Web Usability Video

Here is the video of the Web Usability Event on June 25 featuring Tom Chi, Senior Director - User Experience, Yahoo!, Jeremy Ashley, Vice President, Applications User Experience, Oracle, and David Nelson, Sr. Experience Designer, Adobe Systems.

Turning The Long Tail To The Big Tail

In a seminal article titled The Long Tail, published in October 2004 on Wired, Chris Anderson described a new niche strategy where it became possible to sell large numbers of unique items in relatively small quantities.

In fact, what would have been uneconomic in brick and mortar businesses was becoming possible AND profitable thanks to the Internet.

This concept of the “long tail” flourished and now applies to many other situations, such as domain names, for example, as well as (and especially) advertising. In particular since Google’s impressive conceptual – and commercial – innovation with the famous pair AdWords-AdSense.

In an interesting post on this matter, Scott Karp does an excellent job explaining wherein lies the innovation: factoring relevance into the auction model!

Let me explain: from 1999 to 2001, AdWords operated on a CPM basis, or cost per thousand impressions, the fee structure in fashion at the time, where advertisers were billed based on the number of impressions of their ads.

However, as Sergey Brin himself said, “It didn’t generate much money”.

In his book, The Search, John Battelle tells us that income from AdWords rose to about $85 million in 2001, while Overture earned $288 million the same year with its auction model operating on a CPC basis (cost per click, or the amount an advertiser pays for each click on its ad).

An auction system enables the advertiser to determine the cost per click incurred when users visit its site as a sponsored link. The starting bid is set at 0.15 $ per click. When the visitor enters keywords that were bid on, the search engine results page offers sponsored links, with the highest bidder’s site at the top of the list.

But Google couldn’t simply use Overture’s business model, unless they wanted a lawsuit. Even so, the lawsuit still happened and lasted more than two years, until the parties came to an agreement and dropped the suit.

However, it’s the essential difference between the two systems that enabled Google to defend itself and avoid a sentence: where Overture automatically linked the top ranking in the results to the highest bid value, Google introduced the idea of relevance, or rather popularity, with clickthrough rate (CTR), whose official definition is:

the number of clicks your ad receives divided by the number of times your ad is shown (impressions).

In other words, the bid value now became just a component, factored by the applicable clickthrough rate. John Battelle explains it the most clearly:

(A)ssume further that Accountant One is willing to pay $1.00 per click, Accountant Two $1.25, and Accountant Three $1.50. On Overture's service, Accountant Three would be listed first, followed by Accountant Two, and so on. The same would be true on Google's service, but only until the service has enough time to monitor clickthrough rates for all three ads. If Accountant One, who paid $1.00 per click, was drawing more clickthroughs than Accountant Three, then Accoun- tant One would graduate to the top spot, despite his lower bid.

A tiny innovation, but it took Google from $85 million in revenue in 2001 to billions just 7 years later!

And that’s not all: since apparently no one as improved upon it, most of the major Internet players are still looking for a decent business model.

In fact, this notion of relevance is also at the source of PageRank, at the heart of Google’s success. They go hand in hand. A search marketer cuts to the chase: If you don't provide the results, you don't get the money...

Now, the other reason for mass adoption of Google’s advertising services is... the long tail, as John Battelle rightly describes (emphasis mine):

You think Amazon's got scale? You think eBay is huge? Mere drops in the bucket. Amazon's 2000 revenues were around $2.76 billion. But the Neil Moncreifs of the world, taken together, drove more than $25 billion across the Net that same year, according to U.S. government figures. That's the power of the Internet: it's a beast with a very, very long tail. The head-eBay, Amazon, Yahoo-may get all the attention, but the real story is in the tail.

The power of the Internet is in the tail!

This is how Google achieved such amazing success. It was the only one to match advertisers’ needs with the fuel they required in abundance on the Internet: RELEVANT content. With an innovative ad server that enables millions of small sites and blogs to monetize their content, or at least to hope to...

But where Yahoo! had a presence since the beginning – since well before Google and before running astray – today Jerry Yang's abdication hands Google 90% of the advertising pie practically on a silver platter (if antitrust authorities accept it... even as advertisers already devote about 70% of their search budgets to Google!). All the other ad servers combined share the remaining 10%.

Even so, in 2008 no one has any illusions anymore (as Emmanuel Parody commented caustically: AdSense paying for content? That’s a joke...) and UGC, even if it continues to be created at full tilt, is no longer monetized like it should be (has it ever been?). Leaving millions of content creators fed up with their content be reused and monetized by the Web giants without any satisfactory form of payment or revenue sharing.

* * *

Turning the tail...

A disruption in this success story is possible, however: it would just require turning the tail, to move from the long tail of UGC to the big tail, represented by the yellow part in the graph:

To illustrate my idea, in a predictable imbalance predicted indeed by Clay Shirky in 2003, the analysis of 433 blogs ranked by number of incoming links illustrated the concept of the long tail nicely, with at the head:

1. top two sites accounted for fully 5% of the inbound links between them,
2. top dozen (less than 3% of the total) accounted for 20% of the inbound links, and
3. top 50 blogs (not quite 12%) accounted for 50% of such links.

Now imagine an analysis of not 433 blogs, but tens of millions of blogs, sites, social network pages, etc.

Then you will understand that the head (the green part), which we will arbitrarily say equals 30% of sites/blogs/pages that would form the network’s core in the good old bow-tie theory (i.e., the core of most interconnected sites where the most links and traffic converge and are shared), no longer cuts it when the UGC mainstream now forms not the long tail, but the big tail of the Web, rather predominant today.

There is the real issue for UGC and the creators behind it: they lack representation: Everyone is mooching off their content to monetize it better than everyone else, but nobody really monetizes it at its fair value.

In fact, currently only the head attracts advertisers, while the tail is left to Google, which takes full advantage of it without fearing the inconsistencies...

My prediction is that the first player who succeeds in doing what Google did five years ago with AdSense, this time adapting relevance and fair revenue sharing for UGC, will introduce an even more formidable break with the past, with the added blessing of content creators, who are obviously the most harmed in and by the current system.

Turning the tail, moving from the long tail to the big tail, is the Internet’s next big challenge. Steve Ballmer himself says nothing less :

At the end of the day, this is about the ad platform. This is not about just any one of the applications. The most important application for the foreseeable future is search.

So we have all the data for the problem, and the first ad server that creates the RELEVANT mix to match advertisers’ needs on one side with the legitimate monetization expectations of content creators on the other side (matching the inventory of the latter based on the message of the former), will win the jackpot. Even if there are still a few unknowns.

Tech Executives Use Social Media To Find Cure

Technology executives and the University of California-San Francisco's have banded together to create a special YouTube channel, a Facebook group and a widget to raise awareness for a degenerative brain diseases called Creutzfeldt-Jakob, after learning that former Apple & Netscape executive Mike Homer had been diagnosed with it.

This partnership seeks to tap into the internet's ability to reach a far larger audience to help spread awareness and get people to seek treatment sooner. It represents a new twist in the tradition model of the typical disease campaign. The campaign is being spearheaded by angel investor Ron Conway and has already raised $7 million for research at UCSF.

The disease tends to affect people in their mid-40s. Creutzfeldt-Jakob patients can live anywhere from three weeks to three years. People afflicted with the disease suffer dramatically different symptoms, depending on which part of the brain it strikes. But often the disease causes severe memory loss, problems controlling limbs, and personality changes.

