April 2008

What do these two have in common?

If you read Mashable you’ve probably seen this post about Guy Bono’s EU bill encouraging countries to treat internet access as a human right:

Here’s what Guy Bono has to say about the idea of shutting down internet access to anyone, for whatever reason: “The repressive measures are measures dictated by industries that have been unable to change their business models to meet the needs imposed by the information society. Switching off internet access is a powerful sanction which could have profound repercussions in a society where access to the internet is a mandatory law for social inclusion.”

This is going to become more true as time goes forward. Sharing on the internet has become such a powerful mode of social connection that the EU is willing to consider internet access to be on par with other basic human rights.

In other words, building a community online means building a very real community.

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Check out this post over on Face Reviews. Also read this article in the New York Times.

Despite agreeing not to shut down or mess with Scrabulous, Mattel has apparently launched their own version of Scrabble on Facebook. It’s bug ridden, poorly executed, and apparently nobody likes Mattel.

Here are the lessons:

1. Board games can make excellent Facebook applications
2. Adopting a community built by someone else around your product is far better than trying to shut it down
3. Adopting a community built by someone else around your product is far better than trying to mimic it and build it again yourself

About a month ago, I posted a strategy for conversation monitoring by following the attention streams of the influencers in your space. Facebook and Twitter are a couple of my favorite tools for doing this.

One of the downsides of Twitter is that its straightforwardness makes it difficult to see who your friends know and figure out who else you might want to be paying attention to. You have to actually stay on top of who people are having conversations with if you want to be a full participant in the community.

Enter Twubble, which interfaces with the Twitter API and tells you who your friends are following. If enough of your friends are following someone, chances are that you might want to follow them, as well.

[Via Rodney Rumford.]

Apparently the anti-spam account-disabling features at Facebook are just as inconsistent as their privacy features. This popped up on my screen while I was reading my FB messages this morning:

Anyone else being threatened for reading messages?

Google is scheduled to make a big announcement tonight and TechCrunch is speculating that it’s related to BigTable — which could be used to enable a scalability solution that competes significantly with Amazon. This comes on the heels of unscheduled downtime for both Amazon’s S3 and EC2 services.

I talked to Emmett Shear, CTO of popular lifecasting service Justin.tv. They use EC2 to handle overflow during peak demand times for their site. He told me that Google would have to significantly undercut Amazon to justify his relocation expense, even with the recent outages.

TechCrunch says that the main competitive factors will be downtime and price, but I’ll add ease of use to that. If Google builds in an application like Scalr that comes standard with its system — or modifies and bundles the open source Scalr with its product — that would be enough to make me take a serious look at Google’s services over Amazon’s.

Update: Here’s what Google announced. This is an Amazon competitor in some ways and not in others. As Mashable put it, the big winner in all of this is Google - and the Python community.

Rodney Rumford’s tweet this morning sent me over to an article at CIO magazine about the business value of Twitter.

I think the best takeaway is actually from a commenter:

The Business Value of Twitter said great things about Twitter but failed to point out that much functionality has been built around Twitter. My favorite example is the American Red Cross, known on Twitter as @RedCross. The Red Cross has created a way for friends and family to become reunited after disaster all by the cell phone and Twitter. Twitter goes beyond connections and really extends beyond the question “What are you doing?” Twitter is instant knowledge.

I think the business value of twitter is tied directly to the API. Like almost everything making waves in social media, Twitter is an infrastructure technology.

It’s like running power lines; now you can build there. That’s the business value.

Widget marketing is a relatively new strategy, one that many mainstream businesses are conservative about attempting for a number of reasons. One of those reasons is scalability.

Obviously, the biggest concern for anyone building a widget marketing campaign is to get the widget into circulation and widely used. But what if you do your job too well? What if your widget takes off too fast for your servers to keep up?

Scalability issues have stymied many a tech-heavy marketing initiative. One example is the Snakes on a Plane campaign that enabled users to send a custom phone call to friends using pre-recorded statements from Samuel L. Jackson. They underestimated demand, and the lousy execution became as much a part of the story as the messaging was.

This is of particular concern in organizations whose primary function is not building and scaling Web-deployed tools.

The recently open-sourced Scalr makes scaling innovative online marketing initiatives just a little bit easier. Scalr is a super-smart framework for managing the different resources provided by Amazon’s “Elastic Computing Cloud”  (a.k.a. EC2) service. In normal-speak, this means that Scalr can automatically determine what kind of resources are needed based on the demand for your widget and then get them from Amazon when you need them — and only when you need them — without human intervention.

If you’re looking into widget deployment as a marketing strategy, this might be a good tool to keep in mind as you move into the scalability and infrastructure phase of your planning.

It’s pretty hard to screw up in social media if you’re being honest. As long as you’re upfront about what you’re trying to accomplish, ask permission to engage with people, and generally act like you would act in person, you’re going to be OK.

Which is why I’m always surprised at the number of people who decide that bad ideas are good ideas.

All Facebook wrote about fake application reviews yesterday, and how they’re effectively screwing up the system:

Duncan Riley wrote a post earlier today about Slide posting fake positive reviews on their own application. This has become a standard practice nowadays by companies. This problem happens time and time again when you set up any sort of review system. Even on this blog, I have application reviews. It’s pretty obvious who’s voting when immediately after I post an application review and there are suddenly 5 perfect reviews within minutes.

