The average job tenure of the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) continues to decline and is now less than half that of the CEO’s average of 7.2 years. It’s tough being a CMO in today’s fractured media landscape and its ephemeral social media trends — repeatable and predictable marketing processes are hard to find.

I recently met Grad Conn, CMO of Microsoft USA and I was impressed by what he had to say and his approach. He was speaking at a media roundtable dinner organized by Sprinklr — an enterprise-ready social media tool set used by Conn and a team of more than 150 social media managers.

The first thing Conn told me was that he has been in his job nearly twice long as the industry average. Here’s some of my notes from the conversation and some insights into Conn’s approach to social media.

- Conn said that he had to accept some harsh facts that much of what he had learned about marketing in school and as a former P&G product marketing executive no longer worked or had lost much of its effectiveness. 

- To understand the social media platforms such as Twitter it is important to be active in them.

- It is important to be responsive to any complaints and to give the social manager managers the authority to quickly respond and to take conversations to a private channel.

- Standardizing on a set of tools and metrics is important. The changing nature of digital media should be supported by the toolset and integrated into the management dashboards.

- The media landscape is constantly changing that’s why the CMO has to be involved and needs to publish a lot. Conn is very active online and offline as a speaker. 

Foremski’s Take: Grad Conn is a near perfect example of what a tech company CMO should be like.

- He is not afraid of attention — look at the way he dresses.

- He is active in social media, blogging, video and is a frequent speaker at conferences.

- He has built a social media center and trained hundreds of social media managers to act independently and independently react to any crisis with full trust of the management.

- He knows what tools to use and how to use them and why. 

- He understands that what works today in marketing might not work for long and that new marketing processes will likely be needed.

- He can make a quick decision and be confident that it is the right one for that particular time. 

Marketing is most definitely an art otherwise you could just buy your marketing outcomes from a menu. And like all the arts it requires experience and practice. It cannot be achieved by managing a process — a machine can do that.

Most CMOs have mostly none of the above qualities demonstrated by Conn. Most CMOs are extremely cautious and curiously are publicity shy. But they know how to keep their CVs updated.

[ A version of this article first appeared on ZDNet: In My Humble Opinion.] 

If Twitter were to falter much further, it would create a big problem for the city of San Francisco and its mayor Ed Lee. The city granted Twitter a controversial tax break on payroll taxes and sales of shares in return for it agreeing to stay in San Francisco and move its headquarters to the Tenderloin -- one of the city's poorest districts.

Ed Lee is running for re-election this year and Twitter's financial problems could become a problem for his political campaign. His deal with Twitter has been criticized for helping millionaires while doing very little to help its underprivileged neighbors, and for being a burden on the city through lost taxes and lost services. 

San Francisco tax officials have said that the deal appears to be working and the mid-market area where Twitter is located has helped to attract businesses and additional taxes, with the total exceeding that lost to Twitter. However, those estimates don't include the tax savings on Twitter stock sales, which will likely be much higher than the payroll tax savings, estimated at around $55m over the eight-year deal. 

The lost Twitter money and the loss of future Twitter taxes,  if the company were to shrink and falter, could create a backlash in the city government and affect many other tech companies. The pro-tech Ed Lee administration has been favorable towards startups such as Uber and Airbnb despite local laws that ban such activities, giving those companies a much needed early break. 

If Twitter loses its competitive battles the city's many other tech companies will likely face a less friendly city administration. 

San Francisco is already battling a rising resentment of tech firms as rents continue to rise and giant buses distort neighborhoods as they ferry their workers to distant business campuses. 

- - -

Tax-break Tech Hiring a Bust in San Francisco's Tenderloin - New America Media

I had no idea this was happening but Mitzi Szereto drew my attention to this:

Facebook Cull Harming the Harmless | Errant Ramblings: Mitzi Szereto's Weblog

Facebook is culling any user profile from their site whom they do not consider to be of the “human” species, pets in particular. This includes many friends of mine, be they canine, feline, and ursine (including “stuffies” – ie those whose innards are not of the moist and pulpy variety). This cull also includes a large number of animal rescuers who do good and valuable work to help animals whose lives have been harmed by this apparently superior species known as HUMANS. 