"It's like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's on fast forward," said Dr. Michael Geschwind of the UCSF. The cause is unknown and it's unclear how or why it strikes any given person.

eBay Buys Social Media Tools Start-Up

eBay announced that it has acquired a small company called VUVOX (pronounced “view-vox”) to help further develop rich media capabilities in the eBay marketplace. At first glance, the integration of VUVOX into eBay is aimed at creating an enhanced customer experience using the personal media tools and applying them to listings and pages on ebay.com. VUVOX focuses on allowing users to produce and share personal media including video, photos and music. Terms of the deal were not disclosed although EBAY did announce the VUVOX team would be hired as eBay employees and join the design and development teams in San Jose.

Nokia Keeps Beefing Up On Social Media

Nokia has bought Zurich and Berlin-based social networking service Plazes. It will become part of Nokia’s Services & Software unit.

Plazes provides a location-based social activity service that people can use to plan, record, and share their social activities: why they are at a given location at a given time, whether in the past, present or future. Nokia will integrate this service into its own handsets.

Nokia has been expanding its presence in social media via a slew of acquisitions such as social networking and media services over the last year such as Twango, Enpocket, Loudeye and mapping company Navteq.

See: Nokia Becoming Web Company

1 in 4 People On Social Networks

One out of four online users are visiting social networking sites. This, according to a survey conducted by the Consumer Internet Barometer which is being reported on by MarketingVox. Such a high number is a testament to the popularity of sites such as MySpace and Facebook. This also suggests that "Online social networking is an integral part of many people’s lives and a natural extension of our means of communication which the internet has created. The next growth wave will be expanding and incorporating these networks into our business lives,” according to Lynn Franco, Director of The Conference Board Consumer Research Center.

Some of the findings of the report were:

• About half of social networkers visit social-networks sites on a daily basis - and half of them (or roughly a quarter of all social networkers) say they log on several times a day.
• Among household members, those age 12-17 are more likely than their siblings to be daily users, with 57% saying they frequent social networking sites at least once a day.
• Most users - more than three quarters - log onto social networking sites from home, but users also log on at work, school, and public places throughout the day.
• Women are more likely to frequent social networking sites than men; in general, women use the internet more than men for personal communication.
  

Don Ryan, VP of Technology and Media at TNS, said social networking sites are integral to the new media mix: "As social networking becomes a staple in people’s media experience, brands will place it alongside print, TV and search as a main advertising vehicle."

New Bookmark Recommendations Service Launched

Bookmarks inSuggest is now launched. It is a service that gives recommendations to users of bookmark services, based on personal taste. This improves the user experience on the Internet by giving suggestions that the users did not know they were looking for.

If a user of the bookmark service del.icio.us enters his/her username on inSuggest.com, the user will immediately get personal recommendations of web sites that the user might like. A special feature is the tag filter functionality.

"Personal recommendations will be a more important way of consuming content on the web, when the amount of online content is growing", says Dennis Gustafsson, founder of inSuggest.

Web 2.0 Organization Adoption Survey

Here are the results of a survey of the adoption of Web 2.0 by organizations, with a focus on marketing practices/vehicles, conducted by DeCarolis Design and Marketing.

May Survey Results

1. My company’s marketing initiatives include the active implementation and use of these online collaborative media (by percentage):



2. How do you measure customer feedback on marketing campaigns?



3. Which of the following online marketing and advertising vehicles does your company use?

1. Email – 80%
2. Display ads – 50%
3. Video ads – 0%
4. Webcasts/Podcasts – 20%
5. Other emerging vehicles – 30%

4. The main roadblock to my company becoming more engaged in Web 2.0 marketing practices such as blogs and other forms of social media is:

1. Budgetary concerns – 20%
2. Management/ownership buy-in – 40%
3. Applicability to our industry or business – 30%
4. It’s overrated – 0%
5. No roadblocks, we’re all in – 40%

As DDM notes, "it's interesting to note that most respondents currently employ a mix of traditional media along with gradually escalating ventures into Web 2.0". I'd love to see a similar survey on W2.0 adoption for internal and external (customer/partner) uses also...how ready are we for putting bi-lateral communications goals into practice? Do we really embrace customer-generated content (beyond testimonials and SCM issues)?! What happens when we "go bi-lateral" internally with employees, as opposed to the predominant use of blogs, etc., as executive platforms? It's not surprising these issues aren't addressed here, but it sure would be interesting to know the extent to which this background dynamic affects/doesn't the foreground conversation and how to move forward effectively as a result..No answers yet here; just posing the question....

Submitted by: Lucie Newcomb

Social Media - Who Are Those Guys, Anyway?

The growing importance of Social Media has spawned a very interesting discussion about the future role of those who are not currently participating actively. Some are suggesting that participation can broadly be viewed as a pyramid where for every 100 people you can expect to have one who is producing online content (e.g. a website or blog), ten who are actively participating with that content (e.g. commenting) and 89 who are only passively involved (e.g. reading).

I'd suggest that this general pyramid is correct, but that the numbers of participants are actually even lower - more like 1 in 50 who comment with the overwhelming majority just reading.

But in any case the number actively participating is low, and Venture Capitalist Fred Wilson has posed these excellent questions about those who do *not* participate:

Why aren't they coming?

What will bring them into online social media?

What do/will they expect from social media?

Will they want to share?

What will get them to stay?

Fred is optimistic about a future where everybody plays and everybody wins and that is appealing. However I wonder if we will find that the number of participants will never increase past a certain point. What percentage of the population simply has no desire to actively participe in social media in its current forms? I do think that the coming plethora of social community widgets inspired by Facebook, Myspace, Google, MyBlogLog, and others will create a "friendlier" face for social media, and encourage socializing via a person's favorite niche website.

The short answer to Fred's questions is simply that people want what people want, and when they find it online they will hang around. When they find a way to easily socialize with others in their niche they'll hang around even more.

Facebook Platform Now Open Source

Facebook announced today that it will be opening up its code. Dubbed Facebook Open Platform or fbOpen, this move is viewed as being in direct competition to Google's OpenSocial which is also an open source development platform for creating social apps.

"The goal of this release is to help you as developers better understand Facebook Platform as a whole and more easily build applications, whether it’s by running your own test servers, building tools, or optimizing your applications on this technology. We’ve built in extensibility points, so you can add functionality to Facebook Open Platform like your own tags and API methods." says Ami Vora, Senior Platform Manager, Facebook. The release is licensed under the Common Public Attribution License (CPAL) and the rest of the code is licensed under the Mozilla Public License (MPL).

Facebook has over 24,000 applications built on its platform, over 400,000 developers building new social apps, and about 140 applications added to their directory per day.

Coffee's for Closers

Go viral or go home

Since 1996 Tim Draper of Draper, Fisher, Jurvetson has claimed he invented “viral” marketing when his portfolio company, Hotmail, included a line on the bottom of each email that said "Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com/."

Although viral marketing as we now know it was used by companies much earlier, the Hotmail example perfectly illustrates why marketers chase “viral” as if it were the cure to stopping spam. After getting the right message, the biggest challenges facing marketers are message distribution and authentication. If someone doesn’t see your message, you lose. If they don’t think it’s legitimate or don’t trust its source, you lose. Viral campaigns solve both those problems; accelerating propagation faster than we could ever do ourselves and authenticating the message by having it delivered by a trusted source. It’s marketing Nirvana. Forget visions of sugar plums dancing through my head - when I sleep I see social networks acting as Force Multipliers; delivering my carefully packaged message to receptive and qualified customers.

