Storytelling and the Blogospehere -Third Thursday April 2007

This is the recording from Third Thursday’s monthly meetup in Silicon Valley on April 19, 2007. This month’s discussion featured a great presentation from Elisa Camahort and Kathy Klotz-Guest called “How Storytelling is (Still) Critical to Communications in the Blogosphere”. There are really some wonderful insights here that get at the heart of branding, engagement and blogging’s role facilitating both. From the event’s description:

As companies try to figure out how to use blogs and other social media tools to engage with customers, successfully participating in the blogosphere remains a bit of mystery to many marketing and PR professionals. Social media initiatives can’t be spin, but companies must have a compelling story to tell about their brand, culture, products, and customers in their online activities. At the heart of every communications effort must be a story. Storytelling can be an organic process that comes from open dialog with customers.

More feedback on the Meetup from attendees and a full description of the event is available on the group’s Meetup page.

Many thanks to Jen McClure and the Society of New Communications Research for sponsoring this month’s Meetup.

Download MP3 File

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Social Media Now: DIY Media Makers Arise!

Thanks to tech journalist Mathew Ingram for flagging a post by Ethan Kaplan that laces into the received wisdom about DIY media, “user generated content” and big media’s attempts to adapt to this new environment.

The essence of Kaplan’s argument is that thinking about media created outside of the corporation as “user generated content” presupposes, and thereby reinforces, the traditional media hierarchy of professional creator/owner/producer at the top and consumer/user at the bottom.

It’s a point well taken and well made:

The whole concept behind “User Generated Content” as a means of describing content created by and for the People is flawed in that it simultaneously is presupposing a hierarchal difference — subjugating the “User” as a different class — as its maintaining this hierarchy by virtue of a disingenuous altruistic elevation of said content to that of Corporate under the guise of Marketing.

Kaplan, who is senior director of technology at Warner Brothers Records, focuses his discussion almost entirely on video, and he has nothing nice to say about things like the Modest Mouse/MTV video contest that invites fans to create animation that will be inserted behind the band in a video (To older readers the contest will be reminiscent of Winky Dink, our formative experience with interactive video, a cartoon in which children were expected at some point to lay a transparency over the TV screen and draw props for the characters to use at key points in the plot development):

Is it really UGC if all the User is doing is generating content as a way of offsetting cost and onsetting “hipness” through the proxy of adoption of an organic concept by what in the end are marketing departments at big companies (and I do understand the intentional irony here, being where I work and all)?

Kaplan’s repose is a call to action:

Take back the media! Do not partake in systems meant to enforce hierarchy, and instead embrace those that seek to diminish and eliminate it.

Remember: nothing stands between the quality or distribution of you and the media companies except the cost of the toys. The quality is not quantifiable different, neither is access.

I think that kind of response is a little facile, neglecting to deal with the diverse motives people have for creating online content, the honest-to-god difficulty of drawing attention to one piece of content in a infinite-channel universe and the ease with which traditional media can co-opt DIY media (as TV news organizations did very effectively in covering the Virgina Tech massacre). But certainly Kaplan’s piece provides food for thought.
Akamai Launches BitTorrent Add-On: The embedding of social functionality into the Web browser continues. Red Swoosh, which Akamai purchased a few weeks ago for $15 million, yesterday released FoxTorrent, a Foxfire BitTorrent add-on that theoretically allows media streaming from torrents.

I remain skeptical about BitTorrent’s potential as a mainstream consumer media distribution technology. In it’s wild west, user controlled form it’s clunky and unreliable. In the controlled centralized form (a la BitTorrent Inc.’s store) it offers users few advantages over other P2P technologies. And the need for a client limits the number of consumers who will be willing to try it. But if BitTorrent has a future, a browser plug-in that enables streaming is an important step forward (even if the streaming functionality remains limited because of the way BitTorrent distributes data). Can’t wait to try it out.

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Quick Update from San Francisco

Been a tough and busy few days, but today is going to rock (though losing the earlier version of this post was not the highlight I hoped for). Tonight in San Francisco Karen O’Brien and I are leading a discussion on connecting with our communities - how to find them, how to determine where to get involved and how much social engineering is required to make the networks of people work. Many thanks to Crimson Consulting for sponsoring this month and next month’s refreshments. There are still a few open spots if you are interested, expecting a few to show up out of the 80+ registered.

