Social Media

Your Social Media Content Strategy is Backwards

As more and more traditional marketers get involved in social media, you hear more and more about the importance of having the right content strategy.  Usually this involves things like a schedule of Facebook updates and Tweets and other ways of pushing content on fans or followers.  It fits in nicely with the way that many of these same marketers focus on friend collecting (getting “Likes”) either concurrently or before the content phase.  Build your audience and then hammer them with content.  It’s the old reach plus frequency equals retention formula that gave birth to advertising as we know it.

Content is a crucial part of social media marketing, particularly for brands that aren’t inherently social, but there are a few reasons it shouldn’t be your first priority.  The primary reason is that social media – when it has it’s highest impact – isn’t about broadcasting content.  The big wins in social media are when a stakeholder transitions from feeling completely unattached to a brand and then receives that personalized attention, just like they get from their friends organically on the same networks, and is then transformed into an advocate or enthusiast for that brand.  This is almost universally a result of direct engagement rather than effective content marketing.

Does it sound like one of those pie-in-the-sky social media promises that no one really delivers on or can scale to meet the demands of a major brand?  It’s not.

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Can Stalking Save Facebook?

I’ve been using Google+ for a couple weeks now and there’s really nothing anyone can do to convince me that it isn’t a superior product to Facebook as a social technology.  Here’s is just a partial list of where I think Google+ has improved on the social networking experience:

  1. There are no Friends, Likes or other misleading nomenclature that tries to draw awkward analogies to real life.  The exception to this is Hangouts but I give it a pass since it’s actually a very good description of what the feature offers.
  2. Privacy is so intuitive that you don’t even realize that you’re adjusting privacy settings.  It requires almost no explanation and is always at the core of whatever you’re doing.
  3. Photo sharing, which for some reason is treated with separate sharing controls in Facebook, is handled the same way as all other content and improves upon the newer Facebook photo presentation.
  4. While Google is very upfront about taking your content and using it to serve you more relevant ads, the Google+ platform isn’t an ad platform.  Everywhere else may be pretty soon but they at least let the utility be a utility.
  5. It’s integrated with some of the best tools on the Web.  You don’t have to go to Google+, it comes with you every time you use search, Gmail, Google Docs, Google Reader or any of their other great products.
  6. It simplifies the purpose of almost all social technology: sharing.  This should make a lot of competing technologies very scared.

Unless you’re on Facebook to support your Farmville habit, you can probably recognize most of the superiority of Google+ at the core functionality level.  Maybe you have misgivings about Google as a company or you really connect with the rise of Facebook into the dominant media platform that it is today…that’s fine.  I still don’t buy any argument that Facebook, which has been around since 2004, has perfected the technology behind personal sharing (though I will give them points for scaling).  For now I won’t even get into the implications of brand presence, which is another area where I believe Google+ is positioned to succeed.

So why won’t Facebook just shut down tomorrow?

It’s obviously their volume of active users, which is still about twice what MySpace had at it’s peak.  So if Facebook came around and answered all the usability and scaling problems that plagued MySpace and MySpace still managed to be viable for another five years since they began their decline, what does that mean for Facebook in the worst case scenario?  If this marks the beginning of the decline of Facebook, will it take ten years for them to begin to really fade into obscurity?

It won’t be 10 years.  Facebook changed the fundamental reason people use a social networking site like theirs.  By pushing people to build deeper and deeper profiles and making privacy secondary, Facebook made stalking fun for even the non-tech savvy.  Compared to MySpace’s fairly simple profiles, you can learn things about people who aren’t even active users that goes far beyond any of the information that previous services asked you for.  For some reason people always cling to the idea of someone finding an embarrassing photograph but I was using a service (Turntable.fm, which is great) where someone was trolling and trying to get under the skin of one of the mods of the channel and decided to tap into their Facebook profiles for amo.  Since you need a Facebook profile to join Turntable.fm, that person gots plenty of info from the mod’s profile and began insulting his education and threatening to call his employer.  As it turns out, the mod worked in PR and probably should’ve known better than to make that info public but should he really have to know how to adjust his privacy settings to prevent malicious stalking?

