(* Source: three billion *)
Content is king. Actually, content is the king, queen and all the heirs apparent.
But it’s no use if no one gets to see it.
I love this handy little chart from Social Reflexion. So simple, but so good.
(* Source: Greg Rollett via three billion *)
Today’s musicians, both mainstream and indie, are using social media to connect with fans, build anticipation, and generate revenue in new and unique ways. The products range from singles to mix tapes to digital six-packs, even oddly shaped USB sticks, vinyl, and the occasional traditional album.
But how are these artists reaching their new fan bases online through social channels? Much like the business world, social media promotion for musicians is still a very new game, with no exact recipe for platinum success.
There are however, some innovations being put forth, and a new connection is being formed between artists and fans — a connection that empowers both to give each other what they are looking for.
We have all heard about the success of micro lending organizations like Kiva, which use multiple small payments to contribute to a larger goal. The same process is being applied to creating an album or a music-based project.
One such project is the Washington D.C.-based indie hip-hop group Panacea. The producer/MC duo listed their project on Kickstater, a funding platform for artists, designers, filmmakers, musicians, journalists, inventors, explorers, and others.
The project was posted on the morning of February 26th. According to Jeremy Calvery, the group’s Director of Digital Media and Promotion, “We were at $1,000 before the end of the first day. We had to increase the number of $200 packages from three to five over the weekend because people were e-mailing and literally begging for the chance to ‘buy’ the whole back catalog. Less than five full days from the first e-mail to the list, we had reached the funding goal of $3,800, which was set to be just a bit more than what the minimum press of 250 vinyl copies was going to cost.”
Another hip-hop outfit, the Get Busy Committee, also launched a project on Kickstarter. In their drive to raise $3,218, they included one premium pledge level at $1,000 — an investment that netted the donor a song about him or herself to be included on the record, as well as a platinum plaque. They sold this spot within 24 hours.
Another approach musicians are taking is the use of web video series. Indie pop artist Mike Posner has been telling his story over the course of a video series titled “One Foot Out The Door.” Daniel Weisman, Mike’s manager, stated that he was attempting to create an income stream for Mike while he was finishing college and working on his debut album.
Daniel and his management company Elitaste were approached by the shoe company Puma about integrated artist campaigns. Puma ended up sponsoring Mike’s last semester in college, and provided a camera crew to follow him from classes, to the studio, to shows all over the country.
Daniel wanted to do something special for the Mashable (
) readers when I reached out to him, so fresh off the upload, here is the premier of Episode #10 of “One Foot Out The Door.”
Puma Presents: Mike Posner “One Foot Out The Door” Episode 10: California Love from Mike Posner on Vimeo.
Live streaming has also been worthwhile for big announcements. Underground artists the Kottonmouth Kings turned to Ustream to tell their fans all about their new album and when they could expect it in local stores.
The video was watched live and formatted like a press conference, with fans getting the chance to ask questions and share their feedback. It was a smart way to bring their fans into the experience and give back to the community that has supported them for 10+ years.
Rob And Kal are a pop/rock act from the UK who are taking fans inside their studio and the music creation process. They call it Mubla 2.0, which Rob defined as “our interactive recording project where we come up with song ideas and you help us develop them with your comments, suggestions and musicianship.”
So far they have five songs in progress with fans like Adam saying, “I just feel the intro has a little too much going on and 2.33 to 2.56 I almost want the piano to play and pull at the heart strings.” Another commenter named Russell gave tips like, “Think drums and a bit more of heavier guitar would go down nicely particularly near end.”
This concept empowers fans and gives them a product they feel responsible for and connected to. The project can only strengthen the bond between fans and artists, and result in an easier sale when the time comes to release an album.
Glasses Malone, a new artist signed with Cash Money Records, is turning to bloggers to get the word out about his new album “Beach Cruiser.” What makes his campaign unique is that unlike traditional artists who look to get their tracks on highly trafficked MP3 blogs and review sites, Glasses and his team are focused on adding value to bloggers whose primary focus is not on music.
A marketing rep for Glasses told me, “These bloggers are more open to running contests and integrated campaigns than traditional music bloggers because they are not accustomed to being pitched by a major label artist. We have found blogs that love unique and fresh content that will separate them from their peers and competition, and it is working out very well for us so far.”
Armed with a research team, they have been targeting biking blogs, college blogs, beach lifestyle sites and more, all with the hope of driving new traffic to Glasses’ site and generating some pre-album buzz.
No matter what the labels and corporations are doing, musicians are taking it upon themselves to use social channels to connect with fans, offer value, and create relationship. This has ultimately led to new business models and revenue streams from sponsorships, touring and live appearances, custom products, and social monetization through advertising.
(* Source: Niels Bellaar *)
Niels says...
We love it when the online world and the offline world come together and share. It’s what we have seen from exciting brands like Red Bull and Apple and we believe many brands have the opportunity to port their offline activities to the online world. And today Diesel is doing such a thing.
At this very moment the world’s hottest fashion designers and brands are showing their fall 2010 collections at the semi-annual New York Fashion Week. Among these is Diesel who will show their Diesel Black Gold fall 2010 collection today at 5pm.
Many want to attend this fashion show, but only a few actually can. From Apple we learn that major offline presentations (the Apple Keynotes) are followed by many via streaming video. At the Diesel Black Gold dotcom you can tune into the live broadcast of the runway show, giving you the opportunity to be among the first to know about this fall’s hottest designs.
In addition Diesel invited not only their offline press relations to the runway show, but also several online fashion influencers. By doing so Diesel shows the importance of having an online presence and closes the gap between traditional journalists and bloggers.
Discussing what you’ve just seen at the live broadcast can be done at Diesel’s Facebook and Twitter channels. It really looks like Diesel is moving away from traditional marketing and towards a model which is more content driven, engaged and focused on consumer dialogue.
(* Source: Jason Kincaid *)
Jason says...
If you’ve ever tried to use Twitter Search, you know that it’s got some pretty serious problems. First, the site only lets you search back through a couple weeks of tweets. Even worse, the service doesn’t seem to employ any relevancy algorithm to speak of — you just see the most recent tweets that contain your query’s keywords, regardless of who said them (which oftentimes yields junk and spam). Today Topsy
, the startup that views tweets as the currency of the web, is launching a handful of new features that improve on the official Twitter search in almost every way.
Up until now, Topsy has been based entirely around links. When you visited the site, it would prompt you to enter a search query, and then would display a list of links most relevant to whatever you searched for. The links are ranked by the number of times they’ve been retweeted, and also by the influence of the people who have tweeted them; the site actually keeps track of the number of retweets each user typically gets to establish their overall reputation. Now, Topsy is taking this reputation system and extending it beyond just links, allowing you to search for both photos and tweets that don’t contain links at all.
So what does that mean? Before now, if you ran a search for “Google Buzz”, the site would return links to articles and videos about the new service. Now, it will also surface tweets from influential Twitter users, even if they don’t include a link. That’s important for breaking news when a story may not have already been covered by a publication, or when there’s a tweet that’s important in and of itself (say, Bill Gates’ first tweet). You can view just these tweets using the navigation menu at the top of the screen, and important tweets will also be included in the site’s flagship web search, alongside links and photos (more on that later). You can filter these results by time, sorting by Hour, Day, Week, Month, and All Time (which represents 18 months of data).
This new search functionality for linkless tweets comes with one big caveat — it will only count retweets that use the native Twitter retweet functionality, which has been pretty controversial. Native retweets don’t allow users to append their own comments to a retweet, and they’re still only used around 10% as often as the “old school” retweet functionality. That said, the Topsy team says they will eventually be tracking all retweets, though it may take a while.
The other big addition to the site today is support for photo search. This searches the text of any tweet that contains a link to a photo, and then presents all matching photos in a thumbnail view similar to Google Images (as with links and tweets, these are all ranked according to Topsy’s reputation system). Because these are pulled in in realtime, the results can be more useful and timely than what you’d find on other image search engines. That said, they can also be pretty quirky. For example, I ran a query for “airplane” and got results of a guy hiding his head in a sweatshirt (on an airplane), a photo of an airplane safety manual, and a photo of a guy wearing a banana suit (again, on an airplane). Queries appear to work better if they’re related to a current event. But even if the results aren’t always perfectly on point, you can definitely have a lot of fun with them.
Finally, you can see the top trending items for all three search categories — web, photos, and tweets — in the “Trending” section, which sort of serves as a Digg for Twitter. And, for those who were asking for it, Topsy now supports RSS feeds.
This is a big improvement for Topsy, and I’ll definitely be using it as an alternative to Twitter’s official search. My concern, though, is that Twitter will probably be launching something similar in the future — its own search engine really hasn’t changed in years, and is ripe for an overhaul (especially since it’s now featured on the Twitter homepage). That said, Topsy has its search indexing over 18 months of tweets (search.twitter.com only has around two weeks of content), so that may help differentiate it from whatever Twitter releases.
(* Source: Sara Inés Calderón *)
Sara says...
JetBlue, the economy airline, launched their All-You-Can-Jet Fan Sweepstakes Facebook promotion last month in an effort to drive up the number of their fans to compete with the million-plus followers the company has on Twitter.
The sweepstakes started on December 9, 2009 and ends on January 31. Before the promotion the company had 60,000 fans, now the company is bordering on 125,000.
Alison Croyle, spokeswoman for JetBlue, said the timing of the holiday promotion was directed at picking up where a previous Facebook promotion left off in September.
“The All-You-Can-Jet Sweepstakes was a huge success during September — our lower travel period for our customer. Based on the success of that, it was another way to leverage interest in our social media,” Croyle tells us.
The company has more than one million fans on Twitter and wanted to duplicate that success on Facebook with the sweepstakes.
Prizes in the sweepstakes ranged from a free round-trip flight awarded weekly (for a total of eight) to a team prize drawing of a five-day/four-night getaway to a grand prize drawing for one All-You-Can-Jet pass valid for one year of travel.
Facebook users have to fan the site in order to enter, then register by entering their personal information, and then may receive multiple ballots for multiple chances to win, or compete with their team members on JetBlue’s Facebook page.
JetBlue also had a caveat in the contest, that for every 250,000 fans the page added, an extra All-You-Can-Jet pass would be added to the mix for another fan to win. It was an ambitious goal, Croyle says, but in the end JetBlue was happy with all the fans that joined them on Facebook during the promotion.
JetBlue’s Facebook page is also a hub for deals on airfare, with status updates and a Wall littered with deals for the company’s major hubs in New York-JFK, Washington D.C.-Dulles, Ft. Lauderdale, Long Beach, Oakland, among other places.
(* Source: PSFK *)
Nike is giving us their taste in mobile marketing with True City, an iPhone app with the tagline ‘Making the hidden visible.’ It combines social elements with current mobile technologies to create a next-gen city and travel guide for six European cities.
With each city comes a host ‘tastemaker’ to guide users to lesser known community attractions. For Paris, it is BKRW founder Jay Smith. Of course Jay’s perspective alone is not enough, as an addition to each host there is a second tier of designated contributors and a third of so called ‘civilian’ contributors. Everyone is encouraged to add their own finds, geo-tagged, throughout a city. The best, or most popular, will have an opportunity to join the team of Nike insiders. It appears that Nike is reaching for an army of hyper-local, mobile-connected advocates.
(* Source: Erik Schonfeld *)
Erik says...
The biggest U.S. music service on the Web in December was Vevo
, a new entrant which is a joint venture between Google, Universal Music Group, and Sony Music. Dubbed the “Hulu of music videos,” Vevo attracted 35.4 million unique visitors in December, 2009, putting it above the 33.1 million visitors who went to MySpace Music, according to estimates put out today by comScore. Considering that Vevo only launched on December 8, that is a pretty good showing.
A closer look at the numbers shows, that nearly all of that audience came from YouTube, which hosts a Vevo channel. Of the 35.4 million visitors which comScore counts for Vevo, 32.6 million (or 92 percent) are attributed to YouTube. In one fell blow, YouTube has helped to push MySpace Music from the No. 1 spot.
Not only does this illustrate the distribution might of YouTube, but it also shows how professional content is still hard to beat, even on YouTube. The Vevo channel is already the most viewed channel on YouTube, with nearly 13 billion views across all Vevo and all of Vevo’s sub-sites, which include the individual artist channels for Lady Gaga, Kings of Leon, Timbaland, and many others.
Here are the top ten music services as measured by comScore in unique U.S. visitors for December, 2009. The only real startup is Jango (No.7), with 9.6 million, but the comScore numbers include some lyric sites it also owns. ToneFuse Music, No. 8, is almost entirely a collection of lyric sites. Rhapsody rounds out No. 10 with 6.5 million (Last.fm would be No. 11 with 6 million).
Top U.S. Music Services On The Web (in unique visitors, December, 2009)
(* Source: PSFK *)
Suicide Machine is a website that allows users to delete their social media accounts in a sensational way.
Facebook has blocked the site, but while active, users could input their social media credentials, allowing a program to unfriend, unfollow, and remove any trace and contact with other users.
These traces include personal information along with wall posts and tweets. The system automatically removes information and unfriends others one user at a time, allowing you to watch as the system gradually removes your 2.0 existence.
Rather than deleting profiles, which allows Facebook to still keep photos and data back-ups of your profile, the creators hope:
by removing your contact details and friend connections one-by-one, your data is being cached out from their backup servers. This can happen after days, weeks, months or even years.
[via The Guardian]
(* Source: Leena Rao *)
Leena says...
We’re big fans of TripIt, a nifty site that creates customized travel itineraries from travel confirmation emails. Today, the service is becoming even more useful by integrating Yapta.com, an airfare and hotel tracking service, into its platform.
Yapta lets you track fares from most of the major domestic and international airlines, allowing users to select flights to track, and then be alerted when the price fluctuates. If the price declines after you purchase it, Yapta will help you get a refund or credit from airlines that have lowest guaranteed fare policies. Travelers can now forward their flight confirmation emails to plans@tripit.com and can choose to have Yapta start tracking their flights for airline refunds or credits. TripIt members can then link their account to Yapta in order to be alerted when they are eligible for a refund or credit based on an airline’s “guaranteed airfare” policy.
Yapta, which has been able to gain a steady group of consumer followers since its launch in 2007, is revealing a few compelling statistics about airfare price fluctuations. To date, Yapta has conducted approximately 500 million airfare price checks, showing that seat prices on 45 percent of flights will drop before the cabin door closes. Approximately 15 percent of these flights are eligible for a refund or credit and since May 2007, Yapta has identified over $250 million in savings for its members, an average of $334 per traveler each year.
Yapta stands to gain a new influx of users with the integration with popular service TripIt. It’s made Michael’s list of products he can’t live without for three years running, and is quickly gaining fans among frequent travelers. Yapta also offers a companion hotel price tracking service.
(* Source: Leena Rao *)
Leena says...
Actress Kirstie Alley is venturing into the microblogging world with the bizarre launch of Phitter.com, a Twitter-like community site dedicated to helping consumers share tips on weight loss, dieting, fitness, exercise and living a healthy lifestyle. Alley has been publicly battling with personal weight gain over the past few years, and even sells her own branded weight loss products.
According to a release, Phitter.com is a “phitness phocused community that encourages members to talk, or Phit, about fitness, weight loss, working out, dieting, exercising, and healthy living while making new ‘Phriends’ and having ‘Phun’!” The site lets users write and post messages in 140 characters via the web or SMS. Similar to Twitter, you can send private messages to other users. And Phitter also integrated with Twitter to allow users to post directly to Twitter and to find Twitter friends who have already joined Phitter.
The site’s UI definitely needs some work, but the ambition of the site may resonate with folks who want to share the trials and tribulations of weight loss and fitness. Of course, there’s no shortage of social networks who are trying to serve the same purpose, including DailyBurn, WorkoutBOX, and ZodBod.
(* Source: MC Siegler *)
MC says...
Regular readers may know my affinity for Pearl Jam. The band, which released a new album, Backspacer, last year had a series of promotions with MySpace to promote the album. Now they’re turning to Twitter for some more.
The band has teamed up with the digital media house Culture Jam to launch a new site that easily allows you to tweet about about the Pearl Jam song “Just Breathe.” This site is actually a simple application that gets your Twitter credentials via OAuth. In exchange for the tweet, you’ll receive a code that will allow you to download the song on iTunes for free. Specifically, it’s a live version of the song that was recorded at Austin City Limits this year.
This free song isn’t without a slight catch. Not only will you obviously have to send the tweet, but in small print on the site, you’ll see that by tweeting the message you will also automatically follow the @pearljam account on Twitter. Of course, if you’re tweeting this, you’re probably into Pearl Jam, and won’t mind following the account.
On the site, there is also a way to buy a digital copy of the single and you can enter to win a limited run copy of the new album on White Vinyl LP (there are 15 of them available).
Culture Jam does these types of promotions for a number of musical acts. The use of Twitter in this regard is smart because there is a very low barrier to entry. As we discussed yesterday, a growing number of brands and venues are using Twitter to trade free goods and deals for promotion on the service.
(* Source: PSFK *)
PSFK says...
Want to attend New York Fashion Week and be a rookie reporter for G-Star Raw? The global fashion brand has adopted the culture of social media to not only recruit the best photographer, the most outstanding YouTube video producer, the most addicted Twitter user and the most active Facebook user they can find but they’re simultaneously using those very same social media weapons to seed their call-for-entry messages. With a specially created sign up platform, potential candidates are asked to sign up by connecting with their social media accounts; for example, via Facebook, G-Star lovers are asked to upload a photo of themselves in their best denim look.
Chosen winners will be flown over to attend and cover the runway shows and glamorous after-parties with all tweets, photos and videos to be streamed live on g-star.com
[via Viralblog.com]
Love it or hate it, social media (and its persistent title) will maintain its grip on consumers – and brand marketing discussions – until it evolves into a different form and role in our digital lives. On that note, Sienna Farris, Director of Social Media at Strawberry Frog, spoke with AdWeek about 5 key social media implications that brands will need to respond to in 2010. Recognizing that predictions don’t hold a candle against the fast pace at which technology changes and renders them dated, these are more of a call to action and awareness, and less of a definite prediction.
The 5 key implications:
1. Social media marketing will finally transition from “nice to have” to “must have”
2. Location-based social networking is here to stay
3. Experimental social media budgets are key
4. The division between the virtual world and the physical world will continue to blur
5. Crowd sourcing will turn social media into a direct sales channel
Leena says...
GROU.PS, a do-it-yourself social network focused on moderated online collaboration has steadily gained an impressive amount of users and added compelling features to its application. The social network platform has just hit 2 million users, adding another million members in just 6 months.
And GROU.PS has amped up its offering for publishers by launching Elastic Modules, which gives publishers the ability to change the way the data is displayed to their visitors. To date, the highest reach of look and feel customization was at the template level; the publisher could only change the skin of their site. Now publishers can actually modify the backend of the social network they’ve created.
GROU.PS counts Don Dodge, developer evangelist at Google, is among the community builders that have chosen GROU.PS as their online platform. “Don Dodge’s Startup List” is sort of a Crunchbase for Boston area.
The startup’s networks are attractive to users because it lets you run all of your group’s collaboration tools from one GROU.PS domain using a single login. The system supports wikis, photos, links, blogs, calendars, chat, forums, maps, profiles, and subgroups – each of which is available as a plug-and-play module for your community. These modules also allow users to pull in their data from other third party services (flickr, Digg, blogs, etc).
The startup, which has over 40,000 networks on its platform, also recently added ActivityRank Pipelines, a point and reward system that lets moderators of a social network measure and rank members’ content contributions and then extend moderation privileges to members based on these rankings. And the social network is launching a subscription model that will allow moderators to charge subscription fees to members (GROU.PS gets a 50% cut on any fees charges).
GROU.PS just raised $1 million in funding, bringing the startup’s total funding up to over $2 million. But while the social network is growing, it is still faces major competition form the leader in the space, Ning, which recently hit 37 million users with 1.6 million social networks created on the platform.
(* Source: Robin Wauters *)
Robin says...
Italian writer, blogger and photographer Vincenzo Cosenza has for the second time put together a visualization that shows the most popular social networks around the world on a map, based on the most recent traffic data (December 2009) as measured by Alexa & Google Trends for Websites.
The first one, which we featured in June 2009, already painted a picture of Facebook taking over the world from the West, but the second one shows its relentless colonization even more clearly.
