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Facebook Deal-breaker

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I have now seen this "Get Your Obama Check" ad about 30 times in the last 48 hours.   ObamaCheck

As a resident of planet internet I've gotten used to the morass of spam that hits my email account, with offers from every salacious, medical, impossible, fraudulent, Canadian, or just mis-spelled offer in the land.  I'm fine with my mental state, my body, and my darn watch for now, thank you very much.

I don't really see the value in the display ads on Facebook thses days.  The dating ads were under my skin for a while- they just seemed to have mean ad copy that took advantage of my profile to target me and be mean.

And now, in this climate, the "Get Your Obama Check" is beyond the pale, a scam sending in $2.99 to "get $12,000" is ridiculous. It's the kind of late night drivel we've seen for years.  I implore Facebook to get rid of these ads, and for my fellow citizens to report such ads as tasteless, opportunistic scams. 

Where will Facebook build significant advertising value?  Does such a thing exist when most people I know deploy a combination of resentment and unconscious filtering to ignore the ads we see?  Did you think that I didn't notice your addition of a third ad slot in the right gutter, Facebook? 
Even at 150 million monthly active users, I'm skleptical of the long term advertising value proposition if Facebook is going to let these kinds of ads destroy what little positive perception Facebook ads enjoy.

Perhaps the pro version of Facebook polls and Facebook's Lexicon utility are where the real money is- if that's so, why should Facebook still be taking these scammers' money?

Creating Value in a Twitter Network

Metcalfe’s law posits that a network’s value is proportional to the square of the number of nodes on the network.  Yet the law of social content consumption is this:  growth of a community service is not correlated with how good the community is.  Why?

The larger a network (like your network of friends on Facebook) becomes, the more information it produces, and the harder someone (either you or your agent) have to work to filter that information.  Status updates, bio changes, blog posts, pics...how do you figure out what to pay attention to?   Is there a new dimension of social intelligence which focuses on filtering your own network?

Following everyone you know on Twitter isn’t a good way of filtering information. Following SOME people and using other tools to filter Twitter become necessary in order to watch the topics you care about. 

This does not change the truth that it has always been hard is to use your own network to get information, but it's hard to simultaneously extol the virtues and warn about coping with the info overload of a social media service; most of the hype focuses on the former.  Barack Obama has evidently won the battle to keep his BlackBerry- he must need this network very badly.  Many folks I know think Facebook isn’t useful for them anymore because they have too many friends on the service- the news feed becomes diluted.  Insert any service here. 

I think we will find that only the techno-elite will be real supercharged users- or at least people who spend 10+ hours a day at a computer without having to devote attention from their Twitter/friendfeed/etc stream. 

With print publications, because the editorial there performs that task.  With social media, we need tpo pick with more granularity:

  1. Get an initial set of whom to follow
  2. Determine which are good filters
  3. Add some limited filters of your own

Subscribing to a feed from a  someone you know is a good way to access their filtering capability.  So we want lots of those.  But unfortunately, not everyone is as good a filter of his own thoughts or their reading list; a lot of individual tweets aren’t useful.  While Twitter is an attention aggregator it also means that I might not get as much out of it when I’m not paying attention; folks are getting hip to how to push social capital around and attract the attention of other followers at intervals. 

Until we can get some reliable AI on top of all of this, perceived value (benefit >cost) will rely on a user’s willingness to make an investment of time and effort.  I’m not saying that never pays off-and I say this as someone who has gotten a lot of value out of Twitter- its days are limited not because Twitter is bad but because we don’t have a tool yet to replace the work we as users put in.

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Network Effects, Attention, and Twitter

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A Twitter presence is getting harder and harder to manage.  Charlie O’Donnell’s “how to manage a professional network online” podcast on BlogTalkRadio gives some interesting guidance in this area for those starting out.  I know Charlie limits himself to following 250 people, but it’s not uncommon for superstars on Twitter to be following thousands.  I don’t know what the number should be, but following 210 people feels very different from when I was following 50.  Why is that?

Twitter is an attention aggregator.  The best conversations on Twitter take place in close to real time, and evolve FAST.  Taking advantage of mobile web or SMS updates to tweet from an event or while away from a computer adds a lot to the experience.  My RSS reading dropped dramatically once I started using Twitter, because I was getting MORE of the folks whose blogs I read: more of their thought process, their likes and dislikes, a bit of their lives…and attention from them.  If Twitter is a network of status messages, its biggest achievement may be to confer status (or as Nate Westheimer put it, the paypal of social capital).  Attention is an input for distributing social capital.