Easier said than done

But hey if it were that easy everybody would be doing it. There are many perils on the long winding road up the peak to Marketer’s Paradise not the least of which is crafting the perfect message. But let’s say you get through that, how on earth do you build a messaging vehicle that has the potential to go viral? And even after you do that what’s really the benefit of doing so? Is there any way to measure the effectiveness of viral effectiveness on buying decisions? I mean, even if the message is right and its delivered by a trusted source in a reasonable time frame is it more effective than a billboard in Times Square?

We’re still very early in our understanding of how effective social media and other 2.0ish technologies will be in helping plain Jane campaigns achieve “viral” status, but the returns so far are encouraging.

One thing that’s much harder to measure however is the effect of networks on individual behavioral (buying) decisions. We know that message reception and retention will be higher when coming from “the network”, but how influential is “the network” on decisions overall?

Viral messaging or networked buying?

New research out of Harvard Medical School indicates that social networks may have more to do with individual buying decisions than we thought. When coupled with Social Media Marketing campaigns this can be much more powerful than just a more effective message delivery campaign. Instead of just permeating an effective message, a “tuned” network could theoretically process a message and if followed up with positive product purchase experiences, directly influence the purchasing decisions of others in the network. This makes the “message spreading” potential of viral marketing seem downright anemic. Traditional viral marketing still relies on the effectiveness of my message to be effective. But if this research holds true for Social Media networks, then there might be a more compelling and cost effective way to harness “the network” in marketing campaigns that transcend traditional message delivery.

When thinking strategically, its easy to get caught up in thinking that marketing is about messaging and message delivery. But its not. Its about selling product. Too often I think we’re content with getting qualified buyers to the table. What if we could more directly influence actual buying?

Certain markets are already operating in this paradigm and as I consider new campaigns in the future I will certainly be looking closer at “network influence on buying behavior” campaigns rather than the traditional “network influence on message delivery” projects that have worked for us in the past.

Microsoft Email #2 Leaked: Online Strategy

For those of you trying to figure out where Microsoft is headed or trying to head here is another memo. This time from Satya Nadella, VP Search for Microsoft. On Monday we published Kevin Johnson's email to employees on Microsoft's Key Initiatives.

satyamemo - Upload a doc

Read this doc on Scribd: satyamemo

Microsoft Email Leaked: Focus Search, Social Media, Display Ads & User Experience

From: Kevin Johnson
Sent: Sunday, May 18, 2008 1:30 PM
To: Platforms & Services Division; APSP FTE - Adv & Pub Solutions Platform; Employees.all.corp.adf@main.corp; Employees.all.adf@main.corp
Subject: Online Services Strategy Update

We have been executing against the core strategy I first presented at our Financial Analyst Meeting in July 2007 to go after the growing opportunity in online services and advertising. Four pillars have formed the basis of our strategy:

1. Consolidate ad platform and win in display
2. Innovate and disrupt in search
3. Deliver end-to-end user experiences across PC, phone, and web
4. Reinvent portal and social media experiences

We have many options that support acceleration of our strategy. As announced earlier today, we are also considering new alternatives for a transaction with Yahoo! which do not involve a full acquisition. At this time, we have not made a new bid to acquire all of Yahoo!, but we reserve the right to reconsider that alternative depending on future developments and discussions that may take place with Yahoo!, shareholders of Yahoo! or Microsoft, or with other third parties.

Regardless of the outcome of any new discussions, it is important that we continue to move forward to strengthen our online services business. The fact is that we are not where we want to be in this business yet and we've been in this position longer than we'd all like. To that end, we will be accelerating elements of our core strategy, and breaking ground in new areas.

On Tuesday, Brian McAndrews is hosting advance08, our annual advertising conference here in Redmond. Over 400 leaders from across the media, technology and advertising landscape will be here for two days to engage in dialogue on industry trends and opportunities. These leaders are some of our closest partners in the digital transformation of the advertising industry, and they recognize the increasingly important role Microsoft plays in this transformation.

We are very excited to have these customers and partners on campus.

Brian's keynote will highlight our unique position in the advertising industry. It's amazing to see how far we've come with the aQuantive acquisition in differentiating our advertising platform. This foundation is paying off, with Q3 advertising revenue growth of nearly 40%, a rate that has accelerated over the past two quarters while growth rates at Google, Yahoo and AOL have slowed.

On Wednesday, we will be announcing a major new initiative that our search teams have been driving. We are getting better and better with our core algorithmic search, and at the same time, we are investing to differentiate in vertical experiences and to disrupt the current model. You'll hear more about our plans Wednesday.

advance08 will underscore our commitment to search and online advertising, and you'll continue to see announcements demonstrating our progress in this space. Earlier this week, I spoke to leaders across our online services business about our core strategy, the importance of acceleration and a set of actions we are taking, including:

1. Innovate and disrupt in search - We will disclose some elements of our plans with this week's release of search and sharpen our focus on user experience and business model innovation. The work we have done over the last 4 years on search has established a solid foundation to build upon.
2. Win targeted distribution - With this release of search, we are now ready to throttle up broader distribution initiatives.
3. Reinvent portal and deliver new experiences across PC, phone and web - We are building our new releases of Windows 7, Windows Live wave 3, Windows Mobile 7, Internet Explorer 8, Search and MSN with an eye towards optimizing and unifying experiences and scenarios.
4. Fix our online branding - Our brands are fragmented and confusing today, and we recognize a need to clarify and align our online branding. We are now driving forward to address this opportunity.
5. Win in display advertising - We have an advantage in tools, agency assets/relationships and a team laser-focused on capturing the display ad platform opportunity. As we build from a position of strength, we will increase engineering resources to drive even more innovation.
6. Build on our strengths in Europe - As measured by comScore in March, our online business in Europe is doing well. We have over 3 times the page view volume and nearly 7 times the minutes of usage compared to Yahoo!, and 68% reach to internet users throughout Europe. We will double down on our investments in Europe and expand on this strong position.
7. Expand strategic partnerships - In addition to our organic innovation agenda, we will expand strategic partnerships that increase inventory on our display ad platform, enable new paradigms in search and accelerate growth in key geographies.
8. Pursue small, targeted acquisitions - Looking forward, we will focus on small, targeted acquisitions that support our work in search, complement our value in the ad platform and help us grow scale in key geographies. Recent acquisitions including Rapt and YaData are examples of these types of acquisitions.

The PSD leadership team is actively working on the FY09 budget, including resources and investments to support the actions above. Additional elements of our work will be revealed in the coming weeks, leading to our Financial Analyst Meeting in July where I will share more details on our strategy and business/financial outlook.

As we move forward, I want to remind everyone that we are well positioned to compete. We have some of the industry's best assets on our side: technical and business talent, global scale, a culture of self-criticism and tenaciousness, a healthy balance sheet and an unparalleled product portfolio. It's time for us to seize the opportunity.

Thanks again for your continued leadership and focus on our business. If you have any feedback or thoughts, please feel free to send me mail.

Regards,

Kevin Johnson

Cisco Marketing Has Got Game

Some call it social media excellence some just say we've gone crazy...whatever you call it, it seems to be working.

As an extension to the social media efforts that we're leveraged for Cisco's ASR launch, Cisco announced a tournament around the EDGE QUEST game where they are offering $10,000 cash plus a Cisco ASR 1002 router to the sole winner. Not a bad deal for playing a game but the competition is stiff with a top score currently at 204,540.