Facebook, with over 350 million users, is the undisputed leader of social networking in the English speaking parts of the world, and has been making strides in Latin-America, Europe and Africa as well. Based on Alexa data only, Facebook has even taken over Orkut in India, historically a high-flyer in those parts. Google’s social network remains the most trafficked in Brazil, however.
Facebook clone Vkontakte.ru has been able to resist and stop Facebook from becoming the leader in Russia. It’s worth noting that Vkontakte is largely owned by Digital Sky Technologies, which also owns a significant stake in Facebook, so you can see how they could potentially melt together in the future.
Hi5 has also seen Facebook take over most of the territories where it was leading, and has only been able to stop the social network from dominance in Peru, Portugal, Romania, Thailand and Mongolia. Meanwhile, QQ is still ahead of everyone else in China, where the number of Internet users is expected to double and reach a staggering 840 million by 2013.
Nowhere to be seen on the map: MySpace (which only leads on the Island of Guam).
(* Source: MG Siegler *)
MG says...
Facebook has just released its list of top status updates for the year, and they’re pretty interesting. This is a new feature that Facebook plans to release yearly called “Memology,” the study of how memes are spreading on Facebook. Specifically, the Facebook Data Team looked at status updates in the U.S. for this year’s list.
For this list, Facebook grouped together similar items to make it a more comprehensive one. As such, the first item on the list should be a surprise to no one: “Facebook Applications.” The specific words that Facebook grouped together here include Farmville, Farm Town, and Social Living, they note. The fact that Farmville has 72 million month active users who update their statuses with info from the game was probably enough to give Faceboook Applications the top spot.
But below that, things start to get interesting. For example, “FML” is the number two term. As you likely know, this stands for “fuck my life” (or as Facebook puts it, “We’ll leave the “F” open to your interpretation”) and is a popular Internet meme in general for talking about why your life sucks. As you can see in the graph they included, FML usage rose out of nowhere to peak in May, then dipped, then came back in September. Facebook also notes that usage of the term was strong during Mondays and Tuesdays.
“Swine Flu” and “Celebrity Deaths” came in third and fourth place respectively, which isn’t surprising given how much news both created this year. Then things get pretty boring until number 10: “Twitter.”
Technically, Facebook included both the word “Twitter” and “RT” in this trend. There are a few interesting things about this. One, the two are obviously rivals as Facebook has seemingly been taking a lot of product cues from Twitter, and Twitter turned down an acquisition offer from them. Two, “Facebook” did not appear on Twitter’s year-end list, which we found suspicious and still think it may have been filtered out. Three, Facebook still manages to take a swipe as its much smaller rival:
Talk about Twitter took off at the beginning of the year. April showed a peak of activity and momentum, though mentions of the word “Twitter” decreased over the past few months.
There’s been a lot of talk about Twitter’s lack of growth recently, and Facebook is clearly playing that up here.
Update: Facebook continues to be moody about Twitter-talk. As they write to us, “Just had to object to your claim that we were taking a swipe at Twitter.” They continue on, “We also made very clear that the term RT (retweet) had grown to be very common. The mere fact Twitter made the list means it’s become one of the biggest trends of the year—and we openly acknowledged that.”
They also link to a post with more charts showing that Twitter talk did in fact decline at the end of the year. We don’t doubt that, but it’s still interesting that much of the blurb is dedicated to pointing out the peak activity and specifically the peak momentum earlier in the year.
(* Source: Brian Solis *)
Brian says...
"Real-Time Responsibilities (fully transparent and disclosed) of a New Media team could include:
Content Producers - Creates content necessary for client/company interaction with customers, peers and influencers, including videos, images, Web pages, blog posts, policies and guidelines, tweets, wikis, comments, online experiences, profiles, etc. In many cases, connectors and industry experts/strategists wear this hat and assign the creation of important content to either content producers, other members on the team with direct experience, or simply produce it themselves.
Digital Sociologists - Observes the cultures, trends, behavior, associated with communities, networks, forums and compares the interactivity around keywords and brands to contribute to engagement strategies, customer service policies and improvements and product modifications.
Digital Ethnographers - Ethnography is the branch of anthropology that deals with the scientific description of specific human cultures. For those projects where a deep study of online culture and communities is critical, an ethnographer is ideal for documenting a descriptive study of a particular human society. As ethnography is based almost entirely on fieldwork, this role usually lives and interacts with the people who are the subject of study.
Research Librarians - Complements or augments in house or contract sociologists by analyzing relevant keywords used by customers, listening to and documenting conversations by content and sentiment, charting volume and frequency within social networks, identification and analysis of true influencers and tastemakers across media, blogs, and social communities, and presents data and charts for analysis by strategists.
Community Managers - Listens to conversations in social networks, forums, and the blogosphere documented by research librarians or through their own process, assigns relevant dialogue to appropriate team leads, manages the workflow and response status, and in most cases is the first line of response.
Digital or Social Architects - Digital or social architects are responsible for building the online bridges between company brand and consumers via widgets, sites, online dashboards, blogs, social newsrooms, social media releases, wikis, social networks, fan pages, forums, groups, and any other application, platform, or group responsible for hosting content, conversations, and interactivity.
Connectors - Informed individuals and teams that can connect stories to influencers and inspire activity, direction, and conversations. Connectors act based on intelligence, empathy, sincerity and the ability to truly “bridge” a story to someone else in a way that’s specific and compelling to them as an individual and also as it relates to their audience and social graph.
Industry Experts/Strategists - Someone has to act as the conductor to this all star orchestra. Qualified individuals have mastered the art and science of attaching new and traditional media to the bottom line of their business and also possess a deep understanding of and experience with customer empathy, market trends, and the governing technology that connects the people within desired market places.
These new, adjoined job functions create a new level of services that complement existing, traditional and necessary communications activities.
- Listening/Monitoring/Documenting – intelligence gathering and trend analysis
- Engagement in the networks and groups where relevant conversations are pervasive and warrant participation
- Content creation
- Conversation management and trafficking
- Influencer and tastemaker identification and networking
- Community management, empowerment, and cultivation
- Event hosting and franchising
- Story development and connectivity to “The Magic Middle” bloggers and Long Tail networks
- Humanizing company and product messaging and redefining the online journey and experience associated with the online presences associated with specific brand/products"
(* Source: Mike Johansson *)
If I were a preacher, here's what I'd preach ...
(* Source: Frank Striefler *)
A great presentation by Frank...
(* Source: Alison Driscoll *)
Not even a year ago, Facebook was still being dismissed as a silly site intended to help college kids slack off. Indeed, that is what helped the social network take hold with a large number of users, but it has proven its worth in business and by now, nearly everyone is on board. Companies of all sizes are scrambling to get on the site and reach both new and current customers with a Facebook Page, the Facebook preferred method for user interaction with a brand, company or public figure.
An effective Facebook Page not only attracts fans, but is sticky so that fans keep coming back and may even share the content on the Page. To do that, you need a well thought out Page that has some great applications supported by good, relevant content. Here are eight essential apps for your brand’s Facebook page:
This app was originally a Facebook feature that they then converted into an application; as such, it is sponsored and maintained by Facebook and less likely to break or be abandoned. Set this application up to pull in the RSS feed from your blog or other content source and it will automatically bring everything into Facebook and show all of your friends that you’ve posted a new Note.
This notification system is important for staying on their radar and is more visible than an RSS Reader, or mini-blog as I like to call it, but lacks many formatting capabilities; it’s best to think of Notes and an RSS Reader as working hand in hand. Start here to get content coming into your Page, then move on to the RSS Reader.
I may have jumped ahead a bit with the Notes recommendation, but I am assuming that most companies have, or could have, a blog. If you don’t, work on that before Facebook, for many more reasons than I could get into here. But if you already have a blog, good news: there are tons of blog and RSS apps out there, but I’ve done the leg work and I found this one offered more functionality, better customization (you can pick an image to make your Facebook mini-blog look more like your actual blog) and a greater sense of control. It can be a bit buggy, but it’s worth persisting for the level of customization, and therefore attention grabbing potential.
Again, this assumes that you have a Twitter (
) account, but if you’re reading this and working on a Facebook Page, my guess is you do. Or you at least know you should have one. If not, set one up before adding this application to your new Facebook Page. This will automatically pull your tweets into your Facebook status, and it puts a cute little Twitter-themed box on your profile, so everyone knows you’re cool enough to be on Twitter. It also saves you time in updating AND ensures profile activity to keep you relevant.
Neither Facebook Pages nor Profiles allow any type of HTML in the main content section, but you can add FBML and HTML applications to add more stylized elements to a Page, like clickable images, anchor text and interactive content. The Static FBML app allows you to add advanced functionality to a page by placing a customizable box in which you can render HTML or FBML (Facebook Markup Language), giving you free reign over the space to add images, video, stylized text and almost whatever else you want. This app was developed by Facebook, so it’s fully supported and not prone to the problems of some third party applications.
In the Extended Info box you can use HTML to customize any kind of content and create numerous fields beyond the standard Information categories; you can also name the box anything you want so it matches your page perfectly. This app works much like the Static FBML application but is slightly easier to use. Although not developed by Facebook, it is highly ranked and provides a nice alternative or second customizable box option on a page.
This Flash application, also developed by Facebook, will add a box to your Page in which you can upload your own Flash files to achieve advanced customization and play any kind of Flash video, widget or game. It can be renamed to maintain the integrity of the page and keep the look and feel consistent with your brand.
With Posted Items Pro you can embed multiple YouTube (
), Yahoo, and Google Videos, music mp3s, sites, files, and more onto your profile and Facebook pages. You can add any variety of these elements, making it great for a media center or press section.
If you have the resources, add some personality to your profile with a fun, irreverent application that you create just for your Page. This could be tied into your brand in multiple ways; try to think of something that people outside of Facebook would appreciate or enjoy that will remind them of who created it and keep them coming back, like a game or contest.
In order to stay relevant on Facebook, you need to continually update your Page and use the site. The more actions you take, the more you appear in a fan’s News Feed. This keeps you in their mind, and in their friend’s Feeds when they interact with you. But updating content will do more than keep you on the News Feed; it will also help make your Facebook Page sticky by offering fans an incentive to remain a supporter and come back more than once; one of the best way to do that is to provide some unique benefit to fans: exclusive content, secret contests or insider access to information before non-fans.
If you have a good brand, product or service with a strong website behind it, building a Facebook Page should be fairly easy. But if you need a few examples or inspiration, check out these Pages that definitely get it right:
PINK collection is aimed at college girls, so Facebook is a natural fit, and this Page nails it. They are my most frequent example when explaining effective use of Facebook. This Page makes good use of HTML and FBML apps and provides lots of contests and exclusive stuff for Facebook fans.
A childhood favorite of many avid Facebook users, Britney is taking Twitter by storm and her Facebook Page is not far behind. Britney sends out tons of Updates to fans and posts plenty of sneak peeks on Facebook.
Lots of videos means plenty of opportunity for laughing and sharing. Zappos is almost always mentioned as a social media success story, and they’re working on making their Facebook Page meet the brand image.
Target has managed to break free of the Wal-Mart stigma and position itself as a hip and budget conscious alternative to mall stores. They’ve chose to direct visitors to their “Vote” tab, where not only is Target donating to a good cause, it’s encouraging fans to participate and spread the word to their friends with interactive voting.
Adam says...
The company has launched a Facebook app that brings together the biggest highlights from Jordan’s career, letting users vote for their favorite, which is then shared to their Wall. Each highlight includes commentary from a well-known sports journalist, and at the end of the competition, the highlight receiving the most votes will become a Gatorade label (the sports drink maker has already produced 6 commemorative MJ labels – this will be the 7th).
The app is part of Gatorade’s Facebook page, where the company has around a quarter million fans and shares lots of behind-the-scenes clips from its iconic commercials. Here, Gatorade shares the making of the commemorative bottles, shown in this 30-second spot:
Also worth checking out – the “Play” button on the main page for the Jordan app loads a spectacular visual display of Jordan’s career highlights. In all, a very cool promotion to celebrate the career of Number 23.
(* Source: Christina Warren *)
Christina says...
More and more businesses are learning that adopting a strategy of incorporating social media to connect with customers is a great way to build a solid brand. Even companies that already have very successful global brands, like Audi are starting to use social media to enhance their presence and garner feedback from users.
Audi USA has partnered with TurnHere to promote its participation in the “Youth Mobile 2030″ design challenge and to engage with its fans via the company’s Facebook page.
Right now, Audi is gearing up for the Los Angeles Design Challenge, which will take place at the L.A. Auto Show. Southern California automotive studios are competing to design a youth-oriented concept car for the year 2030.
Using Facebook , Audi is posting videos of their design process, information about the contest as it progresses, and soliciting questions and feedback to find out what the fans would like to see in a car of the future. It wants its 300,000 fans to know that as a company, Audi listens to its customers and wants to engage in a conversation about the future.
I’m sure that whatever Audi ends up coming up with for their concept car will be stunning — I just hope the console has built-in Twitter and Facebook integration!
Kyle says...
One online service that I’ve grown attached to is Mint.com. Simply, Mint.com is the most effective way to manage your money, rent, loans, bills, expenses, financial planning in the Web era (Personally, I love the email alerts when I go over my chosen budget). All of this has allowed Mint to become the most used online personal finance service on the Internet, with more than 1 million users.
It has also enabled the company to build a high brand affinity with its users. In addition to being a great service, Mint has harnessed user’s positive experiences with the service and turned them into brand fans on Facebook. As I’ve followed closely over the last several months, Facebook is making very steady progress in appealing to marketers. Fan and brand pages, check. Vanity URL’s, check. Mint.com is one company that has taken advantage of these changes.
Their Facebook page has grown extremely popular with more than 32, 000 followers and constant interaction. From Mint.com prize pack giveaways, to financial haiku contests, to updates on their latest blog posts, Mint leverages Facebook to the fullest.
Before the vanity URL gold rush I speculated that Mint would be one of the first companies to get their customized Facebook URL. And they were. You can now find them easily at www.facebook.com/mint. Yup, they beat the US Mint, the herb and Wrigley to the findable, SEO-friendly domain.
In addition, Mint’s Facebook admins have been diligent in integrating video and their other social media channels (i.e. Twitter) into the Facebook experience. They’ve also started to use Facebook as their de-facto HARO or Profnet service; allowing their PR and marketing team to track down users for stories that may fit a particular angle or be from a certain area. Anyone from Minn-e-sota?
Mint’s approach is not siloed within Facebook. Their aforementioned blog is extremely popular with more than 11,000 RSS subscribers. This visual-friendly post got 400 plus Digs.
It’s obvious that Aaron and his team understand the future of integrated marketing and are building a brand that has real staying power.
(* Source: InsideFacebook *)
Eric says...
Over the last few weeks, was all of a sudden getting popular on Facebook. Instead of just gaining a couple hundred users a day, he was gaining tens of thousands. But recently, .
Why? Well, first, we recognize that Slash is a great guitarist, and that people just want to be fans of him because they love him. Second, we recognize that he has a very active page — he’s constantly updating via text messages, even automatically sending his updates to Twitter via his page.
But we also recognize that he’s been active on Facebook for months, yet only recently saw a spike in new fans. So there is likely another cause, or two. We asked readers, and a few people responded to say they’d seen actual ads for Slash’s page on Facebook — apparently ads being run by Facebook itself. Slash may be benefiting from a larger effort by Facebook to promote celebrities.
“A few weeks ago, I noticed that Facebook replaced ads with fan page solicitations,” as commenter Jason F. told us. “I think Slash was one of them. I wonder if that helped seed the audience more diversely than organic growth ala Guns N’ Roses and Velvet Revolvers’ fan pages would have.”
What does Jason mean by “seeding?” Facebook fan page advertising is not itself necessarily the main explanation for the new growth. Jeff Widman, a Facebook marketing consultant who helps big clients grow pages, has more:
“The Highlight section of Facebook means if you can get a page rolling along at a good clip, you can keep picking up more fans. It’s a solid way for him to basically capture on Facebook all the people who already like him (and are friends with him). I’ve seen some major spikes with my clients when we try to push something hard all at once rather than dribble a little at a time. If they want to spend $1K on ads every month, I tell ‘em to blow it in one week every month.”
In other words, a little bit of growth can snowball into a lot of growth. So the answer to the riddle of Slash’s page growth could really be “all of the above.” First: He is already popular with the general public. Second: He has an active page. Third: He had ads running that apparently were seen by a lot of people. Fourth: Facebook’s viral loops — its highlights, as well as its activity stream — may have allowed the first three conditions to exponentially increase the results.
For page owners looking to grow, this is maybe another reason to buy those Facebook ads, and to think more strategically about ad spending patterns. Or, of course, to figure out who within Facebook decides to promote particular celebrities, as that person now appears to be the equivalent of whoever is in charge of the Suggested User List over at Twitter.
(* Source: InsideFacebook *)
Social networks accounted for 21.1 percent of all online display advertising impressions in the US as of June, with Facebook reaching the most unique visitors. For the month, nearly 70 billion impressions reached some 130 million unique visitors, according to a comScore report released yesterday. Out of those numbers, most of were split between MySpace and Facebook.
While MySpace had 30 billion impressions that reached 65.5 million unique visitors, Facebook had fewer impressions but more users who saw the ads — 27 billion impressions for 67.4 million unique visitors.
We took a deeper dive into how gaming companies are taking advantage of this advertising inventory to find more gamers, see our report from earlier today. Companies like Zynga are now some of the largest advertisers on social networks, according to the comScore data.
(* Source: Inside Facebook *)
Chick-fil-A and Pizza Hut were the first quick-serve restaurants to gain at least 1 million fans on their Facebook pages, but top fast food burger chain McDonald’s has closed the gap. It hit nearly 1.2 million fans by the end of last week, after adding some 250,000 fans on August 26th, and 400,000 more on August 28th.
Why the massive growth all at once? Quite likely, McDonald’s requested that Facebook fold some large unofficial fan Pages into its official Page. Facebook intends for Pages to be owned by companies themselves, so it has been helping various organizations do this already.
However, that is not to say that unofficial Pages accounted for all of McDonald’s growth. The official Page has been gaining roughly between 5,000 and 20,000 fans on more typical days in August. The steadiness of that growth suggests, first, that many of its “billions and billions served” were satisfied customers who wanted to express their loyalty by joining the page. It also suggests that some of the features on the Page are drawing additional people in.
The company actively posts few updates, and the ones they do post link to full-featured advertisements on its home site. Interestingly, the company has tried to duplicate some of these advertisements as tabs within the Page. For example, there’s an interactive ad on McDonalds.com about its Angus beef burgers, called Angus Axioms – on Facebook, that same interactive ad also appears on the landing tab. The Angus beef feature lets users browse the different elements of various styles of Angus burgers (browse your mouse over the bacon part and you’ll see a close up photo and a description of the bacon).
Chick-a-Fil and Pizza Hut have seen growth through highly customized integrations into Facebook, like photo contests and online ordering. McDonald’s hasn’t taken its page that far, but the rollup of its unofficial Pages shows that it cares — so watch for more from the company in the future.
(* Source: Jeremiah Owyang *)
Jeremiah says...
Many brands are considering it, some have done it. Done what? Marketed on social networks (Facebook, Myspace, or private label social networks).
Why? Social Networks are attractive because consumers are connecting with other consumers and the trust tends to be higher. Secondly, there’s a tremendous amount of buzz from the media for this newest form of marketing. Lastly, there’s lots of folks using social networks (about 2/3rds of all North American youth use it daily, and about 1/3rd of NA adults use it as least once a month –data From Forrester Research, Q4, 2007)
Sadly, many brand are going to do it wrong, by wasting resources, or embarrassing their brand with a campaign that doesn’t fit the needs of a community. To help marketers do it right, and to save users from dealing with more bad campaigns, I’m going to do some research on the topic.
I’m a laaaazy (or is it efficient?) analyst, I use social media (what I cover) to help me with my research. Besides, the social collective is far smarter than some big headed analyst.
The following attributes are what I think are often found in successful social networking campaigns, but don’t let me be the judge, I want your input.
Meets a business objective: First and foremost, any marketing campaign or activity should match with a business objective, regardless of the tools being used.
Supports Community Goals: Every community is different, and each has unique goals (from supporting products, to each other, or to just be entertained) the campaign focus should therefore meet the needs of the community, before the needs of the marketer. Effective campaigns will first understand the core drivers, interests, and rituals of the community and learn how to meet those desires. (Expanded by Laurel Papworth)
Encourage Member Interaction: The most successful social networking campaigns and efforts involve the audience.