In a few moments, I am going to start a little Ustream experiment, with a call in consulting show called Chris’ Insytes - if you have some questions about social media strategy, or you have a specific challenge your are now facing, join me in the chat room (or direct Twitter me, username is chrisheuer) and let’s see if we can come up with something innovative and insightful together.  As I always say, “there is no box”…

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Social Media Now: Deflating the Blogosphere, Sony Share

Maybe it’s time for Blogspotting to change it’s name. In the Newsweek online column of that title, Heather Green takes a closer look at numbers provided by Dave Sifry at Technorati. The numbers, first reported early this month in Sifry’s State of the Live Web, suggest that the practice of blogging has plateaued.

Picking up threads from Matthew Hurst and Steve Rubel, Green emphasizes active posting, not the sheer number of blogs,  as the best measure of the blogosphere’s health. Technorati’s threshold for counting a blog as active isn’t a high one–at least one post within 90 days. According to numbers provided to Green, the number of active blogs tracked by Technorati is around 15.5 million. The total number of blogs is 70 million. So only 22% of blogs are active ones.

We already calculated back at the beginning of the month that the rate of daily blog posting per blog has declined slightly– from 2.3% in October to  2.1% at the end of March 2007.  Green finds that the percentage of blogs that are active has also been declining from 36.7% in May 2006 to 20.9% in March 2007.

And, interestingly, the English language blogosphere in particular is shrinking. In October 2006 39% of blog posts were in English. In March 2007 only 33% were.

In other words, in October 2006, 39% of blog posts were in English. In March 2007, only 33% were in in English.
Sony Shares: The videosharing battle between GooTube and big media is getting a new competitor.  Tomorrow Sony will launch a video sharing site. The unnamed site will be Japanese only, but Sony has said that it will decided about an overseas launch schedule based the Japanese experience. Last August Sony spent $65 million to acquire video-sharing site Grouper. It’s unclear if Grouper technology will power Sony’s new effort.

More social media acquisitions: TheStreet.com has purchased the remaining 50.1% of socially-enabled, and vowelly-challenged financial advice site Stockpickr; and NBC has purchased Rmail, a service provider that integrates RSS feeds into email. Terms of neither deal were announced.

 

 

 

 

 

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Quick Recap of the NYC Social Media Club Meeting 4/23

This month’s meeting was held in conjunction with the Web 2.0 Social Networking meetup. Thanks to Brett and Peter for making us feel welcome.

This wasn’t a typical NYC Social Media Club meeting, which is good. It is useful to have meetings to see product/company pitches, especially local companies in the Web 2.0 space. There was also good socializing-networking going on in the bar space, also a different-not-better change from our regular format.

When we typically meet, we try to have fewer presenters and make sure the entire group is being heard, and that’s not really the style of a meeting in a bar or of this meetup. I want to emphasize here that this is not a criticism of this meetup - as I really enjoyed it and met some good people.

However, my preference is for the format we have had in the past. It is tough these days to find a place to be in a somewhat quiet space and be able to ask tough questions about business and the trends of Web 2.0 and Social Media and get back great answers.
I hope that people are ready for that format, because on May 31 we’ll be joined by at least one special participant who will kick off our discussion on community and on creating a community where the users love you. I’m excited to welcome Craig Newmark to town on that day, and to learn what I can from him about Craig’s list and participate in the discussion.

Powered by ScribeFire.

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Social Media Now: Monetizing Widgets, MySpace: Link Nazi, Social News

Bits and pieces this morning from around the world of social media.

First, in the wake of the mysterious end to the MySpace/Photobucket war, comes an interesting quick piece by one of my favorite bloggers, Andrew Chen, entrepreneur in residence at Mohr Davidow Ventures, on the subject of monetizing widgets. Widgets=ad networks, Andrew argues. And that means widget makers are faced not only with the challenges of making great widgets but also with the challenges of building sales staffs and paying publishers:

This means that companies like Slide, Photobucket, and others will start having to pay a Traffic Acquisition Cost (TAC). For ad networks, this TAC looks like 60-80% to the publisher, but they are given a standard unit with little to no value to the end user. Let’s say that the widgets will get a better position, like 40-50%.

But even once this is solved, they will have to figure out how to monetize the space. They will also have to build out ad sales teams in order to monetize the real estate, and it’ll probably be brand advertising and not direct response. The former is much harder than the latter.

Andrew offers four things widget makers need to do to improve their earning potential including building sales teams and destinations sites of their own. And Chen is down on widget aggregators:

I think one major loser for this perspective on the market is widget aggregators. In those cases, every $100 needs to be split amongst the blog infrastructure, the widget market, the widget aggregator, and potentially the user. Yuck. That’s a bad business to be in.