I haven't exactly kept it a secret that I'm one of the marketers behind this campaign so of course I think it's cool but here are a few specific reasons why I think it’s working for us:

1. We're reaching our target audience in a new, fun, and engaging way. Last year online gaming attracted 28 percent of the total worldwide online population -- almost 217 million people -- and according to CIMS, 24% of those were IT professionals! Us marketers are always trying to fish in a big pond but it helps when they’re all swimming in the same place.
2. Low cost, high ROI. This program was an extension of an existing program. The EDGE QUEST game was created at launch so the cost of the tournament includes just the "carrot" of $10K plus the router. We also invested a small amount in changing the game a bit for the "money round" of the tournament but no budget went into promotion we focused solely on social media outlets. In return we've had an influx in PR and Blog pick-ups and a substatial increase in traffic to the game and product page. All of this activity of course is being measured and considered as part of the ROI of the campaign.
3. It was just a blast to work on. Hey there's nothing wrong with that - it's fun for the people engaging with Cisco in a new way and it was fun to be part of the marketing team to develop and creatively promote the game and tournament leveraging social media tactics which included a social media release, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Del.icio.us, Digg and Flickr.

This particular campaign won't work for everyone but creating a social marketing campaign can get your customers engaged and extend your message far beyond traditional marketing.

Social Media Strategies Event Wrap-Up

The WebGuild's Social Media Strategies Event on May 7 was very successful and a social affair. Many thanks to the stellar speakers: Sam Lawrence, CMO, Jive Software; Sylvia Marino, Executive Director - Community Operations, Edmunds.com; and Felix Serna, Sr. Director Global eMarketing, Sun Microsystems. They were highly knowledgeable and entertaining, and shared great anecdotes. Thank you as well to all who attended and we look forward to seeing you again. Photos of the event.

Internet Trends 2008

Morgan Stanley has made available their Internet Trends report for 2008. The 72 page report covers:
1) Usage Patterns
2) Social Networking
3) Widgetization
4) Measureability
5) Monetization
6) Facebook Apps
7) Online Ad Spend
8) Online Video
9) Mobile Outlook
10) Emerging Trends
11) Recession Impact

Click to view report on Internet Trends

Journalism, Politics, and Social Media Converge In An Egyptian Jail

The intersection of politics, journalism, and social media became even more striking over the past few days as student journalist James Karl Buck was arrested along with Mohammed Maree, an Egyptian friend who was helping him report on political unrest in Egypt.

In large part thanks to a Twitter post after his arrest, legions of onliners came to his virtual rescue, contacting the US Embassy and the University of California which quickly dispatched an attorney to Egypt to meet with authorities. Buck was soon on a plane out of Egypt, but his friend Maree's whereabouts still appear to be unknown after a second detention by police.

Details of this remarkable and still very active story are at Buck's blog. Maree's wherabouts are still unknown as of this writing at 10:30 am Saturday.

Buzzlogic Acquires Social Web Startup Activeweave

The Valley is indeed a small place. On Sunday I was at Brian Solis's party where the who's who or the glitteratti of tech converged. I was speaking with Jean Sini, co-founder of Activeweave and as I started to ask him indepth questions about this company he became silent. I finally asked him "What would the exit strategy for Activeweave look like?", he responded "I am not even thinking about". Oddly enough I received an email from him yesterday and the next thing I know is that Activeweave is being acquired by BuzzLogic which is a social media software company.

Social Media Top Priority For Enterprise

Enterprise 2.0 will become a $4.6 billion industry by 2013, according to a report by Forrester Research. The top priority for enterprises will be social media applications and tools and most of the money is expected to flow to social networking tools and mashups.

Forrester defines Enterprise 2.0 as the corporate version of Web 2.0. Here’s the research firm’s definition:

In Forrester’s view, the key hallmark of Web 2.0 is efficiency for end users, and the ultimate goal is to use technology like Ajax, rich Internet applications, blogs, wikis, and social networks to foster productive, advantageous behavior among employees, customers, partners, and other networks such as Social Computing, the Information Workplace, and collective intelligence.

Across the board, Web 2.0 tools enter a crowded space full of legacy software and processes that are difficult to displace and with which Web 2.0 software must integrate to be fully effective. Integration with lightweight applications like email and Excel, as well as heavier applications like Web content management suites, campaign management software, portal software, and customer relationship management (CRM) systems, must all be addressed over time.

AOL Spheres It With Acquistion

AOL announced today that it purchased Sphere for an undisclosed amount. The company responsible for the "Sphere It" link which appears on a growing number of sites, describes itself as connecting your current articles to contextually relevant content from your archives as well as from blogs, media stories, video, photos, and ads across the web.

According to Ron Grant, AOL President, the acquisition will help AOL enhance content on its own sites and distribute its content across Sphere's third-party publisher network. Additionally, the acquisition provides AOL with access to advertising inventory across Sphere's network, while growing its reach to content publishers via the widget. Sphere was founded in 2005 and is based in San Francisco.

Social App Maker Loomia Gets $5 Million

Congratulations to Ken Fromm, David Marks and the Loomia team on closing their $5 million series A round led by Asset Management Company and joined by strategic investors NBC Peacock Ventures and Telefonica.

Loomia makes social applications like this Facebook app called SeenThis?, which allows users to see what their various friends are reading. The idea here is that a reader of the Wall Street Journal might want to know the stories their friends find interesting, in addition to links served up by behavioral and contextual targeting.

Loomia launched the application in January with the WSJ, NBC Universal and CNET. The company shares revenue with publishers from the additional traffic from social networks generated by the application. CEO Dave McMurtry said Loomia would use the funds to build additional products and to expand the reach of SeenThis? on other social network platforms.

Starbucks Uses Social Media To Boost Image

Starbucks has turned to social media to improve their products, image and reputation. The company has created a sort of interactive suggestion box to solicit feedback from customers, employees and partners. The site an elaborate production and it is hosted at SaleForce.com. They could have achieved the same thing by using simple community building and rating software instead of the current expensive solution. Starbucks' problems are associated with its core business and I am not sure even the best social media technologies will solve them. The stock has taken a deep dive from $47 to new lows of $17 in light of serious competition from Peet's Coffee, McDonald's and Dunkin' Donuts. I have a suggestion start by lowering prices and spend the millions instead to reward frequent customers with a point of sale program like "Buy 6 and get the next FREE".

Enterprise Social Media Adoption Ramping Up

A report issued by Society for New Communications Research reveals that many companies are adopting social media as a marketing tool however they are struggling to find effective metrics.

The report is based on findings from a survey of 297 advertising, marketing, PR and corporate communications professionals, 57% felt social media tools are becoming more valuable, 27% of whom say that social media is a core element of their communications strategy.

The most popular social media tools used were;
1) Blogs - 78%
2) Online Video - 63%
3) Social Networks - 56%
4) Podcasts - 49%

Awareness and engagement were cited as the most important criteria for evaluating the effectiveness of the social media in addition to the following:

* Enhancement of relationships with key audiences
* Enhancement of reputation
* Search engine ranking of website
* Customer awareness of program
* Click-thrus to website
* Comments/posts relevant to company or products
* Social media coverage
* Unique visitors from influencers’ sites

Researchers expected social media to be more effective when targeted at younger age groups, with 18-25 being the most likely to be influenced. However, the over-65 age group closely trailed the under-18 and 26-35 age brackets.

