Social Networks

Scoble wrote today that he was rather surprised that he hasn’t yet been contacted by any companies marketing to new parents. After all, he’s announced his wife’s pregnancy to the entire world via his blog.

He also says that the advertising industry should pay attention to Twitterment. This service basically compares two terms based on the frequency with which they appear in Twitter entries. Here’s a chart comparing the frequency of mentions of Coke vs. Pepsi:

If a representative sample of consumers were using Twitter, this would be unbelievably useful. But the vast majority of people don’t even know what Twitter is, let alone pay attention to or use it. Like I mentioned before, individual tweets don’t get linked to, so they don’t have any real search engine presence.

That said, I do anticipate that one day a Twitter-like feature will be a common feature among social networks and fully integrated with people’s individual Web presences. When that happens, analyzing the data will be of immeasurable value to marketers the world over. But until then, the most relevant measures of the online conversation will continue to be analytics like the report we’re generating about CES.

Update: And speaking of Twitter as a feature rather than a service, it looks like Facebook just cloned it with RSS feeds and a dynamic page listing all friends’ status updates. I almost feel like this is more useful to me as a personal tool than Twitter is.

Sarah Ellison and Suzzane Vranica report today in The Wall Street Journal that for most newspapers, online advertising growth won’t be as strong as predicted. Blogs and other news sources such as myspace are partly to blame:

Media buyers also indicate marketers are beginning to look beyond traditional journalism sites, realizing many news junkies go elsewhere, too. “Advertisers are getting less scared of blogs and newsgroups and now are beginning to take money away from the traditional newspapers’ sites,” says Greg Smith, chief operating officer of Neo@Ogilvy, an interactive ad agency owned by WPP Group’s Ogilvy & Mather, New York.

Another significant drain profiled is the move toward search-focused ads, which of course is a key source of revenue for many bloggers. FYI that we’ll be hosting sessions contrasting ad networks for bloggers at our next event.

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People far smarter than I have declared that the future of social networking is in three places:

1. Social networks that cater to niches.
2. Social networks that act as a hub for people’s many disparate social networking accounts.
3. Mobile social networking.

The third category heated up yesterday when the patent for some key components of mobile social networking sold for $2.6 million.

I did a bit of research into some of the beta social networks out there and had a lot of fun with Socialight. Basically, it uses your phone’s GPS to find out where you are, then it tells you information about locations near you. I quickly joined and geotagged a number of my favorite restaurants, complete with my menu preferences for each.

If you’re a business owner with any kind of a storefront, sites like this matter tremendously to you. Just look at this listing for Huling Brothers auto dealership. Apparently, the store once scammed a mentally disabled man. If you’re a socialight user and your phone beeps with that information when you get in range of Huling Brothers, are you going to want to shop for a car there?

This is very similar to the wine bottle story that John Battelle told in his book The Search. In that instance, a person can find out what her friends thought about a particular vintage and where in the area she might be able to buy it for cheaper just by scanning the bottle’s bar code with her mobile phone.

The importance of these variants on mobile social networking and opinion sharing will only grow for your customers over the next five years. And unlike a number of online services that aim to do the same thing, they’re impossible to game. These networks enable people to listen only to their friends or other people whose opinions they have come to trust. If you post a recommendation for your own restaurant, not too many people are going to pay attention.

The recent tragedy at Virginia Tech has shocked the nation and provided the cable news stations with a 24/7 stream of graphic, tragic images. Viewers have been treated to round-the-clock coverage that repeats the sad facts of yesterday’s massacre — the death toll, the locations of the separate incidents, the statements by President Bush and Virginia Tech President Charles W. Steger — ad nauseum.

But in this most recent national tragedy, the most compelling, hard-hitting and provocative sources of news have not been mainstream. The most important news has been broken by the students of Virginia Tech themselves as they share information and grieve together on the student-oriented social networking site Facebook.

Just as September 11th, 2001 cemented the blogosphere as an important source of news, so has the Virginia Tech incident cemented the importance of social networks in how people get their information.

Couple this striking fact with the recent study that concluded that viewers of Comedy Central’s Daily Show and Colbert Report were more informed about current events than viewers of FOX News or CNN and you start to see a pattern emerging: mainstream news is being rapidly eclipsed by other forms of media, both old and new.

As always, the most compelling and informative content will always draw the most eyeballs. People are moving away from mainstream and network television as more varied and compelling options present themselves. Needless to say, marketers will need to pay attention to this fact moving forward.

Author’s Note: The thoughts and prayers of the entire Blog Business Summit team are with the Hokie nation today as they recover from yesterday’s tragedy.

