Social Media Now 10.22.08

Here’s a quick round-up of some recent news in social media. Did we miss your favorite social media news story? Add it in the comments or email us to add it to the next post for social media now.

Shel Israel writes about not mistaking popularity for influence. There’s an interesting post on Mashable about top blunders from the social media gurus, with a little something we can all learn from. Chris Brogan reminds us that it’s not necessarily true the famous bloggers are the only ones with anything important to say, and to promote and encourage others to keep the conversations fresh. Blog Action Day showed how social media can help us raise our voices and awareness about critical issues and thousands of bloggers responded in their own ways. Nonprofit Bootcamp happened in San Mateo, and over 2000 people got the resources they needed to get down to business online. Nielsen online ratings showed huge traffic growth for several social media sites this year, especially Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin, while some other sites like Buzznet and imeem slipped a bit, and imeem may be doing some cutting back. FriendFeed announced their real-time API, so now you can keep up to date on your friends in real-time.

Bright Shiny Objects

• AppLoop is an iPhone friendly RSS reader that’s getting good reviews.
• Lijit search just added advertising to it’s bag of tricks.
• Twine can help you track your bookmarks and other content, and learns what you like the more you use it and then makes recommendations based on your usage.

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• FriendFeed Announces Another Update
• Followers, Friends, and Fans: Expanding Your Online Community - Emetrics Summit DC 2008 - Day 1

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Help a research project - Facebook Groups in Business

Social Media Club NY member and Organizational Development consultant Jenny Ambrozek asks for help on the following issue:

21st Century Organization: Facebook Groups in Business: Call for Best Cases

Should Businesses Be Friends with Facebook?

While our investigation provided insight into the dynamics of 10 Facebook Groups by tracking activity data over a 10 week period, we realize thousands of organizations are using Facebook Groups every day.

Jenny and her team are seeking best practice case studies regarding using FB “externally to build brands and market products, and ii. Internally, to bring employees together and share work, while at the same time allowing them to connect to their external networks.”

Check the site for how you can help them in their research.

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Social Media Club NY Meeting, 12/11/07

Last night, Business Wire hosted SMC New York for a panel on “What Worked and What Didn’t in Social Media in 2007.”

I moderated a panel with Jack Myers, Founder and CEO of Myers Publishing, Joel Smernoff, President and COO of Paltalk, and Peter Himler, Founder and principal of Flatiron Communications LLC. Being moderator, I couldn’t really take too many notes, but thankfully2 intrepid bloggers captured some of the action.

Jenny Ambrozek posted in “Social Media Club Gathering 20071211: A Gorilla on YouTube” a thought from panelist Jack Myers:

“Jack proposed a potential outcome of the current writers strike is fundamentally changing the traditional television broadcasting industry. Given the impact of digital technology on transforming the recording industry, an entirely reasonable prediction.”

Les Blatt wrote some comments about the other Gorilla in Social Media, Facebook:

“There was a long discussion of Facebook’s Beacon conflict. Did Facebook hurt itself with Beacon? Possibly, although they do seem to be trying to fix it – the move from opt-out to opt-in, while perhaps not handled as smoothly as it should have been, is at least a move in the right direction.”

I know that the intrepid Steve Eisenberg, who helped organize the meeting, has recorded audio and we’ll link to it when it’s posted.

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Social Media Now: How Much is DIY Talent Worth?

Is DIY Internet video a new media type? Or just a minor league development system for traditional media?

The announcement that CBS is acquiring Wallstrip, a business group vlog covering stocks, sure looks like the classic minor league or indie rock development path. Wallstrip founder Howard Lindzon tells the rather unremarkable tale of the company’s development on his blog under the headline “You Can Make Money from Blogging!!!” But that headline is a big of misdirection. First, Wallstrip isn’t a blog, it’s a vlog. If it were a blog CBS wouldn’t have been interested. Second, proof that a company will acquire your vlog is hardly proof that the vlog can make money.

I don’t mean to dis WallStrip–in fact I’ve never seen one of its vidcasts and my friend Fred Wilson is involved and I know he has impeccable taste when it comes to Internet companies. I just want to put the deal in perspective for all the new media triumphalists out there who insist that Internet video is killing the TV stars. It looks more like Internet video is creating TV stars. And, as Om Malik points out, “the Wallstrip deal does put a price tag on these ‘talent’ oriented buyouts.” The price for the Wallstrip talent acquisition was $5 million according to reports, but what exactly is CBS buying? Said Duncan Riley at Techcrunch:

From my previous discussions with my source close to the deal, WallStrip has close to no revenue; indeed he claimed that WallStrip has no revenue at all. The cost of CBS or other media outlets establishing a rival video blog to WallStrip would be relatively low and CBS now faces that real threat, the purchase of WallStrip bound to create new startups targeting the investor focused video podcasting market.