Is Word of Mouth the Great Local Search Disruptor?

Was reading this morning a great analysis by Mathew Ingram about a New York Times article describing the way "young people" get/read their political news. It's clearly more and more about word of mouth and your social graph.

As Mathew says: "It’s not that there is anything earth-shatteringly new in the piece, mind you. But I think it does a great job of describing how digital “word of mouth” — in other words, social networking of all kinds including Twitter, IM, Facebook and so on — has become a dominant means of news delivery for young people in a way that I’m not sure old geezers like myself quite grasp, no matter how often people describe it"

The Times sums it up: "In essence, they are replacing the professional filter — reading The Washington Post, clicking on CNN.com — with a social one. (...) In one sense, this social filter is simply a technological version of the oldest tool in politics: word of mouth."

What it means: I remember when I joined Yellow Pages Group in 1999 (called Bell ActiMedia at the time), old-timers used to tell me that the biggest "competitor" to directory publishers wasn't other directory publishers (or Google or other online directories), it was word of mouth. People have always asked their friends for recommendations and it has always represented a large volume of local search "queries".

Admittedly, news and local search are not totally the same. Local search information is usually more of a pull (i.e. someone looking for a product/service) than a push (i.e. someone broadcasting information about a new merchant they found). It's also more "evergreen" than news, i.e. unless you're a total local merchant junkie, you don't need to learn in a timely fashion about a new restaurant opening in your neighborhood. But there's the seed out there of future consumer behavior which could create a great disruption effect on local search. Who knows? It might become valuable to broadcast information about your favorite local merchants. As I estimated in this blog post, there's potentially 7 more times online local conversations than online directories searches currently. Anyone who successfully harness these conversations will create very valuable local search inventory.

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.

Does Anybody Pay Attention To Banner Ads

That is the billion dollar question being asked by ad executives everywhere according to a report by Ad Age. They are finally realizing that no one pays attention to online banner ads. Banner ads offer web publishers a means to monetize their traffic but the report questions how long it can last. Advertisers will realize that they are not getting the bang for their buck as they hoped and will find alternative ways to achieve their goals than banner ads. TechDirt suggests that Advertising Is Content and Content Is Advertising and offers the following recommendations for "brand" marketers who are starting to worry about the effectiveness of banner ads.

1. The captive audience is dead. There is no captive audience online. Everyone surfing the web has billions of choices on what they can be viewing, and they don't want to be viewing intrusive and annoying ads. They'll either ignore them, block them or go elsewhere.
2. Advertising is content. You can't think of ads as separate things any more. Without a captive audience, there's no such thing as "advertising" any more. It's just content. And it needs to be good/interesting/relevant content if you want to get anyone to pay attention to it.
3. Content is advertising. Might sound like a repeat of the point above, and in some ways it is -- but it's highlighting the flip side. Any content is advertising. It's advertising something. Techdirt content "advertises" our business even if you don't realize it. Every bit of content advertises something, whether on purpose or not.
4. Content needs to be useful/engaging/interesting. This simply ties all of that together. If you want anyone to pay attention to your content (which is advertising something, whether on purpose or not) it needs to be compelling and engaging.

Online Advertising Shift To Continue In 2008

Interesting comment by David Hallerman, senior analyst at eMarketer

"Several elements unique to the Internet will support continued US ad spending growth even if other media falter."

"The greater ability to measure ads online will likely encourage marketers with reduced budgets," Mr. Hallerman said. "Those same marketers are finding that the audiences they need to target are spending more of their media time on the Web."

Search will account for the largest portion of online ad spending in 2008, at 40%. That percentage will decrease slightly through 2012, when it will account for 37.3% of US online ad spending. Conversely, spending on rich media and video advertising is set to grow as a percentage of online ad spending, rising to 18.5% in 2012 from 10.2% in 2008.

Bear Stearns analyst Alexia Quadrani said US ad spending would increase 4% in 2008, up from an estimated 3.3% in 2007. Ms. Quadrani said that, despite fears about the economy, marketers still have reason to spend on advertising. "Many marketers face an extremely competitive landscape with products that aren't very different from those of rivals. They also have raised prices and need to advertise to get consumers to continue to buy their goods."

Video - Social Bookmarking 101

Here is a video explaining Social Bookmarking and how it works. See also post on Social Bookmarking Going Enterprise.

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 Bookmarking Going Enterprise

Social bookmarks are joining the ranks of utility navigational elements like print and email as a standard feature. For companies integrating Social Marketing into their Web Strategies and adopting Social Bookmarking, this can be a competitive advantage.

Bookmarking 2.0 or Social Bookmarking has been popular for about five years now. The old-school way of bookmarking web pages using your browser toolbar to "Add to Favorites" in IE or "Bookmark this Page" in Firefox is now considered archaic, basic, and standard. Newer and more advanced bookmarking tools have spawned which allow users to save links to pages using varying bookmarking services such as Del.icio.us, Stumbleupon, Google, and Yahoo.

The basic premise behind this kind of bookmarking is:

• Portability - to allow users to save their bookmarks online and take them with them so they have access to them anywhere they go as opposed to saving their bookmarks to their browser favorites locally on their computer - where they would be inaccessible from any other computer.
  
• Social Bookmarking also allows users to not only save for quick, ubiquitous access but with the capability to share and proliferate content virally if they so choose. In some cases, users can subscribe to web feeds for their list of tagged bookmarks allowing them to be notified when a new bookmark is added.
  
• Users can also tag the content in meaningful ways to them and others making them easier to find and be found.

Having been tried and tested for some time and popularized, the concept made its way to the blogs and news sites such as CNN and NYTimes, and is now making its way more and more to enterprise websites. The business case is similar to that of the standard "Email this page" functionality - referrals! If a visitor on your site reads a great white paper that they find is worth sharing, they can do so easily with potentially many people using a social bookmarking utility. Many users are leary of the "Email this page" option as they fear their email address will being captured for lead generation or other purposes. So, social bookmarks are a safe alternative. For corporate sites using social bookmarking, the relevance seems to be more so for news, press releases, blogs, webcasts/podcasts/videos, and case studies/white papers. But there are many instances where for such bookmarks are made available persistently across sites.

Obama Outmaneuvers Using Web & Social Media

Yes, We Can
Barack Obama has outmaneuvered brand name Hillary Clinton in part by running an efficient campaign utilizing the web and social media technologies. The campaign has been so successful that executives from the world's largest advertising agencies are briefing their biggest clients on the power of the web and social media technologies. Some of these clients control billions in advertising dollars that are deployed across many mediums that influence the way society thinks and makes purchasing decisions.

No, You Can't
When Hillary Clinton donated $5 million to her campaign, the Obama campaign sent out a note saying we have to match this quickly. In 24 hours, people donated $8 million to Obama.

"His web site is amazing. It's completely and continually updated. It feels alive and energetic." said Rishad Tobaccowala, Chief Innovation Officer of Publicis, the French advertising giant. His job is to brief market-leading clients on web and new social media technologies.

The Obama campaign actively uses e-mail to keep supporters informed. For instance when Obama is on a live debate or speaking at a local event, alerts are sent to supporters to make supportive phone calls or arrange for rides where events and primaries are being held. The web is the infrastructure used to support Obama's grassroots efforts, to get people involved and build a community.

On the other hand Hillary Clinton use traditional media almost entirely, like her town meeting on the Hallmark Channel. She got maybe 250,000 viewers. The Obama campaign ran a music video made by the Black Eyed Peas on YouTube and on their home page which gets about 1,000,000 views a day.