The ever-prolific Michael Arrington asks today, “Can PhotoBucket Survive Without MySpace?”

He cites a lot of statistics based on some leaked information about PhotoBucket’s revenue stream. But the gist of what he says is that most of PhotoBucket’s revenue has nothing to do with MySpace. He also makes a pretty bold statement, which is that a non-trivial number of users are going to pick PhotoBucket over MySpace.

It’s a bold statement that I agree with. Here’s why:

1. MySpace acted unilaterally to block the PhotoBucket content, which we all know pisses users off. To compound the problem, they’re not engaging with their pissed-off users in any real way.
2. MySpace turned a symbiont into a competitor when they blocked PhotoBucket. PhotoBucket has loyal, invested users who are now pissed off at MySpace.

This begs the question: can MySpace survive without PhotoBucket? In the short term, the obvious answer is, “of course.” But longer term, I’m not so sure. If MySpace continues the practice of regularly alienating third-party value adds for reasons that they don’t explain clearly, then I think their prospects for survival head south big time.

The future of social networking is in opening the platforms up to interoperability and cross-pollination. Users will gravitate toward sites that allow them to make connections with as many people as possible. The sites that win will embrace that fact and figure out how to monetize it rather than resisting and stonewalling. It’s really that simple.

In biology, a symbiont is a creature that lives within a host animal in a mutually beneficial relationship. Mitochondria, which are the power plants of our cells originated as separate organisms until they found that they were better off living inside the cells of other organisms. Human civilization would likely be completely different or even nonexistent without our little mitochondria friends.

The same is true of MySpace and Photobucket. Yesterday, MySpace banned users from embedding content they created at Photobucket in their personal pages.

Users are pretty pissed off about the ban. This puts them in the position of having to decide between a social network they love and a photo-sharing service they love. Before, they could use and enjoy both. MySpace and Photobucket had the perfect symbiotic relationship. The services reinforced one another. Now, they’re competing for the same resource: people.

MySpace’s decision to ban Photobucket is a bit like if the human race decided that we were going to extract the mitochondria from all of our cells and make them into a competitor for food and resources. It’s a stupid choice that benefits nobody, least of all MySpace.

Update: Robert Scoble just called Photobucket “parasitic”. I still vehemently disagree. Parasites drain resources from the host without making any contribution. Photobucket made a huge contribution to MySpace’s user base. It didn’t take anything away from MySpace.

Today without warning, MySpace unilaterally turned off its users’ access to PhotoBucket, which is one of the most popular third-party services for photo sharing and display on the Web.

Photobucket users can upload their photos and share them. Or they can create complicated slideshows and embed them using HTML. The most popular place to embed these slideshows and photos used to be MySpace, until the social networking giant unilaterally turned off access to the software.

On it’s blog, the Photobucket team wrote:

We are not happy about this and we’re pretty sure you’re not happy either. We appreciate that you have invested hundreds of thousands of hours using the editing, remixing and management tools and features available only on Photobucket. In particular, you’ve all been really embracing videos at Photobucket — to the tune of 50,000 video uploads a day, which is great. Rest assured that your content is being kept safe in your Photubucket album even though it may disappear from your MySpace pages.

We believe that by limiting your ability to personalize your pages with content from any source, MySpace is contradicting the very belief of personal and social media. MySpace became successful because of the creativity of you, its users, and because it offered a forum for self-expression. By severely restricting this freedom, MySpace is showing that it considers you as a commodity which it can treat as it sees fit.

I recently blogged about how Facebook learned its lesson about drastic unilateral changes to its product. In short, they unilaterally launched a very controversial feature known as a “news feed” about six months ago. The feature made users’ activities on the site much more public and transparent, and the uproar was tremendous.

Let’s contrast that with today. This morning, Facebook launched a series of major changes to their user interface. But this time, they were smart enough to engage users in the decision making process months ahead of time. They started a group for users who wanted to share their two cents about the new interface. They posted screenshots and discussed the ramifications of potential actions. They changed course on a few features based heavily on user input. In short, they listened.

I would argue that MySpace’s ban on Photobucket is even worse that last year’s newsfeed fiasco at Facebook. Why? Because on top of unilaterally taking action that profoundly affects their users, they’ve taken away an essential feature rather than adding something new and cool. This really does send the message to MySpace users that the site thinks of them as commodities rather than people who are building a community online.

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch believes a conspiracy is afoot:

This is turning into a habit for MySpace, which usually claims bugs, security issues or terms of service violations were the cause of a shut down. In January MySpace mysteriously shut down all Flash widgets on the site for 2.5 hours. An Imeem blockade came next. Vidilife, Stickam and Revver have been permanently banned.

