Social Networks – Page 17 – Marketing Technology and Analytics

August 1, 2007May 22, 2008

Is Second Life real estate another bubble ready to burst?

Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail, recently posted his reservations about the commercial potential of Linden Lab’s metaverse, Second Life. (Check out the many comments, by the way. I praise him for his willingness to stir a hornet’s nest.) The main reason for Anderson’s pessimism: Lack of traffic to the virtual storefronts and office spaces. Chris Andersonâ€™s Avatar on Second Life Does this mean we should all forget the Second Life “land rush” ever happened? I don’t think so.

Yesterday I heard Steve Ennen, VP, Digital Business Strategies at American Business Media, speak at an online marketing summit. He pointed out that we should look at the potential for marketers in a “Third Life, Fourth Life or even Fifth Life.” I would agree. Especially if the next platform can be one that doesn’t require special plug-ins or players. Online, experiential marketing is here to stay. And a whole generation is growing up having spent a significant portion of their young lives on gaming platforms very similar to Second Life.

In the future, favorite online communities may well become these consumers’ first lives.

You’ll find more information on Second Life in this and associated entries.

July 20, 2007May 22, 2008

Explosion causes a potty-mouthed Twitter skeptic to see the light

I had vowed to readers I would never again write about Twitter. It is, after all, a frivolous little diversion. True, in the same breath, I had also acknowledged (in one of my last posts on the topic) that this trivial toy has the potential to save lives. It can spread news when all other sources are slow to arrive or completely cut off. In a time of rising terrorist threat levels around the world, that makes Twitter sound far less trivial.

Proof of my theory arrived today. Here’s the story that has brought me out of my Twitter silence. Warning: The blog entry I cite, on the other side of this link, includes a profanity in one of the images.

A friend had been trying to coax Howard Lindzon into the Twitter habit. He refused, and finally conceded only on this condition: His “Tweets” would only come from him via his cell phone, and only when he was — ahem — using the facilities. Since he considered Twitter a waste, he was only going to Twitter about waste. But that all changed when there was a terrifying steam pipe explosion. Caught with no other way to get or receive news about it, you can guess where he turned:

Lindzon uses the one tool he bashes and pokes fun at to inform and hopefully inform himself of a crisis situation. Instantly! Wirelessly! … My buddy Loic Le Meur’s twitts a few days ago about how he catches up with news on Twitter more that by reading his RSS.

Now excentric [sic] Lindzon accepts my invitation to join and unwilingly [sic] offers this awesome example of the right person at the right time in the right place using the right service and instantly informing his peers he networked with registering to Twitter. Is this the real web 2.0? Ought to be, as Lindzon did not blog or email about the blast. He freakin twittered it!

When the telephone was invented, it wasn’t thought of as a tool for doing business. It was imagined by most as a way, before consumer radio appliances entered the picture, of carrying music and news across great distances. That all changed of course. Relatively speaking, it didn’t take long for this “toy” to earn its keep in society (just a few decades).

Could Twitter, the first truly widespread mobile time-waster, be on its way to its own social legitimacy?

June 27, 2007May 22, 2008

Dracula vs. Frankenstein: The latest in the battle between Facebook and MySpace

The Frankenstein’s monster of the Universal Studios film was hideous. A product of an unholy experiment, it was gruesomely assembled, yet through a miracle of science walked the earth, wrecking havoc. Count Dracula, from the same studio at about the same time, was mysterious and elegant. This monster’s seductive powers were finely focused. Dracula came from a remote, distant land. And, like the heretofore Mary Shelley invention, wrecked his own considerable share of havoc. Guess which is MySpace and which is Facebook?

And if you’re wondering who is winning the battle of Dracula vs. Frankenstein, well, it’s too early to tell. They are definitely using their differing powers differently, and with equal aplomb.

It was exactly a month ago when Facebook announced it would open its platform to outside developers. This online social network certainly regards no site more of a competitor than MySpace. The move to a great extent was to blunt the loss of users over to that site.

