Yelping For Your Business

Yelp is a popular review and social networking site in the Bay Area. Yelp also covers other regions but my understanding is that they've had limited traction outside of the Silicon
Valley Heartland, partly because Yelp's strategy is to bring people together in reality as well as online through Yelp parties. Although I think blending reality and online worlds is a clever idea, the labor intensiveness of real parties may limit Yelp's ability to grow in the explosive way that other social networks can, unhindered by real world limitations.

What is clear is that Yelp can help or harm the businesses that people are reviewing. Yelp has launched "Yelp for Business" which will allow businesses to create their own dialog on the website. In my view this is a great approach rather than heavy moderation of comments which can distort the natural dialog. Unfortunately people will often rant unfairly or opportunistically about other businesses, but this should give those businesses a better opportunity to enter the dialog and correct misperceptions.

There will still be unfair challenges for reviewed businesses, however. A common marketing tactic is to criticize competitors and praise others based not on merit but on who hired the most aggressive online marketing team or - in an even more subtle form of bias - who has been the most persuasive at having happy customers leave comments at social networking sites like Yelp. For example a clever Bed and Breakfast might "invite" happy customers to leave favorable feedback at sites they have bookmarked on the computer they have for their guests while guests who are unhappy are simply not directed to do so. This is a form of "white hat" marketing that does not break any rules, but also does not present a high order picture of the establishment.

The Twitter Scaling Storm

Twitter quickly moved from internet obscurity to one of a handful of key online social media players. Past concerns over Twitter's infrastructure and reliability came to a head this week as key Twitter IT architect Blain Cook has left the company amid a swirl of blog commentary and criticism over his performance at the company.

As Matt Ingram notes in his reasonable take on things, it is ironic that Cook will be speaking soon at a Web 2.0 conference in Silicon Valley about how to scale up large online applications.

I'm a big fan of Twitter but unlike many of my tech friends I am not obsessed with it. I think many Twitter critics have really overreacted to the downtime and slowness because ... overreacting to modest tech defects is what tech people love to do.

My take is that people are not reasonably factoring profitability issues into the Twitter equation. Cook is getting more blame than he deserves because he probably was tasked with keeping things going less than the budget you'd have with a more profitable enterprise.

Twitter has been wildly successful in terms of traffic and adoption, but it has not been monetizing that success. Scaling up to an extremely robust infrastructure could be throwing good money after ... no money. Many bubble companies developed huge and robust architectures to handle trivial traffic and thus I am not at all convinced Twitter is wrong to set their priorities as they appear to have done - a great service with a second class infrastructure until they figure out how to turn a buck from all the Twitterers.

A Penny For Your Pageview: The Profit Potential of Social Applications

As social applications like Facebook, Myspace, Ning, and dozens of others attain sky high valuations few are focusing much attention on how poorly most of these social networking sites monetize their enormous traffic levels.

Microsoft's Emerging Business guru Don Dodge, in an excellent post about Social Networking, notes an example where a Facebook application only manages to generate $6,000 to $15,000 per month revenue with page views of .... wait for it .... three hundred million per month. This disparity is so great I'm wondering a bit about his source for those numbers, but it is certainly clear that social media monetization is no walk in the PPC park.

Google's dominance in the very lucrative search pay per click market has made Google the global online advertising leader in terms of advertising traffic and advertising revenue. Despite this success, even Google has been failing to find another holy grail. YouTube may eventually justify its huge valuation in indirect ways, but it does not appear to be a very healthy way to capture revenue for Google or for affiliated video publishers.

Likewise Facebook's key advertising revenue has come somewhat indirectly - from a guaranteed advertising deal with Microsoft rather than from clever internal advertising schemes like Beacon, which practically blew up in Facebooks ... own Face when issues were raised over privacy and potential misuses of Facebook user account information.

People, and certainly the advertising market, are still adapting to social networking so it is too early to know if social networking will prove to be as fertile a ground for advertisers as search. What is clear is that not much revenue is growing there yet.