But not everyone can stay on Twitter, all day every day.  While we’re asleep, doing our jobs, even making eye contact with people in real life, living life, we are usually interacting with the world without writing it down.  We get value from Twitter when we pay attention TO it, and everyone pays a little different amount.  Twitter's effects are normally distributed, too.  There is some minority of people it hurts, a great many who get little to moderate value, and some other minority who get supercharged about it.  Twitter changed how I view a lot of events, connected me more closely to co-workers, and made it clear that instantaneous responses from marketers could have an impact on brand reputation.

My next post on this topic will discuss how the necessity of filtering affects social network and community growth.

Web Radio...vs Online Radio

Report out yesterday suggests that CBS radio's web traffic is up- which made me think of their acquisition of last.fm.  Which ones are doing better?

Wonder if they are doing anything with these properties purportedly recienving so much traffic?
via mediapost:

CBS Radio's network of radio station Web sites saw its total number of unique visitors increase 30% in December 2008, compared to the same month in 2007, according to Web analytics service OneStat.com, reaching an all-time high for CBS Radio. The online measurement company also noted that unique visitors grew 7% between November and December 2008.

Among the biggest growth stations were KRLD-Dallas, which jumped 133% between December 2007 and 2008; KNX-Los Angeles, up 113%; and WBBM-Chicago, up 104%. Major increases were also seen at WCBS-FM-New York and WPGC-Washington.

To put this in context, I pulled up a compete chart for last.fm, pandora.com, blip.fm (which some of my twitter peeps seem tp be using although I have not really played with it) imeem.com and favtape.com (which I think any of my twitter followers would agree is a favorite of mine).  Since the figures in the article are percentages only, it is not clear if they refer to site visitors or listening traffic. 


Nielsen Netratings puts the CBS radio network at 5.6mm visitors in December 2008, topping a period of significant growth:

CBS_Network

Bright Spots in 2009...really?

This is my first time being laid off, (it's Norm's fourth as I understand it).  This is cross-posted here and at www.jobsandless.com, to which you should all subscribe and support Norm.  Also, if you're looking for a  have a job opportunity for him, so much the better.

I wrote that I am looking for a certain kind of firm for my next position, one that is looking at the long term and interested in making great strategic decisions.  I don't know if it will "create more value than it extracts" (Fred Wilson quoting Tim O'Reilly) but that seems to be the way of things in the tech world these days.

But what industries will this firm operate in?  How will I go from all companies to only a few?  Is my insight applicable to anyone else?

The thing is, it's pretty likely that

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The future of NOT free

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David Carr writes in today's NYT that "We need an iTunes for news" and I'm finding myself thinking very hard about what actually might help the struggling newspaper biz (bad news from Fitch ratings came out the other day, and it looks like the Seattle P-I is on the brink). 

Is it just "variable pricing" which Carr argues has allowed the music business to stick around, though perhaps not to thrive?  What the music business still hasn't really learned, is how to combat piracy by adding value in the distribution part of the business.  Apple figured the out- the device and the store are, for many many people, a top notch experience (I know there are people who prefer eMusic or other services) but the emphasis Apple placed on delivering value rather than delivering "content" is what gave Apple's iPod such dominance.

So can newspapers just turn around and create an iTunes-like store, charging for the convenience of reading the paper on an enormous iPod touch or the Kindle?  I think the issue is not exclusively supply-side.  That is, newspapers don't have to deal with precisely the same intransigence as the music business with respect to digital- they already (largely) give the product away for free online. When the NYTimes pulled the plug on TimesSelect, it looked like they were screwed.

I posted these thoughts to the nextNY list in December:

The BHAG here is to make enough of your content consumers want to buy your content even if there is some proportion of people who believe it should be free, wants to be free, or that they are entitled to consume it for free.  We are at the point where creators pass up the opportunity to extract some optional $ from many of their consumers while restricting the content to non-optional payers of $$$. 