There is a petition page looking for signatures:  Give us back pet profiles on Facebook - The Petition Site

A 2011 article in the UK newspaper The Telegraph claimed that one in ten pets has a profile on Facebook.

Chris Heuer and Giovanni Rodriguez.

I was there in 2006, on Chris Heuer and Kristie Wells's back porch when they first began discussing Social Media Club. Then Chris went on a giant global trek, like a Johnny Appleseed, setting up local Social Media Clubs everywhere.

Over 300 local chapters connected more than 500,000 people over the past seven years. That's a wonderful achievement. 

Chris and Kristie said they are stepping down from their current roles because they have new projects. On Facebook, Chris wrote:

"…and with that, Heuer, has left the building! I am no longer involved in Social Media Club operations after leaving the last 2 leadership groups.

For those of you who don't know, I registered the domain in March 2006 and went on a tour hosting round tables that summer and fall to get it started…. It was a very interesting and lesson filled ride for sure.

Wishing the board and amazing local chapter leaders much success in the future as the experiment continues to play out."

Kristie wrote a letter to the SMC community:

We are humbled and proud to have had the wonderful opportunity to work with you to build an organization responsible for the development of so many of today's social media leaders!

Social Media Club has always been our labor of love, but the 40+ hours a week needed from us to manage the global organization is just not sustainable as we also try to manage our full-time careers and family life. -

Dan Holden has a great write up here: Founders Wells and Heuer Leaving Social Media Club - Silicon Valley 411 

Wells and Heuer have left a lasting legacy, inspiring hundreds of people to commit to projects and start-ups in what for many years was the hottest market in Silicon Valley.

“Chris and Kristie were some of the first people I met when I arrived in the valley in 2005,” said author and start-up founder Tara Hunt. “Both were brilliant and generous and even before Social Media was a ‘thing’, they were working tirelessly to get companies to recognize that the future of marketing is social. I think we should all be grateful for their efforts.”

Kristie writes:

Chris and I have recently taken two new, very big and exciting roles; me as Director of Global Social Media and Customer Engagement at Ancestry.com, and Chris as Founder of AdHocnium (and a soon-to-be announced new startup).

I want to congratulate them on creating Social Media Club and I wish them luck in their new ventures. Check back here next week for details on Chris's new startup.

Watch Silicon Valley on PBS. See more from American Experience.

The superb American Experience documentary series on PBS finally cast its focus on Silicon Valley yesterday evening in an 82 minute program largely focused on the founders of Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel.

The heroes of the story are eight scientists, in mechanical, electrical, metallurgical, and optical engineering, and a chemist.

It's a story that takes place more than half-a-century ago, when the "traitorous eight" left  their employer Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory en masse because their boss, William Shockley, had become grossly egotistical and a horror to work with. He sounded like an early version of Steve Jobs, the Apple co-founder.

It was shocking to leave an employer, which is why they were called traitors. In those days loyalty was expected, as were the lifelong careers that companies provided. And it's this "traitorous" culture that continues to grow Silicon Valley, as people continually leave to create new startups.

American Experience also showed the close connection to the US Department of Defense and how military spending was the prime source of money for new ventures for a very long time.

Foremski's Take:

The American Experience "Silicon Valley" story ends in early 1970s with Intel's development of the 4040 microprocessor -- which signaled the official start of the "Digital Age." It ends about the time when the name "Silicon Valley" was used for the first time by journalist Don Hoefler in Electronic News.

The Silicon Valley that these eight men helped create is a far different place today, primarily there's no silicon chips being made. Over the past 40 years Silicon Valley would have needed a name change every five to 10 years.

In the 1980s it became a "PC Valley" as hundreds of PC companies and hard drive companies each competed for "just 10% share" of the market. In the 1990s it became a "Network Valley," or a "Communications Valley," with a "Multimedia Gulch" in San Francisco.

It's all about media...