Tomorrow, I will look into the blogosphere's coverage of the campaign.

Barack Obama boards his plane in San Antonio, Texas. Photograph by: Reuters

Hillary Clinton gestures to supporters during a campaign stop at the University of Toledo in Ohio. Photograph by: Reuters

Yahoo Acquires Online Video Ad Company

Yahoo is acquiring Maven Networks for US$160 million. Maven, is an online video ad insertion company. Their clients include Fox News, CBS Sports, Hearst, The Financial Times and Gannett.

Maven’s technology identifies the right moment during a video to show a specific ad. Yahoo will integrate the technology in video as clickable ads, interactive ads and short clips. According to Yahoo these formats have proved far more effective than preroll ads, which are ads that appear before the content the viewer is trying to see.

“We really see this deal with Maven as creating one of the most robust video platforms in the industry,” said Hilary Schneider, an executive vice president who oversees Yahoo’s network of advertisers and publishers.

Online advertising accounted for about $US775 million of the US$20 billion spent on online advertising in the United States in 2007 reports eMarketer.

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>>

MySpace Announces Launch of Developer Platform

As read on TechCrunch yesterday morning,

MySpace is finally getting ready to pull the trigger on its long-awaited platform for developers. Starting today, programmers can sign up to register for the MySpace API program, which will go live on February 5th. The APIs will allow developers to create social applications for MySpace much like they can already for Facebook. The platform will be compatible with Google’s OpenSocial platform, meaning that applications written for OpenSocial will work on MySpace with a few minimal tweaks.



More details will come out later about what exactly the APIs will allow developers to do, but at a high level they will allow for deeper integration into MySpace than can currently be done with Flash widgets. The APIs we believe will support Flash, iFrame elements and Javascript snippets, and give developers deeper access to MySpace member profile information and their connections. Developers also will be able to make money from advertising associated with their applications.

What it means: with all the talks about Facebook in the last 6 months, we tend to forget MySpace is still a major force in the social networking world. According to this recent eMarketer article, "The site received 72% of US visits to social networks in December 2007 alone" with Facebook a distant second at 16.03%. In terms of reach, MySpace had close to 72M unique visitors in October 2007 (source: eMarketer quoting ComScore) giving the site 40% reach of the US online market (Facebook is at 18%). In November, Compete data showed that only 20% of MySpace members were also on Facebook. So, if you're interested in reaching these 72M users, get in line to get a developer access.

Top 5 Social Media Sites

Here are a list of the top 5 social media sites as I see it and why.



Digg: We all know Digg, one of the most popular social news sites. It is also the first of its kind and has many loyal users who are working on the backend of Digg to bring in news to the homepage of Digg, where most people arrive. One can expect to find funny and interesting videos and images with stories from popular blogs on Digg. Kevin Rose, Founder of Digg, was looking for $300 million buyout of Digg, but as I had noted, it seems to be pretty difficult.

Reddit: While Digg started by centering on tech news and then expanding its domain, on Reddit it's mainly the political news that rule the roost. With a much simpler interface - in fact, too simple, I think it survives because it serves a niche.

Newsvine: This site has a bit more of a traditional look with its content being not wholly user contributed but also automatically picked from sources like Associated Press, ESPN, New Scientist, etc. Of course, users can submit their stories too, but self promotion there is heavily frowned upon!!! Its interface and look and feel though is much admired.

Mixx: Now, this site is said to have a future. Though presently, a small but active community, it has mainly received good reviews. Recently, it introduced features for private or public groups inside its community which basically did away with the need for Digg clones. Another reason behind the rise of Mixx was that it got be an alternate site for Digg refugees, people who were banned from Digg or frustrated because of the untransparent way in which Digg functions. What I am referring to, is buries of certain stories and account bans that happen on Digg without giving a clear reason and being unresponsive to their claims. Many of these users have moved over to Mixx as can be seen by Digg related stories which often make it to their homepage :).

Propeller: This site was touted to be the one among many Digg clones that were present but has not really lived up to its initial publicity. Even though it has grown slowly, I am waiting to see what is unique thing they will try to do or to find a niche that would bolster their growth.

SocialMedia: Wannabe Mecca of Social Apps and Widgets

SocialMedia is a well chosen name for a startup which in their words is aiming to be provide services to Manage, Market and Monetizing apps to developers on platforms like MySpace and Facebook. Managing here refers to a developer being able to track their apps while Marketing means SocialMedia providing services which will enable a developer's application to grow (virally). As we know, in a viral platform like Facebook or even Digg, to attain popularity one needs an initial base of users after which growth is pretty much spontaneous. This is where SocialMedia has stepped in to help apps become viral. Note also here a viral calculator which claims to predict the cost of each new user. Of course, its quite low mainly because of the Facebook referral effect due to its feeds and thats why developer love it most for.

SocialMedia is also an ad network helping developers monetize their ads. Other players in this arena are startups like Lookery, Rockyou, Cubics etc. This ad network was launched back in late August. While giving developers about $1-$3 for every thousand users, as mentioned, developer Greg Thompson who developed Aquarium Application had earned $100,000 in the first 3 months of his joining the network. You can have a look at their Appsaholic application if you are interested in the popularity and growth of some of the popular Facebook apps.

SocialMedia was one of initial developers for the Facebook Platform. It launched Food Fight and Happy Hour applications which attained quite a bit of popularity. Now, in their own words Social Media has developed as a way of providing services to applications after they felt a need for managing, marketing, and monetizing the apps themselves. It is a good strategy which has payed off well till now. There have been some apprehensions about this kind of advertising on Facebook apps which involves one application advertising other applications, so I am going to be very interested in how advertising is handled in the Facebook apps context.

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.

The Problem of Monetizing Twitter

Ok, we know that Twitter has been revolutionary and its growth has been exponential like a dream Web 2.0 app with its unique idea of restricting message length and centering them around the question "What are you doing?". Also, now that they have a nicely working (though sometimes a bit shaky) platform with useful third party apps, I am sure they are looking at some way to monetize it. But how do you monetize it? For instance, putting up advertisments in their empty space on the right is an option. However, to this straightforward approach therein lies a problem, as I noted before too. People on a Twitter page would be looking for info on what their friends are doing and not interested in related content that is ads. So, even though simple ads would work, they won't be too profitable. To think about this problem, we need to consider that what are the assets of Twitter. The assets, of value, presently is the technology or their platform and users who are using it. So, monetizing that has to be done using these assets.

Users send and receive twits via mobile phones or the Twitter interface. So, it would be a good idea to send like every 10th-20th, some nth twit a targeted advertisment. Users can receive them as SMS on their mobiles. These advertisments would be contextual or targeted i.e. based on twits that are generated by that particular user. In essence, it is similar to how Facebook has placed advertisments in feeds of friends that each user receives. These ads are where twitter sends ads to users. There can, however, be a similar model where advertisers are treated as users. Then, behind the screen, users interested in a particular area will be made follower of these advertisers thus receiving twits from them. Another similar model is where advertisers are charged in the order of, for instance $5, for sending a message to some thousand users. Note that here all that is proposed is sending advertising twits to users.