UK Judge: Facebook Friends Are Not Real Friends

A judge in the UK has "settled" what many of us have wondered for some time - are Facebook friends real friends, even though you often don't really know the person?

No, said the judge in a case where a woman argued that she was being harrassed by her ex-boyfriend's friend requests on Facebook.

The Syndey Morning Herald noted:

... the magistrate accepted his argument that the contact was highly innocuous because being "Facebook friends" could not be defined as "friendship in the traditional sense".

Source: Sydney Morning Herald

The best Facebook advice I had was from Robert Scoble who suggested to me some time ago that a friend on a social networking site was whatever you wanted them to be. I loosened up my approval and invite process thanks to that invite and it has led to some excellent contacts I might not have made if I'd waited to actually meet all those "Friends" at a conference.

Will You Listen To Your Apple iPod If It Is Saying You Are Overweight?

A series of patents filed by Apple Computer today, and uncovered by Apple Insider, suggest that Apple is working on enhancements to the iPod to make is a "lifestyle" companion. Based on the patents Apple appears to be working on ways to have the iPod monitor the health and exercise of the user via new programming and new peripheral monitoring devices that may attach to the body or use motion detection to keep track of walking and other exercise routines.

Although lifestyle contraptions are nothing new, Apple appears to have some clever social networking ideas up it's virtual sleeve as well. For example one module will allow users to challenge others to competitions:

"A rewards system of the present invention also can permit a user to challenge one or more users to a competition. Based on data about the competitors' activities and user-defined allocation parameters, the rewards system can automatically distribute rewards to the user account(s) of victorious competitor(s)."

This social networking aspect of the new Apple system could be a milestone in using online social networking for health purposes, though it remains to be seen if building online health relationships will really lead most to health and happiness.

Social Media Application Smackdown

This excellent article over at Internet Duct Tape has reviewed data from the explosively popular social sharing application Friendfeed to determine the most popular Social Media applications. Although this Friendfeed sample has some challenges this is probably a great snapshot of social media application use among many early adopters in the US technology crowd, and thus offers a lot of insight into what is hot and what is not in terms of social media:

Two interesting findings:

90% of the Friend Feed participation comes from the top 8 services (Twitter, Blog, Google Reader, del.icio.us, Digg, Tumblr, YouTube, StumbleUpon). 46% of that comes from Twitter. It’s not surprising that Twitter leads the pack, because the nature of the service makes it easy to update many times a day.

The bottom 12 services (not include the ones added this week) can’t even manage to scrape 1% of the total between them (Pandora, Ma.gnolia, Upcoming, Picasa, iLike, Google Shared, LinkedIn, Vimeo, Furl, Yelp, Zooomr, SmugMug).

The author suggests that the maximum number of social media applications a person will use is about six, and that the consolidation of social applications provided by Friendfeed make it a very powerful application.

I'd suggest we are still in a very transitory mode with social media, where the holy grail has yet to be found that will provide simple, broad, fast, and efficient social and data networking across almost all applications and hardware platforms.

Bebo Sale: Who pays the piper?

Writing in the New York Times, songwriter Billy Bragg raises several important questions about money and music in the context of the sale of music-focused social networking site Bebo, which was recently purchased by Time Warner for $850 million.

As we noted yesterday discussing how dividing Facebook revenues amongst all the participants in that social network would yield very little to each person, it is important to put some of these big money deals in context.

I am totally in agreement with those that suggest the "right answer" is to find ways to bring the content producers into the equation by giving them equity stakes in the projects they help to build. However it is also important to understand the needs of investors who have little incentive to pump cash into projects unless their equity stake is reasonably in line with the investment.

Rightly or wrongly, music is cheap and money is expensive, so it is not reasonable to expect venture capital to flow unless equity is delivered. Of course in the case of Bebo the founders reaped the giant money and their main contribution was the *idea and excellent implementation" of a musical social community. How do you value that idea compared to the value of the musical contributions?

Bragg writes:

The musicians who posted their work on Bebo.com are no different from investors in a start-up enterprise. Their investment is the content provided for free while the site has no liquid assets. Now that the business has reaped huge benefits, surely they deserve a dividend.

