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.
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
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.
Here is a recent Social Media report from Universal McCann. The report has data points on global usage of social networking sites, blogging, content sharing and creation. The report is not available for distribution but McCann was kind enough to provide a download link to the report.
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.
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 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.
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 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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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 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.
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 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.
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 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.
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 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.
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 Virtu
DiggIt
Del.icio.us
Stumble It!
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 
Forrester defines Enterprise 2.0 as the corporate version of Web 2.0. Here’s the research firm’s definition: 
AOL announced today that it purchased 
Congratulations to Ken Fromm, 
Interesting comment by David Hallerman, senior analyst at eMarketer
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.
