All Things Cahill

Category: Web 2.0

  • Monetize This…

    As our economic downturn continues, it’s become very apparent that the buzzword for the year is going to be Monetize.  That means just about anything we’re doing (as web developers, designers, community managers, etc.) is going to be expected to pick up the yoke and plow the fields from the start.  That’s a lot to ask in a field like social media and social networking where the 800 lb. gorilla, Facebook, has just entered it’s 5th year, with 110 million registered users, but has yet to produce a net profit.

    110 million users, no net profit – that’s right.  

    Esteban Glas shares my concerns on this in his post “Train Wreck: Social Media to meet Commerce in 2009.”

    I’m prepared to witness a ton of experiments that will make me want to go and live as a hermit in some obscure and inaccessible cave with no internet access. Dire situations require desperate measures. This can be the recipe for:

    1.  unprecedented originality or, much more frequently:
    2.  nasty efforts that smell, look and taste like desperation.

    That is exactly the smell I am picking up around the web right now: desperation.  

    The other day I saw a post on twitter that astounded me from Mack Collier (via Tony Santos):

    “Communities do not come together around the idea of being monetized.”

    My comment to that was very simple:

    “Smart onliine communities realize they risk becoming unsupported or orphan communities if they can’t be monetized. “

    I’ve seen it in several situations where an absentee owners community was purchased and the community was generally thankful to know that someone was placing some value on them, and at the very least, would continue to pay the server bills.  Notably, the Reel-Time.com was generally quite positive during the Namemedia.com acquistion of the site last May for exactly that reason.  I don’t know how many realized how close they came to becoming digital orphans, had that deal not gone through.

    The problem is that not all our actions can (or should) be subject to monetization.  Sometimes our actions are simply for the betterment of the community, and that, in the end will have an affect on our bottom line, but we’ll have a hard time tying that action into a concrete line item on a balance sheet.  

    The other problem we end up with is that ideas get rushed through to market before they’re even half baked.  Again, I’m seeing some initiatives online that I can tell were never specified properly, or even run through a few rudimentary use cases, because if they had, they never would have seen the light of day.  

    Yes, we should be able to monetize the sites and services we provide.  This isn’t public radio, it’s commerce and we have every right to make money of our creations.  That said, the question of who really owns a community comes into play.  I’ve often heard cries of “free speech” while I moderate my forums, and my answer is almost universal: it is not free, and I have the hosting bills to prove it.

    We’re going to be seeing a lot of new “monetization” experiments this year.  We need to stand firm, shine a light into the dark places, and call out the efforts that are wrong.  Social media is still an experiment, and if we don’t take ownership of it, we’re in danger of someone creating a mutant virus that will infect the lab and kill us all.


  • Facebook Privacy Settings – a Must Read for Facebook Users

    The Unofficial Facebook Blog brings us a post that all Facebook users should read “10 Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know.”  It’ll help you navigate the proper settings for your Facebook account and help you to find a way to show your work compatriots one level of info, while showing your personal friends another.  It’ll also allow you to friend your family members without worrying they’ll be reading about all your antics with your friends (Hint, hint, hint – Christina?  This one’s for you…).

    A sample:

    I can’t tell you how many people are not aware of their friend lists. For those not aware of what friend lists are, Facebook describes them as a feature which allows “you to create private groupings of friends based on your personal preferences. For example, you can create a Friend List for your friends that meet for weekly book club meetings. You can create Friend Lists for all of your organizational needs, allowing you to quickly view friends by type and send messages to your lists.”

    There are a few very important things to remember about friend lists:

    • You can add each friend to more than one friend group
    • Friend groups should be used like “tags” as used elsewhere around the web
    • Friend Lists can have specific privacy policies applied to them

    I’ve been working with social media for a long time, and frankly, I’ve seen few things that were so convoluted and hard to understand as Facebook Privacy Settings. I suspect the space shuttle, or even an IBM Websphere server might fall into that group, but not much else.

  • Open Discussion: How to Crowd Source Weekly Fishing Reports

    cape_led-july27

    (Update: In thinking about this, I believe my fundemental problem is that while I’ve crowd sourced content generation, I am now at a point where I need to crowd source some of the content entry, formatting and editing tasks…)

    I’ve been editing the Fishwire Reports at Reel-Time.com since 1995.  The task has generally been hugely manual, requiring tons of my time, most of which has happened over the years between the hours of 4am and 9am on Friday mornings.  In short, a really bad system.

    The Scenario:

    We cover 6 distinct regions throughout the northeast.  Each area is the responsibility of a different writer, although last year I wrote the reports for two regions.  The reports each contain around 6 subregions, such as “Boston Harbor” or “The Cape Cod Canal.”

    Generally on Tuesdays I send an email out to my sponsors (generally area fishing guides) and regular contributors.  Then over the next two days the reports and images come back in via email.  If the weather is good, I probably have close to enough for a report.  If not, I go into our forum and look for posts that contain info from the general area.

    I do a ton of cut and paste, much of which requires me to use notepad as an intermediary, since half the email comes in with nasty word or other formatting embeded.  Also, I get many of the images at full res, as many of the guides don’t have or don’t know how to use Photoshop.  Hence photo editing is a huge component of the task.  The images are generally optimized, have a caption added, and get a photo credit.

    Then I put together the best of the images to use as the story leads for the homepage.

    The current system, if it could be called that, is custom coded php that dates back to the dark ages.  I plan to move most of the non-forum components of the site to a highly customized version of WordPress that we use for many  of our sites.   If needed, I have the capability to make WordPress stand on its head and dance.  I do a LOT of WordPress development.

    The Question:

    My big problem is that I only see moderate improvement in the process no matter what I do.  Essentially, we’re managing a crowd sourced report here.  Many contributors, a writer, a photo editor,  and an editor.   How are other people doing stuff like this without having to use so many different skills?