Yes, a dividend but no, this is not like investment of capital. Even if the online company fails (and most do fail), the musicians get something of value which is distribution and promotion of their work. Since they don't give up their rights to pull the work and move on to greener pastures (or more importantly promote themselves at all networks all the time), their is effectively zero risk to the musicians in these equations. Risk lies at the heart of what makes investment equations difficult, so generally as you eliminate the risk you must reduce the rewards if you want to maintain a successful business ecosystem.

The claim that sites such as MySpace and Bebo are doing us a favor by promoting our work is disingenuous. Radio stations also promote our work, but they pay us a royalty that recognizes our contribution to their business. Why should that not apply to the Internet, too?

Not disingenuous, but probably incomplete to suggest that exposure is all the artist should get. Royalties should be integrated into the risk and reward equation we are talking about above. This isn't about fairness as much as it is about creating systems that can work to deliver the goods to people. Without that, nobody will make any money.

I think Bragg's point here about compensation is basically valid. The best models will find a way to get money flowing to artists in proportion to their contribution to the social network. Given that music consumers are the big winners in the current system through free downloads both legal and illegal, I think it would be optimal to find better ways for musical consumers to pitch more cash into the social networking equation, perhaps in exchange for greater social networking privileges such as insider interactions with the artists, pre-release music, and more.

What social networking features would get you to happily pay more for your music?

Bebo Financials

Today's big news is AOL's acquisition of Social Network Bebo for a cool $850 million. Kara Swisher has an excellent piece detailing some of the financial aspects of this mega-deal. She also notes that despite some significant success in the space, Bebo is very much in the shadow of Myspace and Facebook as a social network.

With only $5 million in EBITA for 2007, Bebo is selling at a whopping 160+ times earnings. Big companies tend to do be viewed more favorably than small ones by this EBITA multiple metric, but it is notable that with small and moderate sized website dealings one would expect to pay only about one or two times annual earnings rather than paying in the tens or in this case over one hundred times annual earnings.

This discrepancy is in part due to the fact that large sites are arguably more stable than small ones, but in my opinion this is still a very conspicuous aspect of wheeling and dealing with online companies, and arguably yet another indication that internet bubble two may be ... growing ever larger.

One has to be middle aged to remember when AOL was pretty much the *only* big game in town in terms of online socializing, and I'm sure AOL execs are wishing they had managed to turn more of that early chat room activity and idle banter into a thriving social network like Myspace or Facebook or Bebo.

Can Bebo help AOL regain the former glory it enjoyed in the early days of online activity?

Social Networking Report Hijacked By Scammers

Compete.com's report on Top Social Networking Sites for February 2008 shows Fubar.com was the fastest growning social networking site. The site has grown 3,272,217% in 12 months. As a result of this report the site is getting tremendous publicity and the founders/operators are knocking on the doors of venture capitalists using the Compete report and others as validation.



Fubar.com launched as Lostcherry.com in 2006. The site ramped up to about 200,000 users by October and then changed the name to Cherrytap.com. After changing the name to Cherrytap.com the company embarked on a public relations campaign promoting Cherrytap.com as a new site that grew from zero to 200,000 users instantly.

Later, Cherrytap.com changed its name to Fubar.com. Fubar’s founder/operators have again embarked on a campaign promoting the site to venture capitalists and PR agencies saying Fubar.com is a new site that has grown from zero to 200,000 users.

Hopefully no VC will put money into this and tell us that it is the next MySpace killer. Facebook was touted as a MySpace killer after Benchmark poured money into the company. Eventually they discovered that they would need a ton more money to compete with MySpace. Then it was spun in such a way that Microsoft fell for it and invested $240M last year. See: Ballmer - Facebook Not A Mistake

Thanks to a WebGuild member Val D'Souza, CEO, PictureTrail for pointing this out.

Hidden Power of Online Forums As A Marketing Tool

I was at the Opsource SaaS Summit today and sat in on a preso from the Lithium SVP, Amy Lewis, who talked about the value of online forums to companies. Some of the key points were as follows.