My theory is that privacy and, more specifically, online stalking becoming even more sophisticated and commonplace will be both the key to Facebook’s longevity and the reason for it’s demise.  Google+ has answered this by making privacy a part of the content sharing process.  Being concerned about your online privacy is generally theoretical until someone gives you a reason to be genuinely concerned and I think those moments are coming for a large part of Facebook’s user base.

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.

Facebook Death Pool

What’s more fun than speculating about the demise of major media properties?  Ok, maybe a lot of things are but that not going to derail me when I got the blog bug and several tabs worth of data blinking at me.

This may not be brag worthy but, as is evidenced by a post-it note on the corkboard of an old employers wall, I was able to predict the decline of MySpace within three months.  I still generally lose in Vegas and am always surprised when that Tahoe suddenly pulls into my lane but, as far as social media properties go, I have a pretty good record.

So how do you define an actual decline?  For me, it’s when there are more month-to-month decreases in unique visitors than there are increases over a 12-month span.  Since there are a lot of things that can artificially boost traffic, like a major ad campaign or some sort of PR event, I like to focus on trending data over a longer period of time to judge performance.  Sure, there are some sites that have bounced back from 12-month trending declines but not in the social space (please correct me here if I’m wrong).

Looking at Facebook over the past 12 months, I think you could say, as Gartner would put it, that they are at the “peak of inflated expectations,” which is the last stage before the “trough of disillusionment” in the Hype Cycle.  With the Facebook movie, “The Social Network,” seeing great success and scores of brands shoveling resources at the platform, awareness is through the roof.  If you’re not on Facebook, you’re certainly aware of it.

While awareness and mainstream sentiment around the brand are somewhat intangibles, traffic and usage statistics are not.  If you look at the Compete data on Facebook over the past 12 months, you see an increase in unique visitors of only about 13%.  While in numbers that equates to more than 15 million, it’s not the “hockey stick” growth that Facebook has experienced in previous years, like in 2009 when they claimed their user base climbed 145%.

While the year-over-year traffic is interesting, I’m more concerned with month-to-month data.  Even as overall traffic was inching upwards, there were four months in the last year that Facebook actually saw declines.  The actual drop in the declining month were never severe and the following month of each period of decline was always met with an increase over the month preceding, which means that overall growth was never eroded.

However, if you look at the bounce-back months, the margins were growing more and more narrow.  In December’s Compete data, after a decline in November, the traffic bounced back to only a third of one percent increase over October’s total unique traffic, which can only been seen as flat growth.  Don’t trust Compete?  Multiple sources reported the same.

Traditionally the fall has always been the highest growth period for Facebook, presumably because students are coming back and making new friends (although growth in the 18-24 year-old demo is currently the weakest and getting weaker), so flat growth over the holidays alone isn’t a clear signal that Facebook is in decline.  However, it does suggest some legitimate growing pains.

Ok, prediction time.

I expect that Facebook will see some more growth over the first half of 2011, although the months in decline will be more significant with slightly less pronounced bounce-backs.  The third quarter, where Facebook traditionally sees their best growth, will, in my opinion, begin to flatten for the first time in the company’s history.  Then in the fourth quarter of 2011, we will see our first signs of legitimate decline in the platform.

So, mark your calendars, I’m calling for the decline of Facebook to begin in Q4 2011.  There’s my stake in the ground.

Does that mean that Facebook is over?  Aw, hell no.

If you look at the decline of major social networks, there’s no reason to think that Facebook will disappear.  Friendster may have fallen fairly quickly, due primarily to massive performance problems and the existence of a viable competitor (MySpace), but that cycle hasn’t necessarily repeated itself.  The decline of MySpace has taken much longer and the platform still remains relevant.  While in danger of slipping further, MySpace is currently a top 20 online media property in the US and enjoys roughly twice the traffic of sites like CNN.com.  They can’t sustain 40% annual drops in traffic for much longer but they’re probably not falling off the face of the earth anytime soon.