Second, regular readers know I’m a believer in the creeping decentralization of social networking–moving away from hubs like MySpace and Facebook and towards white label social networks and Net applications (like the browser) with embedded social functionality (with some kind of cross-platform portable ID). It’s a future against which MySpace continues to erect barriers. Several blogs, and several forums for MySpace layout providers, have noticed that MySpace has begun to filter outgoing links posted in comments through a service called Msplinks.com–a property owned by fraud protection service Mark Monitor.

On one hand the move–which replaces direct links to outside sites with links through Msplink–will benefit users by targeted comment spam. On the other hand it gives MySpace the ability to defeat not only businesses it considers parasitic, but even defeat collateral brand building that come by placing links. Writes Hooman Radfar at Widgify:

For example, I posted a link to Widgify to my friend’s MySpace page. I set the link target to:

http://www.widgify.com

When the link was published to his MySpace comment section, the link target was replaced with:

http://www.msplinks.com/MDFodHRwOi8vd3d3LndpZGdpZnkuY29t

This means that MySpace can now not only track link-out activity, but can also block outbound links. This only seems to be the case with new comments. Old comments still point to their original link targets. MySpace has already turned off links for Flash widgets, so there is definitely a pattern emerging. This activity is extremely interesting in light of the upcoming changes coming soon from MySpace competitor, Facebook. Facebook seems to be moving in the opposite direction - opening up to developers. I wonder if MySpace take a hint from web history, or continue to move along their current trajectory. I guess time will tell if Tom still wants to be everyone’s friend.

Finally, in the world of social news, Seattle-based Newsvine launched a redesigned version of its service yesterday. CEO Mike Davidson gives a full wrap up of the new design on his blog. The central premise of the redesign is the ability of users to recreate not only “MY” style news pages but a customized front page for the service as a whole:

We have our own ideas for what the front page of a news site should look like and you have yours. Most major news sites attempt to solve this problem by maintaining their editorially imposed front page and then offering a “My” page which users can play around with and customize. The result of this strategy is almost always two-fold: 1) Barely anyone customizes. 2) Even among those who customize, there is hesitancy among users to give up their daily reading of the front page in favor of the “My” page. This is evident from sites like ESPN and Yahoo News, both of which have feature-rich “My” pages but do a ton more traffic on their front pages.

The move will be an interesting test of an important question in the world of customized news–do end users fail to customize because it’s not easy for them to do so, or do end users fail to customize because they’re more interested in having some third party provide a top level news filter in a world over information overload?

I think social news should function a lot more like Last.FM–I’m must more interested in knowing which news stories are being read by friends who share my interests than I am interested in knowing what news stories are being rated highly by an enormous general audience. A top level news filter based on social profiles and friends, plus distribution via widgets, would do a lot more for the social news business than individual customization or over all ratings at web hubs.

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Can’t We All Just Get Along?

Saw a Tweet from Jeremiah Owyang giving a nod to his boss John Furrier for standing up for his team, and then saw Robert Scoble’s post at the heart of it all, telling people he was going to hang out in the hallway at Microsoft’s Mix 07 Conference since he did not have a conference pass. Apparently, Alfred Thompson thinks that conferences like Mix 07 should only be attended by and reported on, by “people inside the trenches”, “whose business it is to not only understand but use this technology?” He sees little value to the media, and thinks Robert “is a writer for the popular press no real different from some reporter from Wired magazine.” (he also thinks Robert is a nice guy, so don’t go jumping on him for expressing his opinion)

You can think whatever you want about Robert, even insist that he has no real influence in the mainstream portions of society and that he is only important within the Blogosphere’s echo chamber, but that is missing the real point. You can’t marginalize anyone based on the role they are serving in society, especially when that someone has proven themselves to be a good person, worthy and deserving of the trust placed in them by others to shape their opinions of the world. Einstein was famously a patent clerk. Hundreds of important contributors to the advancement of society have held mundane, or even ‘dirty’ jobs.

This is not about Robert and Alfred though, this is about the need to respect other people and not be dismissive of the potential value they can contribute out of hand, for the title they hold or role they serve. For too long we have easily dismissed ‘the media’, ‘the marketing people’, ‘the geeks’ and, as Mary Hodder talked about on her panel at Podcast Hotel the other day, ‘the others’ because they are not like us.