Today’s shutdown of Photobucket comes suspiciously close to news that Photobucket is up for sale (Fox, MySpace’s parent company, was notoriously rumored to be furious when YouTube sold to Google). It seems that just when a company starts to break out from the pack, MySpace finds a security breach and shuts them down. Even though MySpace has flat out denied it to us, it is our belief that these blockages are meant to send a clear message to widget companies - don’t forget that MySpace is in charge.

If this is true, it represents a mentality that simultaneously devalues the individual user and third-party innovation that enhances the end user’s experience. With this kind of an attitude, MySpace might indeed go over the proverbial hill in a hurry.

Via Techmeme.

We all remember the great hullabaloo over Facebook’s unilateral introduction of its News Feed feature last year. Facebook’s users didn’t like the feature because it aggregated so much information about their friends in a “stalkerish” way.

From the blowup, I drew three conclusions that were relevant to businesses:

• Ask what your customers want and then listen to them. To paraphrase danah [boyd], you should configure your product to match your users, don’t try to configure your users to match your product.
• Admit when you screw up. Then communicate frequently and consistently about what measures you are taking to solve the problem.
• And finally, even after you’ve corrected the big issue, continue to respond to feedback from your audience.

It looks as though Facebook is making the most of that third idea with their Facebook Sneak Preview group. The group boasts over 100,000 members and gives users a chance to preview the upcoming changes to the site’s user interface. It also encourages broader discussion of what users want out of their social network.

This idea of using the Web to engage customers in product development is hardly new. In Facebook’s case, it had everything to gain and nothing to lose by opening the kimono. But there are some companies with trade secrets and intellectual property to lose.

What do you guys think? Should companies err on the side of caution when it comes to IP and other sensitive information? Has this world of transparent communication online left no room for opacity, or do we have some wiggle room? When we bring product development into the equation, do we change the rules?

Incidentally, and in the interests of self-promotion, this is one of the big issues we’ll be discussing at the next Blog Business Summit in September.

The ever Web-savvy Dallas Mavericks — owner Mark Cuban has a blog — have launched Friends.Mavs.com, a social network for Mavericks fans. They’re calling it “the first professional sports social network and video hosting site.”

Evidently, they’ve never heard of NHL Connect, the social networking site the NHL launched last year to connect hockey fans.

So far, the site only appears to have just over 1,000 members. (I calculated this with a quick glance at the list members page. There were twenty members to a page and 52 pages. 20*52=1,040.) It’s built with Ning, which has some open source features but retains the right to feature its own advertising.

I think the Mavs are cool to be so low-key about this and go with an existing service rather than building a Wal-Mart style command and control social network. But I’m not sure the value add is really there for them. Ning doesn’t even allow those who build networks with their software to access their users’ e-mail addresses, although it does allow them to message all the users within the system.

As with any blogging or social networking platform, the user’s needs take precedence. Ning works very well for a company whose end goal is to facilitate community for community’s sake. But forget about analyzing the behavior of that community in any kind of detail.

On the upside, they seem extremely committed to helping social network builders develop an attractive product for the end user. I like their Ning tricks feature on the blog, which features tips and tricks for getting the most out of your social network. They allow backup and export of the network’s underlying data, so companies could conceivably move to a network of their own making at a later date. They also earn points for rapid scalability.

Only time will tell whether the Mavs were smart to choose Ning for their platform. But I think it’s wonderful that they’re getting into the game.

I was pretty excited to read on the Facebook blog about a new plugin they’ve developed that lets users upload and tag photos directly from iPhoto.

One of my biggest problems with Facebook has always been that uploading photos is a ponderous, tedious, multi-step process. Next to the Flickr Uploadr Facebook’s little java-based app is kind of pathetic.

The only reason I use Facebook’s photo sharing feature is that it gives you the ability to tag people’s faces in photos and link those photos to the person’s profile. When you go to the profile, you can see “more pictures of so-and-so.” This is tremendously fun and also good for researching job applicants.

Now that I don’t have to worry about the annoying uploader any more, I’m even more excited about photo sharing on Facebook!

Michael Turk over at techPresident has a recommendation for Republican presidential contender John McCain, “create something online that lives beyond the moment.”

McCain is busy inviting supporters to his Online Idea Exchange tomorrow at 6:30 p.m. EST.

Writes Turk:

I like the “Exchange of Ideas” thematic, but it’s in New York. Why not have some fun with the branding and make it the New York Idea Exchange and play off the NYSE? With a little bit of work, you could actually make this a user interactive thing and create an “ideas exchange” and your users could trade futures in McCain’s ideas. It would give you feedback on which of your campaign messages play better.