Today it's a "Media Valley" whose top companies, such as Google and Facebook are better described as technology-enabled media publishers, and where thousands of startups create media technologies and related products and services.

Intel makes chips that are better described as media processors; Apple and other PC makers make computers that are essentially media hardware platforms that create as well as publish all types of media.

Silicon Valley has a massive media industry that's leaving New York's media industry in the dust.

Companies such as Google et al, don't like to be called media companies because they work with traditional media companies who think of them as tech companies and not as competitors.

Silicon Valley has become a giant Gutenberg Machine built from a vast array of powerful media technologies.

From movable type to programmable type...

Mass production of movable type was the innovation that Gutenberg pioneered more than half a millennium ago. Silicon Valley's Gutenberg machine is based on programmable type -- the publishing of any type of media content in manipulable forms and formats that can change dynamically in real-time.

And that giant Gutenberg Machine can be accessed in micro versions, pocket sized, enabling anyone to publish anything, at minuscule cost and with minimal effort.

The Internet is an advanced publishing technology. In it's first phase it allowed any content to be published to any type of computer screen that could display a web browser.

Now, any web browser or any connected app, can publish back. We've wired up the other end of the Internet -- it's now a two-way medium. 

If you thought the first version of the Internet was amazing, hang on to your hat because this two-way Internet will blow our minds in ways we can, and can't imagine. It's an incredibly innovative and creative space. And it's happening here -- in Silicon Valley.

That's a damning announcement by GM and it's not something that any company does in such a public manner. Many seemed to dismiss this event as GM being clueless about how to run social ad campaigns. But that's a poor argument because GM, like all large corporations, knows very well what works and what doesn't, it has sophisticated processes in place to track and measure every dollar they spend. Car companies are among the largest advertisers, if people think they aren't on top of their massive ad spend, they are dead wrong.

Andreas Ramos, a digital marketing consultant, makes some interesting observations about the comScore/Facebook report, which published case studies on Starbucks and Target's Facebook ad campaigns that appeared to show traction for their ad campaigns. But a closer examination shows some glaring problems with the published data:

Important data is missing: ROI, CPL, CPA. ComScore does not state cost-per-lead or cost-per-acquisition.

...

The lift in control groups also increased. Why would this happen? The control should be flat. The document does not explain this.

...

If you carry out a massive campaign, there will be lift, even if it's 0.58%. After all, FB itself showed a billion ads to get 0.038% engagement for their privacy vote.

He shares some of his own data.

I have data for a $2.7 million 60-day campaign for a large nationwide bank. Ads were placed in Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Facebook. Over one billion ads were shown.

The CPLs: Google at $5.78;
Yahoo at $4.20;
Bing at $3.94;
and Facebook at $57.06.

There were 2.26X ads in FB over Google (383.7m vs 169.8m ads), but Google's CPLs were within the target CPL and thus profitable. Google's CPLs were 10% of the cost of FB CPLs. FB's CPLs were not profitable. If the money spent in FB had been spent in Google, it would have produced 19,700 more leads.

Foremski's Take:

OK, we don't have a control group here other than competing ad platforms, but these are interesting results and underline the type of data that companies such as GM are looking at on a minute by minute basis.

Looking at competing ad platforms is a far more important measure of Facebook's performance than control groups. Control groups don't compete for advertising dollars.

Facebook needs to figure out what does work. It's not making money in mobile, and on the desktop its ad performance is weak. It can still make money but can it make enough to support its share price?

This is a very serious issue for Facebook because there are a lot more companies that have suspended their Facebook ad campaigns without having issued a media alert as GM did. And there will be plenty more companies that will find reasons to delay their Facebook ad spend.

Facebook has been trying to manage the financial expectations of Wall Street analysts, it now needs to manage the expectations of its advertisers -- and help them with tools, shared knowledge, best practices, etc.

In confusing times like these, when there is a cacophony of conflicting reports and opinions around investing in Facebook, I like to go back to the fundamentals. Fundamentals cut through hyperbole and understatement because they are just that: fundamentals.