Now, from reading the conversation (via the comments), it seems that Alfred is a pretty decent guy, honest and genuine - but when I read statements such as “Don’t you really want to hear from someone like you?”, it makes me cringe. This is, of course, ok because we like hanging out with people like us, they are our friends, our tribes and our families generally, but we should really find a better way to include more diverse perspectives within the context of conferences such as Mix, Web 2.0 and others. To be clear, I don’t feel the same way about conferences on the latest advances in neuroscience, or white-hat hacking or other very focused professional topics. This is not to say that programming is not a professional topic, it is, but the profession of programming includes many levels of skills and areas of expertise that are important for everyone’s success. (DBA, SYSADMIN, CODE, ARCHITECT, UI, QA and ACTIVE USER to name a few)

Over the past several years, one of the things I have been talking to people about is how much economic value (and hard cash) has been wasted as a result of the marketing people and the technical people not getting along. Trillions of dollars have probably been lost as a result of the fact that these two roles are filled by different types of people - people who are not like each other in many ways (not all the time, I know plenty of people who successfully translate between the two groups or who serve both roles). As I have constantly stated, in the knowledge economy the most important aspect of creating value is the ability of smart people to collaborate with one another. The value of cultural diversity is widely known and lauded, but many people often insist on only hearing and participating in monocultural discussions.

BTW - This is not to say that there can be some really silly things that come from people who don’t understand what we are talking about, which is what I believe Alfred is trying to protect against - along with preventing media from misreporting the story. Indeed, we should create contexts in which experts can gather and explore their expertise, going deeper and advancing their industry/market - this is in fact, a part of our vision with Social Media Club as well. The real issue though is that we should work to create contexts for all of these types of conversations to take place and create good signals about them (via tags and syndicated distribution) so that the right sort of people, with similar expectations participate.
From my perspective, Alfred’s point about Blogs (and direct reporting from ‘experts in the trenches’) replacing the need for mainstream media, actually supports the inclusion of people like Robert and other’s who are ‘not like him’ (Alfred). By this I mean to say, that Blogging is transforming the very nature in which we interact with news and knowledge and each other. It is no longer the one way communications of a static newspaper article, but it is a conversation, with ebb and flow, moving the participants to a deeper understanding through the back and forth exchange and thereby correcting mistakes in early reporting and resolving misinterpretations for the benefit of all.
What is it going to take to open up our discussions and our perspectives, to include more divergent observations, insights and points of view?

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Social Media Now: Climbing the Social Ladder

The blogosphere is full of cynics. And there’s plenty of cynical response on the Net to Forrester’s report on adult social media behavior. The report, which is geared to helping marketers integrate social media into business strategies, proposes a “participation ladder” as a metaphor, with six rungs stepping up from “inactives” at the bottom to “creators” at the top.

Pramit Singh criticizes the report, and all off the meme-making blogosphere punditry, for over hyping recycled information:

If you look at the above graphic, do you see anything new? To me, this looks like they have taken Jason Calacanis’ observation about social networking/web 2.0, namely ‘80% consume, 19% comment, 1% contribute”, added up known observations taken by the Pew Research and voila!, a new report is born.

But there IS new and interesting information in the Forrester report. Most importantly Li and her colleagues have tried to slice online social behavior into narrower segments that the traditional ones of contributor, participant, and tagger. In doing so they challenge the conventional thinking about social segmentation most recently reiterated at Web 2.0 Expo last week by Bill Tacer, general manager of Hitwise, who said:

It’s not the 80-20 rule anymore. It’s 1-9-90.” Spread across the Web, generally 1 percent of visitors are creators and producers, 9 percent are “highly involved participators”,… and 90 percent are consumers or viewers.

Li splits the universe of social media participants into the following categories:

• Creators, who publish blogs, web pages, etc, comprise 13% of users
• Critics, who comment and review, comprise 19%
• Collectors, who tag and bookmark, comprise 15%
• Joiners, who uses social networking sites, comprise 19%
• Spectators, who passively engage with social media content, comprise 33%
• Inactives, who use the Net but not social media, comprise 52%

Obviously the user classes overlap since the percentages add up to well over 100%.
I’m not crazy about Forrester’s metaphor. The ladder is bad because it implies that users climb from the bottom to the top–that “spectating” is a gateway drug on the way to creating. This isn’t true. Also the ladder fails to convey the truth these strata are not discrete–creators are also joiners, for example.

And I would quibble with Forrester’s nomenclature. Collector is the wrong word for someone who shares tags and bookmarks since collectors typically acquire rare stuff and hold it close.

The study also comes up short when it examines the reasons for which people become engaged in social media, slicing those into only three categories–entertainment, career, and family–so broad as to be utterly useless.

But I applaud Forrester for trying to look at the universe of social media through a finer sieve than is typical and I’m particularly interested in a table that Li et al have complied about different behaviors in each of these categories according to age. The table reveals that 18-21 year olds are way more deeply involved in joining social networks than people a little older and those a little younger. Could social the MySpace/Facebook business have peaked with this demographic?