Another way is that they offer their technology to businesses which have a need for sending messages. For instance, providing the infrastructure when businesses and companies need to send updates like appointments over a secure channel. Or pages like Companies'/Bands' blogs where updates about their products/services are put up and people can follow them. That is, charging for micro-blogs. Now, as posted here, Evan Williams, Twitter founder says:

"Two more-straightforward ideas:1) Ads on the site. We have a little AdSense on there now, but we haven't really tried. As the traffic grows, some tasteful sponsorships might be sellable. 2) Charging companies who are using it for marketing or other commercial purposes. If an organization finds Twitter to be a valuable communication tool with their customers/constituents/etc -- especially if we're sending lots of SMS's for them, which cost us money -- it seems viable to make an offering around that."

People are thinking about viable and effective advertising models for Web 2.0 websites/social services. The same problem is faced by Facebook and it would be interesting to see which generic approach succeeds.

Image Source: Ambermac

Data Portability: LinkedIn Allows You To Export Your Data

Big storm this week in the blogosphere as Robert Scoble's Facebook account was temporarily suspended for breaking the site's terms of service. He was using a new tool from Plaxo Pulse that was extracting and matching Plaxo and Facebook users. As Robert said: "I wanted to get all my contacts into my Microsoft Outlook address book and hook them up with the Plaxo system, which 1,800 of my friends are already on." Scoble was eventually reinstated but the debate about data portability now rages on (see also DataPortability.org).

A few minutes ago, I discovered that LinkedIn now allows you to export your data in various formats (.CSV and .VCF). I don't know how long they've been offering this feature (not long I suspect) but it's an extremely smart move to position themselves as the definite business-oriented social network. Bravo!

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.

Best Search Marketing Blogs For November

Here’s a roundup of the best search/marketing posts during November. This summary was compiled by Matt McGee, SEO Specialist, Marchex.

Social Media

• Muhammad/SEL: It's The (Other) Algorithm, Stupid! Understanding DiggRank
  
• Muhammad/Search Engine Land: The Social Media Manual: Read Before You Play
• Jennifer/Search Engine Guide: How Do You Value Social Media?
• Todd/Stone Interactive: 9 Simple Ways for Small Businesses to Leverage Social Media
• Pat/Lonely Marketer: 7 Ideas For Social Media And Business
• David/Search Engine Guide: 5 Ways Small Business Can Benefit From Social Media/Networking Sites
• Josh/hyku: Starting Small with Social Media: Georgia Aquarium Flickr Photogroup

SEO

• Lee/Top Rank: Press Release SEO Tips
• Andy Beard: SEO Linking Gotchas Even The Pros Make
• Michael/SoloSeo: 7 Steps to Get Your New Site Indexed in 24 hours
• SEOBook: The Blogger's Guide to SEO
• Ross/Stepforth: How Glossaries and FAQs Can Improve Search Engine Rankings
• Andrew/Local Search Guide: Yelp SEO Analysis: Part One

PPC

• Amber/PPC Hero: Use These 5 Holiday Tips To Help Increase Your PPC Revenue
• Ryan/rkgblog: Starting from Scratch: A Paid Search Primer
• Marty/aimClear: Challenges of Scaling Big PPC Management for Small SEM Shops
• Amber/PPC Hero: 5 More Common PPC Mistakes…
• Jennifer/Search Engine Guide: Five Common Paid Search Mistakes That Can Sink Your Campaign

Google

• Bill/SEO by the Sea: Google Patent on Web Spam, Doorway Pages, and Manipulative Articles
• Dan/SEO FastStart: Why Google Can't Just "Dump" PageRank
• John Andrews: The SEO, the Press, and Pandering
• Robert/Search Engine Guide: Composing the Perfect Letter of Surrender

Small Business

• Chris Brogan: Small Businesses And Social Media
• Michael/Planet Chiropractic: 23 Surefire Small-Business Marketing Tips for 2008

Local Search

• Mike/Understanding Google Maps: How many Google Coupons are there?

Link Building/Viral Marketing

• Aaron/SEObook: Publicize Your Publicity to Create Successful Viral Marketing Campaigns

Blogs / Blogging

• Avinash/Occam's Razor: Ten More Blogging Tips From A Novice Blogger
• Andy Beard: Optimizing HTML Links In The Aftermath Of A Blog Storm
• Loren / Search Engine Journal: 20 Essential Blog Directories to Submit Your Blog To

Analytics

• Avinash / Occam's Razor: Blog Metrics: Six Recommendations For Measuring Your Success
• Alex/Search Marketing Gurus: Compete Search Analytics - My Review

Rants

• Michael/Graywolf: Christina Warren of Download Squad is a Clueless Idiot
• Lisa/Bruce Clay blog: Are You a Social Media Idiot?
• Amber/PPC Hero: Stop Complaining, Start Educating!
• John Andrews: Google vs. Innovation

LOL Funny!

• Philipp/Google Blogoscoped: What If Gmail Had Been Designed by Microsoft?
• Jeff/Search Engine People: The First (un)Official Sphinn Awards - Day 1
• Michael/Solo SEO: What the Customer Actually Wanted

Introducing Sebastien Provencher

Just a short note to introduce myself. I'm the latest addition to the WebGuild blogger team. My areas of expertise are local search and social media. Hope you enjoy my contributions to the site!

My official bio:
Sebastien Provencher is Co-Founder & VP, Product Management at Praized Media, a newly-funded stealth start-up operating in the local/social space. He has more than 10 years experience in local search, interactive entertainment and online media. From 1999 to 2007, Sebastien played an instrumental role in formulating Yellow Pages Group's online strategy, notably developing their most successful online advertising product ever (DirectoryPlus), striking a strategic partnership with Google, and creating a vision around local search. Sebastien is also the blogger behind The Praized Blog. He can be reached at seb AT praized.com.

OpenSocial Video

The video for "OpenSocial—High Octane For Widgets & Web Apps" is now available. The session is moderated by Daya Baran, President, WebGuild and features Chris Schalk, Google Developer Programs, Google; Joseph Smarr, Chief Platform Architect, Plaxo; and Akash Garg, Co-Founder/CTO, Hi5 Networks. Check it out!

First Impressions of Flock – The Social Web Browser

After reading about the Flock release in this blog post which nicely outlines the features, I downloaded the new ‘Social Web Browser’ to give it a test drive. Here are my first impressions:

The good: For a social media nut like myself this is pretty cool. Similar to Plaxo Pulse it aggregates all of my social networking profiles but they’ve done it in the browser – a tool that I use everyday. So I can stay connected to my social graph while doing my daily activities.

The bad: It feels busy. There’s a lot going and it’s a little distracting with all the buttons, options and links. I think it would appear less busy if they would have chosen muted colors for some of the buttons and links. Also they didn’t think about integrating other RSS readers, they only gave the option to use the browser as an aggregator. I’m pretty happy with Google Reader and would have liked to simply login and access all of my feeds through a widget or something.

Favorite Feature: The drag and drop web clipboard – this is a place to temporarily save images, links, and even text. Today I often use an email window to save things I want to go back to that day and this may serve as an interesting alternative.

The bottom line: I like it enough to keep using it –for now. I’m going to give it a week and see if I can make this an everyday browser or as Scott Gilbertson says, a ‘weekend browser’. It will all depend on if I actually use the ‘social’ features and if all of the options don’t distract me from doing my job.

If you find that you have a little extra time between holiday shopping this weekend I say give Flock a try and see what you think. If you’re already a user of Flock I’d love to hear about your experience with it.