Instead of the current share price consider these key points:

Columnist Larry Magid in summed it up perfectly :

"I don't know what Facebook is worth today, and I don't care. Because that type of short-term thinking has nothing to do with what it takes to build a great company... When I look at Facebook, I don't think about price-to-earnings ratio, but of how it's changed the world for both better and worse, and how nearly a billion Facebook users are using it to enhance their lives and the lives of those they care about."

Whether Facebook's ads are performing to their optimum or not does not concern me. The fundamentals are there, and the company has plenty of time to tweak, innovate, and adapt its business model. Buying shares in Facebook is a long-term bet on those solid fundamentals.

David Benolt in The Wall Street Journal, reported:

The social networking giant has just added five more lead investment banks to its IPO from the original six, according to an updated filing. On top of that, Facebook added another 20 investment banks that will get a piece of the action.

The move is the opposite to Google’s IPO, which shunned Wall Street banks as much as possible.

In the lead up to its IPO, Google reduced the number of banks involved, cutting Goldman Sachs. That left just Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse First Boston to offer shares through a very rare and unusual IPO, using a Dutch auction process.

This was carefully designed to cut out Wall Street banks and create a level playing field where the IPO shares were available to small and large investors.

Larry Page wrote in his Founders’ Letter (he highlighted this passage in italics to stress its importance):

It is important to us to have a fair process for our IPO that is inclusive of both small and large investors. It is also crucial that we achieve a good outcome for Google and its current shareholders. This has led us to pursue an auction-based IPO for our entire offering.

Auction did not disrupt Wall Street

However, Google’s attempt to disrupt Wall Street’s normal IPO practices with its auction, and its refusal to include more investment banks, was not successful.

Google faced a big problem in that it had to persuade existing shareholders to offer up enough shares to create a decent sized market but the offer price was uncertain and so the numbers of shares available became uncertain too.

The result was that Google was forced to cut its offering price before the IPO and the size of the offering because the auction process did not meet existing shareholder expectations on price.

Google failed in its goal of achieving “a good outcome for Google and its current shareholders.”

Facebook isn’t willing to take a similar risk and leave money on the table.

By including so many banks in its IPO, it’s making sure that small and large banks, rather than “small and large investors,” as in Google’s case, have access to its IPO shares and that this method will bring a better price for its existing shareholders.

Opposite strategies

Google wanted to have a fairly large float of shares so that it would discourage speculators. In its S-1 filing, Mr Page wrote:

Many companies going public have suffered from unreasonable speculation, small initial share float, and stock price volatility that hurt them and their investors in the long run.

Here again, Facebook has chosen the opposite strategy: it reduced the number of shares offered by one half – it now has a much smaller initial share float than initially planned.

This smaller share float is guaranteed to increase volatility and produce a high initial valuation. With smaller numbers of shares distributed among a larger group of banks demand will far exceed supply.

GOOG$ shares went out at $85 and closed the day at $100.34.

Airbnb, the rent-out-your-home service had a very bad and very public problem last year when a renter trashed and robbed a home.

Whit.li. an API designed for collaborative applications, is addressing this problem with its API, which looks at a person's social media activity and determines a trust score.

Jack Holt, founder of Whit.li writes:

The things you tell the world (city, age, etc.) and those you do not--specifically, your choice of words in your status updates or reviews.

You could call it the, "dependability" or, "reliability" score.

... we track your use of ingestion and perception words, which allows us to divine a particle of your personality and attitude. Combined with other factors we calculate like lifestage, class, income and more, we can paint a pretty good picture of who you really are.

We have a psychologist on retainer who has pointed us to research and, with our own testing, has validated the correlations we use. But we are early, so the algos will surely improve greatly as we track their effectiveness in apps.

You can test it against your Facebook activity.

Foremski's Take:

It's a reasonable approach to use social media activity to gauge 'trust.' However, only a tiny number of people are active in social media compared with the large number of people engaging in consumer-to-consumer services.

And will the headlines of articles that people share be counted and the wording used against them?

People who trashed and robbed peoples' homes won't be found through their social media trails. There's little protection to be gained from that type of behavior using this approach.

