when the Fail Whale comes out to play, Twitter’s simplicity and pure functionality has followed the Google path to success.  You don’t have to be a maniac to make it useful either, I’ve been saved by it while sitting on a tarmac during the debates and stuck on a closed highway on Christmas Eve.  It’s purely social and it seems to have struck a chord with a population that doesn’t have the energy for blogging.  The runner up in this category unfortunately has to be Facebook since their stolen feed technology became so ubitquitous that it convinced a generation to microblog before they even knew what it means.

Site I Spent Far Too Much Time on in 2008

The Huffington Post

I caught a bad case of election fever this year and subsequently spent a LOT of time on all sorts of political sites.  The content on the Huff Post is not, by a longshot, the best written or most insightful but they have proven why blogs still matter.  Like it or not, blogs are probably the fastest and most democratized way to break news and the Huff Post was always timely and good for 45 minutes of my time no matter when I logged in.  Sure, there is plenty of trashy news on the Huff Post that is no better than Perez Hilton but their filter is applied well enough to keep it from becoming the left’s answer to the Drudge Report.  There are too many runnners up in this category to post.

Ok, so there it is.  A couple weeks late is better than never.

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Does Being a Magpie Mean Being a Spammer?

Who doesn’t want to convert their tweets into bling bling?  Yeah!  I just get to keep doing what I normally do and signing up for this little service will convert my musings into cold hard cash.  Woo hoo!  Where do I sign up?  I want to be a Magpie!

You may want to give this a little more consideration.

Yes, I know that there are very few Web properties that can survive without a revenue model so it is somewhat inevitable that we will all one day be staring at ads while we use Twitter.  I’m not resistant to that concept.

What I am resistant to is the transformation of consumer or peer content into advertising.  I understand that consumers are powering behavioral targeted advertising all the time but, if you truly view this kind of technology as conversational, this approach to monetizing social media is roughly the same as if your friend uncontrollably said “buy a Toyota!” every five minutes while you were discussing cars.

Also, as much as Magpie’s flow charts show cute little businesses like organic bakeries and “Suzie’s Veggie Shop,” these services will eventually be bought by media agencies that aren’t exactly famous for protecting the reputation of their advocates.  Do you really want advertisers controlling the messages you’re sending out online?  Do you want to risk that a future employer will know the difference between a racy ad embedded in your tweet and the information you voluntarily control?

Unfortunately, Magpie doesn’t address these concerns in their FAQ.  They tell you to “keep your followers happy and don’t risk annoying them with too many magpie-tweets” but they don’t really address what is means to turn your microblog into an ad.

Twitter asks the simple question “what are you doing?”  If Magpie is answering that for you with an ad then I think you’re missing the point.

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