I think I understand CBS’s thinking. The company needs to prepare content for the new Internet video distribution channels sprouting like mushrooms (like AOL and Joost). It needs a team that understands how to make content that suits that form and feed the monster, and the Wallstrip team has proven it can produce video if not revenue.

But if getting a pretty girl to read news and commentary online is worth $5 million….well, any pretty girls out there interesting in starting a social media vlog?

 

Facebook Opens Up: MySpace may be the biggest operation in the social media business, but Facebook is the best.

At every step of the way the company has made the right decisions, at least according to my standing focus group–my 15 year old daughter and her friends. Staying elite before going open kept the creeps out. Keeping the nav and design clean make it quick and easy to use where, according to the girls MySpace was clunky and slow to load.  Today my daughter keeps a ghost MySpace page (I wonder how many MySpace members are, in fact, vestigial), but she and her friends live their lives on Facebook.

Now the company is apparently ready to open itself to third party developers who will do everything from widget building to social shopping, as yesterday’s WSJ story noted. If there were social shopping on Facebook my daughter and her friends would never visit Amazon or J.Crew; if there were music recommendation and downloading they’d never go to iTunes.

Yesterday’s WSJ  piece was the kind of Monday morning leak that only reporters at the WSJ and the NYT get, and it touched off a lot of speculation as to the true nature of Facebook’s new program, which will supposedly be unveiled on Thursday.

Tony Hung described it as a “reverse API” strategy:

But, what is Facebook doing?

Its letting *other* companies build mashups *for* Facebook *within* Facebook, and then not sharing any revenues (if any are made) with that company.

Wow.

Whatever you call it and however it shakes out, Facebook’s strategy is 180 degrees opposed MySpace’s vertical integration strategy of buying backend service providers.

Link Love:

Sharing the Widget Wealth
Change.org, The Network for Political Change

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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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Social Media Now: MySpace Kicks the Photobucket

This isn’t going to help Photobucket with its efforts to sell the company. Late last night MySpace moved to block its members from posting links to videos hosted on Photobucket.

Photobucket had been trying to expand it’s business from photo hosting to video hosting by offering users a suite of editing and production tools to spur the loading of video. The still photos it hosts remain unblocked.

Scoble offers a little tough love for users of Photobucket’s video service:

If you want to avoid these issues there’s really one choice: pay for your site’s own hosting and build your own traffic. One reason to join services like MySpace and Wordpress.com is that there’s a built-in level of traffic…. If you go off and build your own site you don’t have those advantages, but you’ve got to live with [it] when they pull down parasitic services, which is what Photobucket is.

Calling Photobucket a “parasitic service” is a little harsh. It’s a backend business that provides photo hosting and video editing tools for free to users. That its value relies on user created linkbacks from sites it doesn’t own doesn’t make it any more parasitic than your average search engine. Still, its fair to say that Photobucket, like dozens of backend service providers and widget makers, rely for their success on the kindness of strangers.

Michael Arrington at Techcrunch offers a short term history lesson:

This is turning into a habit for MySpace, which usually claims bugs, security issues or terms of service violations were the cause of a shut down. In January MySpace mysteriously shut down all Flash widgets on the site for 2.5 hours. An Imeem blockade came next. Vidilife, Stickam and Revver have been permanently banned.

Clearly News Corp’s war on widgets and add-ons continues.

Duncan Riley looks at the business implications for Photobucket, calling the MySpace move an “act of corporate sabotage” and wondering outloud if the move is designed to drive down Photobucket’s asking price:

….when your product targets social networks and you’ve had access partially blocked to the biggest marketplace of them all…with the possibility of course that the ban could end up involving all content, your value drops, and drops dramatically…and because of this there’s little doubt that News Corp has simply just screwed Photobucket over. I wonder if News Corp ends up buying Photobucket? What better way to squeeze a better price!

At Deep Jive Interests Tony Hung nails the lesson of the MySpace move for the development of the widget business:

If MySpace has an alternate video storage and management product cooking — which only has to be *just* has good — it will have no problem locking in its users. ….

And if MySpace *does* have an alternate to Photobucket, the next logical question is “what else do they have cooking?” There’s been a spate of news around widgets which cross blogs and social networks. But if MySpace (and other networks) starts developing their own in-house widgets, it might signal a larger trend towards creating truly closed-in system…not only preventing people from leaving MySpace…but also increasing the height of those metaphorical walls which separate its users from marketers who are salivating at the chance to get at this demographic. Higher walls (to flog the metaphor) can only mean steeper tolls to get access to MySpace’s users.

Scoble adds the observation that this will chill the climate for investment in businesses like widget businesses that rely on social networks to drive traffic.