Meanwhile, Jeff Jarvis has some advice for Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama. He wants to know what Obama stands for, and he wants Obama to take the time to tell him in video form.

Jarvis holds up Hillary Clintons (now embeddable!) “Hillcasts” as a great example of using video media to share views. And I would agree if only Clinton didn’t sound so scripted.

Obama does a better job of being off the cuff in his videos, even if he isn’t really saying anything yet.

I think it’s great that Edwards features links to social media sites throughout his website. He continues to lead the pack of Democratic contenders for the 2008 presidential nod in leveraging social media. Thomas Hawk pointed out that he’s joined Twitter.

Hawk also nominated Robert Scoble to be Edwards’ Internet Communications Director if he gets elected.

According to Future Majority– my new favorite blog for all things at the intersection of Web “2.0″ and politics — 69% of American women and 56% of American men ages 17-25 rate Facebook over MySpace and YouTube as their favorite social network.

I’m a big fan of Facebook because the interface is clean, the privacy controls are spectacular, the photo sharing tool is fun and the sharing feature is great for “spitting” content along to people who will find it interesting. I am in the females 17-25 demographic and I visit Facebook at least 10 times a day on the average day.

The ever exciting world of social network APIs took a giant leap forward over the weekend with the announcement of Facebook’s FQL, which stands for “Facebook Query Language.”

Basically, this allows developers to string together scripts that can query the Facebook databases for all kinds of information. Here are a few ways the language could be used within Facebook:

• Play Yente. Find out if any of your single friends share interests. Then fix them up.
• Suggest Media. Find out which of your friends you have the most in common with when it comes to movies, music and books. Then rely on their other preferences when deciding which media to consume.
• Stalk Rivals. Think your current S.O. might still carry a torch for a former flame? Keep track of her relationship status and pay attention if he starts acting weird when she breaks up with her boyfriend. ::inserts tongue in cheek::

Those are just a few ideas that come readily to mind, based on what I know of the language. Although I think that last one might be a little farfetched. But there’s already a script that will tell you which of your friends are in relationships.

I don’t need to tell you that the more cool little functions like this a social network has, the more of a draw it becomes for users. These features also empower exisiting users to talk about your products in completely new ways. If you’re in any facet of media right now, you want to be especially aware of how this could play out because Facebook’s profile features focus heavily on media preferences.

And if you’re a politico of any stripe, you want to be paying special attention to the election features that Facebook implemeted before last year’s midterm. The query language could be a way to identify and court potential supporters on a large scale based on who they supported last time around.

A big group of geeks was sitting around in Chris and Ponzi Pirillo’s new basement last night talking about social media and why businesses should care.

Robert said that bloggers are “spitters” who spray pieces of information to lots of other people when we open our mouths. And just like spitting in public is a great way to spread disease, virtual “spitting” is a great way to spread information.

And of course social networks like Facebook and MySpace make it easier to “spit” information with sharing features and bulletins. You don’t even have to be a blogger anymore to spit.

And of course, the next wave of this whole phenomenon is the interoperability phenomenon. Even your non-blogging customers will have giant megaphones to address the world without starting their own blogs.

More disintermediation in the works!

That’s a big topic. Frankly, it’s a billion dollar question and if I had all the answers to it, I’d be a billionaire.

What I do know is that your outreach has to be about more than just selling your product. You have to genuinely want to get in touch with the people that care about your company. And you have to relate to them on their terms.

I get a lot of invitations on MySpace to clubs that I would never go to. I’ve been “friended” by a lot of bands that I have no interest in listening to. That’s why I made my profile private and made it impossible for people to friend me unless they know my REAL name. I know that people are just trying to self-promote, and I do understand. But if the marketers in question had taken the time to read my profile, they would have seen that I really don’t want to listen to their Metallica rip-off band. So pay attention to people’s interests before you contact them.

Because despite the friend-gathering behavior you sometimes see on Web-based social networks, it’s important to remember that quality of relationships is a lot more important than quantity of “friends.” Especially when you’re promoting your organization.

Why is this true? Because you and the group of contacts you develop are only the starting point for the message you are trying to send. If people truly enjoy interacting with you, they will talk to their contacts about you. If they have an inkling that one of their friends might enjoy your product, they’ll be more likely to mention it if they don’t think you’re a tool for pinging them with corporate jargon that’s irrelevant to their lives.

So once you have contacted them, don’t just send them a form e-mail. Pay attention to what you, a unique individual, have in common with them, another unique individual. Don’t go into a sales spiel. Focus on making a connection.