Quickly scale: Social networks are designed for information to quickly move from member to member, so campaigns that lean on these capabilities perform the best. These attributes known as Velocity, Viralness, and Spread are key.
Utilize Media: In some campaigns, the best way to get members to return is to offer them media. Depending on demographics and community needs, this could be audio, videos, or demos
Foster self-expression or communication: Members in social networks like to communicate with each other, or self-express. As a result, campaigns should satisfy these needs with the appropriate tools
Offer a satisfying User Experience: This encompasses the overall experience of the campaign, the content and navigation items should be where expected, the language familiar to the audience, and overall look and feel of the site appeasing.
Provide longer term utility: Successful campaigns have a longer term value, rather than a short term ‘disposble campaign”. These campaigns add value by being a useful application to the members, rather than just quick dose of entertainment.
Enhance Value as Community participants: As more people contribute or interact with the campaign, the value is increased. This can be in the form of content that is created by the community, contests, voting, or games.
Integration with other marketing activities: Successful marketing campaigns aren’t single channel, in fact they utilizie multiple channels and mediums to enhance the overall activity. The same thing applies to marketing campaigns on social networks, those that are promoted from other locations such as (corporate websites, email newsletter, blogs, podcasts) outside fo the social network have a great chance for success.
Maintain agility during the campaign: Social networks are living, breathing organisms made up of real people connecting with each other. Marketing campaigns also should share these attributes and show be flexible to change in-flight, yield to legitimate requests or complaints of the community. Those campaigns that reflect the same dynamic behavior as human interaction have a higher chance to be interacted –and accepted –by the community. (Submitted by Graham)
Company Participation: In some cases, companies that participate in the discussions or conversations will yield to a more successful marketing campaign. Activities can range from recognition, company interaction, or attention to members perhaps from a community manager (Submitted by Whitney McNamara, Esther Lim, Crimson Consulting, Warren Sukernek)
You add your attribute: Please leave a comment below, I welcome and respect your opinion. If you’re from a vendor in this space, feel free to leave your company name or email so I can properly credit you.
(* Source: Inside Facebook *)
Facebook and Britney Spears launched a premium line of virtual gifts inside Facebook that made several custom designed, limited edition Britney-themed gifts available to users.
The gifts, titled “It’s Your Birthday,” “Britney Pride,” and “Slave 4 U,” etc., cost 20 Facebook Credits each. That’s currently the equivalent of USD $2.00, or twice the price of most Facebook virtual gifts. The gifts are still available today, and may be for some time.
Since the campaign launched, many other artists have expressed interest in getting into the Facebook gift shop. Facebook won’t say how many of the gifts have been sold so far, but a Facebook spokesperson did tell us that the company will “continue to explore licensing gifts, such as the Britney Spears line, and others such as gifts specific to charities.” Facebook also regularly runs sponsored virtual gift campaigns as part of its core offering to brand advertisers.
The Britney Spears experiment is just one of the many virtual gift shop tests Facebook has been running recently. Last week, Facebook confirmed to us that it is now testing the availability of both third party virtual gifts and third party physical gifts with a limited number of users. It’s the first time items from third party merchants have ever been made available in Facebook’s official virtual storefront, though third parties have been delivering a variety of virtual gifts in Facebook Platform applications for a long time.
We think Facebook is likely to continue testing licensed virtual gifts with more musicians and artists whose revenues are increasingly being derived from merchandise sales. Just as fans are willing to pay a premium for officially licensed physical gifts and decorative items, the same will be true for virtual gifts inside Facebook. Since margins are so high on virtual goods, Facebook is in good position to explore several different licensing models while reaching a uniquely large and targeted US and worldwide audience.
(* Source: eMarketer *)
Women who are core social network users expect a lot, according to “The Power of Social Networking For Women Research Study” from female-oriented social networking site ShesConnected. Participants in the survey were recruited through several social networks and were encouraged to share it with friends.
ShesConnected respondents were heavy users of social networks: 59% reported visiting such sites multiple times per day, with a further 14% logging on daily.
Unsurprisingly, Facebook was the most popular social network among these users, with 83% belonging to the site. Nearly three-quarters (73%) were members of LinkedIn and 55% were on Twitter, while just 41% belonged to MySpace. Almost one-half of respondents (48%) reported belonging to four or more social networks—the most common response.
Professional networking and staying up-to-date with friends were the most compelling reasons to visit social networks, according to the respondents. Substantial majorities also considered researching products and services (79%) and finding deals and discounts (64%) important.
Despite their enthusiasm for joining, female social network users are concerned about privacy issues. Fully 93% of respondents said control over privacy settings was “very important,” and another 6% rated it “somewhat important.” The ability to block specific users from contacting them, presumably also for privacy reasons, mattered to 96% of users.
These concerns spill over into the marketing side of social media. While the vast majority of respondents were fine with social networks displaying advertising, the prospect of the sites selling data to advertisers was another story. More than four in 10 respondents said they would not be comfortable with the idea, and nearly as many—36%—said they would refuse to use a site that sold their data.
“Advertisers should strive for engaging and useful communications on the site so that it is viewed as an enhancement to the community rather than a painful requirement,” noted the ShesConnected report.
While users understand the need for revenues, networking, self-promotion, keeping in touch and privacy remain their top priority.
(* Source: eMarketer *)
Universal McCann’s “Power to the People: Social Media Tracker” study, now in its fourth year, indicates that social networks continue to climb in popularity around the world. But the research firm believes a change is happening in social media: Internet users are “starting to focus their digital life” around single networks, rather than around many specialized tools with social features.
The study found a major increase in the percentage of US Internet users with a social network profile between 2008 and 2009. This year, 59% of active Web users—those with access at least every other day—reported having a profile, up 16 percentage points. Previous gains were in the single digits.
eMarketer estimates that 44.2% of all Internet users in the US are social network users, meaning they log on to such sites at least monthly. Logically, Universal McCann’s figure is higher, since its respondents may have created a profile but use social networks less often.
According to the “Power to the People” report, the US is far from tops in social networking activity. Seven other countries polled had higher percentages of Internet users with a social network profile. Russia, which came in first at 85.3%, also had one of the fastest growth trajectories—just 23.1% of Internet users in the country had a social network profile in 2006, the first year of polling.
Worldwide, 62.5% of active Internet users ages 16 to 54 have a social network profile in 2009. In addition, 71.1% have visited a friend’s profile page.
Universal McCann also sees a “decline or stasis” in the use of separate sites for activities such as blogging and photo-sharing. Instead, users are looking to social networks that consolidate multiple social media in a single place.
“These platforms—and there are different dominant players depending on the market—continue to grow even as other elements of the social media universe stagnate or decline,” wrote the report’s authors.
Evidence of this consolidation can be found in the top social networking site activities reported in 2009. Messaging friends was most popular, with 81.5% of users, but the No. 2 activity was uploading photos (76.3%). About one-third of users installed “useful” widgets on their profile, and another one-third have uploaded videos on their social networks. Almost three in 10 respondents used their social network as a blogging platform.
As noted above, despite consolidation social media is not a one-stop shop. Universal McCann advises marketers to give consumers options when engaging them through social media. Allowing individuals to share and discuss on their platform of choice remains important.
(* Source: Mark Walsh *)
Mark says... Giveaways pay on Facebook. Starbucks has surged past Coca-Cola to become the most popular corporate brand on the social network, powered by its recent free pastry promotion. As of Thursday, Starbucks' Facebook page boasted 3.7 million fans compared to Coke's 3.5 million -- with their sites ranking 8th and 9th, respectively, among all pages, according to data compiled by Inside Facebook. (Fan pages for celebrities and prominent figures like Michael Jackson and Barack Obama generally top the list.) A well-designed page, fun promotions and effective use of Engagement Ads on the Facebook home page have all helped Starbucks drive a large following on the social network, according to the Facebook-tracking blog. Promotions have played an especially big part lately. Starbucks added 200,000 fans this week alone -- pushing it past Coke -- with its Free Pastry Day on July 21 allowing fans to print out coupons for complimentary pastries with any beverage purchase. It's not the first giveaway campaign the coffee chain has run on Facebook. Earlier this month, it promoted the launch of branded ice cream by offering coupons for free pints through its Facebook application. Among other social media initiatives, Starbucks in May asked people to take photos of new outdoor advertising in several cities and post them on Twitter. And it used a YouTube video to promote its Election Day offer of free java to anyone who voted. A report released earlier this week by social media platform Wetpaint and digital consulting firm Altimeter Group rated Starbucks the highest among the top 100 brands for its efforts in social media based on engagement across 10 categories including blogs, Facebook, Twitter and wikis. "Free coupons can be a very viral way to do promotions on social networks, as long as it's a compelling offer," noted Justin Smith, editor of Inside Facebook. He pointed out that other companies such as Papa John's and Ben & Jerry's have also had success at making coupons available via Facebook. What about erstwhile brand king Coke? The beverage giant's Facebook page, famously, wasn't created by the company but by a pair of Coke enthusiasts in Los Angeles. A case study of a brand "letting go." (Dusty Sorg and Michael Jedrzejewski have since been hired to co-manage the page with Coke's marketing team.) The contrasting approaches of Starbucks and Coke to brand-building, however, suggest there's more than one way to bring consumers to a Facebook fan page. Then again, giving stuff away for free tends to draw a crowd anywhere. 
(* Source: Giles Fitzgerald *)
Giles says...
Ted Baker’s new Born menswear range has launched a new campaign which will require dedication, stamina, and quite possibly ear plugs. In order to promote its new Born clothing range of shirts, polo shirts, T-shirts, and hoodies - all aimed at a younger 18-24-year-old audience than its mainline brand - Born is setting a ‘Gig Race’ challenge.
Contestants involved will have two weeks to attend as many gigs as they can, whilst blogging and twittering their exploits as they go. The eventual winner will walk away with £1,000 of Born by Ted Baker clothing and possibly a Guinness World Record for the most gigs attended in one week. As well as that Born has two tickets for his year’s sold out Bestival music event, featuring Kraftwerk, Lily Allen, Fleet Foxes and Massive Attack, to give away.
If you think you have what it takes to tackle this musical triathlon, then you can sign up via the link below.
http://twitter.com/bornbytedbaker
(* Source: Simon Beaumont *)
Wired magazine reports...
The iTunes music store sells single songs at approximately the same price, with artist presented in more or less the same way.
Apple’s app store, however, is still somewhat like the wild west (at least as far as music goes), where the rules are being made up in real time. Artists and labels can sell music alongside other digital offerings through the app store at any price from zero to $999.99.
As we suggested last summer, this creates an opportunity for artists and labels to distribute a new type of product, especially because the app store concept is spreading to other mobile phone platforms.
On Monday, six of the 20 most recently submitted music apps to appear in the App Store featured a single artist: Jason Carver, Jessica Harp, Jimmy Cliff, John Butler Trio, Kadence, or The Cribs. Each showcases music videos, photos, news, photo-jumble games, concert listings, and/or community features that let fans share photos with each other. And all of them were made with iLike’s iPhone app toolkit — as was Ingrid Michaelson’s app, pictured to the right.
Since iLike launched the service in May, about 250 of the over 300,000 artists with access to iLike’s dashboard feature have launched customized iPhone apps through the system.
“We’re encouraged by the positive response our create-your-own-app platform has generated, and this is only the beginning,” said iLike CEO Ali Partovi. (The company also announced a new version of its Local Concerts app on Tuesday, with concert listings based on your music library, push notification for shows, maps to venues, and concert information sharing.)
These artist-specific apps, which labels also develop in-house, place a constantly-updating tattoo on fans’ phones. It’s like having a music subscription, but in the sense of a fan club, rather than in the sense of subscribing to music in general as one would with Rhapsody.
Many of iLike’s music apps are free and promotional. Other apps contain full songs, and cost money.
Dave Dederer, former singer and guitarist for the Presidents of the United States of America and current Melodeo business development vice president, released one of the first of these, which charged $3 for four albums plus exclusive material. His company sells another $3 app containing streaming versions of top 100 hip hop songs in the iTunes store (iTunes link).
The app store broke the rules for selling music through iTunes, and the ramifications of that are beginning to be felt. Now that iLike has allowed app creation to scale across hundreds of thousands of bands, and other mobile platforms are emulating Apple’s modular app concept, the artist-specific app could — in addition to being the new MySpace page — become a formidable music format in its own right.
If that happens, the idea of buying a bundle of music won’t die with the album — it will survive with the app.
(* Source: Christopher Mack *)
Chris says...
It’s now official: farming games are all the rage on the Facebook Platform. Of all the big moves we saw in this month’s Facebook gaming charts, none are more pronounced than the staggering popularity of the farming “genre.” FarmVille is now the most popular game on the Facebook Platform with over 16.6 monthly active users, and Slashkey’s Farm Town has skyrocketed 40% in the last month as well to near 15 million monthly players.
This month’s charts are pretty dramatically different than July’s. Smaller games have grown drastically in reach, new faces have appeared, and even long time leaders are falling from the top. The social gaming space is growing beyond just numbers. It is starting to mature.
Here are the highlights from the past month:
As social games developers compete with one another, the quality of games is going up, and the players are liking it. Will a new era of higher quality games ascend the charts this fall?
(* Source: Ben Parr *)
Ben says...
Okay, so what happens when you get an invite from a friend about his or her wedding? You get a few invites, probably a link to TheKnot, and maybe a list of pre-approved things you can buy the couple. Even if you’re one of the bridesmaids, you’re probably just trying to figure out what the bride wants you to do over a series of frantic phone calls. Information gets lost, good suggestions go down the drain, and friends don’t get involved.
That’s why OneWed’s approach intrigues us. The wedding planning website has launched Wedding Pre-Party, a new website that essentially creates your own private (and organized) version of Facebook (
) where friends and guests can share tips, add photos, and keep informed about all the fun (and terror) leading up to the big day.
The site’s set up primarily in the form of a news feed – those who are invited to the a wedding pre-party website can add comments, propose a toast, add wedding tips (useful if you’ve been through it before), and provide stark and truthful info on weddings (on top of that, the bride and groom can ask for inspiration for new ideas). This conversation feed is a great feedback tool for you to reach your closest friends.
OneWed’s also made it easy for your friends to sign up by integrating with Facebook Connect. Thus, when they sign in, your picture and info will already be available. You can also invite friends via Gmail (
) or Yahoo Mail.
The site has a couple of other useful features for organizing the wedding. The checklist allows anyone involved in planning the wedding to add tasks, assign due dates, and categorize them. Even better, there’s already a set of standard wedding to-dos in the checklist. However, you might start crying when you see how long the list is (hint: it’s over 70). Nobody said planning a wedding was easy.
In terms of customization, OneWed’s Wedding Pre-Party tool is solid; you can add new webpages, like the story of your engagement or a gift registry, with very little hassle. You can also change themes and create a vanity URL so friends can easily type in your wedding website’s URL. The ability to designate specific users as bridesmaids or groomsmen also exists, which makes for easy categorization.
If you want to try it out without making your own wedding, OneWed has a “crashable wedding” -that, after you ask to be invited, will automatically allow you in so you can play around with it for yourself.
This is the type of practical social media that can transform how we manage our personal lives. Weddings can quickly become messy and stressful affairs. Managing friends, appointments, and parties requires help and the ability to get things done in a streamlined fashion. OneWed is betting big that you want to get all of your friends involved in your wedding, while keeping it organized. We think their wager is spot-on.
OneWed follows in the footsteps of other social tools focused on making the events of your life social. thisMoment (), for example, creates vivid social media scrapbooks while Timetoast transforms a series of events into an interactive timeline.
Social media is incredibly effective at connecting friends for common causes. There are few times where those connections are more important than a wedding. OneWed’s Wedding Pre-Party platform effectively organizes your wedding while adding in the social element. It alleviates a lot of worries and saves time so you can focus on one thing: enjoying the best day of your life.
(* Source: Chris Lynch *)
Chris says...
As Facebook expands its reach globally, international brands should appeal to local audiences with their public profile pages. At least, that’s the thinking of adidas, the German footwear maker, which launched a “Your Area” tab on its Facebook profile. It allows the 1.8 million fans of the adidas Facebook page to view content from their local countries where they buy sneakers and other products.
The page will target 13 countries with the Your Area tab, including the U.S, China, and several throughout Europe. While the features adidas packed into the new tab mirror that of normal profiles (such as “videos” and “news feed”), it makes the profile more interactive and engaging.
A list of the features include:
The page also helps local stores target their specific fans. Local adidas managers, for example, can feature products and post content to the page. They can also tag new products, and provide liks to the adidas e-store.
More here
(* Source: b-side *)
We heading down to HCMC in Vietnam and were looking at the state of the nation in terms of social media. Here are a couple of finds:
Bryan Pelz - Founder and CEO of Vinagame on Vietnam online advertising:
Huyen Chip on Twitter in Vietnam and a couple of clones:
It’s festival season, so this may be a welcome addition to the gigantic directory of music-related information websites and applications already out there on the Web, particularly for live gig buffs. Setlist.fm
is an awesome free wiki site (although they prefer to call it a “wiki-like service”) that aims to become the biggest repository of live performance track lists with the help of music fans across the globe.
The good thing about Setlist.fm is that the goal is to collect the real setlists, meaning which tracks artists and bands actually play at live gigs rather than what the setlist says they will. If you have any basic knowledge about the live music industry, you know that those are two completely separate things.
To submit and edit setlists, you don’t necessarily need to register, although the startup behind the site recommends that you do. Once you add tracks for a certain gig, say Metallica’s performance at the Sonisphere Festival in Hockenheim, Germany from last week, the back-end of the system will automatically check the web for a playable stream of the tune, YouTube videos and the lyrics. The site will also auto-generate statistics for artists and bands (example for Metallica) which gives you a good overview of their performance history and what their most played songs at live gigs are.
Setlist.fm comes with a decent internal search engine and enables visitors to easily share the setlist in their Last.fm event review or embed it on their own website or blog. For example, here is the setlist of U2’s concert at Camp Nou in Barcelona, Spain from the beginning of this month:
As an aside, this is most probably the first project that we cover that hails all the way from the tiny nation of Liechtenstein. Which goes to show good ideas can come out of countries with less than 40,000 inhabitants too.
Nice one!
Daniel says..
Twitter seems to be the hottest thing in tech recently — if you look at TechCrunch, it averages at least 3 posts a week about Twitter. But the bigger question is, who is really using Twitter? Many of you might think that, as with most of the latest gadgets and technologies, teenagers are using Twitter, but you’re wrong, and here’s why. Matthew Robson, a 15 year old intern, over at Morgan Stanley, wrote a report on how teenagers are consuming media, and why Twitter isn’t the hot topic in high school halls.
If you look at technologies trending with teens right now, it’s Apple devices (iPhone, iPod), smart phones (Blackberry, Palm), and then social networks (Facebook and MySpace). At least that’s what I see from hanging out with 1,500 other teenagers in high school every day (I am 16 years old). But why not Twitter? Well, because Twitter is a different type of social network than Facebook. Facebook is about connecting people, and sharing information with each other. The way my friends and I see it, Facebook is a closed network. It’s a network of people and friends that you trust to be connected to, and to share information like your email address, AIM screen name, and phone number. You know who’s getting your status messages, because you either approved or added each person to your network.
With Twitter, it’s the exact opposite. Anyone can follow your status updates. It’s a completely open network that makes teenagers feel “unsafe” about posting their content there, because who knows who will read it. Sure, you get emails notifying you when you have new followers, but that doesn’t compare to the level of detail you get when someone on Facebook adds you, and you get their information.
According to June, 2009 comScore numbers, 11.3% of visitors to Twitter.com in the U.S. are ages 12-17. Internationally, in May, 2009, only 4.4% of visitors were younger then 18.
Twitter is also seen as more expensive to keep up with than Facebook. Most of my friends spend their time playing video games, watching TV, surfing online, and text messaging to actual friends who you know will reply back. In an economy like this, most parents don’t want to spend the extra money on unlimited texting to total strangers. So why spend money on sending SMS updates to Twitter, when you can send updates to someone you know will read it and reply?
Facebook has a more dedicated community than Twitter, which is why teenagers want to use it. Maybe the reason Twitter still isn’t considered mainstream quite yet is because Gen Y isn’t the early adopter this time around.
Leana says...