Also, Whit.li sort of sounds like "white lie," which is not encouraging when it come to matters of trust.

You can set a status 'mood' message, you can text message, use it as a group chat system, you can share files, photos, your computer screen. Plus, you can talk with people plus video calls, and set up videoconferences with several people.

There's a huge and active user base, more than 30 million people use it at any one time, and there's close to 500 million user accounts. Skype has a payment system, and has a billing relationship with tens of millions of people who regularly top up their accounts to make overseas calls.

So why isn't Skype in the media and blogger conversations about social networks? Why aren't it's numbers of users counted by social media analysts?

- It wouldn't take much for Microsoft to add a few bits and pieces to turn Skype into a full fledged social network with all the bells and whistles. And with many advantages.

- It's much more natural for me to share photos and videos with family and friends via a Skype relationship because I'm talking to them there anyway.

-Similarly, using Skype to share work with small groups of business colleagues feels natural, and there's no need to create 'circles' and special groups.

- The structure of Skype makes it easy to keep your activities separate from each other and from others. There's no need to set and reset privacy controls. Privacy is baked in.

- Skype isn't trying to publish every aspect of your online activity all the time.

- Google doesn't get to spider your content, and that means there's no need to fight the SEO spammers who are looking for boosts in their rankings.

- There's no advertising.

- Most people find Skype easy to use while many find Facebook and Twitter confusing.

- Even though most are "users" and pay nothing Skype isn't trying to monetize them, the premium users pay for the lot.

- I'd rather keep my mom engaged on Skype than have her on Facebook and that's also true for a lot of my family.

- And it's a good place to engage in business because Skype is a distraction-free environment, it's well suited for work.

Skype has the potential to be the dark horse in the social network platform battles. It's high time for it to be included in this conversation.

Social media agency Umpf released the results of a survey of about 2,400 UK consumers with active profiles in the form of an infographic: (via Vikki Chowney at Econsultancy.)

The infographic is not perfect, the choice of shapes and colors can make similar sized percentages look very different in size so please take a look at the numbers.

Youtube does pretty well, it's not often included in discussions about social media. Should other platforms be considered too? Say, Amazon where lots of people write reviews and engage with one another?

In some anecdotal cases, the number of users, active and actual, could be as small as one-third. And nearly one-half of user accounts could be fake or contain no user profiles.

No user profiles means very little usable data for marketing or advertising campaigns. This is a huge hole in social media platforms.

It means corporate marketers and advertisers will not be able to reach and engage with the numbers they expect, resulting in increased costs and a discouraging ROI.

If corporations aren't able to use social media to reach large numbers of consumers, the value of platforms such as Facebook will be severely diminished.

How large is this problem of fake and empty user profiles?

Here is an analysis performed by Kevin Kelly, a former editor of Wired magazine and a book author, on 560,000 people that have him in their G+ "circles."

Where did these half million people come from? And who are they?

With the help of my research assistant Camille Cloutier, we randomly sampled my great circle...

Conclusion: Most of the half million people following me on Google+ are ciphers. They have signed up, but have not made a single public post, or posted their own image or a profile, or made a comment.

The Technium: The Ciphers of Social Media

He and his assistant discovered that only 30% published anything on G+ and only 6% were "outright spammers." But the largest group he classed as,

Ghosts. 36% had not even filled out a profile.

Mr Kelly pointed to a study by two journalists at Popular Mechanics that only 25% of their Twitter followers were real, and 49% were fake or spam.

And this is a widespread problem:

Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich claims to have 1.3 million followers. But last August a group at Indiana University did an analysis of some of the 2012 Presidential candidates and found that 76% of Gingrich's 1.3 million Twitter accounts lacked a profile biography.

The rise in fake users is directly related to corporate marketing campaigns that aim for large numbers of followers, "likes," and to show high levels of online engagement.

This has given rise to a growing services sector where it's easy to buy "friends" and "followers," by the thousands, and "likes" by the tens of thousands, for a low fee. This can jumpstart a marketing campaign if it makes it onto a top trending list. Buying such services will also help contractors meet performance goals set by clients and trigger payments. It can be a lucrative arbitrage.

