Month: April 2007

Liz Gannes at GigaOm points to an interesting study done by MySpace about the value of “friending” as a marketing vehicle. It’s obvious that the survey of 3,000 Internet users was done primarily to justify the use of MySpace as an advertising and marketing tool, although the press release takes pains to point out (as they always do) that it was done by an independent firm, etc., etc.

The survey results were released, coincidentally enough, at a Fox Interactive Media event called “Never Ending Friending,” a conference for FIM marketing clients. In other words, the results should be taken with an industrial-sized bag of salt (Pete Cashmore seems to agree). After wading through a forest of typical press release verbiage — about things like the “Momentum Effect,” a new “metric” coined by one of the survey companies that is apparently right up there with Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle in importance — you get to the real money quote for marketers and advertisers, which is that:

“According to the study, more than 40% of all social networkers said they use social networking sites to learn more about brands or products that they like, and 28% said at some point a friend has recommended a brand or product to them.”

It’s not surprising that marketers are looking for ways of insinuating themselves into social networks such as MySpace (hopefully in somewhat more subtle ways than just creating profile pages for their lame mascots, like Burger King did), but what’s interesting to me is that 40 per cent of those surveyed said they use social networks to learn more about brands or products.

Is that statistic itself just marketing hype? Not according to Adidas, which found that its MySpace campaign for its soccer products “increased purchase intent 78 percent, brand image 71 percent and likelihood to recommend 57 percent.” Electronic Arts got a lot of bang for its buck too, says Forbes.

There are some other nuggets in the survey too, including one that might make TV advertisers sit up and take notice. The study says that social networking users spend 11 hours online per week compared to just 9.4 hours watching TV. And while heavy social network users still watch TV, 68 percent said their favorite time to visit social networks is during prime-time TV viewing hours.

Alex Krupp, whose blog I haven’t come across before, makes a lot of sense in his latest post about social networking (which is fitting, since his blog is called Sensemaking). He notes that the term “social network” has become so over-sold that it now causes many venture capitalists to run screaming in the opposite direction, and startups are pitching their businesses in cliched Hollywood movie terms: It’s like MySpace meets Flickr, or Facebook meets Pornotube.

All of which is true, of course. But as Alex points out, that doesn’t mean the concept of social networking is dead or lifeless — not by any means. To me, the desire for some kind of connection with others, whether based on shared interests or location or both, is one of the most powerful forces around — so powerful that social networks are actually outdrawing online porn, if you can believe that. And Alex also notes that MySpace and Facebook and YouTube their ilk have only scratched the surface of what is possible, and each one focuses on a very different piece of the puzzle: Facebook is much more an instant-messaging and photo model, while MySpace is music oriented, LinkedIn is business contacts, etc.

Not only is the power of social networks not decreasing, I think it is increasing and expanding, and that can be seen in the growth of youth networks such as Gaia Online (which I wrote about here), Neopets, Webkinz and so on. And the draw of an online network seems to be pretty strong in Toronto: according to this post by Ryan Keeley, Torontonians are — per capita — much bigger users of Facebook than residents of other large cities. Maybe it’s the weather.

Forrester analyst Charlene Li thinks social media is going to be “like air.”

I’m glad Wagner James Au — who also writes about Second Life as an “embedded” reporter for New World Notes — has written a post about Gaia Online for GigaOm, because I’ve been meaning to write something about it and I keep forgetting. Now I don’t have to. I think Wagner’s headline might be overdoing it a little by saying MySpace should move over for Gaia, but there’s no question that Gaia is an interesting property.

I would never have heard about Gaia Online if I didn’t have a teenaged daughter. As Wagner points out, the service began as a fan site for teens who were interested in Japanese-style animation, or anime (and may have started with some animation students from Toronto’s Sheridan College, according to this three-year-old article from Forever Geek) and has been kind of flying under the radar — at least until it raised a bunch of venture capital financing last year. Now it has two million unique users a month, many of whom come for the online games but also for the chat forums and the various anime-related, role-playing fiction forums.

The latter are what my 13-year-old daughter spends most of her time on, although she does play games from time to time and has also accumulated a fair stockpile of virtual Gaia currency (which unlike Second Life can’t be exchanged for real-world currency — an interesting decision on the part of Gaia’s creators). But her favourite thing is to join a forum where someone has begun writing a story about a particular character, and to help expand and extend that story — with half a dozen other writers all taking part.

I find it fascinating, and she clearly does too. And it seems to have a considerable amount of staying power, since she has been involved with the site for two years or more now.

Update:

As he points out in a comment below, Jeremy Liew has a post up about Gaia and some of the other “casual immersive worlds” that are gaining traction, including Webkinz, Club Penguin and Neopets. As it turns out, I have some experience with those as well, since my 9-year-old daughter is a huge fan of all three of them. We’re a virtual household 🙂

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWrNCCx2p5U]

Do you love it enough to give it all of your personal browsing info? That’s effectively what Google is asking you to do, with the release of its new Web History feature. The company has had a search-history feature for a couple of years now, but the new service effectively keeps track of wherever you go with your browser, every ad you click on, etc. A little Big Brother-ish perhaps? Maybe just a little. A touch of evil? Depends on how you look at it.