The gap between Facebook and MySpace is growing wider in the U.S. In May, Facebook finally caught up to MySpace in unique U.S. visitors and surpassed its rival social network by a smidgeon. Last month, Facebook left MySpace in the dust, according to June data from comScore. Facebook reached 77 million unique visitors for the month of June, rising from 70.28 million unique visitors in May. MySpace had 68.4 million unique visitors in June, dropping from 70.25 million unique visitors in May.
Facebook is steadily growing in the U.S.; the network gained just under 7 million unique visitors in June compared to a gain of 2.8 million U.S. unique visitors in May. In comparison, MySpace lost nearly 4 million unique visitors in June, compared to 700,000 unique visitors lost in May. While Facebook is growing both in the U.S. and internationally, MySpace appears to be stagnating.
The widening of the gap between the rival social networks network comes at a time when MySpace is under new management and recently terminated two-thirds of its international staff, laying off staff in countries where MySpace is being trounced by Facebook. MySpace’s international numbers were startling. For example, in India, where social networking is growing fast, Facebook had 6.4 million unique visitors in May, compared to 848,000 unique visitors to MySpace. In our most recent model of the true value of social networks, MySpace fell below Facebook, dropping from the top spot last year.
MySpace still generates more page views than Facebook. In June, MySpace had 32.4 billion page views in the U.S., but that number dropped 10 percent in a single month, from May (gulp). Facebook is catching up there as well, with 21.3 billion page views in June, a 12 percent increase from May. And worldwide, Facebook is already ahead. As we reported a few months ago, worldwide monthly page views for MySpace declined from 47.4 billion a year ago to 38 billion in April, a 20% drop. In that same period Facebook grew from 44 billion to 87 billion, a roughly 100% increase. MySpace’s user number growth has stalled out also, and developers are reporting that activity on MySpace is decreasing at a dramatic rate, as high as “half a percent a week.”
A decline in user numbers isn’t the only predicament that MySpace is in—there is speculation that the social network could lose one of its major revenue streams in the near future. In 2010, MySpace will be receiving its last “welfare payment” from Google (stemming from an advertising deal between News Corp. and Google struck in 2006), after which it looks like it will be cut off. Under the terms of the agreement, MySpace will receive $300 million over the next year if the network hits certain search pageview requirements, which considering the recent data on page views, may not happen.
Meanwhile, Facebook shows no signs of slowing down. The network successfully launched its “vanity URLs,” in June, with millions of users signing up for the new feature within days. The network also got some notice around its use during the Iran elections and protests, and around the new privacy settings surrounding its “Everyone” button.
(* Source: Mashables *)
Sharlyn Lauby says...
I spent many years of my career in the hospitality business and the first rule of thumb when dealing with customers was, “if a guest had a positive experience, they’ll tell 3 people and if they had a negative experience, they’ll tell 10.” That same idea holds true in the new media world, except the numbers have grown exponentially. Instead of it being 3 people – it’s 3,000, or instead of 10 – it’s perhaps 100,000. The numbers aren’t meant to scare you. But what should you do when something goes wrong?
Our goal, of course, hasn’t changed – work to increase the number of positive comments written about your company, product, or service and take care of those who have negative experiences. But, how do you make that happen in the social media world? What steps to you take to keep negative social media damage to a minimum?
Before we even talk about how to fix what goes wrong, let’s talk about the positives. One of the best ways to minimize social media damage is to proactively create an environment that encourages positive feedback. There are two main things you should do to keep the accolades coming.
1. Foster a positive culture. There are plenty of studies showing that if your employees are happy, they will deliver good service to customers. Not only does this minimize potential damage, but it leverages your brand in a very positive way. Keeping your employees engaged and letting them know how they fit into the corporate culture goes a long way.
Case in point: I recently returned from a conference in New Orleans where Harvard Professor John Kotter showed us an old video of a Roto Rooter employee who had pimped out his van to make his job easier. It had everything from pull down maps (obviously this dated prior to the Garmin) to a makeshift toilet. The point is, this employee created all of these conveniences for himself so he could spend more time servicing customers. How many of your employees are doing that?
2. Train employees on the proper use of social media tools. Your employees represent your organization, and if they have a solid, credible personal brand, it will carry over to the company’s image.
It’s not enough to allow employees to have Facebook pages and Twitter accounts. Organizations need to show employees the proper way to use them. For example, Zappos employees are not only encouraged to have Twitter accounts, but they receive training during company orientation on how to use the application. Again, if your employees use social media well, it will benefit both those employees and the organization.
Keep in mind, however, that someday the other shoe might drop. Many companies have fallen prey to negative press, so don’t put your head in the sand. It’s not about “if” something will happen; it’s about “when.” In this transparent, authentic and real-time world, expect a hiccup to occur. But be prepared.
In the end, the issue is less about the mistake that was made, but the reaction that came after. So, here are some tips to follow if you find yourself in a damage control mode.
Daniel Ruby, director of marketing at advertising network Chitika, recently had an issue where McAfee flagged one of their ads, thus making their entire network have issues with aggressive McAfee antivirus alerts. Ruby credits Twitter for alerting them to the issue. “We actually found out from one of our publishers who was telling a reader via Twitter as well as the comments box on his site that our ads were why his site was giving McAfee users a red flag,” he said.
From there, Chitika could respond to concerned users (also via Twitter), and keep users up-to-date on the steps they were taking to fix the problem.
No matter how proactive you are, customers will start to question your organization when they see problems. And, whenever there is an information void, those customers will tend to fill in the gaps with their own thoughts on what the cause may be. That’s why it is important to respond to issues quickly, even if the message is just, “we’re looking into it.”
Ruby elaborated that he “reached out to the publisher via his comments box, letting him know what happened and what Chitika was doing to resolve it.” He also kept him updated via Twitter (apologizing as profusely as one can in 140 characters).
Communication is key here. Make sure each employee knows the same message all the way down the chain of command. And, when that message changes, don’t forget to communicate those changes. This serves two purposes; (1) it gives the public a sense that you have your arms around the issue; and (2) it gives your employees a sense of unity – working together to solve a common problem.
These situations are not contained to just a certain type of organization. For example, following a meeting of Ignite Phoenix in Tempe, Arizona that was attended by over 600 people, a number of attendees had their cars towed after parking in a privately owned lot. “The social media response was immediate and spread like wildfire. It went from Twitterverse to mainstream TV in just a day,” said Kris Baxter, the City’s Community Development Marketing Specialist.
The City worked some of the key organizers of the event to get the matter resolved. This was their first time reacting in real-time/social media environment, so they decided to tweet responses versus waiting for the newspaper.
Baxter explained, “Because we reacted quickly online to solve the problem, our reputation took substantially less of a hit than it might have. People who blogged and tweeted about the experience actually started writing comments such as ‘seems as though Tempe cares and is looking into it.’” Since then, the City has been working with the property owner to sign the lot more clearly and they’re redefining their towing ordinance.
In today’s technology age, a company’s brand image belongs to the consumer, so using social media tools to learn, communicate, and evolve makes for a better, more flexible company. “People have an infinite number of ways and places to talk about your brand (or any number of other topics), and if you don’t go where they are, you don’t know what they’re saying,” Ruby told me.
If you make a mistake, own up to it. Recently, for example, European furniture maker Habitat was caught spamming Twitter. Their response was an apology. No skirting the issue. No blaming a computer glitch. So in the end, the old cliché that honesty is the best policy still holds true.
While I’ve spent the majority of this post talking about how to respond when crisis hits, it’s important to realize that sometimes the best response is no response at all. It’s easy to get sucked into the flurry of activity and turn a molehill into a mountain.
These can be tricky waters to navigate. Obviously, if you have a public relations firm, you want to tap into their expertise in creating a response strategy. But let’s say you don’t and something happens… what can you do? Jenni Brand from Bastille Marketing offered up some terrific suggestions:
1. Assemble a team of trusted employees who are willing to work round the clock (it won’t be for long – just a few days at most) to help you evaluate the situation and possibly respond
2. Assess the situation online by harnessing the tools that are publicly available, such as Google Search, Blogs, Technorati, Twitter Search and Who’s Talkin’. Also watch RSS feeds to the online publications of both mainstream and industry media sources.
3. Track these sources constantly to see what and how the situation is developing. Watch the “attacker’s” website or blog as well. They may change their tune or consumers may react negatively and post comments about it on their site.
Then assess the situation:
– Trend the volume of response and the type of consumer reaction over time: Is it growing or waning? Is it supportive or negative? How is this changing over time?
– Identify what your target audience’s reaction is. This will determine your response. Remember: your response could validate that there is an issue and may further perpetuate a negative situation.
I asked Brand how organizations should evaluate the need for response once organizations have all this info. Here’s her take on how to respond (if at all):
– If consumers are silent on the situation, continue to monitor but don’t respond publicly. Assess the need to respond on an ongoing basis – hourly, twice daily, daily, etc.
– If consumers are demanding a response, be sure that the initial upswell of outrage has passed and that the issue is, in fact, continuing. The online audience is fickle – if something more interesting breaks in the news, they may abandon your issue to move on to something more “important.”
– When responding, be sure to really listen and determine what consumers want – do they just want an apology/acknowledgment or do they demand change? Be sure to address these things in your response.
– DO NOT RESPOND too quickly, too thoroughly, in too much of a ‘corporate’ tone or via a press release posted on your website (as the sole response mechanism). These tactics are typically not well-received in the social media landscape.
People like Kris Baxter and the City of Tempe are the ones that “get it” where social media is concerned: “Our situation showed that social media is not only a means of getting out your positive, proactive messages but also a means to protect your brand and react to negative situations to resolve them quickly and positively,” said Kris. Well said.
(* Source: Mark Hefflinger *)
The founders of gadget news blogs Gizmodo and Engadget have teamed to launch GDGT, a gadget-focused online social network.
The site was launched on Wednesday by Pete Rojas, the founder of Gizmodo and co-founder of Engadget, and Ryan Block, the editor of Engadget.
The site will not produce original news content or reviews, as do Gizmodo and Engadget, but instead aggregate news and reviews, and allow users to post their own gadget reviews.
Users can also create profiles and list their stable of gadgets, as well as wish lists.
Block told The New York Times that the gadget blogs focus on only 5% of a device's lifecycyle, the "lust phase," while GDGT will address "the 95 percent of the time you own the product there is nowhere to go. We are building the place where you can live with your gadgets online in perpetuity."
See site here
(* Source: Scott McClelland *)
Jeremiah Owyang from Forester Research in Silicon Valley says...
All Social Networks
Techcrunch has listed out comscore’s numbers across multiple social networks, Sources: Techcrunch via Comscore, Jan 1, 2009 Compete has released stats in Feb, comments by Cnet. Unique Visitors, Total Visitors and rank information. Cnet, Feb 10, 2009 Nielsen Online shows that: Social networks and blogs are now the 4th most popular online activity ahead of personal email, Member communities are visited by 67% of the global online population, time spent is growing at 3 times the overall internet rate, accounting for almost 10% of all internet time, PDF, Nielsen Online, March Nielsen reports that Social Networks 68% more popular than email 65% (but not by much), Nielsen, Cnet, March 2009 Techcrunch has an interesting application that shows which social networks dominate by country, June 2009
Facebook has some very limited stats on their own website, view here, Facebook, often updated 150 million people around the world are now actively using Facebook and almost half of them are using Facebook every day. This includes people in every continent—even Antarctica. If Facebook were a country, it would be the eighth most populated in the world, just ahead of Japan, Russia and Nigeria. Facebook is used in more than 35 different languages and 170 countries and territories. Source: Mark Zuckerberg, Jan 7, 2009 Facebook has 54.5 million monthly unique visitors, says Comscore, with a growth rate in the U.S. averaged 3.8% per month over the last year. Source, Comscore via Techncrunch, Jan 13, 2009 175mm users, with 600k daily growth of users, with the fastest growing segment “45% of Facebook’s US audience is now 26 years old or older.” Inside Facebook, Feb 15th, 2009. Compare the dominant Facebook vs MySpace traffic, stickablilty, and engagement, Compete, Feb 27, 2009 Despite those that have over 100 friends, most only communicate with a smaller subset of friends, and the rest is broadcasting to others. Now there’s not enough data presented to see if if content actually can still spread across those that do not interact. Source originally from Facebook’s sociologist, Feb 2009 This graph from Compete data shows Facebook has more users than MySpace, note the ‘crossing of the streams’, Compete, March Inside Facebook says: “the number of Americans over 35, 45, and 55 on Facebook is growing fast. In the last 60 days alone, the number of people over 35 has nearly doubled. Developers and marketers may want to think about how to serve this group of new users.” Inside Facebook, March “Women over 55 remain the fastest growing group, and growth among the teen and college-age set has been relatively paltry. In absolute numbers there are now even slightly more members between the ages of 45 and 65 than there are 13-to 17-year-olds.” Wired Magazine, March. Facebook Ranks as Top Social Networking Site in the Majority of European Countries. Facebook Captures #1 Ranking in Spain for the First Time in February, comScore, April Facebook dominates US visitors over MySpace: “Facebook pulled in 70.278 million unique visitors in the states, compared to MySpace’s 70.237 million, according to data released by ComScore. That made Facebook the most popular site in the U.S., in terms of visitors. Just a month earlier, Facebook had a little over 67 million U.S. visitors behind MySpace’s 70.9 million.” PC Mag,, June 16
Hi5
60 million reported users, and Hi5 has introduced a gaming component. VentureBeat, Feb 5, 2009
“the site’s traffic is up in the recession. It hit 36 million members last Monday and is adding them at a rate of about one member per second. According to ComScore, it’s gone from about 3.6 million unique monthly visitors a year ago to 7.7 million today, Adage, March 2
Microsoft: Live, Hotmail, Messenger
Number of active WL IDs: More than 500 million active Windows Live Ids. Number of Hotmail Users: More than 375 million active accounts worldwide. Number of Messenger Users: More than 320 million active accounts worldwide. As told to me by Microsoft in April
MySpace
76 million members in MySpace US, with a U.S. growth rate of 0.8% per month Comscore via Techncrunch, Jan 13, 2009 “The average MySpace user now spends 266 minutes (4.4 hours) on the site every month; a 5% increase over last month and a +31% increase year over year. MySpace says its users spend nearly 100 minutes more per visitor than the closest competitor.” Social media bible (who cites a press release), Feb, 2009 Compare the dominant Facebook vs MySpace traffic, stickablilty, and engagement, (repeated from the Facebook category above) Compete, Feb 27, 2009 Facebook dominates US visitors over MySpace: “Facebook pulled in 70.278 million unique visitors in the states, compared to MySpace’s 70.237 million, according to data released by ComScore. That made Facebook the most popular site in the U.S., in terms of visitors. Just a month earlier, Facebook had a little over 67 million U.S. visitors behind MySpace’s 70.9 million.” PC Mag,, June 16
Twitter
Having spent time with Ev and Biz, they don’t provide a lot of data and certainly not a total user count, as a result, we often have to estimate based on the following sources.
According to Compete, the growth rate for Twitter was 752%, for a total of 4.43 million unique visitors in December 2008, in the start of 2008, Twitter had only around 500,000 unique monthly visitors. Source: Mashable/Compete, Jan 9, 2009 Demographics of Twitter: Lots of stats here: 11% of online adults use Twitter or update their status online Twitter users are mobile, less tethered by technology, Pew Research, Feb 12 Quantcast data on Twitter indicates that Twitter.com is a top 500 site that reaches over 4.1 million U.S. monthly people. The site attracts a more educated, slightly more female than male, young adult audience. Quantcast, March Compete shows that Twitter is receiving 8million unique visitors in the month of March 2009. Compete (via Nick) March 10 Comscore data shows that “In February, 4 million people in the U.S. visited the site, up from 2.6 million the month before, according to the latest data from comScore. That represents a 55 percent month-over-month growth rate, compared to 33 percent growth in each of the two months prior.” Comscore, March Unique visitors to Twitter increased 1,382 percent year-over-year, from 475,000 unique visitors in February 2008 to 7 million in February 2009, making it the fastest growing site in the Member Communities category for the month, Nielsen, March “Worldwide visitors to Twitter approached 10 million in February, up an impressive 700+% vs. year ago. The past two months alone have seen worldwide visitors climb more than 5 million visitors. U.S. traffic growth has been just as dramatic, with Twitter reaching 4 million visitors in February, up more than 1,000% from a year ago.” Comscore, April
Xing has 6.5 million users, many of which have paid accounts.
2008 Stats
Need more? I have stats compiled in 2008 for AdultFriendFinder, Bebo, Digg, MySpace, Hi5, and many others.
(* Source: Brian Solis *)
MG Siegler says... Time Magazine recently called YouTube one of the of the past decade, which was hilarious. Hilarious in that the site is by far and away the most popular site for video on the web, and has revolutionized the way we view videos, period. Today brings another amazing stat about the site: Every single minute, over 20 hours of video are now uploaded to YouTube.
Think about that for a minute. In that minute, nearly a days worth of footage will have been uploaded. And the pace is quickening. Back in 2007, shortly after Google bought the service, it was 6 hours of footage being uploaded every minute. As recently as January of this year, that number had grown to 15 hours, according to the YouTube blog
. Now it’s 20 — soon it will be 24. That’s insane.
It’s true that YouTube is not making Google any money, but when a site has this much dominance over a market, one way or another, there will be a way to effectively monetize it. The big Hollywood studios are already showing an increasing interest in using the platform, as are others — like ESPN.
Meanwhile, YouTube continues to become a bigger part of Google’s larger social picture. Today, the service added a way to immediately record a video response to a video after you watch it. Sure, this is basically what Seesmic has been doing for a while now — but Seesmic doesn’t have 20 hours of video being uploaded every minute.
More than a social phenomenon, Facebook harbors a lively and growing ecosystem of game and other application makers, ad networks and retailers of virtual goods. What happens when businesses running on Facebook become bigger than Facebook itself?
That could very well be the case in 2009. Facebook, which just surpassed 200 million global users, is expected to bring in about $500 million in 2009 revenue, mostly from advertising. Tech blog Venturebeat estimated that Facebook developers make a combined $500 million on the platform. Ad Age estimates the collective revenue from Facebook of developers to be between $300 million and $500 million. All in all, numbers big enough that Facebook is looking to cash in.
Not all the developer revenue is from advertising. San Francisco-based Zynga, the top developer on Facebook with more than 41 million users, according to AllFacebook.com, makes much of its revenue from the sale of chips for its Texas HoldEm Poker or weapons in Mafia Wars. Zynga is expected to break the $100-million-sales mark in 2009, split between Facebook and MySpace. In addition to Zynga, there are at least a half dozen other companies in the $10 million to $50 million range, as well as many smaller players.
"It wouldn't surprise me if apps on Facebook generate more revenue this year than Facebook," said LivingSocial CEO Tim O'Shaughnessy, whose app is Facebook's most popular at the moment, thanks to its "Pick Your Five" feature. "The overall platform is in the hundreds of millions of dollars."
Lisa Marino, who runs West Coast business development for RockYou, estimates developers will earn $300 million from Facebook this year primarily from three streams: virtual currency, branded sponsorships and ad-network inventory. "These are three strong revenue models that Facebook isn't participating in but that might overall be bigger than what Facebook brings in revenue," she said.
No charge for developers
Unlike News Corp. unit MySpace, which took a hard turn toward commerce in 2008, Facebook has stressed ubiquity of its platform over revenue. Its strategy is to become a conduit for as much of the world's communication as possible and part of that has been to not charge developers to use the platform, no matter how much revenue they generate from it.
That's about to change. Facebook is testing a payments system with some of its developers that would enable one-click buying of virtual goods and services on the Facebook platform, with Facebook taking either a percentage of the transaction or a flat fee. In addition, Facebook is testing a service to allow users or advertisers to buy and trade "credits" or a virtual currency to facilitate commerce. Spokesman Brandon McCormick said three tests of the system will commence in the coming weeks.
That the developer community will soon overshadow the platform in revenue is a sign that Facebook is growing up as a platform, but it also presents a conundrum as it attempts to develop its own advertising business. Facebook profile pages, and the stream of social connections and information they contain, have proven a tough environment for advertising. Display ads in social networks are some of the cheapest inventory in the business. Facebook is pushing "engagement ads" -- surveys, quizzes or games that encourage interaction, but a big chunk of its revenue comes from a pre-existing ad deal with Microsoft.
Applications, on the other hand, have proved fertile ground for commerce. "Once the user goes from their profile into the app platform, whether to play a game, send a virtual gift or check stocks, then its not about connecting with people; it's about having fun or saving time and money," said Buddy Media CEO Michael Lazerow. "There are a lot of different ways to monetize that."
