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

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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Social Media Now: YouTube v. NewTube–Can Big Media Keep it Real?

Last November VC Fred Wilson asked an interesting question of the blogosphere: Can you fake authenticity?

It’s an enormous question of course–the stuff of a thousand dissertation–particularly for Americans. After all, our culture is based on the artificial invention of identities that project authenticity.

But Fred was asking specifically about social media businesses–can the sense of community that inspires the viral growth of companies like del.icio.us, Digg, craigslist, and, yes, YouTube, be intentionally replicated through corporate planning?

Well, it looks like we’re about to get a text-book test case with impending announcement  that NBC Universal and News Corp’s Fox will launch a YouTube competitor this summer.

The effort is hardly a surprise. For months Big Media’s war on YouTube has been shadowed by talk of looming corporate competitors. Staci Kramer at paidContent had the latest chapter nailed on Tuesday — that the JV was coming together, and that Fox and NBC were soliciting Google’s online and tech competitors like Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo with Viacom an on-again, off-again possible collaborator.

PaidContent reports that Fox and NBC video, including material from shows like Heroes and Family Guy, will be distributed on MySpace, Yahoo and MSN.

Also, Terry Semel told an AdAge conference that the new service will be chock-a-block with YouTube-like sharing tools.

Pre-announcement commentary abounds on the Net this morning following the publication an LA Times piece which included this locker room bulletin board fodder:

Google executives’ disdain for the project is evident in their nickname for the consortium: Clown Co.

24/7 Wall Street picks up on the LAT’s comment that big media JVs have a checkered history:

The plan is cumbersome and complex making it unlikely to work. Sites like Yahoo! already have a large store of video content and a huge number of other channels, so making content from major media companies stand out will be very difficult. The same holds true for the other large web portals that the venture will target for distribution.

Mike at Techdirt hedges obliquely:

There are plenty of ways the networks can (and probably will) screw this up, but at least they’re doing something.

Whether or not the JV succeeds will, of course, depend on how cooperative the big media powers can be. It may also depend on legal matters–if the big media companies collaborate on exclusive online distribution, it that illegal, anti-competitive collusion? I also suspect that companies in the traditional distribution channels for TV content–MSOs, TV station owners–will offer some push back.

But most of all the success or failure of the JV will depend on the answer to Fred’s question about authenticity. There’s no doubt that users will show up wherever popular content is posted, especially if it is posted at sites with big traffic like Yahoo and MySpace. But will users confer on this new effort the vibe of Internet authenticity? Will users think NBC and Fox are keeping it real?

That will depend on how much Fox and NBC give to users. Success in social media depends on following the Beatles’ dictum: the love you take is equal to the love you make. Will sharing be limited to the friendly confines of approved destination sites? How intrusive will advertising be? Will users be able to make mash-ups even across ownership (say a Heroes/24 hybrid)? If so there’s a good chance that NewTube will be the feel good hit of the summer.

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