All Things Cahill

Category: Web 2.0

  • Social Network Wars

    Yeah, I need some humor today…

  • Social Media – Participation Rates Much Lower Than We Thought…

    Jeremiah Owyang from Forrester has a great post up entitled ” Why Some Don’t Need to Join the Conversation“. The basic premise is that even though social media has been so very hot in the past year or two, actual participation by users remains at a relatively low percentage of overall visitors.

    To prove my point, let’s start with data: In most markets, (even youth) there are no bars that span 100% for creators. In fact, 18-24 year olds in United States only are creators 39% of the time. 45-54 year olds in UK only create online content a paltry 6%, although they are critics 11% of the time.

    So what does this tell us? Not everyone is part of the online dialog exchange. Not everyone will ever be part of the online conversation.

    This point has really been driven home lately to me as I’ve become more directly involved in the Reel-Time Community again. In discourse with a few readers, I’ve mentioned “well, you’ve only been a member for the past two years,” only to be told that they were actually lurkers back well into the last decade. In two distinct cases, that means they waited at least 8 years before registering or posting on a site they use almost daily.

    So what’s it all mean? My feeling now is that you’ve got to assume that the active participants on your site are the tip of the iceberg. They’re responsible for helping to make the experience rich and vibrant, but you’ve got to realize that many of your dedicated users may actually never really contribute.

    New information? Not hardly…we’ve been discussing the lurker factor on online bulletin boards since pre-internet days.

  • Twitter, FriendFeed and Overexposure of the Personal Brand

    I’ve said it before, but this post especially requires that I state it clearly again: I am a New England Yankee.

    That means that I possibly have a heightened sense of propriety and generally would consider a lot of things marketing-wise as crossing the line that some of you might not have a problem with.

    I’m noticing lately that a lot of marketing types are spending a lot of time on micro-blogging tools such as Twitter, FriendFeed (the new darling), Plurk, etc. I’m sure many have convinced themselves that a lot of what they are doing is “creating social media brand awareness” for their products. The truth is that Twitter is more about branding for the personal brand, and as such I find in most cases, it creates a level of over exposure that’s downright harmful to your personal brand.

    Think about Jason Calacanis, who was for a while offering all kinds of contests, giveaways, etc. via Twitter, trying to increase the awareness of the Majalo Search Engine (disclosure: I signed up to contribute when it first started, but honestly never did produce any results for them). For a time, it seemed that the Twitter stream I was getting was all Jason, all the time. “I’m going to have lunch with xxx here. Burritos, yum” or something like that. The signal to noise ratio was so high that I really began to dislike what Calacanis was doing. I didn’t even know him and I was starting to develop a strong dislike.

    Jason mentioned on the This Week in Tech podcast this week that he has a lot of people who can’t stand his online persona, but actually become good friends when he meets them. And for the record, I really enjoy hearing Calacanis on podcasts, and I’m sure I’d like him if we were to sit down for a beer sometime. However the Twitterati Calacanis was, for a time, utterly annoying.

    Similarly Jeremiah Owyang – he’s been a perennial link in my posts, but when Forrester did their conference in March this year, I had to un-follow him for the time being, I just didn’t need to know whenever anyone decided to go to the bathroom at the conference, or what specific CEO he was talking to.

    On the other side, I see a lot of the Twitterati catering to prurient interests to build their following. Yes, sex sells, for the most part, you’re selling yourself here. Do you really want the interest that brings? If you’re even thinking about that, you might want to talk to Ariel Waldman, community manager at Pownce, who’s now got her own stalker, with all the fun that brings. Oh joy!

    The problem we have is that so many of us are making the mistake off blending our personal and our professional lives. In business, I prefer not to be known for my ability to consume Mojitos…although personally I really like them. Yet, I blend my Twitter posts with a weird mix of both professional and personal information (yeah, do as I say, not as I do).

    I think too many of the Twitterati are making the fundamental mistake of overexposing their personal brand via social networking, to their personal and professional detriment. Your thoughts?