Pennies add up
While there are plenty of ad networks and companies making branded applications and games, the biggest source of revenue in the applications come from small payments people make, say in games like Mafia War to restore health more quickly. Unlike advertising, the payments business has grown internationally along with Facebook's audience. Players in Singapore are plunking down pennies along with users in the U.S. As a game gets big, it starts to add up. The top five "megahit" games make between $1 million and $3 million a month.
Adding a payments system would allow Facebook to dip a toe in the developers' strongest source of revenue, and for the first time create a business relationship between Facebook and its developers. "In the past they've made it hard to give them money even if we wanted to," Mr. Lazerow said.
Max Levchin, founder and CEO of Slide, creator of SuperPoke, Top Friends and Funspace, believes there probably should be a commercial relationship between Facebook and the developers that rely on its platform for their business. "As long as they add to the bottom line, developers will pay the price."
(* Source: Alison Driscoll *)
Alison Driscoll is an interactive copywriter and social media consultant who specializes in Facebook. She authors a blog at alisondriscoll.com.
Not even a year ago, Facebook was still being dismissed as a silly site intended to help college kids slack off. Indeed, that is what helped the social network take hold with a large number of users, but it has proven its worth in business and by now, nearly everyone is on board. Companies of all sizes are scrambling to get on the site and reach both new and current customers with a Facebook Page, the Facebook preferred method for user interaction with a brand, company or public figure.
An effective Facebook Page not only attracts fans, but is sticky so that fans keep coming back and may even share the content on the Page. To do that, you need a well thought out Page that has some great applications supported by good, relevant content. Here are eight essential apps for your brand’s Facebook page:
This app was originally a Facebook feature that they then converted into an application; as such, it is sponsored and maintained by Facebook and less likely to break or be abandoned. Set this application up to pull in the RSS feed from your blog or other content source and it will automatically bring everything into Facebook and show all of your friends that you’ve posted a new Note.
This notification system is important for staying on their radar and is more visible than an RSS Reader, or mini-blog as I like to call it, but lacks many formatting capabilities; it’s best to think of Notes and an RSS Reader as working hand in hand. Start here to get content coming into your Page, then move on to the RSS Reader.
I may have jumped ahead a bit with the Notes recommendation, but I am assuming that most companies have, or could have, a blog. If you don’t, work on that before Facebook, for many more reasons than I could get into here. But if you already have a blog, good news: there are tons of blog and RSS apps out there, but I’ve done the leg work and I found this one offered more functionality, better customization (you can pick an image to make your Facebook mini-blog look more like your actual blog) and a greater sense of control. It can be a bit buggy, but it’s worth persisting for the level of customization, and therefore attention grabbing potential.
Again, this assumes that you have a Twitter account, but if you’re reading this and working on a Facebook Page, my guess is you do. Or you at least know you should have one. If not, set one up before adding this application to your new Facebook Page. This will automatically pull your tweets into your Facebook status, and it puts a cute little Twitter-themed box on your profile, so everyone knows you’re cool enough to be on Twitter. It also saves you time in updating AND ensures profile activity to keep you relevant.
Neither Facebook Pages nor Profiles allow any type of HTML in the main content section, but you can add FBML and HTML applications to add more stylized elements to a Page, like clickable images, anchor text and interactive content. The Static FBML app allows you to add advanced functionality to a page by placing a customizable box in which you can render HTML or FBML (Facebook Markup Language), giving you free reign over the space to add images, video, stylized text and almost whatever else you want. This app was developed by Facebook, so it’s fully supported and not prone to the problems of some third party applications.
In the Extended Info box you can use HTML to customize any kind of content and create numerous fields beyond the standard Information categories; you can also name the box anything you want so it matches your page perfectly. This app works much like the Static FBML application but is slightly easier to use. Although not developed by Facebook, it is highly ranked and provides a nice alternative or second customizable box option on a page.
This Flash application, also developed by Facebook, will add a box to your Page in which you can upload your own Flash files to achieve advanced customization and play any kind of Flash video, widget or game. It can be renamed to maintain the integrity of the page and keep the look and feel consistent with your brand.
With Posted Items Pro you can embed multiple YouTube, Yahoo, and Google Videos, music mp3s, sites, files, and more onto your profile and Facebook pages. You can add any variety of these elements, making it great for a media center or press section.
If you have the resources, add some personality to your profile with a fun, irreverent application that you create just for your Page. This could be tied into your brand in multiple ways; try to think of something that people outside of Facebook would appreciate or enjoy that will remind them of who created it and keep them coming back, like a game or contest.
In order to stay relevant on Facebook, you need to continually update your Page and use the site. The more actions you take, the more you appear in a fan’s News Feed. This keeps you in their mind, and in their friend’s Feeds when they interact with you. But updating content will do more than keep you on the News Feed; it will also help make your Facebook Page sticky by offering fans an incentive to remain a supporter and come back more than once; one of the best way to do that is to provide some unique benefit to fans: exclusive content, secret contests or insider access to information before non-fans.
If you have a good brand, product or service with a strong website behind it, building a Facebook Page should be fairly easy. But if you need a few examples or inspiration, check out these Pages that definitely get it right:
PINK collection is aimed at college girls, so Facebook is a natural fit, and this Page nails it. They are my most frequent example when explaining effective use of Facebook. This Page makes good use of HTML and FBML apps and provides lots of contests and exclusive stuff for Facebook fans.
A childhood favorite of many avid Facebook users, Britney is taking Twitter by storm and her Facebook Page is not far behind. Britney sends out tons of Updates to fans and posts plenty of sneak peeks on Facebook.
Lots of videos means plenty of opportunity for laughing and sharing. Zappos is almost always mentioned as a social media success story, and they’re working on making their Facebook Page meet the brand image.
Target has managed to break free of the Wal-Mart stigma and position itself as a hip and budget conscious alternative to mall stores. They’ve chose to direct visitors to their “Vote” tab, where not only is Target donating to a good cause, it’s encouraging fans to participate and spread the word to their friends with interactive voting.
(* Source: Robin Wauters *)
Robin reports...
Sharing links on Twitter
can be quite a pain when you need to input a web address that consumes most of the space you have at your disposal for your micro-message. The startup realized that quickly and automatically started shortening long URLs to make its users save on space for their 140-character updates.
To get this implemented, Twitter went with TinyURL, a service that shortens URLs down signficantly (but not extremely) and at the time had been around for years already. It never gave a reason for this choice, but it did provide TinyURL with a lot of exposure and a lot of extra traffic.
Those days are over. Apparently, Twitter has silently replaced TinyURL as its default URL shortening service with bit.ly, a competing service that launched quite recently and not too long ago raised $2 million from several prominent angel investors.
This is actually not that much of a surprise. Betaworks, the startup accelerator behind Twitter related companies such as Summize (acquired by Twitter in July 2008), is also behind bit.ly, and it just happens to also count early Twitter investors and advisors Chris Sacca and Ron Conway as their own backers.
Which obviously prompts this inevatible question: does the move signal Twitter paving the way for an outright acquisition of the URL shortening service provider?
Ning’s social network-building platform is getting a huge boost today, with the private beta launch of Ning Apps, a new suite of applications and features that Network Creators will be able to deploy across their networks with only a few clicks. The news has been a long time coming - network administrators have long been asking for features that could enhance their networks. But because of the nature of Ning, which houses hundreds of thousands of unique social networks, Network Creators were often requesting totally different things. Now they’ll be able to make everyone (or nearly everyone) happy.
At launch, Ning Apps is offering 90 new features to Network creators, built by 52 different developers that encompass a wide variety of web services. Network creators will now be able to integrate live video chat through TokBox, condunct contests with Wildfire, and create Wikis. Even better: network admins will be able to easily integrate monetization options, selling merchandise through Cartfly and tickets through Amiando and other ticketing apps.
Ning is likely going to be a very enticing platform for developers, too. Unlike social networks like MySpace, when a Ning network creator chooses to deploy an application, they have the option of deploying it to all of their users at once. And with some networks reaching more than 500,000 members, that translates into a huge jump in users. The applications are based on the OpenSocial standard, with some modifications to make them suitable for network-wide deployments. Still, even these changes are pretty minor - Ning says that developers have been porting their applications from other social networks in just two to three days.
Access to applications is beginning to roll out to a small number of Network Creators tomorrow, and will be available to everyone by the end of the month. At launch, all of the applications will be free to install (though some of the apps that involve money, like Cartfly, will take a revshare at the time of transaction), but Ning may well decide to deploy premium applications in the future.
Before now Network Creators have had access to some added functionality through third party applications. But Ning didn’t support these, and some of them were eventually removed from the site entirely. CEO Gina Bianchini says that Network Creators installing applications through Ning Apps can have ‘absolute confidence’ that the applications will work as advertised.
Aside from the launch of Ning Apps, things seem to be going quite well for Ning. The site recently saw the creation of its 1 millionth network (of which 200,000 are active), and is seeing 85,000 to 100,000 new users per day across all of its networks.
(* Source: Brian Solis *)
Mark Zuckerberg
Brian says...
Not to be outdone by the news of Twitter's astronomical growth, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg announced that the popular social network has hit a noteworthy milestone, the welcoming of their 200 millionth user.
To celebrate the moment, Zuckerberg commented, "When we built Facebook in 2004, our goal was to create a richer, faster way for people to share information about what was happening around them. We thought that giving people better tools to communicate would help them better understand the world, which would then give them even greater power to change the world."
Indeed, Facebook and other social mediums are empowering those who possess the ability to emerge and shepherd as true leaders at any level. Social Networks represent the larger impact beyond mere communication efficiency, they serve as a catalyst for organized connectivity, inspiration, and action, ultimately shifting our culture for how we consume and share information and potentially engender positive change.
To celebrate "change," Facebook is also creating a space in the network where people can share their stories about how Facebook has helped them make an give back. Facebook is also collaborating with 16 charitable and advocacy groups to create gifts that are available now in the gift shop.
General Statistics:
It took 20,000 years for the world population to reach 200 million people
It would take 46.5 years for 200 million babies to be born in the U.S.
200 million would be the world's 5th most populous country, bigger than Brazil, Japan, and Russia
Facebook Statistics:
General Growth
* More than 200 million active users
* More than 100 million users log on to Facebook at least once each day
* More than two-thirds of Facebook users are outside of college
* The fastest growing demographic is those 35 years old and older
User Engagement
* Average user has 120 friends on the site
* More than 3.5 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day (worldwide)
* More than 20 million users update their statuses at least once each day
* More than 4 million users become fans of Pages each day
Applications
* More than 850 million photos uploaded to the site each month
* More than 8 million videos uploaded each month
* More than 1 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) shared each week
* More than 2.5 million events created each month
* More than 25 million active user groups exist on the site
International Growth
* More than 40 translations available on the site, with more than 50 in development
* About 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States
Platform
* More than 660,000 developers and entrepreneurs from more than 180 countries
* Every month, more than 70% of Facebook users engage with Platform applications
* More than 52,000 applications currently available in the Facebook Application Directory
* More than 5,000 applications have 10,000 or more monthly active users
* More than 8,000 websites have implemented Facebook Connect since its general availability in December 2008
Mobile
* More than 660,000 developers and entrepreneurs from more than 180 countries
* Every month, more than 70% of Facebook users engage with Platform applications
* More than 52,000 applications currently available in the Facebook Application Directory
* More than 5,000 applications have 10,000 or more monthly active users
* More than 8,000 websites have implemented Facebook Connect since its general availability in December 2008
(* Source: Richard Yu *)
Editor’s Note: Social networks are taking off in China. The following guest post by George Godula. David Li, and Richard Yu explores how Chinese social networks are pursuing different business models than their American counterparts, relying more on micropayments and the sale of virtual goods. George Godula is the founder of Web2Asia
, an East Asian incubator and also a consultancy for Western startups trying to enter markets in China, Japan and Korea. David Li is a developer of social networking applications such as Growing Gifts, and he also was the developer of OnChat, an early in-browser graphical avatar chat system. Richard Yu is a Seattle native living in China, where he consults for Shanghai-based web startups while writing his blog.
Despite China’s massively growing internet market, international giants like Google and Facebook are having trouble making gains with the 300 million Chinese online users. China’s netizens are on average very young – 66.7 % of them are younger than 29 years old and 35.2 % of them are teenagers—with social networking and entertainment applications being the most popular.
While companies like Facebook struggle to conquer market share in China and to create viable business models everywhere, their Chinese clones have built lucrative cash machines literally earning billions of dollars a year. Unfortunately, adopting Chinese methods may not help American social networks due both to cultural differences in Chinese user behavior and industry practices. Below is our analysis of the Chinese social networking scene.
Chinese Social Networking is Dominated by Local Players
Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) have long played the dominating role in Chinese Internet life and still continue to be one of the most popular online platforms for social interaction. Registered user accounts, which are mostly anonymous, surpass 3 billion (users have multiple accounts) and 80% of Chinese sites run their own BBS. However in the last year social networking services, most of which require real name registrations, have shown explosive growth in China with 19.3% of netizens using them regularly.
Despite the popularity of social networking in China, the social networking market is dominated by local Chinese players, and Western networks have trouble adapting to Chinese culture and user expectations. Facebook does not rank among the top 15 asocial networks in China while MySpace has only 6 million users (vs. the goal of 50 million users after 2 years initially proclaimed by Rupert Murdoch).
Meanwhile, China’s leading social network Qzone, which is targeted at teenagers, may even be the largest in the world. Tencent, Inc., the company that runs Qzone, recently announced group revenues of over $1 billion in 2008.
As ad sales slump in the recession, only approximately 12% of Qzone’s revenue stems from online advertising with the rest coming from virtual item sales such as applications and avatars. Internet ad spending in China is expected to reach $1.7 billion in 2009, which is about 4% of total ad spend. In comparison, the US is estimated to spend $25.7 billion reaching consumers online through advertising. These comparably low online budgets in China are largely spent at four large news portals, which earn the majority of online ad revenue. This forces most “smaller” portals to find more innovative ways to monetize their traffic.
51.com, which targets working class adults from rural parts of China, is the second most popular social network in China with 130 million registered users. Concurrently, Chinese students flock to Xiaonei with approx. 40 million users. It is backed up with $430 million in funding from its parent company Oak Pacific Interactive and investors like Softbank. Kaixin001, which skyrocketed out of nowhere to 30 million registered users from the middle of last year, targets white collar workers in China’s largest cities by employing controversial invitation techniques and copying apps directly from Facebook.
Yet the astronomical growth of China’s social networks can be attributed as much to its massive market size as to its cultural norms and values. Social networking apps can hit hyper-viral levels in China due to a higher tolerance of intrusive app invitations. It is not uncommon for apps to essentially force new users to invite people and perform tasks before being able to join their friends online. Once friends have joined they are required to interact much more with the apps and advertisements than on Western applications. While this model is not replicable for the US market, certain aspects of this strategy/cultural mindset are necessary if companies like Facebook or Myspace want to compete in China.
Open Social Networks are Not So Open in China
In the middle of 2008, Myspace was the only social network to support OpenSocial in China. Despite Google’s effort, the adoption of OpenSocial was slow among the major social networks. Eventually, other platforms caved into the partnership with Google and gave half-hearted support to OpenSocial. Apart from some of the large social networks mentioned previously this included City!N, Yiqi.com as well as the business network Tianji and BBS Tianya. Other social networks such as Douban, Hainei or news portal Sohu had originally announced to join OpenSocial but then never implemented it, choosing an F8 style API instead. Today, only one of the top 50 apps in China’s social networks runs on OpenSocial despite the hard work put in by the Google team in China.
When Xiaonei and 51.com at first opened their own platforms, their terms of services outraged the developer community with clauses that practically blocked all monetization opportunities and a shared user base with their own websites. The developers launched several public protests against the social networks including the website www.anti-opensocial.com to rebel against hypocritical support for these “fake open” platforms. The executives from these social networks did respond quickly to the developers demands and changed the terms of service to more reasonable terms, allowing limited monetization opportunities for the developers.
Unfortunately, most social networks continue to ignore “Open Social” practices, opting for the more familiar “Guanxi paradigm” in business practices with third parties. The term ”Guānxi” describes the basic dynamic of gaining influence and receiving favors within social relationships, and is a central concept in Chinese society. For social networks, this means that rather than developing an open ecosystem, they focus on dealing with third parties individually and face to face. New Open Social Networking platforms (or better put, “selectively opened”) such as Yahoo’s Guanxi, Tencent’s Xiaoyou and Tianya court established third party app developers like Five Minutes while largely ignoring the wider developer community.
Additionally, ad sales are also strictly controlled by the social networks themselves even though 51.com set a threshold of a $35k fee to be paid for app developers to operate their own ad revenue -based applications (which until now no developer was willing to pay).
Keso, China’s most widely read tech blogger, who we asked to contribute to this article through China’s online expert panel BloggerInsight, summed up the situation by saying “Despite an open platform strategy, Chinese SNS are still competing with each other on the application level”.
Imitation of Facebook was only a Launching Point
Chinese sites are notorious for their C2C strategy, or “Copy to China”. This applies to the app market in the same way as it did to the social networks and all other Web 2.0 and eCommerce services. A year after Facebook introduced the F8 open platform, Xiaonei.com followed suit and announced its open platform in July 2008. The developer group xCube on Xiaonei attracted individuals and companies interested in third-party apps. Yet Chinese outsourcing developers such as Apptz and Ismole armed with experience working on Facebook applications made significant inroads by launching several apps and attracting millions of users in just a few short months.
At about the same time, the apps space also felt the power of C2C with copies of popular apps on Facebook such as “Friends for Sale” and “Parking War” popping up on just about every social network in China. Other leading social networks such as 51.com and Comsenz!’s Ucenter Home (similar to Ning.com) launched their own open platform soon after Xiaonei’s effort.
Chinas 51.com first social network in the world to open up payment API
While Chinese social networks started out as mere clones of existing sites, they’ve managed to innovate the business models to create a very lucrative market by cementing the relationship between application developers and the site’s user base. Happy Farm, the most popular app in China reportedly collects well over $75k a month through installations on various platforms, and according to Chinese application tracker, Appleap, the value of the total social network’s apps install base is approx. $4.5 million.
Opening up the payment system was one of the most anticipated announcements from Facebook’s developer conference F8 2008 but the company failed to create an integrated ecosystem for users to buy and sell apps. China’s socail networks took the great leap forward in this area when 51.com became the first social network in the world opening up its payment system to third party developers in 2008. Users pay money to 51.com and receive virtual coins which they can then again spend on third party applications. The revenue is split 50/50 between the social network and the developer.
Facebook on the other hand currently does not offer developers access to its payment system. If a third party application redirects Facebook users to their own website and payment processor, they usually lose the advantage of Facebook’s trusted brand name and the majority of potential revenues.
At the same time, companies like Becomedia are cooperating with 51.com to bring OfferPal-style cost-per-click/cost-per-action (CPS/CPA) for virtual currency models to China. CPS/CPA is one of the fastest growing sectors of Internet ads in China. This means revenues for the developers by trading their virtual currency for hard cash.
Season Xu from Five Minutes, the maker of China’s most popular app, confirmed the three basic revenue models for apps in China: shared ad revenues, income through virtual currencies, and customized development for branded applications. However he and Herock, a leading figure in the Chinese tech blogosphere whom we also spoke to, expect a consolidation in the app development market soon with larger companies taking over and benefiting from effects of scale, rather than individual developers still being able to produce top apps.
What can Facebook and Western social networks learn, if anything?
If monetizing a social network is so easy, then why hasn’t Facebook opened up its payment API to third party developers? While the aggressive and intrusive hyper-viral aspects of the apps in China may not be replicable in a Western Market, the problems for creating a more viable business model run deeper. Western companies cannot innovate in the same way due to institutional problems stemming from their own struggle for an identity and revenue.
Facebook has just recently announced a “credits” system, but it seems to miss the mark. The new system demonstrates little incentive for users to shell over money, and does not speak to the same need as paying for a social application that all your friends are already on and talking about. Facebook may be afraid to become a marketplace for applications, because they are reluctant to be labeled as a social gaming network or a social app store. Instead, they are a self-styled guru of dynamic human interaction. If they opened up their platform to become an apps store, their major revenue streams would put them into a pigeonhole, calling their $15 billion valuation into question. They obviously don’t want to be labeled as a “gaming platform” either, and don’t want to fully depend on selling digital trinkets.
