How Can We Use Social Media To Foster Voter Education?

Educating yourself on the various initiatives hitting our ballots today can be a daunting task as you try and  cut through the emotion and muddied language around each issue. The standard voting guides do a decent job trying to share the pros/cons of each initiative, but more times than not, I find myself asking people around me – in my online and offline network – what their opinions are, to help bring more light to what that initiative actually means TO ME and to those I care about most.

It begs the question – what else we can do with the technology of today to capture those conversations and help inform others asking the same questions?

Join California Secretary of State, Debra Bowen, on Wednesday, May 27th at 7pm in San Francisco, CA for a brainstorming session where we dig into this topic in an effort to find new ways of engaging and informing voters using Social Media.

Contribute your thoughts ahead of time on socialvoter.org (use the form on the right sidebar to contribute), or you can tweet/blog your thoughts using the #socialvoter tag.

There is no fee to attend but they would like you to register so they know you are coming. Simply click ‘Attending‘ on the Facebook event. We plan to live stream the event for those who cannot participate in person. We will also be capturing some of the conversation on our SMC San Francisco Twitter account if you would like to follow along that way.

I am happy Social Media Club can play an active role in government 2.0 discussions. Earlier this month, our San Antonio chapter was asked to participate in covering the mayoral race using the Social Media tools at hand. There are several programs in the works, locally and nationally, where we will be extending this dialogue – so stay tuned!

How The Melting Pot helped SMC in Salt Lake City

Last Thursday we held our fourth Social Media Club event in Salt Lake City. We broke from our established evening meeting timeslot to try doing something at lunchtime.

Our event committee reached out to The Melting Pot in downtown Salt Lake to see if they would be willing to host our event. We liked their Perfect Pairings Facebook application and they were willing to open for lunch exclusively for us (they’re usually only open for dinner; and this way we didn’t interfere with their evening guests).

The Melting Pot put together a special three-course salad, cheese and chocolate fondue menu, at a discounted price for the Social Media Club of Salt Lake City. One attendee posted on Twitter something to the effect of: “…you had me at fondue!” True enough!

As a leadership team, we were a bit apprehensive about trying out the new timeslot and actually charging money for the first time for people to attend an SMC of SLC event. But since we were getting a catered fondue experience, there was really no way around charging for attendance.

Combine the new timeslot and the cost to attend with today’s economy, and a keynote speaker — Jay Shaffer, vice president of marketing at Infopia — who was very accomplished but new to the Salt Lake scene, and we had reason to really publicize and work hard to get buzz about the exclusive opportunity.

Despite the frequent updates on our blog and other channels, SMC members and friends were a bit slow to purchase tickets. But true to the response we’ve received since our launch in January, our efforts really paid off.

Our event, at $30 a head, completely sold out the beginning of last week. We ended up with two groups being seated outside of the private dining room in an adjoining section of the restaurant. We were sold out and overflowing, and sadly had to turn a few walk-ins away.

So, here’s what we learned in Salt Lake City:

Although there’s something to be said for consistency — same bat time, same bat channel for meetings — there’s also an opportunity to mix things up every now and then.

Look for occasions to partner with restaurants and other venues that understand social media and the potential of reaching new customers through the Social Media Club.

Plan a program that’s topical — we focused on Facebook and Twitter, and either of them could have stood on their own as discussion topics.

Reach out to new presenters to bring fresh thoughts and secure new advocates for SMC.

This event, only our fourth one, has allowed our chapter to now have a positive bank account balance. We now have a little wiggle room for booking facilities and providing refreshments at events. And we can say that the Social Media Club of Salt Lake City is one of the hottest tickets in town!

In fact, we’ve decided to use some of our funds to purchase Pokens (they come from Switzerland, you know) and sell them to our members and friends, both online and at events, as a chapter fundraiser. The funds will be used to help us provide excellent programming and unique meeting experiences for our members.

So, the leadership team of the Social Media Club of Salt Lake City is officially and publicly thanking the staff at Salt Lake City’s The Melting Pot for being willing to partner with us and for doing a most excellent job with the food and service.

We’re also grateful to have reached out to Infopia and to now number the energetic and entertaining Jay Shaffer as one of our friends.

And finally, thanks to the Salt Lake Valley residents who believe in and support the Social Media Club.

Do you have examples of programs and approaches that have worked well for your Social Media Club chapter? We’d love to hear about them.

First Social Media Strategy Workshop in Birmingham Alabama

We are very excited to unveil some details of our upcoming Social Media Workshop which will be held on Tuesday April 27 in Birmingham Alabama. After taking the pulse of the market, reviewing the result of the Social Media Buyers Guide and discussing anecdotal evidence, we came to realize pretty quickly that almost everyone is in need of a clear strategy for integrating social media into their marketing and communications mix so companies can start to engage. It was also clear, that the biggest challenge social media champions face is selling it internally and educating coworkers, so our plan for this latest series of workshops pretty much wrote itself.