Here’s the thing about fake reviews: they’re deceitful.

We (noisy, blogging) consumers don’t want to be deceived.* And it makes us angry when we see companies trying to pull a fast one on us.

Every time this happens, a little bit of trust in the medium goes away. Right now, social media has this great, wonderful, high level of trust and personal contact because as a whole people are being very genuine. Let’s not waste it.

——
* Outside of, say, a magic show.

The Gang over at techPresident has astutely observed that Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton is geotargeting her site’s content. Depending on where users are located, they might see campaign content about seating delegates from Michigan and Florida, supporting Senator Clinton in Pennsylvania, or how to help the campaign in Indiana.

If your business goals include outreach to location-based communities, geotargeting is a cheap and effective way present them with the content most relevant and useful to them. Users might not notice that they’re being geotargeted, but they’ll certainly find your site more helpful and relevant than that of your competition.

Well, she is when it comes to you. Scoble’s still pretty darn influential, to be sure. But a recent study by Canadian research firm Pollara demonstrates that when it comes to key purchasing decisions, people trust friends and family more than they trust famous bloggers:

Of more than 1,100 adults polled in December, nearly 80% said they were very or somewhat more likely to consider buying products recommended by real-world friends and family, while only 23% reported being very or somewhat likely to consider a product pushed by “well-known bloggers.”

This seems to back up the model advocated by Duncan Watts:

Watts set the test in motion by randomly picking one person as a trendsetter, then sat back to see if the trend would spread. He did so thousands of times in a row.

The results were deeply counterintuitive. The experiment did produce several hundred societywide infections. But in the large majority of cases, the cascade began with an average Joe (although in cases where an Influential touched off the trend, it spread much further). To stack the deck in favor of Influentials, Watts changed the simulation, making them 10 times more connected. Now they could infect 40 times more people than the average citizen (and again, when they kicked off a cascade, it was substantially larger). But the rank-and-file citizen was still far more likely to start a contagion.

It may be that we need to shift away from the “influencer-focused” model when it comes to online social marketing. It may be more productive to assist passionate users — be they bloggers with a PageRank of 8 or your grandpa — to connect with the people that trust them in a way that is relevant to the core value of the product.

In short, you need to engage with your user community and provide them with tools they find useful. This can be as simple as blogging about an issue of core interest to your community and making it easy for them to share your content with their friend when they see fit. It may be more complex — an organization targeting busy commuters could build an interactive map of public transit options in major metropolitan areas.

It might be that — as the Forum for Women Entrepreneurs and Executives recently decided — you’ll need to build a full-featured social network for your users to help them support one another.

But if engaging with the most widely read bloggers is your only strategy for using leveraging the social Web as a marketing tool, you may want to rethink things a bit.

I see people becoming increasingly worried about monetizing social networks. Case in point: Nick O’Neill’s post on the Social Times this morning.

It reminded me of Battelle’s post from a few days ago that I started chewing on yesterday. I still think that the best way to look at social media monetization is to see it as a vehicle for promoting your business. Trying to build at profitable business based entirely in social media is, for now, an extremely difficult task.

But if you must try, I think that focusing on building your brand is the best way to do it. Engagement, as an undefined metric, is the most important thing you can generate.

For all you developers out there who’ve seen the insides and outsides of the Facebook developers site so many times that you might as well live there, you now have a chance to tell Facebook…everything about you as a developer.

Pete Bratach posted on the developers blog about a half an hour ago asking for feedback about their developers site through this survey. The survey asks such self-critical questions as:

• Are you profitable on the platform?, and
• If yes, how much revenue are you generating per month?

OK, OK, to be fair, they do spend about half the survey asking you to rate, on a scale of 1-3-5, different aspects of their platform. And there’s a field where you can offer yourself for an interview.

So if you’ve got feedback to give, hop on over to the google doc and fill ‘er out.

Cisco is putting together an hour-long TechWise TV webcast about the application of Web 2.0 to business with our good friends Jeremiah Owyang and Robert Scoble. Here’s the trailer:

The event will take place tomorrow at 10:00 a.m. PST. You can click here to test your system, download the streaming software and watch the webinar tomorrow. It should be really cool.

Thanks to Tim Reha, I had the good fortune last year to attend the excellent Future in Review conference in San Diego and have just now signed up for the 2008 event.

Mark Anderson is the impresario who hosts the conference and is the CEO of the Strategic News Service (SNS).

Unlike other “future” oriented events and newsletters, Mark focuses his attention on the view of the technology industry over the next 3-5 years. This emphasis on the near- and mid-term future applies IMHO better to those looking to make real-world investment decisions. This also may be why his prediction accuracy is considered to be unusually high.

Speaking of investments, Mark posted recently about Social networking sites and monetization at the Industry Standard site and his conclusion is that “…early projections by News Corp., Google, MySpace and Facebook are way too optimistic in online ad revenue estimations.”

While I think the current valuation of Facebook will prove to be on the high side, I don’t think that the advertising model is off the mark.

Anderson says that one lesson to be learned from the Facebook Beacon fiasco is that advertising on privacy-sensitive sites is “inappropriate” and that users will “revolt.”

I certainly agree that further invasive approaches like Beacon could lead to a revolt, but passive approaches have their place. Google users certainly don’t mind (and often value!) related ads appearing next to search results. Beacon was more akin to Google notifying friends about your recent searches.