As with most such things, Google’s Web History isn’t really good or bad. All it does is create a giant file of all the places you surf — with your consent, of course, once you install the Google toolbar and activate the feature. What is in that giant file is up to you, obviously (and Ionut Alex. Chitu, the intrepid Google detective, has some tips about how to pause the feature if you go somewhere you don’t want Google to see). And what happens to the file is up to Google. So how much do you love Google?

As Danny Sullivan describes in a long and thorough post, there are many benefits to what Google is doing — and one of those benefits is that the company is at least being fairly transparent about the kind of information it keeps. Other companies, as he points out, keep similar kinds of information through cookies, but reveal relatively little about what they do with it.

As Anil Dash says, many people will get the heebie-jeebies over this, and as such it is yet another test of how much goodwill there is left towards what has become an Internet behemoth. Google blogger Matt Cutts has some thoughts here.

Just a couple of days after buying Tonic, which gave the company a PowerPoint-style application to add to its growing toolbox of Office apps, Google has announced that it is buying Marratech, a company that makes a NetMeeting-type video-conferencing tool and is based in Sweden.

This isn’t all that surprising, of course, since Google has clearly been building a Web-based Office suite ever since it bought Writely, which became Google Docs. One thing that surprises me, however, is that the application requires a download — unlike some of the other Web-based presentation or conferencing apps, such as Vyew and Zoho Meeting. I haven’t tried Zoho Meeting, but I have tried Vyew and it was easy to use and cross-platform (as is Zoho’s app, since it comes in an ActiveX, Java or Flash version). But what I don’t get is why Google wqould pin its hopes on something that requires a download.

I know that they could bundle it with the rest of the Google apps that you can download as part of the Google Desktop, as Mike points out, but I still sort of look at Google as being the king of the “works anywhere” Web-based app. Moving to something that requires a download is kind of an odd step, I think. Just my two cents. (screenshot via Amit Agarwal)

As reported by several sources, including Reuters and Mike Arrington’s TechCrunch (where the notion of an “exclusive” gets some debate in the comments section), MySpace has launched its widely-rumoured Digg-alicious news service, although Mike said that it would go live at 7 a.m. and all I get is a login prompt when I go there. Was the site not quite ready for prime-time perhaps? (Update at 12:05 EST — it is now live).

In any case, this new service from the geniuses at Fox Interactive Media (which owns MySpace and is a unit of Rupert Murdoch’s media and entertainment behemoth News Corp.) was reported to be coming in March, according to Terry Heaton’s PoMo blog. The service will pull in news from RSS feeds — although News Corp. says it will not favour its own services and newspapers — and users can also submit stories, and then vote on them. Apparently news services will be able to opt out and not have their articles displayed, according to News Corp.

Despite the fact that most people who go to such “user-generated” media sites don’t actually submit or perhaps even vote on stories, as Seamus McCauley discusses here (based on a new Hitwise survey), I still think this kind of thing could turn out to be very powerful, and that MySpace is smart to do it. MG Siegler at Parislemon says he is skeptical, and Seamus says that it is a missed opportunity, while The Last Podcast says it is just plain bad. Eric Berlin says MySpace missed the boat and should be focusing on getting user-generated content from its members.

The questions in my mind are these: What happens to Jason Calacanis’s Digg-ified Netscape? Or to Digg itself for that matter, which has been trying to branch out into non-tech news but without much success (as far as I can tell)? With 100 million members, MySpace has more than 100 times the audience that Digg does. Better yet, how long until Google News decides to add a user voting system? Now that would be fascinating.

Update 2:

Now it appears that Google has decided if it can’t have StumbleUpon, it will just build similar stumbling ability into its toolbar, with a “dice roll” feature that produces random links. Om Malik says that he thinks Google is lashing out at SU because they lost out on the acquisition, but I think it’s more likely Google decided they could build the same functionality for a lot less than $45-million.

Update:

Chris Sherman over at Search Engine Land says he got a comment from Garrett Camp, one of the founders of StumbleUpon, who says there is no truth to the rumours. But then, he would say that, wouldn’t he 🙂 And Muhammad Saleem at ProNet Advertising says he can see some synergies between eBay and StumbleUpon involving the latter’s word-of-mouth marketing potential. Pete Cashmore has some thoughts along the same lines.

Original post:

Mike Arrington at TechCrunch and Om Malik at GigaOm seem to have a kind of tag-team scoop going about StumbleUpon — the social Web-surfing app that was created in Calgary — being acquired by eBay for between $40-million and $45-million. Mike seems to have broken the story first, but gives Om credit in an update for narrowing the alleged price range, while Om has an update that mentions Mike as having pinned the likely suitor down as eBay.

Reports are that StumbleUpon, which got some venture capital money last year and moved to the Valley, has been in talks with eBay, Google and AOL, and that the company has signed a term sheet with eBay. The company has been the subject of acquisition rumours since November. Of course, there are no shortage of takeover-talks stories that don’t actually come to pass — including some that involve Canadian companies, such as the rumours that Albert Lai’s Bubbleshare was going to be bought by News Corp. (it was eventually bought by Toronto-based Kaboose).