For only $295, you will benefit from the experience and creative insights from some of the leading practitioners in social media for business. Join Mack Collier, Scott Schablow, Ike Pigott and Chris Heuer for a full day workshop where you get to leave with the framework for your social media strategy and insights on how to sell the plan to management so you can begin to make it real.

So roll up your sleeves, this isn’t a bunch of pseudo-celebrities trying to show you how great they are while talking about how many followers they have on Twitter, this is about you making social media an integrated part of your business strategy. We are doing a WORKSHOP so that you can put social media to work for you. In fact, when you register, you can tell us what you are specifically trying to accomplish and we will work to tailor the final agenda and related discussions to your specific needs.

So what will the Social Media Strategy Workshop look like?

We will start the day discussing the impact Social Media has on your business and why so many people are turning to social media for an up turn in their business during the economic downturn. How does social media change things? What exactly is it? What is possible and what is not? How can it help your business? Why is everyone talking about it? What are the most important principles you need to understand? What’s the different between a status update, a Tweet, a poke, a nudge and all those other silly sounding terms?

After a brief introductory presentation addressing these key questions, each of our workshop leaders will host smaller conversations in breakout groups so we can more directly support your specific needs.  Each workshop leader will then host a conversation that includes some presentation materials as well as demonstrations of important services, software and web sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, YouTube and more.  We will also highlight important areas of focus which may be a part of your final strategy inlcuding:

• Review of current marketing plan (do you have your’s? bring it.)
• Building and maintaining relationships
• Looking, Listening and Responding
• Producing Media
• Engaging with the Market
• Managing Community
• Social Media Campaigns
• Metrics and ROI
• Becoming a Social Organization
• Social Media Campaigns
• Measuring Influence and Maximizing It

After lunch we will review case studies from leading companies such as Dell, H&R Block, GM and Zappos as well as from smaller everyday folks applying the same insights in distinct ways. While the cases are all unique to the specific situation at hand, they do offer incredible insight into the perspective required to be successful. Participants are encouraged to share their own case studies as part of this discussion too so that we may learn from each other throughout the day.

The remainder of the afternoon will focus on developing a social media strategy for you to take back to your business. In addition to discussing in-depth details behind key strategic decisions you need to make, we will also discuss how you can get support for these activities within your organization. So you will leave at the end of the day with a strategic plan and a plan for how to begin putting it to work within your organization.

Participation is limited, so if you live in or near Birmingham, we hope you will consider spending the day with us figuring out how to apply social media to your business.  It’s a transformational step for you and your career as well as your business. So, please register today and join us in Birmingham on Monday April 27.

We are also currently still seeking sponsors for the workshop. If you are interested in sponsoring the event, $5,000 will make you the title sponsor for the workshop.  If you are interested in supporting your local community and you are looking at buying 2 tickets, you might be interested in becoming a participating sponsor for $1,500 which includes 2 tickets for you and your company in addition to 2 tickets for a non-profit organization and traditional workshop sponsorship coverage.  Contact us for more details.

San Antonio SMC Participates in Mayoral Race

San Antonio is proud to be the hotbed for so much activity. From the popular buzz at SXSW for the amazing start-ups locally to the involvement of local media experts in one of the hottest mayoral races to date. Coming off the heels of the recent presidential race, local candidates have not wasted time in incorporating social technologies as just one of many tools to reach out to prospective and current supporters. With so much buzz on networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and other chat forums, it is no surprise that San Antonio has been thrust into the spotlight of yet another ground breaking event, the SA4Mayor initiative.

Begun as a passion and labor for love, the project has catapulted into mainstream media by highlighting the mayoral leaders for this highly contested position. While each of the candidates has held their own townhall meetings, SA4Mayor plans on bringing the candidates into one room for what is sure to be an amazing night of discussion, debating, and progress. This ground breaking event will cover this race both live and online to ensure that all supporters have alternatives in experiencing this event.

“Our goal is to open the door to everyone. We want to go beyond traditional candidates forums, and complement the richest of local media,” says Patricio Espinoza, Emmy award winning journalist and Founder-Managing Editor of SA4Mayor.com. “We have built an online 24/7 stage, they – the people – are coming, and now it is up to the candidates to meet the challenge.”

Social Media Club San Antonio has been asked to participate in this event, and take lead in bringing together top caliber bloggers, tweeters, and other online community members who look to share their voice, opinions, and concerns with the direction of this amazingly progressive city. There is no doubt, that when the dust settles it will be the voice of the people that will come out on top, so the candidates must be at the top of their game.

Join us for this historic townhall event to be webCast LIVE Tuesday, April 14, 2009, 6:30-7:30pm CST. To reach the broadest audience possible, SA4Mayor.com has teamed up with the Current, San Antonio’s award-winning alternative news-weekly.