Why have an online forum:

• Forum-ize your product line as part of your Web 2.0 marketing
  
• Forums can be used for customer support as well as for marketing
• Building a forum allows you to identify who your super users and because they are passionate, they represent a critical user group, a tribal base that are influencers.
• Consumer groundswell can be positive or negative which a forum can help manage. As a vendor, a forum allows you to be involved and make it a two-way dialogue and manage conversations happening on the blogosphere otherwise outside of your control.
• Communities can provide a powerful real-time vehicle:
• enhancing customer care
• enhancing brand loyalty
• providing support provided by users to users
• content is raw and unfiltered
• immediacy of great info
• value of having users talk to each other eg. customers share workarounds
• foster demand generation
• can serve as an online focus group eg. an setup private communities to help with product design
• value of happy comments being viewed by many users has a nice halo effect for branding
• professionalism and tone of forums have improved. Forum moderator should respond where appropriate and establish rules of conduct.
  
• ROI on support forums is a great place to start eg. call deflection
• suppport forum helps to build up critical mass
• lot to learn from customers

Social Network Usage Worldwide

The above chart identifies the leading social networks in selected high use countries worldwide. The chart shows the number of hours (in millions) users spent on social networks. Recent reports suggest that users are spending less time on social networks as a result of being bombarded by ads. However, the average time spent on Facebook continues to increase unabated, according to Hitwise. It stands at 21 minutes, 22 seconds (for the week ended Feb. 23) - 73% more than a year earlier. This is despite the fact that Facebook's market share of visits has dropped 27% from it peak reached in the week ended Dec. 29, 2007. According to the chart the top network by country were;

1. U.S. - MySpace
2. Canada - Facebook
3. India - Orkut
4. Japan - Mixi
5. Korea - Cyworld
6. Philipines - Friendster
7. Russia - Live Journal
8. Brazil - Orkut
9. Argentina - Metroflog
10. Portugal - Hi5
11. France - Skyblog
12. Ireland - Bebo

The Social Graph API & Privacy Says Expert

David Recordon of SixApart has a great post on Google's Social Search API and some of the privacy issues associated with it. He co-authored “Thoughts on the Social Graph” with Brad Fitzpatrick (who joined Google last August to develop the API).

Last August David started developing an open source service that would crawl online relationship data and expose it via an API. He showed snippets of it on his blog (pictures and text), and also gave a brief demo at the Data Sharing Summit. He goes on to say, "We even came close to releasing an online tool which visualized all of your accounts and friends; instead we opted for demonstrating its power with a screencast showing how you could use it to find your friends. While this implementation of the API was based on publicly discoverable information (like Google’s), we simply didn’t feel comfortable shipping that project based on current implementations. More>>

Digg Makes Well Intentioned Changes But More Needs To Be Done

Today came a post in Kevin Rose's blog notifying users of Digg's change in its algorithm. The main change is that it will now take into account voting patterns and will promote stories to the main page (a really valuable web real estate) depending on "diversity of voters who have voted for the story". What this essentially means is that, firstly, stories will take longer time or more Diggs to make it to the front page. For instance, a few days ago stories with a Digg count of 60-70 often made it to the front page while there were instances of stories with 145 Diggs still present in the upcoming section. Secondly, and more importantly, it is an effort on the part of Digg to lessen the influence of top diggers in its community who presently contribute at least 10% of articles that make it to main page of Digg. Each of the top users have a fan following on Digg and their stories automatically get 70-80 diggs and they receive a boost over new joinees in terms of stories they want to submit. This change aims to make Digg a level playing field for old powerful users and new users.

This step of course hasn't gone well with top users with many crying foul over how this algorithm change suggests that top digg users are gaming digg. In the words of Derek, a power user on digg:

"I was quite surprised by Kevin's announcement. Personally I thought all the controversy was a bunch of hot air. It all started because a user by the name of digitalgopher stayed home sick from work a couple days ago and spent the day submitting even more awesome content to Digg then usual. Naturally, this resulted in a lot more of his stories being promoted to the front page than usual that day. This caused a couple of users to panic and before you know it we have people calling for the heads of the top 100 users."