The result however, is considerable inflation in the numbers of users of all the major social networks and platforms.

The operators of the networks: Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc, must know who is real and who isn't. They have usage data that shows telltale signs of a fake account. They also know how much information a user has disclosed, and how many user profiles are empty.

What's not known is how they count the many types of users, how rigorous is their analysis? There is no transparency on the single most important pool of information for their commercial customers.

Accurate data on social media users is essential. It's the foundation of all successful social media marketing and advertising campaigns: the precise targeting of related groups of users with their interests.

If large numbers of accounts are fake, and equally large numbers have no profile information, it means that there is a far less commercial value in social media networks than total numbers would suggest.

Clearly, there is a lot more research to be done but equally clear is the fact that you can't trust -- by a truly massive margin -- the numbers for things such as "likes" of a corporate Facebook page; followers of a corporate Twitter account; numbers of views of a "viral" video, etc.

It used to be said that in advertising, 50% of your budget is wasted but you don't know which half.

In social media, 50% of your marketing could be wasted trying to reach fake or empty profile users.

Or to put it another way, your chances of social engagement for your marketing campaign are immediately cut in half, right out of the gate!

With the possibility that nearly 50% of social network users could be fake or empty user accounts -- this is a massive issue for social media marketing.

Social media marketing mavens and gurus will have to reign in their rhetoric and reset expectations for social marketing campaigns. But will they?

Will they write blog posts and tweet about this important issue? Will they be authentic in their communication of these issues, as they so often advise their clients to be?

Or will the social media marketing promoters line up with the platforms and avoid this issue? Both groups share a common interest: selling social media marketing programs.

MediaPost - Facebook Correlated with Low Self Esteem

The study, titled “‘They Are Happier and Having Better Lives than I Am’: The Impact of Using Facebook on Perceptions of Others’ Lives,” ... revealed that students who spend a lot of time on Facebook are relatively more likely to perceive other people as having better lives than themselves.

According to the authors, “Those who have used Facebook longer agreed more that others were happier, and agreed less that life is fair, and those spending more time on Facebook each week agreed more that others were happier and had better lives. Furthermore, those that included more people whom they did not personally know as their Facebook ‘friends’ agreed more that others had better lives.”

Meanwhile, people who spent less time on Facebook and more time in “real” socializing with friends tended to be happier than subjects who used Facebook intensively.

Earlier studies have found big differences in the behavior of students who spend long hours online. MediaPost reporter Erik Saas points to a 2010 study that links students who spend a lot of time on social network sites like Facebook as:

"...60% more likely to have four or more sexual partners; 62% more likely to have tried cigarettes; 69% more likely to be binge drinkers; 69% more likely to have had sex; 79% more likely to have tried alcohol; 84% more likely to have used illicit drugs; and 94% more likely to have been in a physical fight."

For some students, I'm sure those numbers will sound more like an advertisement for a good time, rather than as a deterrent to the online life.

The reason for the publicity blitz is that once Facebook files for an IPO it enters a quiet period during which it can't make any public statements that could be construed as marketing the company's stock.

But why now? That's also carefully managed. Facebook doesn't want to leave too much money on the table when it IPOs. The best time to IPO is when business is growing fast enough to convince new investors of a generous upside, but not too soon so as not to lose out on rapid gains in valuation as a private company.

The best timing for an IPO is just before a peak in company fortunes and when growth settles down to more prosaic levels.

In secondary markets, which allow wealthy investors to buy Facebook shares in private transactions, the company's valuation is about $78 billion (Sharespost) and it has remained around that level since September. It has flat-lined after spectacular jumps in valuation from around $7 billion two years ago. It's a good time to IPO.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Facebook plans to raise $10 billion at a $100 billion valuation, providing about a 25% premium for current shareholders.

But how much upside will be left for new investors? Clearly, social networks aren't going away but what are some of the more troubling signs that new investors will have to consider?