Like during the American gold rush in 1849, where Chinese merchants prospered while most prospectors went bust in search of striking gold, it appears that building viable, scalable businesses for Social Networking sites may still be an ancient Chinese secret for Westerners.
Leena says...
Startup Nomee
aggregates social networks and websites into a free Adobe Air powered desktop application that helps you manage these networks and sites into a single interface. The nomee personal all-in-one dashboard aggregates all your favorite social networking sites (you can manage profiles from up to 100 networks including Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn and Digg ) and RSS feeds, giving you one place to organize your online relationships, share your information, follow newsmakers, and even publish your own news.
Nomee is designed to simplify social networking by organizing all of your online relationships in a single location, making it easy to focus on who you want to connect with, when you want to connect. With the help of Adobe Air, Nomee also brings news updates to users in a pretty simple interface. In addition, Nomee lets you customize the information you want to share, pointing your contacts to the web sites you want them to see. It also alerts your contacts when you post updates or new content, including providing custom updates to different friends and business associates.
Nomee also allows you to follow your favorite celebrities, sports teams and other interest areas through downloading its exclusive nomee newsmaker cards. You can become your own nomee newsmaker by collecting links on your nomee card and posting it for download from your blog or website, so your fans can track you.
Managing all of your social networks, celebrity obsessions and RSS feeds in one place is not a new idea. FriendFeed aggregates all of this information into a website. But the adoption of Adobe Air into the application gives it a different twist. Nomee, which can be run on a PC or a Mac, isn’t your conventional website, its actually a rich internet application separate from your browser.
Here’s a screenshot:
More and more every day, the social networking giant Facebook is becoming a large part of the overall Internet experience. Company estimates state that over 175 million people have joined since its founding in 2005, and the users themselves contribute millions of pieces of content daily.
The February 2009 Facebook numbers are striking.
Each day during the month, Facebook users averaged over 3 billion minutes on the site. They updated their status 15 million times and became “fans” of a particular company, brand, product or person 3.5 million times daily.
In addition, Compete found that that US residents spent more time on Facebook than any other Website, beating out previous leader Yahoo!. However, Nielsen Online still ranks the site third behind AOL and Yahoo!.
But Facebook’s rapid user growth has not translated into advertising revenues.
The habits of social network users are one obstacle. In 2008, IDC found that 43% of social network users never clicked on ads, a dramatic difference from the 80% of other Internet users who did so at least once a year. Further, 23% of nonusers who clicked on an ad then made a purchase; only 11% of social network users who clicked on ads did the same.
If not through advertising, how can marketers leverage Facebook for their campaigns?
When marketing professionals were surveyed by TNS Media Intelligence on what objectives had the most social media potential, most said brand-building initiatives such as gaining consumer insights, building brand awareness and increasing customer loyalty.
None said increasing intent to purchase.
“If you’re going to build a community, don’t center it around your product, but rather on something deeply relevant to a particular consumer group,” said eMarketer CEO Geoff Ramsey. He also suggested keeping fans of your brand pages happy by giving them a lot of content and letting them share the love with others.
(* Source: Michael Arrington *)
What was a bad situation in November 2008 is starting to turn outright ugly - Facebook is now well over twice the size of MySpace, according to recent worldwide Comscore data. And what’s worse, MySpace is losing audience while Facebook absolutely hockey sticks: MySpace lost 2% of users in just one month, while Facebook grew by nearly 40 million members in February alone. MySpace currently has 124 million monthly unique visitors, compared to Facebook’s 276 million.
That’s a 16.6% growth rate at Facebook in one month. This simply doesn’t happen with sites that already have hundreds of millions of users. It was less than a year ago that MySpace and Facebook were the same size.
Comscore says more than 1 in 4 people with Internet access visited Facebook last month. They’re sixth overall in terms of top sites in terms of unique users, and third (after Google, Microsoft and Yahoo) in overall page views.
MySpace continues to see executive departures, and it isn’t clear that founders Chris DeWolfe
and Tom Anderson will be staying on after their contracts terminate later this year. We expect more defections by the summer, and a possible reorganization of parent entity Fox Interactive Media.
(* Source: eMarketer *)
According to comScore, YouTube received more than 100 million unique visits in January, making it again the most widely viewed video service in the US.
The next four most-viewed video sites were Fox Interactive Media properties, Yahoo! sites, Microsoft sites and AOL, followed by the hard-charging Hulu.
YouTube owes much of its growth to the users who generate the majority of content on the site. eMarketer estimates that 9.1% of Internet users, or 18.1 million people, will create user-generated videos in 2009.
Despite this enthusiasm, YouTube has yet to fully realize its revenue potential.
“Even though YouTube continues to gain the most online video viewers, it barely monetizes those billions of monthly streams,” said David Hallerman, senior analyst at eMarketer. “That underpeformance continues to leave the door open for its competition to take in more of the still-growing video ad revenue pie.”
There are still gains to be made in the online video portal space.
(* Source: Scott Lachut *)
It’s no secret that social media is a driving force in the way big businesses are marketing themselves to consumers. These networking tools create open channels of communication between companies and customers, giving a face to formerly impersonal corporations through employee blogs, Twitter updates and playful Facebook applications. Customers are able to engage with the brands they buy in meaningful ways never before thought possible (or allowable) by sharing their experiences in a variety of ways ranging from feedback and innovations to photos and video.
But simply saying your business uses this methodology doesn’t guarantee instantaneous success. The demographic that is reached in this manner represent a savvy audience of users that value authentic interaction and thoughtful use of these technologies or they’ll choose to opt out of the loop. With that in mind, Samir Balwani, blogger and social media marketer, has assembled an insightful list of ten big brands that are effectively using web 2.0 tools, along with the lessons to be learned from each example. We have included the abbreviated list below:
Mashable: Presenting: 10 of the Smartest Big Brands in Social Media
(* Source: Erick Schonfeld *)
Erik says...
If Facebook has one standout application it has to be Photos. Measured on its own, it is the largest photo site on the Web. A full 69 percent of Facebook’s monthly visitors worldwide either look at or upload photos, based on comScore data. And more than 10 billion photos
have been uploaded to the site.
And it’s been pulling away from its competitors. As can be seen in the comScore chart above, as recently as last September the top three photo sites in the U.S. were running neck-and-neck, with Facebook Photos at 23.9 million unique visitors, followed by Photobucket at 21.3 million uniques, and Flickr at 19.5 million uniques. But by January, the number of monthly U.S. visitors going to Facebook Photos shot up 41 percent to 33.6 million. Meanwhile, Photobucket is up only 7 percent to 22.8 million, while Flickr is up 12 percent to 21.9 million. (Picasa is a distant fourth in the U.S. with 8.1 million).
In other words, Facebook increased the gap between its closest competitor (Photobucket in the U.S.) from 2.6 million monthly unique visitors to 10.8 million. On a worldwide basis, the gap between Facebook Photos and Flickr (which is the No. 2 site globally, and looks like it is about to pass Photobucket in the U.S.) went from 41.2 million unique monthly visitors in September to 87 million in December (the most recent data available, see chart below).
What accounts for Facebook’s advantage in the photo department? The biggest factor is simply that it is the default photo feature of the largest social network in the world. And of all the viral loops that Facebook benefits from, its Photos app might have the largest viral loop of all built into it. Whenever one of your friends tags a photo with your name, you get an email. This single feature turns a solitary chore—tagging and organizing photos—into a powerful form of communication that connects people through activities they’ve done in the past in an immediate, visual way. I would not be surprised if people click back through to Facebook from those photo notifications at a higher rate than from any other notification, including private messages.
But the tagging feature has been part of Facebook Photos for a long time. What happened in September to accelerate growth? That is when a Facebook redesign went into effect which added a Photos tab on everyone’s personal homepage.
(The chart above shows U.S. visitors through January. The chart below shows international visitors through December, with 153.3 million unique visitors for Facebook Photos, 66.7 million for Flickr, 45.5 million for Picasa and 42.7 million for Photobucket).
(* Source: Robin Wauters *)
People generally love sharing things, and Twitter has made broadcasting updates to anyone who cares to care on what you’re doing, wearing, reading, commenting on, eating, using, etc. a breeze; in 140 characters or less, even. It’s only natural to see so many users also share which music they are listening to at any given moment on Twitter, as this has been a fairly popular use of status feeds on other social networking and communication services for years (Facebook, Skype and Windows Live Messenger leap to mind).
Here’s a number of ways to use Twitter for just about anything related to music:
* Blip.fm - dubbed the “Twitter for Music” when we first reviewed the service, it got its own API in late 2008. Blip.fm enables anyone to start their own music station and broadcast tunes to Twitter and other status sharing services where people can interact with the choice of music.
* Twiturm does much of the same - upload music and share it with all your Twitter followers in a heartbeat. Intended for artists who want to share their own music, hence the name (”Twitter Ur Music”).
* Twisten.fm - Escape Media Group linked its music discovery service Grooveshark and its URL shortening service TinySong with an application that crawls Twitter for messages about music (and “then you listen to them”).
* Twt.fm (anyone see a naming pattern here?) - type in an artist, track, and your twitter username. Twt.fm will then generate a track page for you using your twitter page design and you’ll be able to tweet it to your followers.
* Tweetj - include a #tweetj tag in your tweets when you’re listening to music and it’ll be posted to a public playlist. The playlist allows you to discover new music and immediately purchase tracks on Amazon.
* A similar service is WiiZZZ (yes, that’s the actual name) - it allows you to listen to entirely random songs that have been posted and shared by Twitter users on any given day.
* Play Twitter - allows you to easily play mp3 files directly on Twitter or Identi.ca. MP3 links will automatically become playable right on the page.
* Tra.kz - this “URL shortener for all things music” was cooked up by MixMatchMusic and does exactly what you suspect it would do and therefore competes with the above mentioned TinySong and alternatives like Song.ly.
* TwittyTunes - Firefox extension that comes with another Firefox extension, Yahoo’s FoxyTunes, and allows you to instantly post your currently playing songs to Twitter with just a click.
* LastTweet - enables you to embed a widget with your latest tweets into your Last.fm profile
Also worth checking out, even if not directly related to Twitter: Nabbit (”connects your cellphone to your radio”), MuseBin (music news and reviews in 140 characters, like Blippr but music only) and Twones (the “social music feed”).
Did I miss any other apps, tools and websites worth noting?
Share them in the comments and I’ll be happy to update the post.
Update: it’s not Twitter-specific, but you can use Favtape to put together your own playlists / online mixtapes and share them on Twitter.
(* Source: Erik Schonfeld *)
Erik reports...
What if you could peer into the thoughts of millions of people as they were thinking those thoughts or shortly thereafter? And what if all of these thoughts were immediately available in a database that could be mined easily to tell you what people both individually and in aggregate are thinking right nowabout any imaginable subject or event? Well, then you’d have a different kind of search engine altogether. A real-time search engine. A what’s-happening-right-now search engine.
In fact, the crude beginnings of this “now” search engine already exists. It is called Twitter, and it is a big reason why new investors poured another $35 million into the two-year-old startup on Friday. Twitter is not the only company trying to solve this problem. Facebook, FriendFeed, and even Google are trying to crack it, but Twitter has a decided advantage in that it is capturing the vast majority of the real-time thought stream on the Web (because more people enter their thoughts directly into Twitter’s database than any other, and are doing so at an increasing rate).
What makes Google and other search engines so valuable is that they capture people’s intent
—what they are looking for, what they desire, what they want to learn about. But they don’t do a great job at capturing what people are doing or what they are thinking about. For thoughts and events that are happening right now, searching Twitter increasingly brings up better results than searching Google.
Whether you want to know how people are mentally gearing up for this week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona or what they are thinking about today’s Ireland vs. Italy rugby match, searching Twitter will give you a pretty good smattering of sentiment and opinion. It is also a lot faster at getting out the essential details about breaking news, such as the Mumbai attacks or the plane that landed on the Hudson.
Twitter’s search engine is powered by Summize, a startup it acquired last July. But it also developed a feature called Track, currently disabled but coming back soon, that allowed people to follow the mention of specified keywords. John Borthwick, an investor in Summize (and thus now an investor in Twitter), explained in a blog post earlier this month ago why he thinks that “Twitter search changes everything.” Excerpt:
Imagine you are in line waiting for coffee and you hear people chattering about a plane landing on the Hudson. You go back to your desk and search Google for plane on the Hudson — today — weeks after the event, Google is replete with results — but the DAY of the incident there was nothing on the topic to be found on Google. Yet at http://search.twitter.com
. . . How is real time search different? History isn’t that relevant — relevancy is driven mostly by time. . . . This reformulation of search as navigation is, I think, a step into a very new and different future. Google.com has suddenly become the source for pages — not conversations, not the real time web. What comes next? I think context is the next hurdle. Social context and page based context. . . . Twitter search today is crude — but so was Google.com once upon a not so long time ago.
Twitter may just be a collection of inane thoughts, but in aggregate that is a valuable thing. In aggregate, what you get is a direct view into consumer sentiment, political sentiment, any kind of sentiment. For companies trying to figure out what people are thinking about their brands, searching Twitter is a good place to start. To get a sense of what I’m talking about, try searching for “iPhone,” “Zune,” or “Volvo wagon”.
Why can’t Google simply index Twitter? It does, but its search results give more weight to links than to time. It could create a new search product along the lines of Blog Search or News search that is geared more towards Micro-messaging services such as Twitter, FriendFeed, and the rest. But what it really needs to go beyond simply indexing Twitter after the fact. IVP partner, and Twitter investor, Todd Chaffee, suggests:
If they were really smart they could partner with Twitter and make Twitter their real-time feed.
Doing that would require Google to “affirm Twitter’s dominance in this category and the importance of the Twitter data stream,” contends Borthwick. But so far, Google has pretty much flubbed this opportunity to open up real-time search. It bought Twitter competitor Jaiku, only to shut it down. And now it is hoping to create a counterweight to Twitter’s growing strength in real-time data by open-sourcing Jaiku. Good luck with that one.
Listening to Twitter’s investors gives a good sense of how they think Twitter can become a game-changer in real-time search. While it is instructive, it is also important to note that much of this vision has yet to materialize. Twitter’s current search is extremely crude, as Borthwick readily admits. It simply brings up the most recent Tweets with the keyword you are looking for. There is no ranking or clustering beyond that.
An undifferentiated thought stream of the masses at some point becomes unwieldy. In order to truly mine that data, Twitter needs to figure out how to extract the common sentiments from the noise (something which Summize was originally designed to do, by the way, but it was putting the cart before the horse—you need to be able to do simple searches before you start looking for patterns). But what is the best way to rank real-time search results—by number of followers, retweets, some other variable? It is not exactly clear. But if Twitter doesn’t solve this problem, someone else will and they will make a lot of money if they do it right.
(* Source: Robin Wauters *)
Robin says...
I’m not going to discuss the economic meltdown and its devastating effect on technology companies and internet startups in this post, but rather something that crossed my mind earlier this morning: “Web 2.0″ seems to become more and more a void (and an avoided) term. Of course, that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it is definitely apparent.
So why do I say it’s fading? For one, because the number of startups that contact us and include the term Web 2.0 in the subject line or message is visibly dropping (and that’s a good thing), and I hardly ever see it mentioned anymore on other technology blogs and news sites either. That’s not really tangible, so I took a look at the number of mentions of the phrase across the web, and they seem to be decreasing significantly, reflecting my feeling on this.
Judging by Google Trends, which shows how often a particular search term is entered relative to the total search volume across various regions of the world (and in various languages), the term started being used at the end of 2004 when Tim O’Reilly organized the first edition of the Web 2.0 Conference. Search queries for the term started picking up in the middle of 2005, when TechCrunch was started - with the tagline “Tracking Web 2.0″ by the way - and the number kept increasing until the end of 2007. After that, the trend is clearly downwards, falling back to the level it reached in early 2006 today. If the trend continues, there should only be a handful of people left who scour search engines for “Web 2.0″ by 2011.
Also noteworthy: take a look at the geographic regions that have generated the highest volumes of worldwide search traffic for the term over the years - it’s Asia, with the top 5 regions being India, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Malaysia (in that order). Furthermore, Google Trends pegs the number one language in which people search for stuff related to the topic of Web 2.0 to be Russian before English.
And just in case you’re curious: “Web 3.0″ doesn’t seem to picking up much.
Let’s all rejoice.
Google’s “Insights for Search”, a beta service that analyzes a portion of worldwide Google web searches from all Google domains to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you’ve entered - relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time - gives an even better overview:
(* Source: Jason Kincaid *)
Jason reports...
In an effort to monetize the growing number of music videos on its site, MySpace
has just launched a new pilot advertising initiative that places attractive overlays at the bottom of some clips, allowing users to buy the song they’re listening to or immediately jump to the artist’s homepage.
The new initiative stems from MySpace’s partnership with Auditude, a content detection and management company that can identify copyrighted content and serve relevant advertising, even on user-submitted video. Now Auditude is applying the technology to music videos, which in the past have largely relied on banner ads and static text links to music stores for monetization.
On Wednesday the site, in a partnership with Warner Music Group, placed an overlay ad on a video for My Chemical Romance’s cover of Desolation Row. Users were presented with the option to buy the song either on Amazon, or (in an interesting twist) on a vinyl disc. Over the 24 hours that the ad ran it posted an impressive 1.2% click-through-rate (significantly higher than rates seen on typical banner ads), encouraging MySpace and Auditude to expand the program to more videos. Today the site began displaying advertising on U2’s new single Get On Your Boots, with plans to expand the program more broadly in the near future.
Much of the overlay’s success probably stems from the fact that it doesn’t look too much like an ad - it actually shows informative content like the album the song came from, the year it was released, and a link to the artist’s profile. I wouldn’t say I like having it there, but MySpace could have done a lot worse. And frankly in the current economic climate it’s encouraging when companies can find advertising methods that actually work without being ridiculously annoying.
YouTube launched a similar program three weeks ago, allowing content owners to insert overlays for products into their videos (MySpace’s overlays are significantly more attractive, but they both serve the same purpose). YouTube wouldn’t provide any exact numbers, but a representative confirmed that in general the site has seen significantly improved clickthrough rates when ads are embedded in videos themselves, as opposed to appearing in surrounding banner ads.
(* Source: Mike Arrington *)
Great article from Mike... with so many social networks out there today. Keep up with all of them requires more people. Digital P.As anyone?
Want to manage Britney Spears’ online persona? She’s on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and other sites, and somebody (not her of course) has to do all the hard work of posting and responding to content.
That’s where you come in. If you went to Harvard, that is. Brandcasting Unlimited, Britney’s online manager, posted the job listing below for “Britney Spears 2.0 Media Manager” yesterday on a Harvard-only private job board. Among the not-so-tough job requirements: you must be “addicted to social networks such as MySpace and Facebook.”
The full job listing is below:
(* Source: Michael Arrington *)
Sounds like another great music application only to be held back by those people that promote music called "The Labels".
MOG has a history of doing cool new things around music. The service today includes a media player plugin that records and analyzes your music habits, a website that has a dedicated page for every artist, album and song with user generated reviews and posts, and an advertising network that provides revenue for 300 top music blogs. Users can also stream music via an excellent front end to Rhapsody.
All of that brings about 5 million unique visitors a month to their network, and the company says they should bring in about $5 million in revenue in 2009.
Now they’ve created a new music streaming product that breaks away from Rhapsody and its limitations. Like competitor ilike, which also uses Rhapsody, users can only stream 25 songs per month for free. That doesn’t compete well with free streaming services like MySpace Music, iMeem, Last.fm and others.
The new service, dubbed Mog 3.0 internally, is a fully free music streaming service that lets users play whatever songs they like on demand. The user interface is as good or better than LaLa, a service that we love despite the fact that streaming isn’t completely free. Founder David Hyman
and VP Product T Jay Fowler gave me a demo of Mog 3.0 earlier today.
The service combines the ease of use of LaLa with free, which is enough to get our attention. But it also has a recommendation service that rivals Pandora when it comes to discovering new music.
The interface is genius. Users search or browse songs, artists or albums and then start listening to the music. More songs from that artist are suggested and added to the results as you play the songs. And if you move the slider to the right (see image to right), related music is added as well. That lets the user decide if they want a playlist-driven on demand music experience, or to change things up and add Pandora-style related music to the mix.
It doesn’t stop there. Users can also create playlists with the best tool on the market - it’s easier to create and share playlists than even Project Playlist offers, and users can associate a name, description and image with each playlist as well.
