Month: April 2007

(here’s a blog post I put up earlier today at globeandmail.com, related to a story I did for the newspaper)

Miles Beckett and Greg Goodfried still look like the upwardly mobile twenty-somethings (surgical resident and entertainment lawyer respectively) they used to be a year or two ago. But now — along with friend Ramesh Flinders and Greg’s wife, a former executive with Creative Artists Agency — they are the co-creators and producers of the Lonelygirl15 phenomenon.

In Toronto for the FITC design and technology conference, they talked about what it has been like since “Bree” was revealed to be actress Jessica Rose last September.

They also talked about the website, which is built on a hacked version of WordPress, with widgets from Revver that play the videos (both the ones uploaded by the characters and the ones uploaded by fans); there is a chat room where there are usually between 20 and 50 people at a time, and the site has a Wikipedia-style show encyclopedia called LGpedia — which a fan created — that has over 3,000 articles and has received more than two million page views.

Miles: “I spent a lot of time on YouTube watching videos, and after awhile it was clear they were going to become the leader, so [after we came up with the idea] I decided to upload something there rather than try to get people to come to our site. From the beginning, the idea was to create a sense of mystery, so we started posting comments and video as this character — interactivity was very much a part of it.”

Greg: “Miles said we’re going to do this for a few months and then we’ll be on the cover of magazines, and I said you’re crazy.”

Continue reading “Lonelygirl15: A chat with the creators”

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]