Maybe we are at the point where optional $ from only some of your customers would make it profitable.  Suppose 20% of the people who visited the NYTimes online in October 2008 paid $1 for the privilege, that would be about $10 million in incremental revenue.  Would another $100 million every year be worth it? We can play with the numbers like this forever, but I think it's one direction creators should move.

I say all of this as a (GASP) paid daily subscriber to the print NYTimes. 

People need to get okay with not-free news.   The reporting of news organizations is indispensable, and high in value.  While the music business has the advantage of live performance and merchandise revenue- which do not suffer from the free copying problem- news has no such cash cow. 

We'll need news to recover from this serious free-rider problem.  A tip jar?  Maybe tying to distribution on a device, or just making the pricing more flexible, or making it just a whole lot cheaper and also easier to pay would be a step in the right direction.  I'm not convinced- just getting people back to paying for distribution seems weak.  They will somehow need to be non-free even if not subscription only, either.

One of Fred Wilson's recent posts mentions Time Oreilly's three rules:

1) Work on something that matters to you more than money
2)Create more value than you capture
3)Take the long view


I believe that in a similar way, newspapers  "create more value than [they] extract" but this has created a mis-pricing problem: users believe they were paying for distribution, distribution became "free" via the web,  but the value created only grew; we have not figured out how to recapture that. Wish I knew the answer to that one.



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A new beginning in 2009

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And you may find yourself....  

In 2009, I'm sure I will.  After I was laid off from Razorfish at the end of 2008, I had the opportunity to do a jump-started job search, and a lot of the leads I turned up were very promising.  The economic outlook went from grim to super-grim in the interim, and I'm bracing for the worst, hoping for the best. 

In the interim, I have a fantastic opportunity to think about some of my longer-term goals.  2008 was a terrific ride in terms of pursuing my writing and performance ambitions.  I became stronger in body and in my sense of my own self- a very successful year.  A year of reinvention, even, as I harnessed a certain power and confidence from within.  Did I ever think I would run nearly 9 miles straight?

And yet I wondered,  describing my situation to friends and family over the course of my trip to California for the holidays, whether this isn't the time to reverse the balance of time and effort invested in my two lives, my technology/business career and my work as a writer and performer.  In particular childhood friend KS, who landed in "the biz" by accident was highly influential about this. 

I have often said that sustenance aside, I'd probably do both.  I enjoy making links between business ideas, helping businesses to be their innovative selves and presenting that to their customers; I enjoy making people laugh.  It happens to be true that the business of comedy at my level means giving away the product to as many people as possible, as a down payment on future returns- I will continue to pursue these opportunities as a secondary activity.

What I appreciate now is how much I am looking for the right fit with a new employer.  The culture and people of Razorfish were important to and supportive of, my professional and personal development.  Doing some personality and values exercises the past few weeks to drive resume development and interviewing, I have gotten a bit better understanding of myself.  I find that the more I describe myself, the more I think I describe my ideal work environment.  So what does that look like?  

What do I know about that company?  

  • Passionate people from diverse backgrounds
  • A focus on strategy across businesses 
  • Always looking for new ideas and reading from a wide variety of sources, connecting ideas and trends together. 
  • Not maniacally focused on quantitative solutions but loving the elegance of making a model work and making good judgments. 
  • High standards of quality about data and creativity about finding sources of it. 
  • Looking for long term success opportunities for the business very likely "shaper" firms rather than "adapter" firms.  
  • Experimenting with new ideas and applications and talking about them with the public.  Creating a community and recruiting passionate followers. 
  • People invested in developing themselves and a company interested in developing its staff.
  • A place where I'll find some other people with performance in their blood, writers or artists or musicians.

I'm going to be compiling a list of companies I think are on this list, and I'm absolutely open to suggestions.

Movie Review: Gran Torino

Gran Torino was fantastic, instantly among my favorite Eastwood movies (like Blood Work, Heartbreak Ridge, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, and In The Line of Fire).  Remember In the Line of Fire?  "I know things about pigeons, Lily."  Fantastic.

Why is it so good?  Is it because Clint Eastwood can look at you, growl, and do more damage than most people can with a pistol?  That is certainly true.  It is amazing how real Eastwood's character feels, how even as a curmudgeon with a penchant for antiquated slurs, he seems like a good guy.