Comparatively, Facebook has almost twice as many monthly unique visitors as MySpace did at it’s peak and the usage statistics, while not 100% reliable, also seem to be much higher.  Also, by opening their platform through Open Graph/Facebook Connect, they have made moves to stave off some of the motivating factors that could prompt their primary stakeholders to jump ship.  Even if they decline in Q4, as I predict, they should remain the dominant social network for at least a few years, depending on the emergence of a viable competitor (or network of competitors).

That’s my take.  Put it in your status update and poke it.

Why Facebook is Making Marketers Stupid

I should probably preface this post by saying that I’ve never been impressed with Facebook as a technology or a form of media.  When you deconstruct Facebook, there are very few Facebook features that aren’t executed better somewhere else.  Photo sharing is weak at best compared to Flickr and others.  The new location-based services are a shadow of Gowalla and Foursquare.  Even status updates as a microblogging platform are lagging behind Friendfeed, a company Facebook acquired a long time ago.  In fact, aside from the default news feed algorithm, I can’t point to one thing that Facebook does better than anyone else.  Yet nothing really compares to it’s user base and a social network is ultimately defined by its user base so Facebook wins.  For now.

However, as a marketing platform, no one can convince me that Facebook is anything but a watered down form of CRM.  There were three stories that I came across this week that really irked me and, judging by the fact that I came across them through trusted sources, have convinced me that Facebook is actually making marketers stupid.

Case #1: Hitwise, a company full of great tech and smart people, reported that Facebook had passed Google as the most visited Web site of 2010 (8.93% of all US visits vs Google’s 7.19%).  It seems a little fishy but I don’t completely doubt it.  What bothers me was the reaction to this news by many respected marketers.  While I have no interest in calling anyone out, a quick stroll through the marketing blog echochamber (i.e. the AdAge Power 150) will show you that many used this stat to add more credibility to their often bloated Facebook marketing programs.  More visitors, more eyeballs…the age old recipe for online advertising success.  What’s not to understand?

My problem is that it ignores behavior.  Someone on Google is looking, literally searching, for something and when you’re marketing to them there based on keywords you’re reaching someone who is extremely receptive to your message if it matches their criteria.  It’s someone with a question that is looking for an answer.

In the case of Facebook, users are, for the most part, just killing time.  They’re browsing photos or reading status updates or occasionally playing a game.  They’re not shopping, looking for specific information, researching something or doing anything else that makes them particularly receptive to advertiser messaging.  Sure, they may click a Like button here and there but the general behavior doesn’t match someone who is receptive to changing their car insurance or shifting their sentiment about an airline.  In the grand scheme of online media, a Facebook user is as close to couch potato as you can get without actually turning on your TV and putting your feet up.

Passing Google in total visitors in the US does not make Facebook a better marketing platform than the most trusted search engine in the world.

Case #2: The story that Pampers sold out of 1,000 discounted diapers in one hour through an e-commerce gateway on Facebook.  There was a lot of foaming at the mouth on this one and, since it’s a P&G, there’s no doubt that every consumer packaged goods brand took notice and used it to get the wheels in motion to sell “directly” through Facebook.

While it’s generally hard to argue with sales, I think you can make a pretty good argument against the user flow on Pamper’s little e-commerce engine on Facebook.  You first make your way to the FBML “Shop Now” tab on the Pampers page, which is essentially a splash page (a roadblock on an e-commerce site?).  Clicking the “Shop Now” button on that page (I have to do this twice?) actually opens a new window for a Pamper’s branded Amazon Web store app.  As you move through the sales cycle, you actually get thrown back out into Amazon.com to finish the transaction.

So what was the purpose of being in the Facebook environment in the first place, other than to compromise the user experience and limit my shopping options (vs Amazon.com)?  If Pampers can sell 1,000 diapers in an hour through a crippled e-commerce platform, imagine how fast they could sell through a streamlined experience that actually showcased their product in the best possible light without having to compete with Facebook’s nav?