And obviously top users are upset, since this algorithm directly hits on their well earned reputation and fan following. Also, it is taking longer for stories to make it to main page which make them cry about good missed content. Visit this site and you will notice concerns that many people have with digg and which has been inflated with algorithm changes. The situation went so bad that Kevin and Jay, its founders had to talk to top digg users in an attempt to quell their fears. Note that its users have already been upset with digg about issues like banning of accounts without any reason and digg not replying to mails that are sent to them.

However, I think that in one respect that what Digg really needs to change is in terms of transparency. Users want to know if there is a feature called "Auto-Bury List" in digg which automatically buries stories that belong to particular URLs. Kevin and Jay have mainly avoided this question till now. Also in question are digg editors who scan stories and bury which seems inappropriate to them. These features are not necesserily negative, but the problem is the lack of transparency and digg users being kept out of loop. Digg should remember that many users submit stories to digg because they feel themselves to be part of the digg community as contributors. If they are kept out of the loop and their account banned due to TOS violation without giving any reason/warning to them, these users will tend to go look for other options. I had noted in an article about top social media sites that many digg users have left to join mixx, another social voting site with richer facilities than digg. What digg must remember that its value lies only in its community of contributors and thus be nicer and open with them. Many of the users there contribute because they love digg and digg should also love them back so that good stories keep coming in.

Second Keynote Speaker For Conference - Craig Newmark, Craigslist Founder

Craig Newmark, Founder of Craigslist will be the second headline Keynote Speaker at the upcoming WebGuild Web 2.0 Conference & Expo on Tuesday, January 29, 2008.

We all know Craigslist which is described as a centralized network of online communities, featuring free classified advertisements (with jobs, internships, housing, personals, for sale/barter/wanted, services, community, gigs, resume, and pets categories) and forums on various topics. Craig, himself, is a web-oriented software engineer by training, with 30 years of IT experience at companies such as IBM and Bank of America, Craig now spends his days working as a customer service rep at Craigslist.

In 1995 while Craig was working at Schwab, he started craigslist as an email list for friends and co-workers about events going on in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 1999, Craig retired from IT consulting to work full-time on Craigslist. What started as a fun side project in Craig's living room has since grown into one of the busiest sites on the internet, helping people with basic day-to-day needs such as finding a job, an apartment and a date, all within a culture of trust. Craig continues to embrace his inner nerd though he no longer wears thick black glasses that are held together with tape, and he retired the plastic pocket protector some years ago.

Craig is involved with a variety of community efforts and is particularly interested in organizations promoting public diplomacy, mideast peace and new forms of media such as participatory journalism. He's on the boards of Sunlight Foundation, OneVoice, FactCheckED, and VotoLatino. Craig graduated from Case Western University.

Don't miss his keynote! Gil Penchina, CEO of Wikia will be the first Keynote.

Social Networks: New Age Solution to Problems of the Old Economy

I'm a curmudgeon, a hard headed analyst. I compete with much larger agencies to help companies find alternative product strategies when first efforts are running out of steam. I point out weaknesses and overlooked opportunities, find partners, and debunk shoddy market volume figures proffered by staff in order to keep projects funded, or to justify their existence of such. My advice is often ignored - until much later after my contract is long over. That's when they dredge up my reports and presentations and go over them with a highlighter.

Strategies for Social Media, in particular, have been a challenge when soft pedaling my services in the outreach phase. Companies want to just jump in and create systems from whole cloth, offer white box services, or create Facebook apps - all without a thought as to what interactions they are trying to foster, who they are endeavoring to connect or enable, or what model they are trying to exploit. Forget any reality checks for monetization, even in the soft sense of labor savings or process streamlining.

No, when an organization has made up its mind, the strategic issues are often put aside, and the project proceeds apace to implementation. Bad for me, good for the latest crop of Social Media systems designers; all power to them. We will see how it shakes out, long term.