The role of religion was interesting as well.  I think it's possible that the martyrdom angle at the end was too much, but I enjoy new perspectives on the role of religion on modern life, and this made me feel like it's people, not fear or fervor, that keeps religious institutions strong.  The pastor in Gran Torino was a whole lot more interesting than Father Phil from The Sopranos.

It's such an interesting reminder about survivors, of every ethnic group, of every generation, and how the survivors among us are often the ones who bring out our own greatness.  For its fantastioc dialogue, its moments of cross-cultural reconciliation via food, the Pabst Blue Ribbon, and good old Glint Eastwood being a bad-ass, I highly recommend seeing it.

Silicon Valley perspective as I head East

Today I'm packing up from my vacation in CA and heading back to New York.  The NYtimes has a story this mroning about the venture market- In Silicon Valley, Venture Capitalists Turn Cautious and I'm wondering what's new about this story, or indeed unique to the Valley?  The contentions of the article:

  • You can't just say "social networking" and get a pile of cash anymore.  I submit that this has been the case for some time, as the social networking space got so crowded in 2007/8 I wasn't sure how many more of these we really needed. 

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Strategy under uncertainty

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Found my way from the futuramb blog post about strategic planning in the fashion industry to this McKinsey quarterly article about strategy under uncertainty which calls out two kinds of firms: shapers and adapters.  I've been thinking about corporate strategy from an uncertainty perspective since I read  Michael Raynor's excellent book, The Strategy Paradox- in which the roles of managing uncertainty at all levels of the corporation are examined.  Raynor's examples of firms who succeeded by creating options for success under many possible futures are powerful. I previously posted about them here.

In the current economic environment, Hugh Courtney wisely points out that not every firm is going to be able to get out in front of the significant uncertainty and financial turmoil that 2009 will bring.  Some of them will of necessity just be trying to survive.   They'll pursue "bold M&A plays, R&D that others can’t finance, and entry into new markets."  How can we identify the firms who can pursue a strategy of shaping the future rather than just adapting to it?  These are some of their characteristics:

  • very healthy balance sheets, potentially with lots of fully-depreciated assets
  • business models that generate a lot of cash and don’t have much debt
  • typical industries: high tech, service businesses, energy, utilities, and telecom

A very useful insight here is that these companies can re-shape their industry without re-shaping the macro environment- that will always be adaptive.  However, the adapter firms will rely primarily on adapting to the macro environment and hoping to ride it out.

I think startups probably fit into the shaper category as well.  Taking chances that many competitors can't, these firms are constantly investing, with every day, in re-shaping their industries.  A salute, then to the firms, large and small, who use 2009 to create something new and bold, take a chance, and harnessing the silver lining of the year's dark clouds.

Tuesday, December 30, 2008 at 12:43 PM

In a revised report from Fitch Ratings, some new forecasts on the growth (or not) of advertising in 2009.  I think it's interesting to look at how the policitcal season "masked the softness" of the local and national ad markets.  Fitch sees about 40% of national ad dollars under pressure because of industry issues: automotive, retail, general services, and of course financial services.

The report also notes that online media will still grow, albeit modestly

Is Consumer Generated Media the same as "Media"

P&G Ad Man: "I Don't Want To Buy Any More Banners On Facebook." .

There is a good semantic argument that McConnell has, in the sense of  consumer generated media not being the same as media inventory. McConnnell is reacting to monetizing the “real estate”- that is, the ancillary spaces, the page gutters or top borders etc.

 

As much as people are giving up privacy, I agree they are not upset about this fact.  Yet what they are getting really good at is ignoring advertising. 

 

From: Robert Stribley
Sent: Wednesday, November 19, 2008 12:18 AM
To: Andrea Harrison; Branislav Peric; coi.socialmedia.aarf
Subject: RE: The dark side of social media

 

When I read this article, I thought, wonder how much of McConnell’s thoughts come down to something  as simple as a generation gap? Then earlier this evening, I Ws reading Emily Nussbaum’s excellent 2007 article “Say Everything” and it confirmed it for me. Compare McConnell against some relevant excerpts:

Cable television execs aren't in the experience business - but they should be

Advertising Age has an article which surveys some Cable TV execs on their perspective on going in the direction of Hulu: a site which has done fantastically well selling ads along with high-quality online video. The article's title asks, Will Cable Networks Get Their Own Video Site Like Hulu?.