The Web Is Better When It's Social

Maka maka. It's official! Google's platform agnostic API OpenSocial is live. Per its Product Managers:

"OpenSocial is a set of common APIs that will work on many different social websites, including MySpace, Hi5, Ning, orkut, and LinkedIn, among others. In addition, this allows developers to learn one API, then write a social application for any of those sites. Learn once, write anywhere, if you will. And because it's built on web standards like HTML and JavaScript, developers don't have to learn a custom programming language." (like Facebook's proprietary ftml maybe?!)

"Perhaps most interestingly, we will see social capabilities move into new contexts. OpenSocial will also work in non-traditional social contexts, such as on Salesforce.com and Oracle. With a common set of APIs, it will be even easier to extend social functionality. Beyond the many fun and entertaining social applications we already have seen, we think we'll see a number of social applications emerge in business contexts."

The business applications and adaptations of this should very interesting.

Next Gen Social Networks

The video of the October event on the Next Generation of Social Networking featuring Socialzr, RockYou, and Appfuels is now available. If you missed the event or simply want a re-cap, check it out to hear what the panelists had to say on this hot topic.

Web Strategy: How to Evolve Your Irrelevant Corporate Website

Traditional Web Marketing needs to evolve, and this post intends to kick start the next generation.

What’s a corporate web site?
It’s the domain they use after every advertisement where you can learn more about a company, ya know it, anycompany.com.

But we’re tired of the corporate website and all it’s happy marketing speak, stock photos of smart looking dudes or minority women crowded around the computer raving about your product, the positive press release, the happy customer testimonials, the row of executive portraits, the donations your corporate made to disaster relief, the one-sided view never ends.

While some of your traffic may be going up on your website, it’s not indicative of how corporate websites are being used. Analytics don’t tell us why people go to your site, and it may not be for the reason you want them to.

[The corporate website is an unbelievable collection of hyperbole, artificial branding, and pro-corporate content. As a result, trusted decisions are being made on other locations on the internet]
Why is your corporate website irrelevant?

Marketing has shifted, it’s no longer on two domains
Many web marketers are under the impression that the battles are only fought within Google search results and on the corporate domain. In reality, marketing has spread to many other areas where conversations occur: social networks, rating sites, chat rooms, and even blogs. I dedicated a whole post to why marketing is not on two domains only.

Decisions are made before they go to the corporate website
Yesterday, at lunch with a college student, she told me that her peers get ideas about product decisions on consumer rating sites, and from their peers. They use instant messaging, facebook, (and other social networks) and rarely directly type in a domain name to corporate website. If this holds true, then it’s assumed that prospects make decisions on other websites BEFORE they come to the corporate website to get factual information.

Factual information
Legally, corporations need to disclose product details, this is a strong case for the use of the corporate websites. However in my continued conversation with the Generation Y, she continued to tell me that she used corporate websites to get core feature stats and pricing, but that’s after she made a decision based upon her peer feedback to visit the corporate site.

The future, and how to stay relevant:

Websites are created with customers
This is disruptive, but I predict that the most relevant future websites will have customers building websites alongside employees. The most effective websites will contain a balanced point of view of both the product team and customers –even if they have qualms with the product.

Unfiltered customer testimonials will appear
You’ll no longer only be the only one publishing to your website, customers, prospects, and other members of the community will have direct access to publish on your website. Sure, there will be controls to make sure the content is somewhat factual or reviewed, but it will be obvious to many that the only voice won’t be the marketing one.

Content will have both negative and positive views about your products
This one is hard to swallow, but how do you build the most trust? By being open, authentic, and transparent to the marketplace. We know from research that the highest degree of trust comes from those ‘like me’, a savvy marketer will allow content to appear from peers, customers, and the market. These will not always be a product rave, in fact it may be downright criticism, the goal? To take that feedback, and demonstrate in public how you will improve your offerings in plain view. Case study: Dell has done this with IdeaStorm.

Your website will be a Community Resource
This means that you’ll put your customers first, No Really, I mean it. This means providing analysis of not just yourself but to competitors as well, this means that you’ll link to competitors. Crazy? I did this myself at my previous role as a community manager, I created a wiki for customers that linked to competitors, and it made me more relevant.

[The corporate website of the future will be a credible source of opinion and fact, authored by both the corporation and community. The result? A true first-stop community resource where information flows for better products and services]

Outcomes
Customers will make your site the first place to go for information, trust will increase, you may be able to build better products and services with real-time customer feedback, and most importantly, you’ll be a community resource that will help you meet your customer needs faster.

Visualize
We’ll start to see customers help write the corporate newsletter, feeds pulling in industry blogs, media (audio and video) customers rating and ranking and voting for what features they want improved, product teams working directly with customers in real-time, and customers self-supporting each other.

Written by and reprinted with the permission of Jeremiah Owyang, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research

Social Media is killing quality content. Do the info slaves need more food?

The news last month that Microsoft may wind up offering Facebook $500,000,000 for a 5% stake is great news … for the tiny number of Facebook insiders who stand to gain from this move which would effectively value the social media giant at about $10,000,000,000. However for the millions of Facebook folks who provide the content and faces that drive Facebook it means … um … more advertising.

Gee, thanks Facebook.

When the legions of "Information Serfs" wake up they may start to realize that we have got a potential crisis as small numbers of “info intermediators” like Google and Facebook scoop up the lion’s share of the online ocean of cash while the “info creators” are distinctly second class citizens in the big show. Small time web publishers and mom and pops are in this group. But so are all the major newspapers like the New York Times, Washington Post, and WSJ. Also most other print outlets who tend to make relatively little online despite offering much of the web’s best content to date, especially now that the foolish paywalls of some newspaper outlets like NYT are coming down. Having no paywall will allow them to make more, but it’s clear they are unlikely to make enough to keep all that high quality content coming.

Print and newspapers are hurting and that is going to continue. That’s OK as long as websites and blogs continue to provide great insight and breaking news, but it’s about time the big players in the online world start working *a lot harder* to feed the hands that are feeding them. It’s about time they realize that the best web ecosystem must encourage the production of high quality content as well as the valuable but mind-numbing data detritus left over from social networking gone wild.

Yes, it is true that revenue sharing programs like Google adsense give publishers a fair share of the revenues that come directly from activity at their websites. However most of Google’s money (and virtually all of Myspace and Facebook revenues), comes from advertising they run off their own sites - sites that benefit indirectly but dramatically from the oceans of content they feature, index, or otherwise mashup, clip, and snip. Sure the information intermediators should make *a lot* from categorizing *our content* so effectively, but should they make 100%? No, they should not.

One can make a good case that this feudal funding arrangement was fine when the big players turned around and did things with the big money that make the internet ecosystem thrive and grow in ways it could not without their involvement. But I think that argument was far more valid a few years ago than now.

What ideas are left in the dust as the Youtubes and Facebooks - built squarely on the shoulders of other people’s content - scoop up the super gigantic big money? It is not a problem that startups die - in fact it’s a good part of the ruthless evolution of technological things - but it’s problematic when the lion’s share of online resources from the work of so many are redistributed to so few. Not because this is “unfair”, but because this type of inequity does not lead to optimal system efficiency and growth.

Social media in all its various and sundry forms is a wonderful development. Finally we see clearly that people, not computers, will be at the heart of future online developments - probably for some time into the future. Facebook and it's users are now leading with big innovations in this area, though Alice at NYT thinks this could lead to unintended consequences.

To protect this new socially charged online environment from the ravages of our silly, stupid and prurient human interests we’ll need better incentives than the big players currently offer to quality content producers. Those incentives will ultimately shape the quality of online content for years to come.