    The readers and sponsors really like the personal touch the writer gives the report.  I wouldn’t want to go to just a directory of reports, that’s been tried and failed repeatedly.  In fact, our presentation is one of the big differentiators.

    Can you see a better way?  Do you have examples of how others are doing this in new and better ways?   Or should I just look at getting a couple interns to make it work manually?

    As always, I look forward to the shining light of your collective wisdom…

    (Oh, I’ve had a suggestion: why don’t you just do a blog – the short version to the answer is that I did that in 2004 as a test and found that only a very small subset of sponsors would post, so I ended up cutting and pasting again.  Plus, the subset that did post was way over represented on our site.)

  • A Few Interesting Links

    webtoolsIn celebration of  “WordPress Thank a Plugin Developer Day” I’m posting a few interesting  links.

  • Advice for Those New to New Media – Specialize

    My father used to tell a story from his youth, growing up in the depression with my Grandmother and my Great Aunt Sue, the family matriarch and a woman whose strength  I never fully appreciated in my youth.  There were rules which Aunt Sue used to keep the family together, and one of those was “No Day Laborers.”

    It was tough times in Dorchester, Ma during the Great Depression.  As it turned out, that rule worked quite well for the family.  It was also taken loosely to also banish “jack of all trades.”

    What’s that got to do with new media?  Well, I see a lot of  “new media specialists” in twitter, on friendfeed, etc. these days.  It reminds me of the distant past when I started working on the web, I started as a webmaster (you haven’t heard that job description for a while, have you?).  You see, then the field was so new, it was the province of the generalist.  We had to know a little about everything, from server management, to installing code libraries, to writing and debugging scripts, SEO, SEM, community management, advertising, etc.  Each of those areas of knowledge now is its own particular specialty, with people who devote virtually all their time to thinking about it.  In that transition, the need for a real webmaster died. (more…)

  • The Little Things – Executing a Presidential Site Update

    For those of us that live and work in the world of the web, we know how important launching your new site at the right time is.  Today we saw an execution like no other.  While President Barack Obama was sworn in, a site update for Whitehouse.gov was launched, and it’s a good one.

    My initial assessment is this: the change was well timed, prefectly executed, and seems to offer all the basics we could want, from a very strong call to action, to a new Presidential blog.

    The site is built in ASP.net, and though the source code doesn’t credit a generator system, I see some indicators that point to them possibly using an Ektron CMS400 system, although the code looks much cleaner than any Ektron site I’ve seen before.

    Whatever the system, my congrats to the team pulled it together!  I expect with this level of execution, we’ll see a site with frequent updates and as well managed as we hope the country will be.

  • Social Media and Minorities

    Something has been been bothering me for a while about Social Media and the new marketing attention it gets.  It’s seemed to me that we’ve given a very small group of our customers/readers and even the internet at large unprecedented importance.  You’ve got people marketing types from the highest circles of management reaching out to try to solve support problems for customers.  

    I think the thing that has been bothering me is that this creates a two tiered experience.  The squeaky internet wheel gets first class service, mandated from the top, whereas the rest of us get something less.

    I could go on, and I’d planned to.  However, I think Esteban Glas has covered the issue perfectly in his blog yesterday:

    The problem is that there is a lot of noise in the conversation. And that noise is increasing; probably more rapidly than the signal. The real problem then becomes how to tell what in that ocean of conversations is of value and what not. So we end up with “judgment”. Nasty.

    All of us in the social media world need to make judgments about where the important conversations reside. And that is an error-prone process. Thus we end up in a conundrum: we can’t possibly pay attention to all conversations, so we make a selection and we end up either listening to the vocal minorities or just to those that agree with us (the infamous Echo Chamber).

    You really need to read his full post.  Its by far the best bit I’ve read on Social Media in months.

  • The Brand You is Dead. « eyecube

    The Brand You is Dead. Long Live The Brand You Build. « eyecube.

    Right on the money…to once again quote from Dr. Zhivago “The personal life is dead in Russia – history has killed it!”

    This is the single biggest thing that I see people pushing back against when it comes to Social Media – we resent the relentless injection of uber-egos into the mix.  The New Year is here, and with it, we find a new reality; one in which we get down to business and that business will rely on us building our brands, because in the end, that’s what we’re supposed to be selling.

    Over the past couple months, I’ve seen the backlash building, but this puts it into perspective.  The personal brand is dead in America…the economy killed it.

  • The DeFacto Contact Hubs

    It’s probably not news to most of you that we have defacto places we go to contact people;  Facebook for the personal and LinkedIn for the professional.  Over the past could years, LinkedIn was a pretty active place for me, even though I found it to basically be a spot to hang your resume online and not much more.

    Facebook was generally a wasteland for me.  I’m a bit older, and from my generation, it seemed the only folks I really knew were the other early adopters of my age, like Jim Louderback or John Decker.   Your see, when I graduated from College, we didn’t have PCs, and the majority of computer programming was done in Basic or Cobol.  Some of us got into tech, while others learned to avoid it; many  missed the tech wave.   In the past couple weeks, though, I’ve seen a huge trend towards my college friends moving onto Facebook.  In that period I’ve connected with at least 20 folks I haven’t seen in 28 years.  That’s a long time no matter how you look at it. (more…)

  • A Great Big Social Media Bubble

    Over the past couple weeks we’re seeing a lot of folks coming around to the view I express last year: 

    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.

    As the astute Esteban Glas points out here, both Robert  Scoble and  Joel Mark Whitt decry that which Witt calls “Social Media Incest”.   As I have said many times before: when the when the communication in the medium is mostly about the medium, the medium has failed.

    (more…)