I once explained social network marketing to Steve as being like randomly sitting down at a nightclub with a group of people who all know each other well. You have to be able to connect with them as more than just a marketer, or they’ll think of you as a pest. This happened to me in Puerto Vallarta when the owner of the Collage Nightclub sat down with my cousin and I while we were out at another club. We knew he was promoting his nightclub, but he was a cool guy and he was more interested in talking about good music and the town itself.

That’s how you have to be when you’re trying to engage with online social networks.

There’s an article in the LA Times today about a 13-year old girl in Texas, whose parents recently sued Myspace for the alleged sexual assault she experienced:

Whose fault is it that 13-year-old “Julie Doe” lied about her age, met a guy on MySpace.com and was allegedly sexually assaulted by him in a Texas parking lot?

Not MySpace’s, a federal judge said in a decision released Wednesday. The ruling appears to be the first time a federal court has extended to social-networking sites the same broad free-speech protections granted to Internet service providers.

The only thing I know about this case is what I read in this article, but I think the Judge made the only sensible ruling possible. MySpace, like any message board host or “content enabler” cannot and should not be held liable for content that they do not create–just like bloggers should not be held liable for the comments other people leave on their blogs.

I know that sounds a little harsh, and I’m sorry that things like this really do happen, but the burden is still on parents and individuals to treat the internet with the caution it warrants.

According to Business Week, when Friendster opened their technological kimono to a dozen select developers, their unique visitors jumped 17. 76%. “This is our biggest [month-over-month] growth since launch,” Friendster marketing director Jeff Roberto told BizWeek.

Public or semi-public API’s seem to be all the rage in social networking this year. As we saw with Friendster, more flexibility, community involvement and innovation in social networking means more people coming on board. In 2007, businesses will need to start paying attention to social networks the way that they’ve been paying more and more attention to blogs.

This is not only true because more people will be using social networks. Yes, the increase in the number of users is important. But the real story here is about ease of dissemination. As users are able to add their own functions to popular sites, we’ll see a second-wave steroid effect on user-generated content. As we’ve seen in the past, increased interoperability and potential for customization in social media means that what your customers are saying about your products and services will go further, last longer and speak louder than it does already. That means even more loss of control of your traditional messaging.

For those of you who haven’t heard about it yet (where have you been?), LonelyGirl15 is the saga of a cute, vulnerable teenage girl by the name of Bree. Bree video blogs earnestly from her bedroom and belongs to a strange cult that wants her to go through some kind of creepy ritual. She posts her videos to YouTube and gains a huge following. Drama ensues.

Bree is played by actress Jessica Rose, of whom Wired says, “there’s something about [her] that the webcam loves. Her distractingly large eyebrows and small, round face are bent and stretched by the fish-eye lens into a morsel of beauty that fits perfectly in a pop-up window.”

The recent Wired article also details the attempts of Lonelygirl creators Miles Beckett, Mes Flinders and Greg Goodfried to engage with mainstream Hollywood:

Their first sit-down with a major broadcaster was, Goodfried says, an “exercise in futility.” Beckett tried to explain to the executive that the central theme of online entertainment was interactivity, as opposed to the passivity of television. He wanted to create shows in which the line between reality and fiction is blurred, where viewers can correspond with the characters and actually become involved in the story by posting their own videos. The exec responded by walking them through his fall lineup and pointing out that the network’s Web site had great supplemental video material for the season’s upcoming shows.

Beckett is clearly frustrated. “The Web isn’t just a support system for hit TV shows,” he says. “It’s a new medium. It requires new storytelling techniques. The way the networks look at the Internet now is like the early days of TV, when announcers would just read radio scripts on camera. It was boring in the same way all this supplemental material is boring.”

The LG15 crew has a different vision. They want to create entertainment that fans can touch through interactive role-playing and video blogs of their own.

When Business Week wrote, that blogs are “going to shake up just about every business — including yours,” this is what they were talking about. The question is, do you want to be remembered for doing your industry’s equivalent of reading radio scripts on camera while your competitors discover the TV drama?

The girls over at Best. Lesbian-ish. Day. Ever. have a great post up about the American Idol-style writing competition being hosted at Gather.com. Folks submit the first chapter of their manuscripts and the audience votes. Then the next round, the surviving writers submit their second chapters. And so on, and so forth.

The winner gets a publishing contract from Touchstone/Simon & Schuster and a $5,000 prize from Gather.com.

I’m impressed with the way that these publishers are learning to leverage the blogosphere and social networks. This is exactly the way to build grassroots interest in an author before her book is even published.