That’s certainly true. It’s hard to invest in a business whose fate is in the hands of others (unless that business has a patent protectable technological advantage or some such defensible advantage). But I still believe that a secular trend is just beginning which will drive social networking away from walled-garden hubs towards more user directed networks. But a long term secular change is not going to help Photobucket build a consumer facing video business today. It looks as if, to do that, the company will have to launch a site of its own. Does anyone own the Videobucket.com domain?

Building its own social network seems to be the approach of one of Photobucket’s start up competitors. Kristen Nicole at Mashable writes today that DivShare, a photo and video hosting service, has soft launched DivShare Groups–which allows users to establish their own hubs for sharing media. On its blog DivShare lays out the features–comments, RSS feeds, access rules and the rest of the social networking kit and caboodle.

In the traditional media business, power once accrued to copyright holders who often had no direct relationship with consumers–film and TV studios not movie theater and TV station owners. But the irony of the Internet media business is that even though it’s offers a wide open distribution platform, hell, BECAUSE it offers a wide open distribution platform, power accrues to the company that can draw a crowd and develop a direct relationship with consumers. And the more that company relies on the network effect to draw and hold users, the stickier it is (think eBay).  For now, News Corp and Facebook, remain the girls with the most cake.

Link Love: 

Exclusive Screenshots: Spock’s New People Engine
Techcrunch offers an exclusive inside look at Spock, a people-centered search engine

 

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Social Media Now: Do Community and Commerce Mix

April 10, 2007

It’s tempting to dismiss the social commerce survey published today by iProspect as just the latest missive from the Duh! Department.

The survey, conducted by JupiterResearch, found that 33% of Internet users had relied on sites with user-generated recommendations to make buying decisions.

Frankly that number is surprisingly low, particularly considering that Amazon–by virtue of it’s user recommendations–fits the survey’s profile and considering what we know about the impact of social recommendation in the offline world. Writes Pete Cashmore at Mashable:

It’s hardly a surprise that users make decisions about what to buy based on Amazon reviews, and in fact Amazon was by far the most influential of the sites listed, with 28% of Internet users questioned saying they’d made a purchase based on info from Amazon.

The runner-up might be a little worrying: Yahoo Answers, which seems to be populated by teens who provide misleading answers about as often as they provide correct ones, influences 4% of users when they come to make a purchase.

I’d be more worried about the small numbers for big social network players. MySpace, which 2% of users cited as influencing a decision, lapped Facebook which was only cited by 1%; and iVillage, which offers great product-based discussion groups for buyers considering home appliance purchases, was cited by less than 0.5% of respondents. Those numbers suggest one of three things: either there is enormous, untapped potential for growth in commerce touched off by social networking hub;  or users like their commerce and community to remain separate; or the survey is plain wrong.

What the survey seems to suggest is that Internet purchases are most commonly made buy people who begin with the intent to purchase. And those people head to sites like Amazon.com that are identifiable as stores. Forty-six percent of respondents said they the reason they searched Amazon was to buy something, and 28% said the site influenced their decision to buy. Meanwhile 49% of respondents said they searched Facebook to connect to friends, and, unsurprisingly only 2% said the site influenced a buying decision.

What remains untested is the impact of social network functionality on online buying.  Cashmore is “willing to bet that the addition of a ‘consumer reviews’ section on YouTube could increase it’s influence. Likewise, MySpace doesn’t currently provide any way to convene around products.”

I agree with Pete. But the proposition remains untested. According to published reports MySpace is speaking with potential commerce partners about a MySpace store. Such an effort would offer one test of social commerce. Another test would be to look at the effectiveness to date of social shopping start ups like NextThis and ShopWiki.com to see if social shopping works as a widget or whether the social aspect of shopping is enough to allow a start up store to compete with a powerhouse like Amazon. Finally a survey with a control group would be nice: do stores like Amazon or Musicians Friend which are packed with user reviews have higher or lower conversion rates than stores, like LandsEnd.com, which don’t? Do products with higher user ratings outsell those with lower ratings on Amazon?

Link Love:

Gigya To Ease Widget Publishing On Social Networks
How to win in the Twitter vs. Jaiku battle

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Social Media Now: Spanning the Blogosphere, Selling In Second Life, Valuing Facebook

April 5, 2007

Spanning the Blogosphere: I’m not too fond of the phrase “Live Web.” First, I’m not convinced that the so-called static web era was all that static—links were live, after all, and pages were updated regularly, and message boards and other sorts of multiway communication platforms existed. Second, even as multifaceted as it has become—with widgets and clients offering all sorts of live interaction—Web-based information is just one source of information flowing into the message stream in which we all swim, a message stream that includes e-mail, IM, voicemail, text messaging and more, an environment not tied to http or the browser.