Here are just a few of the risks that they'll be acquiring:

- People like to share on Facebook but new members tend to share more than those that have been on the service for a while. But how large is the decline in sharing by Facebook users? The "frictionless" sharing feature that Facebook introduced recently does a lot of the sharing for the user. However, this masks any decline in overt sharing, which would be viewed as a negative trend by analysts.

[What if people stop sharing? Here's Facebook's OpenGraph | ZDNet]

- People spend nearly four times as much time per month on Facebook than Google, according to Comscore. But Facebook has failed to monetize that time to the same extent as Google. Is this an intrinsic characteristic of social network sites that ads will always perform badly?

- People leave social network sites. Take a look at Friendster, MySpace there's little loyalty and people will disengage as rapidly as they joined. Investors have to decide if Facebook will be able to retain members over a long period.

- Facebook will face higher operating costs over the short term because of the short supply of hard drives for its data centers due to Thailand floods. It will have to buy the servers it needs from IT vendors, rather than being able to build its own. Will this affect performance and anger users? Increased costs will make Facebook's financial performance less attractive.

- Is social media fatigue becoming widespread? George Colony, CEO of Forrester Research claims that social networks are running out of people, and that those members are running out of hours to keep engaged.

[Social networking's salad days are ending, Forrester says | Deep Tech - CNET News]

- Can management operate at the same level within a public company? As a private company Facebook can share key financial metrics internally, and that gives its business groups important information on how they are doing. Public companies legally can't share important financial data with insiders and that can be a big problem, especially for an online company that must respond in real-time to changing business conditions.

Max Levchin, co-founder of PayPal mentioned this to me as a key challenge when PayPal went public. How will becoming a public company affect Facebook's performance?

- As Facebook brings in new ways to monetize its audience, will those efforts degrade the user experience? WIll it put people off so that they leave or visit less frequently?

These are just some of the risks that Facebook plans to outsource to new investors.

That didn't happen. And while citizen journalists in the form of bloggers are around, they tend not to break any original stories. In fact, social media has become a distributor, and an amplifier of mass media, an effect I dubbed SoDOMM, (Social Distribution Of Mass Media).

Mvelase Peppetta, points to Facebook's release of its top 40 shared news stories in 2011:

1. Satellite Photos of Japan, Before and After the Quake and Tsunami (New York Times)
   
   
2. What teachers really want to tell parents (CNN)
   
   
3. No, your zodiac sign hasn't changed (CNN)
   
   
4. Parents, don't dress your girls like tramps (CNN)
   
   
5. (video) - Father Daughter Dance Medley (Yahoo)
   
   
6. At funeral, dog mourns the death of Navy SEAL killed in Afghanistan (Yahoo)
   
   
7. You'll freak when you see the new Facebook (CNN)
   
   
8. Dog in Japan stays by the side of ailing friend in the rubble (Yahoo)
   
   
9. Giant crocodile captured alive in Philippines (Yahoo)
   
   
10. New Zodiac Sign Dates: Ophiuchus The 13th Sign? (Huffington Post)
    
    
11. Parents keep child's gender under wraps (Yahoo)
    
    
12. How to Talk to Little Girls (Huffington Post)
    
    
13. Stop Coddling the Super-Rich (New York Times)
    
    
14. Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior (Wall Street Journal)
    
    
15. (video) - Twin Baby Boys Have A Conversation! (Yahoo)
    
    
16. Man robs bank to get medical care in jail (Yahoo)
    
    
17. Why You're Not Married (Huffington Post)
    
    
18. A Sister's Eulogy for Steve Jobs (New York Times)
    
    
19. Ryan Dunn Dead: 'Jackass' Star Dies In Car Crash (Huffington Post)
    
    
20. Scientists warn California could be struck by winter 'superstorm' (Yahoo)
    
    
21. Notes From a Dragon Mom (New York Times)
    
    
22. A Message to Women From a Man: You Are Not "Crazy" (Huffington Post)
    
    
23. Obama's and Bush's effects on the deficit in one graph (Washington Post)
    
    
24. Penn State, my final loss of faith (Washington Post)
    
    
25. Golden-Voiced Homeless Man Captivates Internet (Yahoo)
    
    
26. The most typical face on the planet (Yahoo)
    
    
27. Widespread destruction from Japan earthquake, tsunamis (CNN)
    
    
28. Permissive parents: Curb your brats (CNN)
    
    
29. A father's day wish: Dads, wake the hell up!(CNN)
    
    
30. (video) - Laughing Baby Loves Ripping Paper! (Yahoo)
    
