Comcast Buys Plaxo For Social Media: Google & Cisco Pass

Plaxo today announced that they have just signed an agreement to be acquired by Comcast. Details of the price were not disclosed but it is rumored to be in the $140 - $175 million range.

The company blog says "Plaxo Pulse is to become central to creating a unified “Social Media” experience across the web and television". Not sure what exactly that means for Comcast? Given that 75% of Plaxo's users are business users. I am surprised that Plaxo was not acquired by Google or Cisco.

Google because Plaxo could have been the center piece for its OpenSocial and Friends Connect initiatives, it could provide Google with its own LinkedIn type service and become a sourcing pool to extend Google Apps into the enterprise. Further Plaxo is funded by Google's Founding Board Member Ram Shriram. So the sale would not have been a stretch.

Even more puzzling is why Cisco didn't jump on it - it would have been great to drive adoption of Cisco's Webex products. In fact Cisco has invested close to $15 million in Plaxo. At the time of the investment a Cisco spokes person said "The investment by Cisco reflects an interest in the emerging social-networking space, Plaxo's strength lies in its ability to connect people with those they already know or do business with".

For Comcast this is an expensive way to get into Social Media when there are far better alternatives that are more synergistic to its core business (maybe Comcast knows something I don't). Plaxo's site is still in beta after all these years and millions of dollars in development. Further, their traffic is headed downward. Plaxo management probably decided that any exit is better than no exit. Your thoughts?

Personal Blogs, Corporate Lawsuits

Cisco is facing a lawsuit after an employee - who happend to be in charge of Cisco's Intellectual Property Division - criticized other companies on his personal blog. The companies that came under fire are now suing the company, claiming the employee should have disclosed his Cisco affiliation.

Anne at CNET wonders today if a new spate of blog lawsuits may be coming as employees are increasingly given, and taking, the freedom to discuss company issues. My guess is that companies have little to worry about. Several prominent bloggers have been talking about their companies for years with few detrimental effects and many positive ones. Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo has both complimented and criticized Yahoo many times in his long blogging career.

Rather than hurting the company this level of transparency arguably helps with credibility and gives readers the kind of "reality check" that official corporate blogs cannot provide. Other prominent personal bloggers who became something of the de-facto company bloggers are Matt Cutts at Google and Jeff Barr of Amazon, though more recently the companies have established their own blogs, Google on a very large number of Google related topics.

Corporate blogging advocate Robert Scoble in his book with Shel Israel called "Naked Conversations", argues that companies should encourage personal blogging as well as establish corporate blogs as part of their media strategy to engage with customers on a more personal and more detailed level than simple advertising will provide. I think this is the best advice for the long term, and that lawsuits will be few and far between.

Blog Council Formed to Wintry Reception

The Blog Council has come to order. It has been formed, site launched, and first meeting set to convene in January. Per their official description, the Blog Council is a community for official corporate blogs and bloggers that represent major global corporations acting as a strong advocate in support of responsible, ethics-based corporate blogging. Their mission is to create best practices (global corporate blog directory, standardized blog terminology glossary, moderating and responding to comments), community, ROI, and advocacy. Other initiatives include proactive blogger relations, blog policy, blogs as customer service tools, ROI of blogs, creating "brand love" in the blogosphere, managing blogs in multiple languages, dealing with employee personal blogs, and how to engage bloggers to write about a company. Council member companies include AccuQuote, Cisco, Coca-Cola, Dell, Gemstar-TV Guide, General Motors, Kaiser Permanente, Microsoft, Nokia, SAP, Starwood Hotels, and Wells Fargo. I don't see Google on the list, at least not yet, but the Official Google Blog is more popular than all the others' blogs. Neither is Sun on the list whose CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, has a blog. The council is clear to differentiate itself from and as not representing personal, SMB, and professional bloggers.

Corporate blogging is the corporate adaption of blogging. And, given that corporations have a corporate and legal reponsibility to protect themselves and shareholders, it seems logical that they would have some rules of engagement around this. But this smells of a corporate stranglehold on an inherently open, unregulated, free speech realm. The Council's own site is a blog but already I don't see how you comment other than email the "Blog Council". I don't know about anyone else, but I don't read any of the member council company blogs; okay, maybe I've looked at a Microsoft Blog before. I guess I might check out some of the others in time to see the fruits of this endeavour. Will all this policy-making help or hinder corporate blogging?! I guess that is yet to be seen but people are mostly skeptical.

Robert Scoble writes:
"If your company needs help "getting it" then you shouldn’t be hanging out with other companies.... Demonstrates that the industry has a LONG way to go before it understands the real value that seemingly unimportant conversations have."

What do you think?

Next Generation Social Networking

Last Wednesday, the WebGuild held its monthly event on the "Next Generation of Social Networking" featuring Jonathan Abrams, Founder & CEO of Socializr & Freindster fame, Jia Shen, CTO of Rock You, and Sundeep Ahuja, Founder of Appfuels. It was a highly social event - well attended and high energy.

If you missed it, the video of this event will be available in about a week. View photos.

Vote for Cool Software

That's what Intel wants you to do with the launch of their new website called CoolSW. They are using collective intelligence to help sift through the millions of software companies to find the best one. They've created a social ranking system that allows them to find what's "Cool." I have to admit the software that currently has the most votes in the 'digital home' category is pretty cool. It's a web service that allows people to draw floor plans online, or upload images of floor plans which are converted automatically into 3D Google Earth. Would they have found this company and the many others listed with the 90K+ employees they have? Maybe eventually but they've decided to take the shorter route and rely on anyone who wants to participate in helping them identify and rate cool technology.

This isn't a new concept, people have always gathered together to share information but the internet and the advancements of Web 2.0 allow us to share this information more freely. And those who have taken advantage of this have illustrated the powerful result:

• Google became the number one search engine by using 'PageRank' which uses the search behavior of millions of people to improve relevancy.
• Wikipedia has become the world's largest and arguably the most accurate encyclopedia.
• Innocentive opens up tough R&D problems for anyone to solve - since 2005, 58 of these tough problems have been solved by over 120,000 solvers.
• Cisco's Connected Life Contest resulted in over 600 technology ideas in 3-months that will be used to drive product strategy.

It has been proven that collective intelligence works and those who have jumped on the bandwagon have the competitive advantage. How have you seen 'the power of many' used successfully?