At Skype Journal Phil Wolff proposes an additional ladder, a Ladder of Disclosure–a way of thinking about social media behavior based on how much personal information participants are willing to reveal from live webcam living Twitter addicts at the top to folks off the grid at the bottom. It’s a very interesting way of thinking about the social media universe although Wolff has no survey data to work with. Wolff also notes that Forrester’s ladder misses the mobile Net and live communications systems like IM or Skype.

In other survey news, Liz Gannes at GigaOM reports on a survey that MySpace commissioned of its users, which found, perhaps self-servingly, that there is an exponential increase in brand awareness that comes from social networking campaigns.
Widget Peace: Terms of the armistice have not been announced but MySpace has lifted its ban on video links from photo and video hosting widget maker Photobucket.
Funding News: Mountainview-based Podbridge, a podcasting analytics firm, has raised $8.5 million in second round financing led by new investor Sutter Hill Ventures and joined by first round investors Mayfield Fund and Worldview Technology Partners.

 

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CommonCraft Paperwork: RSS in Plain English

Great video from Lee and Sachi LeFever working to craft a better explanation of RSS for everyday folks. Good idea, and something we want to see more people trying to do - coming up with their own stories explaining the real value they get from their tools and how they use them. It is in their new ‘paperwork’ format and the first in what I imagine will be many such episodes, Video: RSS in Plain English.

The important thing to note here is that just because it has been done, doesn’t mean you can’t improve on it by trying your own creative explanation, but do give them some good feedback and love over on their blog. I think the one thing missing really was a good podsafe music background. I kept getting a Mr Bill vibe, was a little worried for the little guy sitting at this computer really… I really miss those great clay figure shows - perhaps Lee was channeling a bit…

I tried to embed the video here, but it is not cooperating with WordPress, so check it out over on their site… Video: RSS in Plain English.

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When will social media cross the chasm?

Chris asked on a Twitter when social media would cross over into the mainstream.  I think this will not happen until there is either a compelling business case or a compelling social case. From my own work, I think the social case will come first.  I am working with two not-for-profits who want to use social media to creat community among their constituents. The first, The Wellness Community,represents cancer survivors who are interested in maintaining their health and supporting each other.  Social media can help them form virtual communities among cancer survivors who are in treatment and don’t feel well enough to leave their homes, or among people who live too far from the community to participate in its face-to-face activities. The Executive Director of the local chapter of this nonprofit has actually asked for social media tools, although she doesn’t call them social media tools.

Another group, St Luke’s Health Initiatives  is a foundation that acts as a way of magnifying and convening community efforts to solve large health care problems in Arizona — the lack of adequate community mental health care, for example, or the lack of access to medical care for large segments of the population. St. Luke’s supports many communities now that come together around these huge issues, and is working toward deploying social media tools to enhance its other activities.

These efforts are the ones I think will make social media cross the chasm.  As much fun as it is to watch Ponzi trying to teach Geeks to cook , this use of social media makes it out to be a toy, rather than a real builder of community. Its uses at Virginia Tech this week, as well as the ones I described above (still in their infancy) are the real movers for the media.

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Social Media Now: MySpace News Not Ready for Prime Time, Twitter Ready for Its Close Up

The digerati’s first impressions of MySpace’s social news venture, which launched in beta yesterday, was anything but positive. Well undercooked was the general consensus, even for a beta launch.

No one was more harsh, or more scatological, than Rex Dixon who called MySpace News nothing more than a clipping service linking the kind of of generic user rating system that is a generic part of many content management systems

At Wired News, Michael Calore concisely identifies problems more specifically :

MySpace users can’t add stories, only vote on them….

The site has no search, you have to browse items by category. Story ranking is counter-intuitive — are we looking at stories ranked by number of votes or average vote? The top story on the site has only 16 votes. Also, when you click through to a story, a MySpace News navigation bar remains at the top of the page (see my second screenshot below). A second click is required to load the linked article. This strikes me as a usability no-no, but maybe it’s just a matter of preference.

But Josh Lowenstein at Webware most specifically hit the nail on the head:

There are quite a few things missing from MySpace News. The first is integration with MySpace proper. There’s currently no way to show which stories you’ve been rating (or reading) on your MySpace profile. Likewise, you can’t see what your friends have been up to, something that is critical for a social network.

I’m not ready to pile on MySpace after one day, but it does seem to me that if social news is going to work it will have to rely on the kind of word of mouth discovery that comes from see what your friends are reading. I’m surprised that wasn’t the first step for the development team.