StumbleUpon has developed a substantial following by doing one simple thing: sending people to random websites, at which point they can vote on whether they like the content or not. And the service can drive a lot of traffic to sites that get stumbled, although there are debates about how much value there might in that traffic, as there is with Digg.

With all due respect to Om, I don’t get his explanation of why eBay might want StumbleUpon, which seems to involve some kind of integration with Skype. But then, I never understood why eBay bought Skype in the first place, so that’s par for the course, I suppose. My friend Mark Evans says he doesn’t really understand it either.

Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t get most of the reaction to Steve Rubel’s little Twitter-related gaffe (Twaffe?), in which he said that he throws his PC Magazine in the trash, and now has had to apologize to the editor-in-chief of PC Mag, etc. First of all, you mean they still publish PC Mag? Who knew. I stopped subscribing years ago, and so did anyone else with any sense.

And secondly, yes I totally understand that it was probably unwise of Steve to say that about PC Mag, seeing as how Edelman pitches companies to PC Mag, and that we all have to watch what we say now, Twitter is not like instant messaging, etc. etc. Totally get that. But still — what the hell is Jim Louderback doing posting a long commentary on what Rubel did to some anonymous PR gossip rag like Strumpette? He has his own website, although it currently just hosts a bio and some links. Why not put it there?

Better yet, why not post a comment on Steve’s blog, or send him an email? Or talk to Edelman privately? Instead, he posts it on Strumpette, and muses aloud about penalizing Edelman in some way — not to mention that he takes what Rubel said completely out of context. What kind of person does that? It’s like overhearing someone say something offhand on the streetcar and then writing a letter to the editor of the local newspaper. Bizarre.

At the last mesh meetup we had — at the Charlotte Room on March 28th — our good friend and podcaster extraordinaire Leesa Barnes was good enough to work her magic with a microphone once again, and we’re going to be posting some of the results at the mesh blog over the next little while.

First up is Parker Mason, who blogs at BlogCampaigning, who talked to Leesa about the differences between Web 2.0 in Australia vs. Canada; what surfing taught him about never giving up; and how social media affects political campaigns. The podcast is here.

Thanks again, Leesa.

As horrific as the circumstances at Virginia Tech were, as a journalist it was fascinating to watch the information about the shootings filter out through the students and faculty at the college, by way cellphones and webcams, blogs and Facebook accounts, Flickr photos and LiveJournal updates. The Wikipedia page was updated minute by minute (the page of edits makes for interesting reading). Another example of “crowdsourcing” the news.

As others have described elsewhere, Jamal Albarghouti recorded gunfire on his cellphone and had it run on CNN and dozens of other networks and channels; Professor Dennis Hong set up a webcam on the windowsill of his classroom and then streamed the video of police activity to the frightened students inside a locked-down lab; other students uploaded photos to Flickr and their Facebook accounts. One Facebook group set up in memory of those killed had more than 17,000 members within hours of the shooting and now has over 96,000 members and 9,000 “wall” posts or messages.

Several students blogged about what was going on, reassuring friends and relatives that they were safe. The Roanoke Times ran a blog-style update story, a smart response to the event, and the Collegiate Times was providing regular updates as well. Not surprisingly, people started using the Net to search for the identity of the shooter — and came up with the wrong guy, as described by Wired’s Threat Level blog.

A failing of crowdsourced journalism? Perhaps. But as Robert Niles of the Online Journalism Review pointed out, traditional media muffs the details in the heat of the moment too — and that takes longer to correct.

Update:

Robin Hamman has a great post about how journalists (including him) descended on some of the Virginia Tech bloggers, and how the “traditional” media have come to rely on social media such as blogs as a source during events like this. Are traditional reporters vultures, or are they serving an important purpose? Should they try to get access to bloggers, or just point to them? And my friend Tony Hung has some wise words about avoiding the flipside of the “wisdom of crowds” — namely, the mob mentality.

Accenture has a study out that interviewed senior media executives for their views on user-generated content — or whatever we’re calling it now — and found that they are not just taking it seriously, they are outright afraid of what it could do to their businesses. “Media and entertainment executives see the growing ability and eagerness of individuals to create their own content as one of the biggest threats to their business,” the survey said.

According to Accenture, more than half of the survey respondents said the rapid growth of user-generated content is one of the top three challenges they face today. More than two-thirds said they believe that social media, one of the largest segments of user-generated content, will continue to grow. Two-thirds said they believe that within three years they will be making money on user-generated content, with most of these saying they expect to make money through advertising and sponsorships. Others said subscriptions and pay-per-play — while a quarter of those surveyed said they don’t know how they will make money from user-generated content.

Those surveyed included industry giants like Roger Faxon, chief executive of EMI Music Publishing; Leslie Moonves, chief executive of CBS; Doug Neil, senior vice president of digital marketing for Universal Studios; and Sir Martin Sorrell, chief executive of WPP Group PLC.