Case #3:  Maybe I’m a little sensitive to metrics and terminology but the story that really got me this past week was a Mashable post touting the importance of Likes for brands.  The POV used a video from Kraft Foods/Oreo taken from a GasPedal event that was maddeningly titled “How Oreo Learned to Fish Where the Fish Are.”  Oreo is a brand that has a lot of genuine affinity among consumers so I won’t argue that Facebook is a worthless platform for them but I will argue against a point that’s made at about 1:40 into the video as the set up for their whole program.

The statement was “Facebook has really become the de facto brand destination,” which was followed by an example regarding Starbucks.  You see, Starbucks, as per this claim, has about 995 thousand monthly visitors to Starbucks.com and roughly 12 million Facebook fans.  According to the most recent data I can find, about 20% of Facebook users are active on the monthly basis, which is pretty high compared to other community sites.  So, over the course of the month, about 2.4 million “fans” might engage with Oreo on Facebook.  If the average Facebook user has about 130 friends and the average user who friends brands has around 200 friends, then what are the chances that any Starbucks content appears in your default feed?  Let’s be generous and say that the News Feed algorithm filters content from all but 30% of your friends and Likes, even though probably even less make it through for an account with 200+ friends.  That now brings the number of people that are exposed to your messaging to around 700,000.  So my question is that would you rather have 700,000 people possibly exposed to your message in their News Feed on a third party site or would you rather have 995,000 come to your Web site where you can collect information, sell product and have almost no restrictions on engagement?

I don’t mean to suggest that all Facebook marketing is worthless.  In fact, I think it’s a great communications tool for a lot of brands, even with the obvious scaling problems.  My problem is with strategy that is fueled by bad measurement and a misunderstanding of established user experience standards.  While Facebook and social media marketing may be comparatively young, that’s not an excuse to throw out everything online marketers have learned over the past 15 years.

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Why Boutiques are Kicking Your Ass

Kicking the ass of traditional agenciesJeremiah Owyang today made a lot of boutique social media agencies very happy with his new report showing how smaller specialty agencies are wiping the floors with larger agencies in average yearly social media budgets.  Since Owyang often gets applause when he advises brands not to hire “gurus and ninjas” to run social media, has he been proven wrong by his own report or is there something else going on here?

The Altimeter report concludes that smaller agencies aren’t winning because they’re “ninjas” but perhaps a few other reasons, such as:

  • Smaller agencies have a “specialized skillset” that larger agencies haven’t focused on
  • Traditional agencies are too “campaign focused,” which has proven not to be effective
  • Not being rooted in outdated measurement, smaller agencies are better at measuring engagement
  • Larger agencies won’t “get their hands dirty” and get directly involved in the stakeholder engagement that is driving a lot of the larger budgets

While a few of these may be true, there is a larger issue at play as well.  The average annual spend difference for “mature” brands is only a matter of around $150k/year between the traditional agencies and the boutiques that are kicking their ass.  A $200k contract from someone like P&G may be a big deal to a small agency with 8 employees but JWT isn’t going to even get on the call for that much money.  We’re still talking about table scraps here in relation the larger chunks of budget being applied to advertising and other channels.

The good news for the larger agencies is that the work still stinks and has very little business impact.  If you look at even the comparably small resource allocations that the top ten Facebook pages are requiring to keep their “Like” numbers high, it would be hard to make a good business case for brands like Red Bull and Coca-Cola to repeat that again next year.  The reality is that brands are budgeting for social media just enough to keep them from looking stupid for not spending on social media.

Brands continue to dabble in ways that appear to be much bigger than they really are.  The new Ford Explorer got launched within Facebook to a flurry of applause from the social media echochamber but the launch still paled in comparison to even the smallest television campaign.

The real test of who is winning this battle for social media mindshare will be when the agencies are the ones who are mature and start pitching and winning pieces of business that rival the marketing outlays in other channels.  When brands start ponying up for the bigger ideas and the average size of these contracts begin to gain a digit or two, then we will finally see who is trusted with the beloved social media.  Until then, I’d be hesitant to count out the big agencies until you start to dangle a larger carrot for them to chase.