Twittermania, Chapter 387: The start-up story of the year so far in social media is the astounding rise of Twitter. Evan Williams’ Obvious announced on Monday that the company would spin off Twitter, with co-founder Jack Dorsey serving as CEO

Meanwhile developers and entrepreneurs continue to experiment with Twitter as platform. This morning at Mashable Kristen Nicole describes how Menuism, a restaurant ratings business, is using a Twitter feed its developed called Gutcheck through which members can share what their eating. And Fred Wilson offers a very interesting thought piece about his vision of Twitter’s future as “the status broadcasting system of the Internet”:

I don’t consume local services very often on my phone because it’s a hassle to log in and tell them where I am. But if I could just send a text message to Twitter with my location and information starts coming to me on my phone, I’ll do that.

If all these things happen because of one text message I sent to Twitter, that’s fantastic….

Twitter is a simple but flexible status broadcasting system. The web doesn’t have one yet and so Twitter is going to be it.

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Social Media Now: Stumbling Upon Social Shopping, Teen Identity Management

StumbleUpon founder Garrett Camp spent yesterday afternoon denying rumors that StumbleUpon had agreed to an acquisition by eBay.

If that purchase, or one by any of StumbleUpon’s other rumored suitors, goes through its implications for social search will have been predigested. It’s funny and fascinating, seeing out pundits reacted to the reported price of $40 to $45 million.

Valleywag sees the price as evidence that the social news sector’s financial value does not live up to the hype:

The rumored purchase price, of some $40m, will provide the Stumble Upon’s founders and angel investors with an excellent return, because there was no venture capital round; but the deal values the Digg audience only in the $100m-$150m range, and the entire sector below $500m. A revolution in news, maybe, but with more losers than winners.

(I think Valleywag is making a mistake to classify StumbleUpon as social news, but that just highlights the slippery quality of definitions in the world of social media.) 

Dylan Tweney at Wired News had the opposite reaction:

$40 million seems like a lot to pay for a company that has just 2.2 million users — users who have done nothing more than download and install a browser toolbar. $20 per user? It just doesn’t make sense.

Andrew Parker had a more in depth analysis of the reported valuation and its implications for the social media industry comparing StumbleUpon’s price of $21 per user to the acquisition prices of Flickr, MySpace and Skype. According to Parker’s analysis StumbleUpon’s per-user price per user is in range with MySpace’s in 2005.

The Net was also abuzz with speculation over what eBay plans to do with StumbleUpon–a toolbar utility that allows users to rate websites and videos, then enables a sort of query-free social search, directing users to sites according how closely other users rating match a surfer’s own. Om Malik sees the acquisition as more of a technology purchase, giving eBay a new technology to attach to Skype in an effort to create a  backdoor desktop.

I think Muhammad Saleem gets closer to the likely reasoning: social shopping. Saleem quotes a fall 2006  report from American Marketers Association:

…47% of consumers said that they would be open to using social networks (such as MySpace, Orkut, Facebook) to find and discuss holiday gift ideas. Furthermore, 51% of them said that they would look for discounts [on] social networking sites, 51% said that they would download coupons form theses sites, and another 18% said that they would participate on such sites by (reading or) writing product reviews. Most interestingly though, 29% said that they would actually make purchases through these sites.

Social shopping is the slumbering giant of the social media industry. Going shopping together, buying because of word of mouth recommendations, trying on a pair of pants and asking a friend: “do these make me look fat?” are endemic offline shopping behaviors that should translate into online behavior with almost no effort.

So far this hasn’t been the case. Online store fronts have been slow to add social functioning beyond Web 1.0, discussion board-style user ratings. Social networks have been slow to add commerce (although there is some indication that users are more likely to purchase from sites that are specifically devoted to commerce than from general social sites, social networks could certainly launch stores). And social shopping start ups like Kaboodle, ThisNext and ShopWiki have yet to reach notable consumer scale.

While rumors of the eBay acquisition of StumbleUpon made the rounds, Google–a reported StumbleUpon suitor–launched something that looks a little bit like a competitor–a toolbar refinement of Google’s “feeling lucky” feature that will direct users to new sites based on that user’s prior searches. That sounds ok. It has the benefit of requiring less data entry than StumbleUpon, but it also has the disadvantage of being search based. People use search so broadly and so frequently that I can’t imagine search based serendipity being possesses anything close to the signal-to-noise ratio of ratings based serendipity.