  • Reel-Time.com Acquired By NameMedia

    In what has become an utterly bizarre turn of the tables, NameMedia Inc. has bought Reel-time.com – the site I have been working with since 1995 or 1996 as managing editor, head geek and general do-what-needs-to-be-done guy, is now owned by my current employer.

    It’s a great thing for Thorne Sparkman, who is now able to repay the investors in the site. David Churbuck (he blogs on this story here)  and I had been almost completely disengaged and had no financial stake in the final buy out. The big winner is honestly the community which now will actually move forward, vs. being in a holding pattern.

    Last September, when I posted my final Fishwire Report for the Boston Region (a report of what’s going on for saltwater fly fishermen) I swore it would be the last. Yesterday, I wrote two of them…handling both Boston and Cape Cod. The good news is that I was for the first time able to write them during normal working hours, instead of getting up at 4 in the morning.

    Reel-Time.com was a niche online community before anyone had any idea that such a thing could exist. In a lot of ways we invented, identified or were afflicted by, just about anything you now hear about termed as “Social Networking” or “Social Media.”

    So as things change, in many ways they stay the same for me.  I’m now back where I began, at Reel-Time.com and after 13 years, I couldn’t be happier.  Now if I can just get some fishing time in.

  • The Shine is off Social Networking

    Say it ain’t so, Joe! Over the past few weeks, it’s begun to look like Social Networking, the current darling of the conference and consultant set, might have jumped the shark.  I personally would peg the exact point where it went careening off track as the day that Waste Management (the guys that probably run your local honey truck) opened their own social networking site.

    But it goes far beyond that.  Earlier this week Om Malik wrote a very interesting piece showing that social networking may have flattened out, or even may be decreasing. He notes:

    Today there are numbers out from comScore that indicate plateauing growth for the big two — MySpace and Facebook — in the U.S. Last week, Revision3 canceled “SocialBrew,” an online video show dedicated to social networking. Meanwhile, Monster killed its Tickle social networking service (first reported in April by TechCrunch), following closely on the heels of CondeNast’s shuttering of Flip and Verizon’s decision to close up its virtually unknown network, which had managed to garner a mere 18,000 members. (Verizon has shifted its community to Facebook.)

    And these just might be the tip of the iceberg, for there are way too many me-too networks out there failing to find the traction, and hence the volume, needed to grow their revenues. The lack of monetization will only accelerate this process.

    I’ve also been detecting a subtle change in the “conversations” on Twitter lately, with some brave few actually taking a stand against the social networking Kool-Aid.  In one telling argument, it came down to a final comment from the prime Kool-Aid drinker that “You just never got Social Networking,” reminding my of my favorite line from a movie I dearly love, The Duellists, in which the lead character, D’Hubert, (a Napoleonic era officer who has served from Spain to Russia and back) is condemned with the single statement “You never loved the Emperor.”  Indeed, one might as easily be condemned for “Not being Politically Correct,” or whatever the actual flavor of the moment is.

    Also, I find the current “Proactive Customer Support” wherein companies monitor social networking apps to create a two tier service network, in which the middle to upper income have a vastly different support experience than the lower middle to poor do.  Think about “Comcast Cares” on Twitter, a Comcast rep, who actively searches out support issues to help fix them.  I’ll bet he’s finding most of the problems are centered in Bel Aire, not in Compton.

    Social Networking wasn’t invented by the current crop of Powerpoint wielding wannabes, and it’s been around a lot longer than most would suggest.  Honestly, I see it actually predating the internet, going back to the days of computer bulletin board services (Do you remember them?).  Most of the basic fundementals of Social Networking were really polished in online forums, on IRC, and in the first Instant Messaging Apps.  It’s not utterly new, in most cases, this is just a better presentation.

    Some general Social Networking notes:

    • “Join the Conversation” – I’m growing tired of hearing this.  If you already aren’t talking to your customers, then maybe there’s a reason.
    • Just because Facebook says we’re friends, it doesn’t mean I will loan you money…
    • Why is it the GuruVangelistPerts on Social Networking seem to Twitter from bars or about going to bars so often?