The speculation is that they are not interested, for fear of cannibalizing their exisitng revenue streams. Scary. The article quotes David Zaslav, CEO of Discovery Communications:

We don't want to train [viewers] to watch our best shows on [free online] platforms. Most of our research shows if we move our content mostly in clips, we can create an environment where we can mostly satisfy our viewers with consumer content on other platforms but do it in a way that doesn't take away from our core business.


Train them? Why is the broadcast business about keeping viewers in a cage that protects the content producer? While you build the cage, you force your most motivated fans to seek it elsewhere. Hulu's greatest long-term asset will be eliminating the need for those fans to do that.


The reality is that the model of watching TV that provides that "core business" for the MSOs is just broken. Buying CDs clealry broke in the late 90s, and the death spiral of the record industry is proof of that. Hulu approaches things from the user perspective, with the goal of creating an experience that people want. The MSOs create an experience that makes them money, and they know that whatever maze they put between the user and their content, some people will navigate it.

It's just antitheical to the MSO or the cable networks, really, to approach the deployment of services as something to undertake from the user's perspective.

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CBS Scores Again with NotaFathersDay.com

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This week's episode of How I met Your Mother mentions another online tie-in related to the show: www.notafathersday.com. Perennial womanizer and keeper of the Bro-Code Barney Stinson proposes a holiday for single men: Not a Father's Day.  

As soon as I saw the episode I went to the web site, and sure enough, you can buy all the outrageous merchandise showcased in the episode from the store on the site.  Made me smile that the show followed up so well on slapcountdown.com and The Robin Sparkles video (this is to say nothing of Barney's Blog on CBS.com which is also fantastic).  These are very smart plays which are written into the universe of the show without being heavy-handed- it doesn't have to be increadibly complex webisodes and adventuires to give fans a little better chance to engage with the  show and its characters.

They built it, they came, now what?

Reading Ana's post about what news sites like Politico.com can do next to "own" political debate content, I think it is interesting that a site with even fewer resources or infrastructure at its disposal, namely fivethiryeight.com, became so big.   The founder of FivethirtyEight.com, Nate Silver, a statistician with BaseballProspectus, speculated about his own fate and the fate of the audience:

“That’s the paradox,” he said. “You would think that you elect this guy and you want him to effect change, and then he gets elected, and people don’t care about bills being passed.”

He suspects that Nov. 4 was the height of his popularity, and that producers will not be phoning as frequently any time soon. Publishers have been calling about a book, and he will continue with FiveThirtyEight, using it to predict Congressional votes during the Obama administration — if anyone cares.

That is, sadly, the state of our fickle attention.  For all the interest built up in the election, I think there is a now-what element to a lot of people's reading habits.  The Obama transition team's Change.gov is a good start to focusing the attention of the electorate on the business of governing, and it just so happens that much of the Web 2.0 technology suite is well-suited to organizing people.

But we will eventually have to take part, to build something real and true and beyond the walls of our social networks. 

Ch-ch-ch changes

I have made some changes to my blog's layout, going from a center column for posts to a left column for posts and everything else in two columns on the right.  If you miss something that I've removed, let me know.  I also fixed the layout of my about page and edited my bio a bit.

If you're reading this item in Facebook, you may want to check out bsbnyc.net to see what I'm talking about.

Soundrack for this post provided by David Bowie - Changes

Cisco's On-Stage Telepresence and the "Help Me Obi-Wan Kenobi" Test

CNN showed a very interesting idea on election night with "hologram" interview appearances during their election coverage. From my perspective, every hologram technology will have to pass the "Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi" test.  Can you see and talk to this image?  Does it take up realspace on the floor with the humans around it?  

It would appear that CNN's hologram techynology does not pass this test.  It merely renders a 3-D image into the video stream; Wolf Blitzer does not see a reporter's image standing before him in the studio.  

Digging through the gizmodo "how it works post" here, I came across a video for the Cisco on-stage telepresence technology.  The demo with CEO John Chambers shows a much closer version- no tricking the camera, just projecting someone's presence into a room., and here in a demo with King of Saudia Arabiademo for the King of Saudi Arabia.  

Very cool stuff from Cisco.  I don;t know yet how it works or whether it truly passes the Obi-Wan Kenobi test, but it looks closer than CNN's approach.