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Five Easy Ways to Fail at Social Media

ways to fail at social mediaSince Mashable and a host of other search optimized blogs are always writing list posts to help brands use social media more effectively, I figured I might help by offering some innovative new ways to fail.  Sure, failing isn’t the goal of most brands when they branch off into a new channel but often knowing what leads to failure is a better path than accumulating a bunch generic advice or “rules.”  How many brands have really mastered social media simply by “listening first” and being “transparent”?  It’s a lot more complicated than that and I hope this can help your brand avoid a pitfall or two.

Without any further ado, here are my five easy ways to fail at social media:

  1. Invest all your time and resources into Facebook – Sure, Facebook is the dominant social network right now and its reach is immense but a quick look back at the history of social media platforms should tell you all you need to know about how secure SOV is on the Internet.  As big as Facebook is, AOL was even bigger back when the Web was a very raw place and they gave it a nice interface and enabled people to connect with each other without having to know code and command prompts.  In the early 1990′s, if you were on the Internet you were on AOL, Prodigy or Compuserve.  To say that those companies fell from their market position is an understatement.  Likewise, there was a time when Friendster was the only viable profile-driven social network out there and the bell curve of social media has seen MySpace and Facebook follow much the same path.  Yes, be active on Facebook and know how to use it but also know that it’s not a permanent destination for your stakeholders to engage with your brand.
  2. Hire an intern to manage your social media profiles – If you search for social media jobs of Craig’s List, you will probably see most of them offered as entry level or below positions.  The rationale here is that younger people know social media better than older people and luckily younger people are cheaper to hire so it’s a win-win, right?  Very few of these same companies would let an intern anywhere near a press release, the copy of a print ad or one of their call centers even though much of the content they disseminate through social media channels will be around much longer and is much more likely to be damaging at some point in the future.  Conversely, someone who claims to have been an expert in social media for 15 years is also a little suspect since it pretty much didn’t exist 15 years ago.
  3. Be completely in the dark on search optimization – More people will discover and be influenced in relation to your brand in search than any other media channel.  I’ve never seen any data that can refute this claim.  Social platforms like blogs and open third party services like Twitter are some of the best search optimization tools available to you and if they’re used as a low level customer service platform then you’re missing a huge opportunity.  I’m not saying that SEO should drive all your social media content but understanding SEO when you’re linking, writing copy and titling content is one of the most important skills you can bring to your social media program.
  4. Put too much of an emphasis on visualization of social data – I’ve heard more than one creative director with a storied ad history say that social media is ugly.  This mindset is the basis for many ad agencies approaching social media with the goal of cleaning it up for public consumption.  While there are some examples of this done well, like Nike’s NBA playoffs Twitter visualization, generally this creates a disposable piece of content that eliminates all dialogue between the brand and it’s stakeholders and has no UX or SEO value to the brand itself.
  5. Be a robot - People like to talk to other people, not a giant voice behind a curtain.  There is a lot of technology that can help you parse a ton of social media data to give the feeling like you can be everywhere at once but, if you have limited resources, you’re probably better off starting small and tackling social in manageable pieces.  This is easier for smaller brands so make sure you’re able to manage expectations of your stakeholders when you’re ready to open the flood gates.  If your interactions are limited to the things you post on your Facebook wall then you’re not offering anything much different from direct mail.

Obviously this is just the tip of the iceberg.  Opportunities to fail at social media are everywhere so it’s really more of a question of deciding how you want to fail.  With practice and patience, I’m confident that everyone can fail at social media.

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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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The Golden Goose Egg of Twitter

Gold EggKudos to TechCrunch for finally pulling the veil off the one of the biggest myths in social media right now; that you can gauge influence by how many followers someone has on Twitter.  MG Siegler hit the nail on the head when he said that it’s not the number of followers you have as much as it is about the ratio between followers and people you’re following.

Any novice Twitter user can spend an hour or two each day following people, which will result in a lot of them following you back.  This will also attract the spam bots and within a month or two you will have thousands of followers.  Congrats!