But I am a staunch advocate of applying New Age solutions to Old Economy problems.

My first exposure to the notion of Social Networks, Blogs, FOAF, Tags, and the like, was from a true visionary, way back in 2004. Kingsley Idehen, CEO of the under-reported and under appreciated OpenLink Software. Kingsley is a genius and a technological powerhouse, while Virtuoso Universal Server beats other web databases and middleware hands down, not to mention OpenLink Data Spaces as the solid outcome of social media, semantic web enabling technologies that properly leverage the power of Virtuoso.

The foregoing was not a shameful plug for a respected colleague, but an introduction to the idea that new solutions should be prime fodder for old problems. Kingsley understands this and he helped me to understand this paradigm when it was still a very fresh and not well understood concept. This was years before Facebook.

I approached OpenLink about a problem and opportunity in the independent automotive trades such as towing and mobile locksmithing. The background of the problem is interesting, and is my obsession regarding extended efforts to fund it as a venture or project, but the real message here is as follows:

1. Long before the buzz, social networks existed as natural, self-evolving ecosystems in the service sector - product service, skilled trades, artisans, professional services.
   


2. The mad rush to 'horizontalize' and 'advert-monetize' Facebook style systems is fine, but is diverting much well deserved attention from these mature markets which are models of living networks of social relationships.
   


3. As much as I hate the terms Web10 and Web20, I have to admit that there is a real difference to be appreciated in the technology that might have served in the 1999-2004 time frame and now.
   


4. The back end has matured, the front end is richer, the mobile tools repertoire is altogether fresh and virtually unrecognizable from a few years ago.
   


5. Some things the pundits totally missed: AppXchange, others, the sure and steady migration of what once were enterprise only tools to free and inexpensive platforms -
   


6. Open Source moves to mainstream; Google releases a fully fledged Mobile OS.
   

All of the above ripens the environment for preexisting social networks to amplify their models using technology that is becoming almost ubiquitous. What's holding them back is the lack of interest in the blue collar trades that soldier on without new economy advocates to give them true social networks of the Web20 and Web30 (whatever that is) world.

Shall we take an example of the old economy that has been overlooked by the frenzied evangelists of social networking?

Where to start?
Shall we say, free-lance dispatching for independent towing, mobile glass installers, and mobile locksmiths? Ah...yes:

As outlined in the ThruDispatch pitch slides, the social model for the independent automotive trades is a 'native social model'. Independent towing owner / operators use a natural itinerant model to visit external agencies, such as police departments, parking lots, auto dealers, car auctions, etc.

These weary pilgrims wend their way through their local area, seeking to add clients to their work slate. They bank on their network to call them and requests towing (or locksmithing or auto glass repair), on an as needed basis. They have no intelligent work-flow. They might be heading in the wrong direction when a new job comes in. They are not exploiting the best that mobile technology could offer them.

Along with the, 'just visiting' model, itinerant mobile service workers are subject to external preemption, where casually affiliated agencies may use an alternate provider, gather lists of allied trade acquaintances, and join in the general free-for-all that is the independent services trade. It's a game of churn, and often the best candidate (selected for proximity, reputation, or capacity), is never considered due to the opacity of the model.

How would a social networking model preserve the best of the status quo for itinerant mobile services, while extending and enabling better visibility to enhance job/ price matching, and optimize work flow for both the job submitters and those who execute them?

Here are some ideas covered in greater detail in the ThruDispatch plan:

• Multi-Cast open jobs with cost and time parameters to a sub selection of geographically appropriate mobile subscribers
  


• Create a pre-execution view (for job submitter) of all possible job executors, with their ratings and merit figures
  


• Create a 'Virtual Dispatcher" that monitors the progress of jobs in the execution queue, so that non-progessing jobs can be withdrawn and re-assigned, or so that escalating levels of alert reminders can be sent to keep the original executor on track.
  


• Allow overlays and applications that take the basic fleet model, and extend it to include the composition of virtual fleets, made up of many independents.
  


• Allow for the placement of blocks of future job orders that can bid on at a discount, in exchange for demand predictability, and payment advances that are carried by the portal operators, or external financiers.
  