MOG plans to make other changes to the service as well, including adding streaming music to content pages, and creating user profiles that highlight the music you listen to and like. It brings in the best social aspects of Last.fm.
The product is compelling.
But it will quite possibly never launch.
MOG has label deals with Sony BMG and Universal locked up. They’ll provide streaming music rights for free in exchange for a revenue share. But Warner and EMI remain on the sidelines, and MOG says they won’t launch unless and untill they have all four major labels under agreement.
I, for one, really hope to see MOG 3.0 launch sometime soon. And if the last two labels don’t jump on board, MySpace should strongly consider buying MOG. MySpace has label deals locked up but their product continues to have unacceptable technical glitches. The music player is very slow to load and songs have an annoying tendency to skip during playback. Perhaps the MOG team can put that right for them.
More screen shots below - top image is the playlist tool, below that is a user profile page.
(* Source: Valeria Maltoni*)
Even the most difficult endeavors begin by taking the first step. In business, as in life, "we may convince others by our own arguments, but we can only persuade them by their own." [Joseph Joubert] Marketing is business, communications is a technology that provides the lifeblood of thriving relationships, conversation is the opportunity to get out of our own way and see things from a different perspective.
If you have been watching the social media space from where you sit and are still unconvinced that it is here to stay - take the plunge.
Maybe you'll discover your "why" in one of these conversations (by month).
After spending countless hours in front of this screen, I am now more than ever convinced that social media is the modern version of the telephone. It still comes down to saying, doing, or producing something valuable for your customer. And customers are ready for those companies who want to talk with them about them. The marketing conversation was always that way; so forget influentials, in viral marketing context matters.
For companies used to setting the tone by controlling the message, these may seem uncertain times. When a press statement misses Target, the online community piles on. The era of talking past each other is over - and that is valid for you, too. How do you go about revealing yourself to others - how much is appropriate, is that really you online? Your work speaks louder than words, but can you be authentic?
There is no need to build new castles or ivory towers, leading brands lead - and, if you're willing to start over with one line of your business and build a new conversation with customers, 14 year olds may think you're cool. Think of online as a blank slate, do your homework and help your company execute marketing as context building - here are 5 ideas.
With the emergence and rise of mass social media, how a blog is born may inspire you to start one of your own.The top ten reasons why your customer service fails may provide you with an incentive to explore new ways to provide support and connect with your customers. What happens when you have joined the space though? Here are ten ideas for conversation.
You should know that there is power in collaboration as well as plenty of inspiration you can orchestrate for your customers and employees. But has Web 2.0 made you happier? It's a valid question, especially as we spend more and more time online. Part of that happiness lies in the reciprocation of kindness that others extend to us. Learn how to write a business recommendation and make more friends.
With all this talk of personalization and injecting a human voice in your communications, is it fair to ask - is your business lifestreaming? After all, interests feed relationships. You could also have "fragmentation innovation." Create new options through market reputation and authority, but there needs to be an evolution of business as markets and customers don't stand still. How do you go about taking the measure of marketing conversations?
You may ask yourself, what if I fail? How do you go about connecting the dots on social media and the future? How does a company dip its toes in the conversation? Is it true that we could be designing business through interactions? The answers to these questions are ours to give. Creating a totally immersive experience seems to be where it's at. If interactions are designed to be transformative experiences, then the business where the interactions occur, will be transformed.
Are you too accessible? Many ask that question and worry. Accessibility comes down to making choices that align with our purpose - in work and in life. We also learn to look at conversation as negotiation. After all, we buy, we join, we connect on the basis of emotion. The award for most emotionally-charged tool goes to Twitter. It's immediate, short, and can be fast. Learn business uses of Twitter and keep your nose clean.
Asking the right question makes a big difference - are you using your influence? Mentoring, sharing, highlighting good causes, helping power connections that extend beyond your self are all worthy ways to use influence. There are also times when plan B is better than plan A. Regardless of what plan you choose, behaving well will reflect on your credibility, especially when in a tough economy branding matters.
With all this talk of conversation and sharing, I do wonder if you have thought of the idea and practices as organic marketing. These people have and they are beginning to show us the way, a very different kind of behavior for business. Benefit from thinking that your logo is a symbol, your product can be a social object. This outreach by Pepsi via Edelman to 25 influential bloggers was the object of fascination by many. Why pick Conversation Agent? Some asked. Maybe this year-end recap will help you see why. ROI requires focus - on execution.
There are so many choices for November that I encourage you to dig deeper, if you're so inclined. Why start a blog and 25 ways to make it work was the most saved post on Delicious and the most linked ever - with 301 saves to date. Glad I could be of service. A topic that you may overlooked, but that will take center stage in the next couple of years is the light before the storm. Crisis communications is taking on a whole new dimension with community. One thing is for sure - companies need to learn how to talk with customers differently.
Lots of choices for December as well, so I will highlight a couple of important reminders. Change the conversation, change the game is an invitation to take a look at the opportunity that awaits you. But you need trust in order to do that and remember that the future is now.
I hope you will find this content useful and adaptable to your circumstances and ideas. There are many more ways to participate and engage, as many as there are professionals interested in doing so - I've done it my way. One last word of advice. This is not the whole universe of your customers. It's becoming more important and influential, yes. But it's not all there is - you need to get out more.
Happy New Year!
(* Source: Trendspotting *)
I'm not big fan of predictions but have a look at what trendspotting is saying about 2009.
(* Source: Robin Wauters *)
Robin says...
Redanyway
is a young startup out of India that aims to provide an alternate way to manage your ‘centralized me’ where your personal website or blog is your profile page outside of any walled gardens. The founders dubbed the application a ‘distributed social network’, but I look at it more like MyBlogLog on steroids, since it’s basically a way to get to know and interact more with your readers.
Signing up is invitation-only for now, but we’ve got some invite codes for the first 1000 TechCrunch readers that register for beta testing the application. You don’t need to comment on this post to get an invite, simply use ‘techcrunch’ upon registering or click here for a shortcut.
The essential idea behind Redanyway is that it should be easier for content publishers to build a social network around blog posts, photos, videos etc. and also enable users to follow / befriend on this centralized location, enhancing traffic, interactivity and reader engagement. In a sense, it also acts like a feed reader, by aggregating content from various sources and bringing it together in a single feed in the Redanyway dashboard. In a blog post, co-founder Kuldeep Kapade says they want to cut out RSS as the middle-man for subscribing to online content. If they’d add tabs and futher categorization capabilities, it would be even more useful, I think.
The setup is a bit tedious, though, as publishers are required to install a plugin / widget on their personal blog or website, which is still quite a challenge for many mainstream bloggers (i.e. Redanyway’s target audience). The startup integrated Gigya to make the whole process a bit less complicated, but I still feel this might be a hindrance for the company’s growth. I’m also having trouble looking at it from a different perspective than recent initiatives like Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect. Furthermore, I ran into a couple of bugs when adding contacts in the initial setup process, and someone should really take a look at the design and usability of the application as well.
That said, Redanyway is still in private beta and has only been going for a couple of months, so maybe we’ll see some improvements in the future. All in all, I’m not really impressed, but maybe I’m missing something here. The startup was short-listed for the Techstars Summer program out of hundreds of applications, even though they eventually didn’t participate due to external circumstances.
(* Source: Michael Arrington *)
Today’s the day that Facebook makes their big press push for their Facebook Connect service, which was first announced last May. The NY Times has a story giving a broad overview
of Connect as well as competing services from MySpace (Data Availability) and Google (Friend Connect).
All three services are platforms for third party sites (Digg, Twitter, Citisearch, CBS, whatever) to let users sign in via their favorite social network instead of the normal approach. Some profile information flows with the sign in, which the sites can keep for a period of time. And activity that occurs on the site - Twitters written, Digg stories voted on, restaurant reviews on Citysearch, etc.) can optionally flow back to the user’s activity stream.
What the third party sites get out of these services: easy sign in for users, particularly new users. They can also use the profile data to help users create accounts at their site with little data input. The activity stream information published on the social networks includes links back to their sites. And one of the most interesting features, for Facebook Connect partners: sites can request friend lists from Facebook to help them make more connections on their own services. Digg CEO Jay Adelson recently gushed over the potential of Facebook Connect for his service.
Facebook also gives Connect partners most of the same tools as their application developers to promote their services via the news feed, invites, etc.
But the real value goes to the social networks. These services make users begin to think about their identity in terms of their MySpace profile, or Facebook login as they use it to sign into their favorite services. That makes it even more likely the users will maintain their profiles on those services, add friends, etc.
MySpace in particular wants to own user identities. Their MySpace profile is their name online, which is why they’ve embraced OpenID so completely in recent months. Data Availability and OpenID are two parts to a single strategy.
Facebook is probably less concerned with identity - there is no branded URL for users, for example. But they do want to own the definitive profile for an individual and, more importantly, their social graph. Knowing who you are and who your friends are is the key to their yet-unrealized business model.
And the biggest win of all is this free flow of data back to the social networks, which quite nicely fills out a user’s profile for advertising purposes.
Facebook is moving ahead alone with Connect, using proprietary standards for login and data sharing. They’ve also prohibited Google from trying to get in the middle of things with their Friend Connect service. MySpace, by contrast, is using mostly open standards in their approach, and is working closely with Google to make sure the services work properly together.
The battle for partners is intense. MySpace announced Twitter as a launch partner, but rumor is that Twitter is actually integrating with Facebook first (there’s no reason they can’t offer both, and they probably will). MySpace also announced Yahoo and eBay as launch partners. To date, though, they’ve only launched with Flixster and Eventful.
(* Source: YouTube *)
Dr. Vinton G. Cerf, "The Father Of The Internet" and VP, Chief Internet Evangelist for Google shares with OgilvyOne Singapore on how brands can tap into the social media phenomenon.
(* Source: Jim Nail *)
Jim says...
An Ad Age story is headlined "Content Trumps Community" and notes that only 7.5% of consumer time online is spent in community sites like Facebook, MySpace, etc. True enough, but the stats say social networks have less of an issue with the number of users and page view consumption than with their users' fleeting attention.
First, kudos to the Online Publishers Association for recognizing that community is its own category. That alone is a statement about how far "social media" has come in the last couple of years.
I've followed the OPA's Internet Activity Index for several years and I often quote it to show how the Internet is different from other media: other media are 100% about content, but the Internet has always been a balance of content and communications (email and IM), with a healthy dollop of commerce thrown in.
While the Ad Age article implies that the focus and attention paid to social networks is overblown compared to the time spent, I beg to disagree with my friend Ms. Klaasen on these grounds:
I don't think social media's issue is with having sufficient space to sell -- the audience will continue to grow, and if the past is any indication of the future the number of pages per user will grow as well.
I wrote a while ago that social networks have a difficult tightrope to walk, between monetizing their user's attention and alienating those very users.
These numbers also imply that the users' attention is so fleeting (users are cramming 380 pages into about 1/4 the time they spend on content sites) that creating an effective marketing communication/ad format is the real challenge. Like email and IM before it, banners and other display ad formats are probably not the answer; unlike those communications media, word-of-mouth marketing techniques can be employed to involve brands in the conversations taking place.
(* Source: Erick Schonfeld *)
Erick reports...
Three years ago today, Rupert Murdoch bought MySpace and its parent company Intermix for $580 million. That turned out to be money well spent. The last time we ran the numbers, we figured that MySpace alone is worth between $3 billion and $20 billion, depending on how much you value each user. Fox Interactive Media (which is mostly MySpace) accounted for about $850 million in revenues last fiscal year (which ended in June), and is projected to hit $1 billion next year.
It was supposed to hit $1 billion this year,
but never mind. Unlike other social networks, MySpace is actually making a profit. The company now employs 1,600 people worldwide, compared to 150 in October, 2005—more than a tenfold increase.
The social network has grown as well. MySpace now has 73 million unique visitors a month in the U.S., according to comScore, compared to 24 million three years ago. (Facebook has 41 million). That means MySpace reaches about 40 percent of the online population, compared to 14 percent three years ago. Those visitors, on average, spend 263 minutes a month each on the site, versus 83 minutes in 2005.
MySpace has definitely evolved since 2005. Just this year it has made major strides in opening up its platform to developers, launching MySpace Music, and pushing new forms of social advertising.
The question is whether rival Facebook can catch up to MySpace in the U.S. (it has already surpassed it worldwide), or whether the two will co-exist and diverge, with MySpace being more music- and media-oreinted and Facebook continuing on its path towards becoming the platform for social software. Of course, MySpace would also like to play that role.
Three years from now, which one will be worth more? And will Rupert Murdoch still be smiling?
(* Source: Marta Strickland *)
Martha says...
Little Big Planet is one of those games that defies explanation. On Friday, Eric Diem wrote, "I can't find the words to describe what a unique experience this game produces, so I figured it would just be easier to bring in my PS3 in so everyone can check it out."
So he did, and the impression that he left on the office was monumental. Jeff Bossardet confessed to me, "It is gorgeous. I have never been a gamer. For many years now I have thought that it may be advantageous, as an interactive professional, to understand the gaming world from a users perspective. I think I have found my gateway drug I mean game...Little Big Planet."
Why were we all so excited? Little Big Planet isn't just a game. It is a way to make games, mold games, and share games. The only limits are that of human imagination.
In its simplest form, Little Big Planet is a platform game, but it is a game that teaches you how to create your own levels. It provides you with different materials and all the tools you need to turn those materials into moving, changing, and logical objects. These objects can be set to react to different changes in the environment or actions of the players. The result is the ability for every player with patience and practice to create entire video games of their own.
But that is just the tip of the iceberg. The social element of the game is another side to the revolution. All worlds can be "published", which means they are open for the entire community to play. Those worlds can be rated, tagged, and shared. And, if the world creator so chooses, they can give the objects they create (villains, tools, etc) as gifts to other players to use in their levels.
Some see this all as a bold move in consumer-generated gaming, and others see it as opening the door to other greater deeds in co-creation. But everyone agrees it is a HUGE step forward for the industry. Just look at this guy who defied game-makers expectations and created a working calculator. Prepare to be amazed:
(* Source: Marta Strickland *)
Martha says...
It's hard to pay attention to the news of the web industry this week. I've seen digests on other blogs become shorter and shorter. Right now, everything else going on in the world seems more interesting, scary, captivating, devastating...
But if you were paying attention this week, you would have seen an underlying trend, and that is this... social media is growing up.
What's Been Happening This Week?
The Playful But Powerful Google
Google had a few unserious moments this week. It introduced two joke features, an audio preview for YouTube comments and "mail goggles" for G-mail that prevent users from drunk e-mailing by forcing them to do math problems.
But as an ongoing trend, Google continues to be an innovator and a magnifying glass into online culture. They are implementing high-definition imagery and textual advertising into Google Maps. And, ReadWriteWeb had a great article on how one can use Google trends to analyze America's reaction to the debates. Popular campaign words, such as "maverick", saw a huge spike during the debates, as viewers at home everywhere in this nation turned to Google for a true definition.
The Social Network War Is Coming To An End, Or Is It?
It may happen in the next month folks. A battle that has been raging for more than a year might come to a close. As for the first time in US history, Facebook is set to overtake MySpace in traffic numbers. What could this mean? Will Facebook become MySpace like everyone fears?
Better question.. do we even need Facebook? The up-and-comer, Ning, just announced that it has hit the half a million mark with over 500,000 niche social networks. Maybe Facebook and MySpace are they the Netscape and AOL of the 2.0 world? They started the trend, but will fail to innovate quickly enough, as more nimble companies grow in popularity.
Enterprise Embraces Social While Everything Else Falls
Despite reports that half of social media campaigns will flop, there is more and more enterprise dollars being invested in the space. As risky as it may seem, it is far more risky to do nothing. We have 93% of consumers saying they want brands to join them in the space. And we also have compelling statistics to show that their purchase behavior and brand opinion is being shaped by social media experiences.
This space is evolving at intense speeds. We've moved passed the time of "my top 8 friends" and superpokes. Best Buy is building an enterprise Twitter for employees. Digg is flushing out those who are trying to scam the system. YouTube is building in e-commerce options into their site.
The good times are over. RIP. Things are about to get a lot more serious.
(* Source: Nick O'Neill *)
Nick says...
When Facebook released their platform last year, the company generated more buzz in the Valley since Google went public. Thousands of developers flocked to their platform and now more than 40,000 applications have been built. Many of the early applications were widgets and one application in particular, Bumper Sticker, attracted over 12 million installs and was reaching more than 1.5 million active daily users at one point.
As a joke I created the Bush Countdown Clock when the platform launched and amazingly I attracted close to 50,000 users. While the application was nothing more than a simple flash badge, it helped a lot of people express themselves. Expression is not Facebook’s purpose though, sharing is. Widgets or badges that help users express their personal beliefs, ideals, and personality are now harder to find with the new design.
Thanks to the redesign all the badges which were “cluttering” the profile have been moved to a “Boxes” tab which most people don’t visit apparently. When the new profile was first rolled out, the traffic to my application actually jumped a little but oddly enough on September 11th, things took a turn for the worse. I’m not sure what happened but my guess is that a lot of the profiles started to get shifted over.
While many users still don’t like the new design (including close to 194,000 people who’ve signed a petition requesting that Facebook put back the old design), the decision to switch appears to be final. The implication is shown in the chart below which illustrates the dramatic drop in traffic. Ultimately my application has been cut by more than 60 percent.
While my application was only build as a joke some applications were attracting hundreds of thousands of daily users. My application was completely a widget though and provided practically no interactive substance. Other applications which actually provide users with a valuable experience in addition to help them share information appear to have survived the shift over to the new design.
It’s clear though that widgets have not survived the shift over and my guess is that within a matter of weeks we will see most top-performing widget applications practically disappear.
(* Source: Tony Hung *)
Tony says...
At the most recent BlogExpo Twitter was a huge topic, and with good reason. Although it started more than a year ago with fairly geeky roots, it continues to grow at a breakneck pace. Has it crossed over to the mainstream, yet? I think we're on the cusp. I certainly think that when anchors on CNN start using Twitter to monitor conversations on live television -- it's probably time.
Like a few others, I happen to be quite bullish on the topic of Twitter, not just as a singular web application, but as a medium, and microblogging service. As Mike Arrington of TechCrunch believes, services like Twitter are becoming more and more like a utility, much like the telephone service.
But what about its application in branding? Specifically, its role in brand management?
1. Understanding twitter (AKA microblogging) in the ecosystem of conversation
Whether you Twitter, Plurk, Pownce, or Friendfeed (or all of them), the role of such services for the purposes of brand management is primarily to listen. When Twitter launched, there was some angst about how crushingly banal some of the conversations were. However, like blogging, Twitter had some maturing to do -- and we're maturing still. People still Twitter about what they ate for breakfast, what bus stop they're at and where they plan to have dinner, but its also used for communications of other sorts.
Questions about particular services. Opinions about particular brands. Blog alerts on postings. By average folks. By opinion leaders.
The wonderful thing is that, for the most part, these conversations are public, searchable, and trackable. With this emerging ecosystem of live conversation and thought, anyone with any particular interest can follow ideas, topics, names and places as they happen.
The role of Twitter in brand management first is to listen. Find people who are talking about products, services, and experiences with your brand. Then find their friends. Then find who is driving those conversations and who those opinion leaders are.
The best way to do this is probably starting with Twitter's own search function which was acquired via Summize a few months ago. Search for names of products, services, brand names, competitors and people. Then select the feed icon for that search and follow it actively throughout the day in your favorite feed reeder. Done.
2. Engaging in microconversations
Once you've found your conversations of interest, take a deep breath. Because these are live, unfilitered and unmetered opinion, some of it may also contain a lot of raw emotion. After all, when you only have 140 characters to express yourself, it doesn't lend itself to appropriate self-censoring all the time.
Then, reach out.
I presume you already know about your brand, what it stands for, and what your brand "ideal" experience ought to be. You're probably intimately familiar with tag lines, logos, and all of the literal and visual elements of the brand. Now, with all that in mind, it's time to try and sculpt the experiences of others ... but not in a cynical or sinister way.
I firmly believe that there is a lot of banal conversation on Twitter, but there is a lot of important stuff as well. People talk and reach out when emotions are at their peak, whether it be happy, sad, or frustrated. For many folks, they Twitter during these times not only let themselves be known, but to share in the emotion, to get a response, and for some, a hope for answers as well.
The great thing about reaching out on Twitter, much like the blogosphere in some ways through comments, is that the expectation is close to nil that brand representatives of any fashion are present. Furthermore, the expectation that anyone will actually listen, or even do anything supportive or rectifying is also, for many, close to nil.