It’s an important strategy. Facebook has only a quarter of the members as MySpace (28 million versus MySpace’s 108 million). How do you argue with that that kind of success? Or compete against these kind of numbers? If you’re Facebook, the answer is you reverse course.

In their game-changing move, Facebook chose to swing open the doors to their platform to all manner of third-party widgets and software. This Slate article explains how these applications individually amount to little, but cumulatively they can spell a huge advantage (thanks, Bryn, for the link):

None of the nearly 900 (and counting) programs released so far are particularly life-changingâ€”among the most popular add-ons are a “Graffiti” program (downloaded by more than 3.3 million people as of this writing) that lets you doodle other people’s profiles and an “Honesty Box” that lets your friends say, anonymously, what they really think of you. Collectively, though, these programs are hugely significant. If the site figures out a smart way to deploy these mini applications, it will be more than just a social network. Facebook will turn into a do-everything site with the potential to devour the whole Internet.

Good move, Facebook. That had to smart. What would you do in response if you’re MySpace — a site that has been, after all, the anti-Facebook? MySpace has always been open to all comers, fertile soil for application developers — including YouTube videos, which are embedded in MySpace profiles by the millions.

So what do you do? You selectively compete against the very products you’ve allowed to thrive in your garden. Starting with YouTube, itself a threat. This week we learn that MySpace has improved their own embedded video product: MySpace TV.

The clearest damage that could come of this is to YouTube. And it’s a good thing, because YouTube is developing its own social network chops. But the move also shows a different approach to getting and keeping users: Don’t rely on others to produce your most popular applications. Instead, provide them yourself, so you can get traffic to both your own social media site and the site that feeds it.

Mind you, MySpace TV is no copy-cat of YouTube. Instead of trying to engage YouTube at its sweet spot — user-generated videos — MySpace TV focuses on professionally produced videos. Very smart.

It’s a characteristic move from a company that has so far behaved surprisingly shrewdly. Even a patchwork Frankenstein’s monster can display uncanny survival instincts.

To see an excellent face-off between Facebook and Myspace features, check out this recent evaluation of the two by our friends at Mashable.

June 2, 2007May 22, 2008

StumbleUpon buy begs this question: What’s he building in there?

As you are almost certainly aware, the large media and internet firms have lately been on a buying spree. This week news came of one more acquisition: StumbleUpon, to be purchased by eBay. Tom Waits recorded a spooky little ditty (made even more creepy by the video), called What’s He Building? In this spoken word song, the narrator wonders aloud what his loner neighbor is building in his basement. Well, I’m feeling a lot like that guy, scratching my head and wondering what strategic purpose eBay would have with this social bookmarking site.

With 2.5 million registered users, StumbleUpon behaves somewhat like a search engine. It recommends various categories of sites based on the votes of its members. In this way it uses the collective intelligence of a network of backlinks, in the same way that Google made famous. Instead of clicking on a link that states “I’m feeling lucky,” you press a Stumble! button on your specialized browser toolbar, and a new, fun site is served up for a category you enjoy.

The odds that you’ll like the recommended site are quite high, since your peers have already given it hundreds of “thumb’s ups.” You can add your own Thumb’s Up/Thumb’s Down to refine future recommendations, ala Pandora.com (a song recommendation site which, coincidentally, is a perennial favorite that StumbleUpon recommends to anyone saying they like “Music”).

Wait a minute. What did I just say? Toolbar. Google. Just yesterday a friend was wondering if Google would find its share of users eroding because it introduced Personalized Search. That’s a way that Google uses information gleaned from its toolbar and other sources to customize search results. My friend suggested that Personalized Search’s results will often miss the context of a person’s search. After all, when we go home at night we search on very different things, and for very different reasons — than during our workday. So will there be an opportunity for other search innovation to capture some of Google’s share?

True, three years ago eBay launched A9, a search engine in the stricter sense of the word than StumbleUpon ever will be. But maybe eBay is hoping to bolster A9 with a more social mechanism, to make it some sort of social bookmarking mega-search. Or perhaps they’ll try to combine StumbleUpon with another acquisition: CraigsList.org.

I’m baffled. Maybe you can help. “What’s he building in there?”