Teen Privacy and Social Networking: A fascinating study out this morning from the Pew Internet & American Life Project looks at attitudes toward privacy and identity management among teens who use online social networking. Pew is selling as the top line of it’s story the notion teens don’t share personal information indiscriminately, but apply various screens–allowing only friends to view certain information for example to keep things from their parents and others.

It’s a duh kind of finding that fails to plumb more important depths because even the narrower circle of friend who are able to see the personal information can be quite large and the information shared can be quite personal (imagine sharing private information not with six friends but with your entire high school).

I found more surprising the finding that 45% of online teens DON’T have profiles on social networks. And of the teens who do have online profiles one-third don’t restrict access to their profiles in any way.

The most interesting parts of the survey delve into the way teens manipulate their online identities and why. Older teens share more personal information than younger teens. Boys lie about their identities online more than do girls. And predictably girls are more wary than boys about identifying their physical location.

At its core the survey shows that teens are very sophisticated about identity management:

For most teens, decisions about privacy and disclosure depend on the nature of the encounter and their own personal circumstances. Teen decisions about whether to disclose or not involve questions like these: Do you live in a small town or big city? How did you create your network of online ‘friends’? How old are you? Are you male or female? Do you parents have lots of rules about Internet use? Do your parents view your profile?

The Net savvy and privacy sophistication of kids doesn’t surprise me. Back in the mid 1990s I covered for The New York Times the social trend of teen girls using the Internet to form online clubs in an era long before social networking tools make it easy. Even then the 13 and 14 year olds I contacted were incredibly careful, smart and probing about contact from strangers and displayed a more advanced understanding of online identity safety than did their parents.

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Social Media Now: Confusion over DIY Media at NAB, Facebook Widget Friendly?

Reports coming in from the National Association of Broadcasters offer an interesting look at the evolving relationship between traditional media and DIY media. On the one hand you had David K. Rehr, CEO and President of the NAB, kicking off the conference by suggesting that broadcasters are being challenged by the Internet not because anything substantive has changed but because broadcasters are using the wrong words to describe why they old ways are better than the new ones:

Internet radio sounds like the future.  Wireless sounds like the future.  Digital television sounds like the future. High def sounds like the future. YouTube, Google, iBiquity sound like the future. 

What does “free over-the-air broadcasting” sound like?  I think you know.

We were wireless before it was hot, but we are captives of the language of decades gone by.  The language of our past is confusing and perhaps obsolete.  We need to update and clarify.  We need to reframe and rebrand.

….

The NAB right now has a team working on finding the best words to define us and take us into the future.  This will be a long and continuing effort. But, we need your help.  We need your ideas.  We need your self-discipline, so that we all speak the same language. 

Pitiful. Sounds like when athletes and politicians blame the media for their failings.

Meanwhile, NAB members seem to be adapting by co-opting, aggregating and framing user generated content. At Lost Remote Cory Bergman tells the tale of television station WKRN in Nashville which created a blog, NashvilleisTalking, to aggregate information from local blogs already being produced in and around Nashville. In addition the station has launched other blogs under its own domains:

Our traffic has grown phenomenally. 60 percent of our traffic is WKRN and 40 percent is the blogs,” he said. NashvilleisTalking — which aggregates content from 435 local blogs — averages 5,000 unique visitors a day (yesterday the number hit 9,000 due to the Virginia shooting). And what about revenue? “We’re making more money this year than we’ve ever made,” Sechrist said. “And it’s from the pre-rolls on the videos.” He said WKRN is averaging 600,000 videos played a month, and much of that success is due to video’s exposure on the blogs (although he admits a reluctance to push too many ads to the blogs themselves.) But beyond money, Sechrist says “a lot of (our users) are never going to watch us on TV, but they’ll come to us on the web when something big happens. We have a relationship now.”

Meanwhile, programmers continue to try to graft social functionality on to traditional media. The Los Angeles Times has a story today about MTV’s plan to attach online components to all it’s programming:

The key for MTV will be developing shows that will drive viewers to spend time on series-related online games, in Web communities or on cellphones coughing up jokes of the day.

“We can either stay in the mass business,” Graden said, “or we can be in the hyper-specialty business where the shows may not have broad appeal but in the Digital Age would better engage our viewers.”

He said that the current series “Scarred” and “Human Giant” are examples of the new strategy. “User-generated content has to become reflected in our programming,” Graden said. “Something like ‘Scarred,’ which tells the stories behind the Web’s most gruesome clips of crashes, wipeouts and accidents, “is based on footage that may already be infamous, but it’s our own narrative accompanying it.”