  This is a start, and a long article already. Next time - more on the actual model of interactions between job submitters and executors.
  

If the new age social networks, VC's, and mobile platform providers would give this model the time of day regarding partnerships or funding, this cohort of 3.5 million lone wolves would be worth $20 a month in per subscriber fees, additional revenue from handling their billing through card services, and other lucrative channels. What's the hangup?

Written and submitted by Alan Wilensky.

Social Media and Teens

Not super surprising that the web is the newest hangout for teens. According to a study "Teens & Social Media" conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project "some 93% of teens use the internet, and more of them than ever are treating it as a venue for social interaction – a place where they can share creations, tell stories, and interact with others." What is interesting, however, are the trends being reported on teens' usage patterns online.

The use of social media – from blogging to online social networking to creation of all kinds of digital material – is central to many teenagers' lives.

39% of of teens online between the ages of 12-17 share photos, videos, and stories online and approximately 30% either work on a webpage or blog for someone or have their own, up roughly 20% from 2004. The number of teen bloggers nearly doubled from 2004 to 2006 with girls dominating the blogospere at 35% versus 20% of online teen boys. This could be attributed to girls tending to be a little more communicative and expressive than boys. A whopping 55% have created a MySpace or Facebook profile and there is evidence to suggest a direct correlation between teens with social networking profiles and blogging. Many of these teens also tend to be bloggers, read blogs, and comment on blogs.

57% of online teens watch videos online but boys trump girls in watching and posting videos online. Although photos and videos are an important part of teens' lives online, most reported restricting access to their photos and the majority report receiving comments on their photos and videos.

Communications patterns for teens are shifting for "multi-channel teens – those teens who use the internet, instant messaging, text messaging a cell phone, and social networking sites" to cell phones, IM apps, and social networks. And, compared to adults, teens are least likely to use email as a means of communicating, opting instead for texting, IM, and social networks to keep in touch with friends.

This data validates what we've all been seeing which is the growing popularity and demand for Web 2.0 phenomena such as user-generated content in the form of blogs, photos, and videos, and for social networking communities.

Cisco Out To Lunch on Social Networking

Cisco’s social networking strategy is to help media companies connect with their customers. Cisco’s offerings will deliver multimedia content to online communities, help visitors find content through a recommendation and relevance engine that looks at a user's activity patterns and makes personalized suggestions, said Dan Scheinman, SVP Media Solutions. The strategy is predicated on the notion that due to information explosion:

1) Users’ often don't even know what they're looking for;

2) Finding anything in this world of infinite information is really going to be tricky; and

3) Cisco's network expertise and recent social-networking acquisitions uniquely equip it to solve this set of problems.

"We've become the only company that can do all of these three things together," Scheinman said.

Users’ often don't even know what they're looking for. Oh really! Do the millions of users on social networking sites not EVEN know what they want? Is that why they are spending so much time on social networks - because they don’t know what they want?

Users are finding it tricky to find content. Has Dan Scheinman not heard of Google? If not, let me quickly explain. Google is a web site where you can go and enter your search query, click the video link, and find exactly the video you are looking for. It will find the content you are looking for regardless of where it resides. The content does not have to be on your web site.

Cisco is the only company that can do all of these three things together. Wow! Have you NOT heard of YouTube? They do that and more, and they do it for free. Cisco recently acquired Five Across and Tribe.net, both dogs in the social media space. Five Across, was a blogging site founded by folks that did not blog but were looking to make a quick buck. Tribe.net was a site for burning man fans with good intentions but backed by evil doers (Mayfield) looking to make a quick buck. The evil doers finally gave up on the site after talks with NBC failed and an acquisition bid by burning man fans fell through. Finally, Cisco revealed that it had acquired the site for its cutting edge technology such as photo uploading and inviting friends.