    What is new, is that there is now a widespread understanding of Social Networking and it’s overall importance in both web design in particular and marketing in general.  I realize many readers may be rather upset at my saying the Emperor has no clothes, but indeed, that is not what I am saying. I am saying it’s a waste of time to talk about the clothes, rather than the more substantive issues about the Emperor, like taxes, etc.  When the medium is the subject of the message, there is a problem with that medium.

    I’ve said it before, I say it again here.  Social Networking and Social Media are not ends unto themselves.  They are aspects of good web design, and should be employed as such.  To use Social Media for Social Media’s sake is a waste of time.  There is a limit to the number of Social Networks I want to be a part of, and I personally would prefer to have more in common with my fellow users than simple ownership of a computer.  Niche communities are the way to go…as Om so brilliantly notes.

  • Revisiting the Implied Responsibility of Comms Providers

    Regarding my post yesterday about the Implied Responsibility of Comms Providers, two things happened over night that bear mentioning.

    • Twitter again was down for a couple hours starting at 4pm EDT, or so.
    • Users were a lot less charitable in their comments.

    I really think they’re at stage 2 in the matrix I provided, but I’ve seen the first signs that they’re moving from step 2 to step 3, which is a very bad thing for Twitter. Jeremiah Owyang tweeted this morning:

    Hey are you on Friendfeed? It’s more reliable than twitter, and there’s a meta-conversation there http://friendfeed.com/jowyang

    And that, my friends is how things start to go down hill.

    (BTW, I re-read yesterdays post – I definitely would have benefited from more coffee and from a copy editor’s assistance. I may clean it up over the weekend…)

  • The Implied Responsibility of Communications Providers

    Okay, I promise to go Twitter free next week, but for now, an interesting observation…

    Yesterday, Twitter went down for about 3 hours. The general experience provoked a few thoughts. Firstly, I thought of the Twitter addicted, jonesing at their keyboards, hitting refresh endlessly in a forlorn hope the service will return.

    But then I thought more on the idea of what happens when your communication means becomes a part of peoples lives.  I’ve been here before, since the Reel-Time.com Forum literally reached that level for New England Saltwater Fly Fishermen, who are, like most Twitter users, type A obsessive compulsives.  It’s a special kind of feeling to know that your important service has become a singular point of contact for many people.  That suggests that if it goes away, you’ve put those folks out of touch.

    In my experience, services that provide such a commjunications will face a known, predictable response when are repeated failures:

    1. To begin with, everyone thinks of it as an abnormal situation and don’t push to hard.  Oh gee, there was an outage…
    2. Subsequent outages provoke concern.  Users ask where they can send get well cards.
    3. From there, we move on to anger.  You get phone calls…at night…on unlisted numbers, and they’re not utterly pleasant.
    4. From there, if the problems continue, the noise quickly subsides.  No more calls, no more emails from users.  You’ve reached the point that your users simply don’t care anymore, either that or you just don’t have any users anymore.

    Th critical litmus test is this: people will not complain if they don’t care about you.

    I’m generally concerned about using a communications means that’s provided by a single source, not knowing how scaleable their own infrastructure is.  They’ve also got a very open api that allows most users to access using tools other than the standard Twitter homepage.   That disparity of tools also creates a disparity in user experience.

  • Social Media – Shark Jumping?

    Shark Attack
    Shark Attack

    One of the outcomes of my testing of Twitter lately is that I’ve come to question whether or not Social Media has jumped the shark (props t David Churbuck who tweeted on social media jumping the shark this morning – I initially left the attribution out to save the fall out, but since he linked, no need to save him…)

    What I am finding is that most of the people I am finding in my general circle on Twitter are social media types. That’s to say, folks that attend a lot of conferences, and have generally drank fully of the social media Kool-Aid. The thing that calls it all into question for me is the number of people who are generally ex-online marketing folks now using strange titles like “Social Media User Guru” or something equally ludicrous. It reminds me of a networking group I once attended that turned out to be a room full of sales people, each hoping to sell something, and none realizing there weren’t any real customers there.

    Now I’m not certain that this isn’t a function of my very own profile (apparently in Twitter, like objects attract each other, while differing opinions repel with remarkable force). It could be that it’s become like a bad cocktail party with people that know each other standing in one corner, doing their best to ignore the other strange groups.