If you're able to answer questions, respond to opinion, and engage in a real human way (such as the admission that you don't know the answer), you'll shock and pleasantly surprise most Twitterers.
If they've got issues, and you've been empowered to use Twitter in this way, take ownership of the problem. Point them in the direction of someone who can solve it, or work with it until you can.
Because the bar on Twitter is so low, the mere act of appearing on Twitter can be a powerful first step that gets people noticing. Listening is better. Fixing and solving is, of course, best, and can generate word of mouth traffic and notice that is difficult to put a number sign to.
3. Dealing with "thought leaders"
Of course you should try and engage each Twitterer you meet equally. It's critical to keep in mind, that someone who has 5 followers should, in all seriousness, be treated with an equal amount of respect. Every conversation is searchable, and for folks who looking for particular problems, they'll find the exchange just as easily as you could.
However, like in any democracy, there are some Twitters who are, in some ways, more equal than others. And the relative "importance" of these individuals is sometimes, but not always, easy to recognize in the number of followers they have. I say "not-always" because sometimes a person's relative worth or importance may not always be measured by such metrics. They might be well known off line, or be followed by a few popular Twitterers, for example.
For Twitterers who have followers in the hundreds or thousands, engagements *will* be noticed by their followers, and so be prepared to engage in a way that's relative to the audience. However, if you've gotten this far in the article, congratulations, because you've probably identified this as a great opportunity.
It's hard to get any opinion leader to talk about your product, service, or brand (ask any start up about TechCrunch, for example). True, it's never ideal when it's mentioned in a less than flattering light, however, Twitter provides a great way of turning this into a fantastic opportunity. Unlike blogs, where the author may or may not respond, and the author may or may not append their original blog post, on Twitter, especially if you respond in real time, you can literally change people's opinion on the spot.
A great example was with Mike Arrington himself, when he was bitterly complaining about the service he was getting with Comcast. Turns out Comcast was listening, and worked on things in an expeditious fashion. Problem was solved, and Arrington went on to blog about it.
It would be tough to measure how much that good publicity would have cost.
At the end of the day, every conversation about your name, service, products, or brand, should be treated as an opportunity to engage people -- in real time -- with their experiences, and no matter how good it is, try and make it better, in the way that the ideal brand experience ought to be.
Using Twitter this way is not for the lazy, uninterested, or the disempowered. It necessitates a melding of great customer service and the knowledge of what the brand is, how it ought to be, and the integrity to realize that there are always going to be shortcomings. As trite as it sounds, when you engage people in Twitter, you are live and you are searchable. And in many cases, you may not get a second chance if you flub the first.
But in a time when expectations are so low, it represents, in many cases, not just an opportunity, but an easy opportunity to engage in a way that's human, real, and in a way that proves that your brand is listening and willing to help.
(* Source: Paul Glazowski *)
Searching for things through a service that scours multiple engines is one thing. Searching for things through a service that scours certain aspects of the news and social discussion space is another. This is what a new invention called Social Mention allows you to accomplish.
Employing Yahoo’s increasingly noteworthy BOSS search platform, Social Mention, an Ottawa, Canada operation, distinguishes its results by their variety of source. If you’re looking for items to do with, say, today’s official debut of the T-Mobile G1 device, you can specify that the engine find blog posts, microblog posts, bookmarks, comments, events, images, links from social news websites, or videos.
Adding extra flavor to the mix is an asset labeled “Hot Conversations.” Everything deemed of the moment is listed, though these are not specific a category. If you search for the abovementioned handheld, and transition from left to right through the available tabs, the picks in the right-hand column stay largely the same.
Everything seems to work without much trouble at all. While it’s a bit difficult to gauge for relevance for links, at least given our brief test of it, the delivery of information is pretty much how you’d expect it to appear. Yet, you’re likely to notice the length of time it takes for the engine to provide information, both from the start and through successive moves to all sections of the results page. A 5-second wait time is what I sense is the average to see results. Not terribly extensive, but noticeable for sure. Keep in mind, if one aspect is cached, the time spent twiddling thumbs is less. Images and videos, meanwhile, may take longer to display. This is in part due to its aggregation of material from sources like Twitter, FriendFeed, Delicious, Flickr, Reddit, Digg, YouTube, and coComment, as well as the many blogs that inhabit the Web.
What has me most excited about Social Mention is its take on keywords and how they are used in the blog world, the new media space, and conversations had in numerous places. Companies and organizations undoubtedly find it valuable to track mention of their names, brands and products to register trends, pinpoint troubles, and generally involve themselves more in the chatter, as they have been known to do in a venue like Twitter. Social Mention simply broadens the scope. Its speed could be improved, but to begin with, its quite an admirable piece of kit.
(* Source: Jason Kincaid *)
It has been just over a month since Muxtape
, a popular music site that let users share the online equivalent of cassette mixtapes, was shut down by the RIAA for copyright infringement issues. Since then we’ve seen the site reborn in a few incarnations, including an Open Sourced version called OpenTape. Now Favtape, a basic music site that launched last July, is releasing an overhauled new version that has led developer Ryan Sit to appropriately call it “Muxtape on steroids”.
Favtape originally launched as an enhanced frontend to Seeqpod that let users import and listen to full versions of songs from their Last.FM and Pandora playlists. The site’s interface is similar to Muxtape, sporting a very basic layout and a sparse feature set. At the time I commented that the site was too simple - there was no easy way to rearrange a playlist, and there were few features other than audio playback.
The new version of the site addresses these issues, and introduces a host of new features that make the site a worthwhile replacement to Muxtape. Users are now free to rearrange songs on their playlists, and can easily share their Favtapes using a static URL (You can see the one I made here). Other new features include links to music videos for each song, album art, an embeddable player, and playlists of top songs from Billboard charts and iTunes. The new site also supports a mobile interface for the iPhone, so you can listen to your playlists on the go.
One of Favtape’s biggest advantages over Muxtape (but also its main weakness) is its heavy reliance on Seeqpod, a music site that indexes music files across the web but never hosts them. Unlike Muxtape, which asked users to upload their favorite music files to generate a playlist, Favtape is only including links to these files, so it should theoretically be harder to target with lawsuits. That said, if a lawsuit ever brings Seeqpod down (and they have already tried), Favtape will be left an empty shell.
Other sites in this space include Songza, Snuzu, and Streamzy.
(* Source: Three Minds *)
image credit: [AndreaA] (Flickr)
It's hard to believe that the social network space as we know it is today is only a few years old. The summer of 2006 saw MySpace claim the spot as the #1 social network, and a new rival, Facebook, opened their doors to anyone with a valid e-mail address. Over the past 2 years, the two networks have seen some major ups and downs. Facebook, an underdog favorite at the time, was applauded by the web community for opening up their platform and allowing the development of applications. But not that long after came the controversy of Beacon and various other privacy concerns. MySpace, meanwhile, has seen user outrage over everything from reliability and spam to security and child safety.
Although reports vary, most measurements suggest the number of people who visit Facebook and especially MySpace has leveled off over the past few months, possibly even declined. But despite the warning signs of "social network fatigue" early this year, the newswires in the social world and corporate social media plans for 2008 have still centered their efforts around the two industry giants. So the real question is, should they?
Of the $920 million spent this year to advertise on social networks in 2007, 8.2 percent went to niche sites. That is expected to grow to 10 percent in 2008. Niche is big! There are over 300,000 niche networks on Ning alone. We have niche networks being used as tools in the 2008 election. And networks, such as LinkedIn (career) and imeem (music), are growing so quickly that it seems strange to even call them "niche".
Clearly, there is a growing case for the success of niche social. However, how much user base and marketer dollars will it attract? Let's examine the benefits of niche social networks versus niches in big social networks for both the user and the marketer.
What's In It For The Users
NICHES IN BIG SOCIAL
The experience of participating in social network sites like Facebook and MySpace promises users several things above a niche social network. They are more likely to connect with existing friends. Depending on the user's preference they can opt for privacy or they can use content and applications to promote themselves to a larger audience circle. Available content, groups, and applications play to a large audience, so there is surely something there for everyone.
However, it is just that "mass appeal" that makes large social networks less satisfying for many. The interface is not directed for a purpose or put in any audience context. The way a teenager wants to search and browse Facebook is probably fairly different than a teacher or a business. Valuable apps and groups don't necessarily rise to the top of the fold. There is only so much space in the first page of search. The result is mass clutter, everyone trying to reach different audiences but in the same way. And with everyone talking at once, as a user, I am probably not finding the content relevant to me.
Another thing that gets lost in the noise is history. The minute I add a reasonable amount of active users to my account, my news feed becomes fast paced. By logging into the system, I'm not getting an idea of what my friends have been up to in the past week, but what people are up to at this moment in time. The lack of easily accessed historical information makes it hard to build a sense of "culture" around Facebook. It's easy to see why for communities with a purpose, such as the Obama campaign, Facebook might be the way to attract new people, but ultimately the niche social network is where the bulk of event-planning and community-building takes place.
NICHE SOCIAL NETWORKS
By centering the underlying community strategy around a specific "social object" (Jeep, Nike, camping, food) or a target audience (55+, moms), design and functionality can become more customized and more in-tune with the ideal user. The easier a tool is for me to use, the more likely that I am going to use it. Knowing the age of the likely participant can help in making decisions about technology, language, and interface design.
The information architecture of a wine social network could be very different than one of a Nike social network, in which a category such as "reviews" would apply to the former and not the later. Furthermore, the difference between a product-based community and a cause-based community is going to be even more extreme. On a music community, my actions will likely be focused on browsing and matching up with people with similar tastes in order to discover new music. On a political or a career community, my connections to people become far more important than any other activity in the system, and thus I would not want my communications to get lost in the overflowing feed or clutter.
The major downside of niche social networks is a smaller user base and smaller development funds. Third-party application developers are less likely to join and make that awesome mobile wine application that I've been waiting for. And I am less likely to reconnect with long-forgotten elementary school buddies. So ultimately, it depends on the purpose of my interaction. But even then the picture can sometimes be fuzzy...
Would I be more successful trying to organize an online rock band meet-up on my Facebook channel, where I have tons of eyes and ears, but no proof that anyone else has the product, or on a Rock Band social network, where there are tons of people with the product, but with less knowledge of who I am?
What's In It For The Marketers
NICHES IN BIG SOCIAL
The obvious advantage of big social networks for marketers is that there are lots of active, engaged users. The community is alive and healthy, and so there is no fear of investing a huge amount in creating something new only to have people not join. This is truly "fishing where the fish are". Because of this fact, that means that a lot of your competitors are also joining in on big social networks. There are start-ups, big brands, niche brands, and spammers. The field is cluttered and to break through the noise is extremely difficult. Even getting the top listing for your own brand name can be a challenge amognst all the user-generated groups and pages. Sometimes, it's just plain luck.
But because there are a lot of investors clamoring to get their brand onto Facebook and MySpace, that means a lot of money flowing in to develop analytics packages not likely available on smaller social networks. These analytics packages are becoming more robust due to growing demand for social media measurement. However, they, like everything else in this system, is designed to appeal to the masses. There isn't going to be an easy way to extract product-specific information like: What cars do my users drive? What footwear do they prefer? Ultimately big social networks prove more useful in creating awareness than collecting customer insight or inspiring action.
And is the audience really brand-receptive? A participant in a product-focused community might come in with an understanding that they are going to see some marketing. Whereas the Facebook community has expressed annoyance to ads and outright distrust over the Beacon project.
NICHE SOCIAL NETWORKS
The numbers might be fewer in niche social networks, but the messages and activities can become more targeted. The data collected in profiles can become more aligned with the user information the brand is trying to collect. Something can even be said about the need to develop your own analytics package giving brands the opportunity to really evaluate how to measure community success, rather than banking on what data Facebook or MySpace have decided as relevant.
A smaller amount of qualified leads is far better than a large amount of useless ones. But the big dilemma is whether or not the niche community, whether built or joined, will reach a large enough user base to justify that statement?
THE FUTURE: What's In Store
There has been much news over the past few months about the promise of data portability. In one corner we have MySpace embracing OpenID, in the other corner we have Facebook opening up their social graph with Facebook Connect, and in yet another corner we have Google with Friend Connect and OpenSocial. The wheels are in motion for many exciting things including:
1. Allowing users to log into third party sites with their social network ID and access friend information
2. Allowing activity from third party sites to publish back to a user's social network feed
3. Enabling social network applications to be distributed across a series of different platforms, including niche and big social sites
4. Creating a centralized user profile that can be used across social network sites
In the future, whether to join or market on niche social networks or big social networks will no longer be a question. People will be able to bring their friends from one to the other, and applications will be implemented across networks. But at the moment, the effort to make data portability a household name is piecemeal. It is an evolution that is just beginning, and the fact is that marketer's need to make these sorts of decisions now.
So for now, I argue that mass dialogue is not working in the social sector. Marketing efforts must go niche and focus on nurturing brand communities. Whether that community exists in a niche on a big social network like Facebook or as a niche social network like Ning will depend on the brand. Whether it makes sense to join the conversation or build a new community will depend on the loyalty and engagement of the consumers.
The disadvantages of banner ads and traditional marketing campaigns in social media are growing. Finding and enabling and growing that brand community, wherever it may be, is the key to success. The future is niche.
(* Source: Gregor Hochmuth *)
Twitter isn’t for everyone, and you may have dismissed the service a long time ago. But regardless of your own use, it’s hard to dismiss the phenomenon itself and the passion of so many that has built up around it.
No matter how long the outage du jour, Twitter users continue to stay attached to the service despite an ever-changing backdrop of alternatives.
Blogging isn’t for everyone either. But unlike blogging, Twitter enjoys a far a greater variety of users — they include people, many people, who would never think of starting a blog and people who would never touch an RSS reader. The 140 character limit is a plus for Twitter, but it isn’t all.
What explains the Twitter phenomenon then? What produces the positive feeling and the strong attachment among those who tweet? And moreover: How can other systems learn from this?
The answer lies in understanding Audience.
Twitter has a simple premise: You tweet & the message is pushed to your friends. The actual mechanics are slightly different (messages go to everyone who follows you, whether they’re your “friends” or not, assuming your stream is public) — but from a user’s perspective, the circle of receivers consists only of the people they know. Everyone else is part of a faceless crowd that’s hidden behind the follower count.
This simple premise holds the key to Twitter’s success: messages go to a well-defined audience. In the moment you release a tweet, you know who’s on the line and you have an idea of who can catch a glimpse of your message. @replies are the best illustration for this sense of audience: Even though Twitter is not a point-to-point message delivery system (let alone a reliable one), @replies are sent with the understanding that they will be read by the intended people because they are known to be in the audience. (Imagine a newspaper article that suddenly greeted a specific reader.)
Blogging on the other hand has no such clearly defined audience. An aspiring blogger who hasn’t crossed the chasm speaks into the void. Direct feedback can only come in the form of written comments (a relatively high barrier of effort) and it’s diminished by spam and vocal trolls these days.
FeedBurner’s
subscriber count only provides the equivalent of Twitter’s opaque follower count and MyBlogLog didn’t solve this problem either.
So it’s not surprising that the majority of blogs are abandoned — the most-cited reason being “No one was reading it.” No one might be following your Twitter stream either, but Twitter is designed for network effects to take hold and given the natural reciprocity among groups of friends, it’s likely that most people have at least a handful of followers they know.
Back to Twitter: Why Audience works
Twitter works and enjoys such strong attachment because it provides real-time access to a well-defined audience. The backlog of all previous tweets is a guarantee of permanence (you can even search it) and you can catch up on it anytime. As a result, people use Twitter because they have an idea of who will see their lightweight messages and this sense of audience is reinforced by @replies, re-tweets and references in future conversations (online and offline).
Designing for the sense of Audience is a powerful tool to create cohesion and a sense of utility among users of a service. This lesson from Twitter can apply to many other services too. But before leaving the current discussion, it’s helpful to look at a service that has missed the full power of Audience so far.
Facebook: Designed for Audience? Not so much.
Facebook isn’t about Audience? That’s ridiculous, you’ll say — so let me clarify. I fully agree that social network profiles are all about self-expression and being seen, but a platform for self-expression isn’t necessarily designed for the audience that does “the seeing.”
Profile Pages on Facebook can have audiences of course, but this requires that users continually roam Facebook to look for news in their network. Facebook realized this limitation and introduced the News Feed. Its intent was to move a user’s “acts and performances” from the stage of the profile page to a single and central stage, a single place for Audience.
Sharing with the News Feed: Did it ever reach my friends?
Facebook was the first major social network to introduce the News Feed concept, which has since become a standard sauce for stickiness in many places (although not StudiVZ surprisingly). But Facebook’s implementation of the News Feed doesn’t capture the full power of designing for Audience: While Twitter distributes every message consistently, Facebook decides algorithmically which update is shown to whom. Algorithmic filtering is nice in theory, but such black-box behavior is simply unpredictable for the user.
“When I post new things, will my friends actually see them?”, one might wonder. And conversely: “Have my friends posted something that I’m not seeing? The news feed is cluttered right now with people I don’t care about.” Anything that’s unpredictable produces a feeling of uncertainty — and that’s never a comfortable feeling.
Even with Facebook’s recent attempts to introduce smarter filters, users only have relative means to customize their feed (more of this, less of that). Furthermore, there is mostly just one kind of feedback that users can give on the News Feed: comments. Imagine a concert, in which you could only leave written notes as you left — no clapping, no booing.
Because users don’t really know who’s listening on Facebook and who isn’t, the platform hasn’t been embraced as a place to publish proactively. Publishing events or photos is mostly push-driven (and generates an email — “you are invited to an event” or “tagged in a photo”). But for everything else you share, do you know if it ever reached your friends?
Who capitalized on this gap? FriendFeed.
It’s the same setup as Twitter, but with more content: You know who’s listening and you choose the people you listen to. A useful premise but it also has a catch: the word “more”. Too much content, too many people — which is exactly the problem that Facebook is trying to address with its algorithmic feed. But what’s a solution then? It’s not the “middle ground” and it has nothing to do with smarter filters.
(* Source: Chris Anderson *)
Chris says...
At some point in your life, you will wake up and discover that you have more money than time. And you will then realize that you should start doing things differently, which means not walking four blocks to find an ATM that doesn't charge a fee, driving for miles to find cheaper gas, or painting your own house.
This same calculus is the foundation of a big part of the "freemium" economy. We see it a lot in free-to-play online games, such as Maple Story, where you can buy things like "teleportation stones" to let you get from one place to another without a long slog or wait for a bus. Most of these paid digital assets don't make you a better player, but they do allow you to become a better player faster.
If you're a kid, you probably have more time than money. That's the force behind MP3 file trading, which is kind of a hassle and but is free (albeit illegal, of course!). As Steve Jobs famously pointed out, if you download music from peer-to-peer services, fixing the messy metadata as you go, the time it takes to avoid paying means you're working for less than minimum wage. Nevertheless, that works if you you're time-rich and money-poor. Free is the right price for you.
But as you get older, the equation reverses and $0.99 here and there no longer seems like a big deal. You migrate into a paying customer, the premium user in the freemium equation.
As some of you may know, one of my other side projects is an open source hardware company (developing and selling aerial robotics technology), and so I've been following the emergence of the open source hardware world closely. It's a really interesting example of how to make money from free, one that adds a new dimension to the open source software world because it's about atoms (which have real marginal costs), not just bits.
The way most open source hardware companies work is this: all the plans, printed-circuit board files, software and instructions are free and available to all. If you want to build your own (or, even better, improve on a design), you're encouraged to do so. But if you don't want the hassle/risk of doing it yourself, you can buy a pre-made version that's guaranteed to work.
For instance, take the great Arduino open source microprocessor that our autopilots are based on. You can build your own, with full instructions. Or buy one. Most people do the latter. The Arduino team make their money from a certification license fee they charge the companies and retailers that make and sell the boards.
You can build a good business on this model, as Limor Fried (AKA LadyAda, picture above), has shown with her electronics kit retail/design/community AdaFruit Industries. She and her business partner, Philip Torrone, explain the economics and tactics in a presentation here (good summary here).
Short form:
As Torrone said in an email, "I can't imagine doing a book, a video, a magazine unless I had a community that would rally along the way. In the end it always seemed to be about a story, people like to see the beginning, middle, end and plot of something -- and if there's a buy button somewhere, they sometimes click it and reward us for working hard."