It just may be that the tradition media players who thrive will be those who most effectively absorb socially created media, not those sitting around with PR agencies trying to figure out different words to use to describe TV and radio

Facebook to go Widget-Friendly, Direct Challenge to MySpace: Eliot Van Buskurk reported yesterday in Wired News that Facebook plans to open it’s network to third party widgets, taking a precisely opposite approach from its chief competitor MySpace, which has declared war on third-party widgets. If it happens the effort will allow us to gauge the value of openness and widgets to social networking hubs. At Mashable, Pete Cashmore thinks open widgets are the best strategy for wresting the social networking crown from MySpace. I don’t know if widgets will be the difference maker, but I and anyone invested in the widget business will certainly be watching to find out.

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Speaking in Westchester County, NY

I’m privileged to be speaking on a panel at the Westchester Association in White Plains this coming Thursday, April 19th, at lunchtime. Apparently the online registration is closed but there is still room for walk-ins. Or, you can contact the woman mentioned on the page. I’m looking forward to helping people understand Social Media and how businesses can use it to grow.

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Social Media Now: MSM Co-opts CitJ

Coverage of yesterday’s horrific massacre at Virginia Tech was hardly a showpiece for semi-pro and citizen journalist.

Contrary to the reports of boosters, like Amy Gahran at Poynter Online who called it “Another Sad but Seminal Day for CitJ,” those who would denigrate the whole idea of citizen journalism got plenty of ammo from bloggers who raced to mistakenly identify the shooter.

 

Another blog, by a self-identified assistant physics professor in Massachusetts got closer with outlines of the story vaguely correct, but again with the wrong person named.

 

The semi-pros did a better job particularly given how prepared Blacksburg is. (Tom Watson and I first covered Blacksburg’s groundbreaking municipal Internet initiative, the Blacksburg Electronic Village, for The New York Times in 1996.) The Virginia Tech student newspaper, Collegiate Times,  posted minute by minute updates throughout the day, even though the paper’s own servers were down. But for a news operation on the scene, staffed by peers of the victims AND the shooter, the CT coverage was remarkably thin–few photos, little comment from students, and NO investigation. Hard to believe that at the very least the paper’s editors didn’t start tugging at the thread of the earlier murders, looking for witnesses and others, given that they were sitting on top of the biggest news story ever to hit Blacksburg.

 

Planet Blacksburg–a pioneering, student run Web-based newspaper–was slower and more considered in its updates, but failed to advance the story beyond what was being reported by the much maligned “MSM” and didn’t deliver any deeper, inside sense of the events or mood on campus.

 

The most successful social coverage of the event was Wikipedia’s which was updated and edited in real time much in the way traditional news coverage is called in by stringers, edited and published. But this was entirely collaborative. If this is the future of citizen journalism, then the future is bright indeed!

 

Blog attempts to record and respond to events–first and second person  accounts were interesting but not more informative than what was available on CNN or MSNBC, in part because those broadcast outlets were busy soliciting Internet contributions from amateurs with almost distasteful aggressiveness. CNN was calling for submissions the way traffic reporters ask for drivers to call in from cell phones. But they had plenty of accidental material on air, including cellphone video whose audio track captured the massacre.

 

It seems to me that citizen journalism, at least of breaking news events, works by sheer dumb luck–someone is in the right place at the right time with a camera like Virginia Tech engineering grad student Jamal Albarghouti whose cell phone video which capture the sound of gunshots became the cornerstone of CNN’s coverage. MSM is well on the way to fully co-opting citizen coverage of breaking events.

 

Facebook was flooded by members creating greif groups–the cyber equivalent of leaving flowers at the scene of a tragedy–and the social network served to connect friends across campuses where once telephone calls did the trick.

 

I don’t want to lose perspective. The important thing to remember is that 33 people lost their lives to the senseless mayhem of a psychotic killer. But despite all the blather, citizen journalism didn’t get much of a boost yesterday.

 

UPDATE: Citizen journalism, and blogging in particular, is proving to be better at investigative journalism than it is at breaking news. Students in the shooter’s playwriting class offered memories of creepy, violent plays to the Collegiate Times, and a former classmate Ian Macfarlane, now an AOL employee, acutally posted two of the plays, as well as this chilling memory:

When we read Cho’s plays, it was like something out of a nightmare. The plays had really twisted, macabre violence that used weapons I wouldn’t have even thought of. Before Cho got to class that day, we students were talking to each other with serious worry about whether he could be a school shooter. I was even thinking of scenarios of what I would do in case he did come in with a gun, I was that freaked out about him. When the students gave reviews of his play in class, we were very careful with our words in case he decided to snap. Even the professor didn’t pressure him to give closing comments.

 

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