    One thing I know for certain – when the consultants move in so heavily to a space, such as they have in social media (and believe me, there are tons of newly minted “social media consultants” out there), it denotes a fundamental change in the ecosystem.

    So where to from here? I think we move on in the direction which I have always said social media should go. It’s not an end to an end, or even a standalone solution in my mind. This is simply good web design, online marketing practice or branding. Call it what you will, let’s just lose the Social Media moniker and take a more holistic viewpoint.

    (For the record, I’ve been doing niche community work since 1996, was one of the first bloggers, and date back to the days of Compuserve accounts that came with user numbers, not usernames. I too have fully drank of the Kool Aid, but I’m not so ready to take my advice from those who haven’t been dancing the dance for more than a couple years.)

  • The Right Medium for the Message

    Having used Twitter for a few weeks now I’ve come to the realization that it’s a viable communications means. It’s just that I’d never realized the appropriate messages to fit in that medium, which are short comments or conversations. I think of it as yelling over the cubicle wall at the folks around me. It’s good for a short blast, but any substantial conversation needs to move to a more appropriate communication means, be that a blog, an email, IM, the phone, or even the dreaded meat space.

    There’s one usage I’m still coming to grips with and I think it’s a good one, the use of hashtags. This allows you to Tweet using a #myhashtag and then that tag is picked up and aggregated by Hashtags.org where you can go and see a stream of any tweets with that hashtag in them. This has a tremendous potential impact on niche communities. Think of a community of saltwater fly fishermen, who can use their phones to send a short tweet from the water, noting that the fish didn’t come in on the tide, or that their hitting on a particular fly. Or how about “the bluefish are blitzing at Sagamore Beach”? Tremendously useful…

    Hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. They’re like tags on Flickr, only added inline to your post. You create a hashtag simply by prefixing a word with a hash symbol: #hashtag.

    Other mashups with Twitter I question. Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of posts from BrightKite noting the exact address someone is at. I absolutely don’t want to be reporting my whereabouts via my cell phone, I have enough people trying to track me as it is. However, on the face of it, think of that group of saltwater fly fishermen again. They’d probably want to know where their friends are and be able to catch up. Well, at least you’d think that, but the my experience tells me the exact opposite, they’re more territorial than wolverines, and absolutely would take the locations of their favorite spots with them to the grave rather than devulge them to anyone.

    Think about how hash tags could be used at a major event, like, say the Kentucky Derby, which is a multiday affair.  You could use has tags to aggregate what everyone is saying, and also to direct them to the events you want, such as your brand sponsored cocktail party.  “Meet at the ShillCo Pavilion for mojitos…”  If I were planning a major marketing event, I’d definitely be thinking how to incorporate this, provided I could be assured they’re be enough Twitter users around (and of course I’d tie it in with a blog, email, etc.).

    That said, there are communities that BrightKite would fit nicely into.  Think of Crafters at a Craft Fair, or perhaps members of the same car club at a Car Meet.  You know you’re buddies arrived, and you can meet up.

    I think that Twitter is hurting the blogs though. Now it seems to me that rather than linking on a blog, people are sending out a tweet about a good post. The truth is that blog links have legs, and tweets have very limited range, only to your followers, and there, only to the followers who are actually looking at the screen at that time. Twitter is kind of like a stock ticker, the information fades fast. I really only see trackbacks from sploggers now.

    The diaspora that’s hit online media, with so many disparate tools, has got to stop.  Segmentation and tribalism won’t work for us.  We’ve got to move towards aggregating, not compartmentalizing.

  • The Media Debate, Part Deux

    To paraphrase, the battle for print publishing is over, the battle for media itself has begun…

    Several years ago, Leo Laporte predicted that 2007 would be the year of the podcast, and that 2008 would be the year of online video. He was pretty much right on the money.

    Things have changed for big media in so many fundamental ways. In so many ways the problems facing video providers (formerly known as “television”) are, as with the print publishers, about delivery means. Here again we have a quaint and outmoded delivery means that enforces some rather bizarre requirements upon its users. Let’s step back and have a look, pretending we’re looking at television for the first time.