The result is a lot of these “social media gurus” who you’ve never heard of popping up in your inbox with 29,999 followers and 32,853 people that they follow.  At first glance, it may look like they’re probably producing decent content since the majority of people that they follow are following them back.  Unfortunately, most people always follow you back or have use a service that auto-follows anyone who follows them.  They want to build their precious follower number too.  Add a healthy percentage of spam accounts to the mix and you have a very misleading stat.

I firmly believe in the golden ratio for Twitter and rarely follow anyone that appears to be on a quest to accumulate followers (with the exception of some members of the Twitterati, like Scoble and Calacanis).  I want the people I follow on Twitter to be about 20% broadcasters (people who post content and don’t engage) and 80% people who I can actually have a conversation with if something they post inspires a response.  The 80% have much more value to me than the 20%.

The one thing I’d add to this is to watch the number of people that your prospective Twitter friend follows.  There are a lot of great tools out there to filter Twitter but you generally won’t get any traction with someone who is following more than 1,000 people unless they have a good reason to flag your tweets.  Are you comfortable with adding someone to your micro network if they aren’t ever listening to you?  If so, go ahead and add them but don’t be under the impression that @nytimes wants your feedback.

As Twitter matures as a platform, it will be interesting to see how they address these kinds of problems.  Being able to easily judge the authenticity of someone who wants to be a part of your micro network of content is a crucial step in transforming Twitter into a mainstream social utility and one that I hope they address soon.  Well, right after taking care of those spam accounts.

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Marketing to the Sleeping

monsterbed350Sleeping.  The average person does it an average of 7.5 hours a day.  It skews evenly across all demographics, including affluents, mothers, hispanics, the c-suite, iPhone users and residents of the greater Miami metropolitan area.  You hear people talking about it everywhere.  Then why is it so hard to market to people through this universal channel?

Does this sound familiar?

The average US Internet user spends about 6% of their total time online on Facebook.  Over 90 million people a month are using the site.  You hear people talking about it everywhere.  Then why is it so hard to market to people through this (somewhat) universal channel?

The reason is related to how you’re reading the marketing data and some larger issues related to receptivity.

Baby boomers, for example, are one of the groups that are flocking to Facebook.  The problem is that they’re not coming back.  Sure, you could look at the data and see that in February and March there was an increase of more than 1,500,000 new users over the age of 55+ to site.  Get out the checkbook!  Call the PR firm!  We’re going to market our Matlock DVDs on Facebook!!  Unfortunately, you’d be sad to find out that the number of active users actually decreased April and May (by about 650,000, no less).  What went wrong?

There were many reasons that baby boomers visited Facebook in February and March but apparently most of them were not there to make a commitment to social networking.  The numbers were there but the audience wasn’t receptive to the media, which led to them not being receptive to your marketing.

Receptivity to marketing can come down to a science, like choosing the right color, or a degree of common sense.  Interactive media, as the name suggests, offers a wider range of interaction than any form of media to date.  Most people simply read their newspapers but on an interactive media property you might be playing a game, creating something, organizing photos or any range of activities that all greatly affect your receptivity to marketing.

People using social media, in my opinion, have a low to average receptivity to marketing due to the reality of what people do on social networks.  While someone just killing time on a social network might be receptive to interacting with your brand on a meaningful level, those that use it as a social utility (a segment that generally has the most valuable networks of “friends”) aren’t going to pay attention to your display ads or promote your social applications unless they’re extremely compelling or add to the utility of the site.  Can you improve upon the experience of the site or are you merely looking to co-op SOV?

It’s sounds like one of those typical “make better ads” rants but it’s not.  There are opportunities for every brand to sponsor emerging technologies that are adding to the value of social interactions.  Want to get involved with Twitter?  12seconds.tv has a unique way to add video to the microblogging experience.  Looking for an in on Facebook?  Why not build something that improves upon the terrible photo gallery features offered on the site.  There’s plenty of low hanging fruit, you just have to wake up and pick it.

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