Kudos to everyone involved in proving that San Antonio, TX is more than just the Alamo!

SA4Mayor Press Release

Social Media: Who’s getting it?

• GlobeHop: Vendors that get social media are the ones who can break out of the lingo and use plain speak to tie it into client’s business goals.
• hifivelounge: Important to be able to talk simply and clearly about SM without resorting to buzz words. Also value in humility and perspective.
• hifivelounge: @Kimber_Regator that can happen with “experts”. We like to listen first & learn from a client as we roll up the sleeves….
• GraemeThickins: “How do you know your vendor understands social media?” I say if they don’t ask, “Why would you share your knowledge on Twitter?”
• Francine Hardaway offered up some other tips on vetting your vendor to see if they truly understanding social media: “Do you see your vendor on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, other social sites? That’s the bare minimum. Read your vendor’s blog or his Tumblr, or his comments on the blogs of others. Is s/he a valuable member of his/her community? Engaged? Respected? Thoughtful? Social media is a very quickly evolving space, and new tools come out every day. Does your vendor evaluate them? Write about them? Understand what they do? Only after you’re sure your vendor is actually a user of social media do you ask the questions you would ask of any marketing consultant.”
• And finally, SMC Board Member Kimberly Turner found a wealth of posts on the topic, as well as offering up her view: “What I do know for sure is that too many corporations tend to forget the “social” aspect of social media and treat it like just another way to broadcast their rigid message into the universe. I also know that you should not only look at a vendor’s previous results but also make sure that their approach will work well with your company’s individual goals.”

Social Media Now 3.30.09

Here’s what’s been going on in Social Media over the last week or so. Missing something? Email me or add your news in the comments section.

• Jeremiah Owyang discusses the debut of ExecTweet as an example of sponsored aggregation might impact the community.
• Peter Kim shares some metrics on his wiki of social media marketing examples. The list is up to almost 1,000 entries.
• Adam Ostrow points out that social networking is becoming more popular than email as a means of communication.
• Renee Lemley is collecting local small business social media cases in the Baltimore area and shares some quick tips for small businesses to engage.
• KD Paine shares her thoughts on PR Newswire’s Visibility Reports as a step in the right direction.
• Chris Garrett shares results from a survey of 900 marketers on how they use social media.
• Scott Monty ponders how marketing can influence an entire generation.
• Adam Cohen boils down “the real purpose of SXSWi” and reminds us that relationships deepen when you connect face to face.
• Adam Metz shares the opening salvo for his book titled (at least for now), “The Brand Lies Down on Broadway.

Bright Shiny Objects

• retweet for the iPhone shows off the most popular retweets on Twitter. It’s an easy way to scan for emerging trends and get in on the conversation.
• Speaking of the iPhone, won’t it be cool when we can Skype from the iphone? Mashable’s got the skinny.
• Everybody’s been playing with Mailana, a new visualization tool for your Twitter network.
• Josh Peters shares 30+ apps for doing business on FaceBook
• Blellow is an emerging micro-blogging site for freelancers to collaborate, learn and find jobs.
• Need to make a tough decision? Hunch uses machine learning to help you get it right.

Help Us Save Darfur

Special thanks to Chris Heuer and Kristie Wells for encouraging us to blog on the SMC site about some work we are performing on behalf of Save Darfur. This week marks the beginning of an aggressive campaign to take advantage of the administration change and use social media to encourage President-elect Obama to action and end the Darfur genocide.

The Save Darfur Coalition’s “Be A Voice For Darfur” postcard campaign seeks to ensure that Darfur is a top priority for the Obama Administration. Obama has already promised “unstinting resolve” to end the Darfur Genocide.   The effort, which aims for no less than 1 million postcards to be emailed, blogged and snail-mailed to President-elect Obama within his first 100 days in office.

The hottest part is the unveiling of a petition application developed in conjunction with Facebook Causes. Other social media components include an influencer relations campaign, and a Darfur Blogger Toolkit with videos, photos, and other resources at http://www.addyourvoice.org/pages/blogger_toolkit.  And of course, there’s the mandatory Twitter hashtag: #voice4darfur .

The appalling genocide in Darfur continues – now in its sixth year and at the price of nearly half a million lives. Ironically, this December marks the 60^th anniversary of the United Nations  Genocide Convention, and we are still dealing with this horrific issue.

The time to for action is now, and in a year when many of us are suffering financial hardship, we can still make a difference. Signing the petition, tweeting or writing blog posts  are great ways to help without expending a lot of cash.

This is a great example of social media for social good.  But for it to work, you, the Social Media Club member needs to believe in the cause and do something about it. Help us end genocide, and spread the word to your friends online and with other local Social Media Club members

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.

Related articles by Zemanta

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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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