    • A schedule? Why can’t I watch what I want, when I want?
    • I have to pay for access so they can advertise to me?
    • I have to pay extra for access to movies? Didn’t I already pay you?
    • What was up with that “Writers Strike”?
    • How much “Sur-reality” programming do you really need?

    The fight in broadcast media actually started with the advent of cable, has slowly simmered through the days of vcrs and on the the Tivo revolution. A core constituency of viewers was trained to expect to be able to get what they want when they want it, and once that genie is out of the bottle, you’ll never get it back in.

    Back in the day when we had 4 of 5 broadcast channels to choose from and they went off the air sometime after Johnny Carson, we were quite happy to take our video on their terms. Then, the big three networks schedules really meant something, since that was what we were going to have to watch. Now we’ve got hundreds of cable channels and the networks are hemorrhaging viewers. Look at what’s happened to the nightly news cast viewership if you don’t believe me.

    So it’s not surprising that the major networks have begun streaming their own content online with limited commercials, and that other companies like Revision3 have sprung up offering fresh video content developed for web delivery. Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks and owner of HDNet, an HDTV Cable Network posted this on his blog yesterday:

    The ala carting of video on the net will benefit those who enable the search for content and can monetize that search. The economics of supporting content will force independently produced Internet content to be dumbed down to levels that create a perfect match for Youtube. There will be SEOs that come up with arbitrage solutions that will drive traffic to parked videos. Content creators will partner with SEOs and create budgets that reflect the CPMs they can earn in and around the video hosted on Youtube against the costs of the SEO driving traffic to the video. SEO support will be the only even marginally effective way to create baseline traffic to a video/show.

    One can imagine why Mark Cuban might see that as a disaster. And the truth is, he could be right. He goes on:

    Bottom line is that something has got to give. Business as usual is not going to cut it. The question is whether the dollars the big TV and media companies are creating online from the streaming of their current TV lineups are sustainable incremental dollar? Or is streaming the video a collateralized video obligation? The video equivalent of the collateralized debt behind the sub prime mess. Money that looks good while its coming in, but could lead to far, far bigger problems?

    The thing is that people like Revision3 are developing premium content and using the web to deliver. I’ve been a subscriber to Tekzilla, Systm and a few of their other shows for sometime and I’m impressed. In many ways they’ve reinvented the old TechTV channel, online, and then surpassed the quality of its content.

    Jim Louderback, the CEO of Revision3 (disclosure: Jim and I attended college at UVM together and are friends according to Facebook & Twitter…) posted this comment on Cuban’s blog post:

    If you’re getting 1/8th the ads, then you need to figure out how to produce content for less than 1/8th the cost.

    Typical broadcast non-fiction (not HDNet) costs around $300k an hour. Here at http://www.Revision3.com we’re producing 15 shows for about a tenth of that hourly rate.

    And the revenue’s coming in now too. But we haven’t made money by simply cow-pathing existing advertising models, we’ve adapted Howard Stern’s sponsorship and product placement model, with overtones borrowed from Ed Sullivan.

    Our targeted shows are gaining audiences daily, we have loads of repeat viewers, and our advertisers are seeing amazing engagement and action results.

    It’s not cable. It’s not broadcast. It’s a new medium. Those who simply cow-path existing media onto the new platform are doomed to failure. Just like magazines who slapped their print stories on the web back in the nineties (I know, I was one of them who did that).

    Oh, and when it comes to SEO, I think it’ll develop a new offshoot, which I call YTO – for YouTube Optimization. It’ll share elements of SEO, but its a new discipline.

    A new medium…yes, indeed I can see that. I think perhaps we have entered a new frontier on the web. Until now, video was at best a novelty on the web. Now with the increased bandwidth we all have, improvements in technology and the prevalence of digital video recorders, everyone can be come a broadcaster.

    Have a look at the video that Revision3, such as Tekzilla and think about what you’d like to see. Let’s say a home and garden show over the net. Or a show on how to tune your sportscars balky Webber carb. It can all happen, and it doesn’t have to happen in grainy YouTube videos.