If you are responsible for social media strategy for a major corporate web site or a small internet community you can save yourself a lot of money, time, and frustration by simply using YouTube. It is free and easy to use. You can easily upload your videos, integrate them into your web site, track subscriptions, get viewer analytics, and more. If you want to customize it, you can use their API and if you want to customize further, you can use their YouTube Director which has many more options for professional users such as logo customization and scheduling show times etc. In fact, UC Berkeley uses this service.

This is in no way an endorsement of YouTube's offering but information so that you don't end up blowing $250,000 when you can get the same thing for free.

Online Wisdom Coming In A New Flavor?

Wikipedia has become one of the most authoritative sources of information online or offline. Part of Wikipedia's enormous success has been thanks to the prominent placement Wikipedia has enjoyed at Google, often in the top few listings for common, highly competitive terms.

Today, Google announced a new project that may become even more popular as a source of authoritative information, currently nicknamed the knol project.

Knol is a unique information experiement in that it will create an authoritative article about any topic and then allow feedback and comments from the community. I'm not clear how initial authority to write these will be determined, but I'm guessing Google's academic orientation will show here and they'll very appropriately require some form of academic, literary, or business credential before allowing people to post on topics.

The web has only begun to scratch the power of community as an arbiter of quality. Digg uses voting, while Wikipedia uses a group editing model. It appears knol will offer voting and the ability to add to the article, though not change it.

Social Networking Gets a Suit and Tie

It's no secret that Social Networking is growing. In 2006 over half of B2B technology buyers visited social networking sites (2006 comScore World Metrix). The top business players in the space are LinkedIn and Plaxo and they are driving demand by delivering consistent product enhancements:

LinkedIn's Half Open Platform
LinkedIn will be opening their nework to "allow developers to build applications that run inside your LinkedIn account (via OpenSocial) and the far more useful and interesting part — ways to pull your LinkedIn data out and use it elsewhere."

What I like about their approach is that they are sticking to their roots. They are a 'professional network' so rather than taking the Facebook 'apps gone wild' approach, LinkedIn will be keeping tabs on the applications it allows on its network. What does this mean? You won't have to worry about hamburger fights and karate-chops.

Plaxo vs. Flock
I wrote about Flock in an earlier post - you know, the Social Media Web Browser. Well Plaxo (with it's Plaxo Pulse feed aggregator feature) has a different approach to keep you connected to all of your social networks. They've announced a new Outlook connector - being that Outlook is primarily a business application you can guess who this is built for (yet more proof point that Social Networking is not just for friends and teenagers). What's cool is that it's embedded into the what is still the primary communication tool in business - email. Enabling you to 'get a pulse' on your contact before sending them an email will make your message more meaningful therefore deepening your relationship with that contact. Are you ready to give your Outlook a pulse?

Marketing with Facebook

Still not convinced about the uptake of social networking? According to Alexa metrics, half of the top 10 sites in the world are social networking sites including YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Hi5 and Orkut.


I think Facebook offers a huge potential when it come to marketing. One out of 7 web visitors went to Facebook in the month of August. Some companies already see the value of Facebook and use it as a way to communicate to customers (like a new kind of email). However this seems to make the most sense for B2C customers - this is what I'm told. Although I agree that B2C companies have the most to gain I don't think it's a channel that B2B customers want to rule out.

First off, let's get over the myth that Facebook is for college kids. Not anymore! Over half (56%) of Facebook users are over 25 and 45% of those are over 35! They are likely to be college educated and employed with mid-level management positions. They may not be your decision makers but they certainly are influencers. Therefore shouldn't you be talking to these people? With such a low barrier to entry (free account set-up) - what do you have to lose, besides a little time being social?

Okay, so if you're ready to take the red pill, this presentation from Charlene Li of Forrester provides additional demographics, case studies and best practices for marketers.

Nasdaq Launches Internet Index

The Nasdaq (Nasdaq:NDAQ) today announced it has launched the NASDAQ Internet Index (Nasdaq:QNET). The Index is a new benchmark designed to track the performance of companies engaged in a broad range of internet-related services such as:

1) internet access providers
2) internet search engines
3) web hosting
4) website design
5) internet retail commerce

"The NASDAQ Internet Index is comprised of securities of companies that are at