But for Dave Sifry, whose business, Technorati, is Web based, “Live Web” is the phrase of choice although he is still titling his quarterly report “The State of the Blogosphere.” There are some fascinating nuggets: There’s the enormous growth of blogging in the Middle East, particularly in Iran, as illustrated by the fact that Farsi has now become the 10th most common blogging language. There’s the  growth of tagging as bloggers’ ontological system of choice (although still only 35% of blog posts tracked by Technorati include tags). And blog spam is seasonal, peaking during the Christmas buying season.

Two other things worth noting. There is at least one sign that blogging may have peaked.  Technorati tracked an average of 1.3 million daily posts in October and 1.5 million this month. That’s slower growth in per day posting than the survey has found in the past, but not a slide in the number of posts per day as Steve Rubel suggests. It IS a slide, however, in the percentage of blogs that account for daily postings. Using Sifry’s numbers (which sometimes seem to be moving targets) it seems like the rate of daily posts per blog was  2.3% in October and  2.1% in April. 

Also, Sifry continues to highlight a distinction between blogs and so-called “mainstream media” that I think is no longer useful. Blogs ARE mainstream media, at least users experience them alongside traditional media and draw less and less of a distinction (as Sifry notes). No consumer surfing for information about Zune players would consider  Engaget and ZDNet to be in different information categories. The blogging world has to get the chip off its shoulder about “mainstream media.” Bloggers try so hard to say they’re different it sounds like they have an inferiority complex.

Selling in Second Life: GigaOm has an absolutely fascinating piece, written by Wagner James Au, about the failures of traditional marketers to make hay in Second Life. The piece jumps off from a small scale survey (200 repondants) by Komjuniti, a SL brand consultancy. There’s not much news in the survey (when asked people feel marketing is intrusive and uninteresting, I mean, duh!),  But James Au’s suggestions to marketers using SL are fascinating. To wit: Because teleportation is the primary mode of transport, forget billboards, no one sees ‘em; just like in RL, events, giveaways, and the like are necessary to draw people to your location; and finally, join the fantasy:

To play in Second Life, corporations must first come to a humbling realization: in the context of the fantastic, their brands as they exist in the real world are boring, banal, and unimaginative. Car companies are trying to compete with college kids who turn a virtual automotive showroom into a 24/7 hiphop dance party, and create lovingly designed muscle cars that fly, and auction off for $2000 in real dollars at charity auctions.

….as the Komjuniti study suggests, they can keep building sterile shopping malls, and continue wondering why Residents prefer nude dance parties, giant frogs singing alt-folk rock, and samurai death matches– and often, all three at the same time.

Valuing Facebook: There’s a suspicious meme making the rounds started yesterday by Mark May, an investment analyst at Needham & Co (is Facebook beating the bushes for buyers?). In a report May argued that Yahoo made a terrible error in December abandoning attempts to acquire Facebook to the tune of $1.5 billion, because now Facebook is worth many times that number. At Barron’s Online Eric Savitz picked up the ball and ran with it, quoting May:  Facebook is no doubt one of the most important Internet companies to have been created in the last five years.

No doubt. But is it worth more than $1.5 billion? Not according to Douglas McIntyre at 24/7 Wall St:

Comscore says that Facebook as 16.7 million unique visitors a month. Even better, the site has 24 visits per unique visitor, putting it just behind Yahoo! among all web properties.

…The New York Times digital properties have a unique monthly audience of almost 40 million. The market cap of the entire New York Times Company (NYT) is only $3.4 billion. It even includes those worthless big newspapers.

Maybe Facebook is worth $1 billion, maybe less. But more? No way.

But McIntyre is still basing the entirety of his valuation on pageviews. Meanwhile at ZDNet, Larry Dignan got his dander up about arm chair CEOs piling on Yahoo:

Now time for a reality check.

If News Corp. still can’t figure out how to monetize MySpace (it’s getting there) how can Facebook be profitable enough to justify a big valuation? My hindsight indicates that Facebook should have taken Yahoo’s dough and ran. It’s one thing to build an audience it’s quite another to make money from it.

Facebook is the “in” thing for now. Let’s follow May’s logic and assume Yahoo did pull the trigger on a Facebook purchase (of course we’d all pick that apart too.) Guess what would happen when Yahoo bought Facebook? It would be an “out” thing. Consumers are a fickle bunch and will leave in a second. Suddenly that valuation doesn’t look so hot.

Is social media really all that? I know it’s heresy to think that social media may not be the second coming of the Web boom, but there are a few areas of concern. Perhaps Mozilla’s social media meets browser effort hurts traffic at MySpace and Facebook. Perhaps someone cooks up a technology that allows you to take your profile–and all of your friends–somewhere else easily. Bottom line: We don’t know how much money social media can make.

I’m with Larry on all but his last point. Social Media really IS all that.

 

Link Love:
MySpace Music Players: MySpace Speaks

Google MyMaps Smashes Mash-ups

Reko Launches - More Social Networking in Firefox

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