    
31. Epic Cover Letter: How To Get Hired For Your Dream Job (PICTURE) (Huffington Post)
    
    
32. New Zodiac sign dates: Don't switch horoscopes yet (Washington Post)
    
    
33. Things Babies Born in 2011 Will Never Know (Yahoo)
    
    
34. The Psychology of Revenge: Why We Should Stop Celebrating Osama Bin Laden's Death (Huffington Post)
    
    
35. (photo gallery) - 'Where Children Sleep' (New York Times)
    
    
36. Quake moved Japan coast 8 feet, shifted Earth's axis (CNN)
    
    
37. Steve Jobs, Apple founder, dies (CNN)
    
    
38. China's latest craze: dyeing pets to look like other wild animals (CNN)
    
    
39. Grant Hill's Response to Jalen Rose (New York Times)
    
    
40. Steve Jobs's Patents (New York Times)

Please see:

SaturdayPost: McLuhan's Relevance In Today's Media Mess Age...

Some Thoughts On The Social Distribution Of Mass Media...(SoDOMM)

Edelman Barometer Trend: Corporations And Social Responsibility - SVW

Buddy Media helps corporations set up and run their presence on a wide range of social networks.

From Buddy Media:

We are in the midst of a massive shift online from a search and intent-based world to a social, people-based world. The last three years were about the consumer side of social platforms, as we watched Facebook, Zynga and Twitter grow exponentially.

The next three years will about the enterprise side of social, and how companies engage and grow their businesses by tapping into these massive platforms. Buddy Media plans to help accelerate this movement by providing our clients easy-to-use and powerful tools to help them tap into these social platforms to increase revenues, find new customers, and build deeper relationships with current customers and more.

Foremski's Take: This is a good example of a key trend: the flood of corporate media that will be hitting social networks over the coming years.

[Please see: Social Media Is Not Corporate Media - SVW]

Buddy Media has some big VC firms behind it which means lots of other VC firms will, sheep-like, jump onto other, similar investments. That ups the pressure on corporations to be very active in social media. But corporate media is not social media -- businesses should be listening to the conversations rather than trying to actively engage users.

[Please see: I Don't Want A Social Media Relationship With My Hard Drive - SVW]

What will happen to social networks as more and more corporations feel the need to "engage" and become desperate to do something in social media?

Clearly, social media won't be the same experience for users that it is now, and that first attracted them to social networks.

Will corporate media make social media better? It's unlikely. Even those corporations that take a light approach are at the mercy of the corporations that take a heavy approach and end up alienating millions of people towards corporate media on social networks.

My prediction is that people will move to less visible communities, where they can hang out with others, in places that aren't in full view of the corporate eye -- which is ever vigilant and ever wanting to become "part of the conversation."

Five years on there are active clubs in more than 250 cities, a stunning testament to the stubborn and persistent efforts of Chris and Kristie.

I spoke with them about what they would like to see happen over the next five years:

- More integration between the chapters. Kristie was saying that it's been difficult keeping up with the activities of each club.

- More coordination between chapters. One idea is to choose a theme and have each chapter contribute to the discussion. "We could see how, say the subject of privacy is perceived around the world by having each club discuss the topic and produce a report."

- Collect more dues by making some of the content available only to members. The money would go to provide a publishing platform and pay for half-a-dozen or so staff to help with administration.

- More centralized admin and with some rules and best practices. Krisitie conceded that this might push some clubs to go their own way but there would be tremendous gains by getting the rest into a loose but coordinated infrastructure.

I took part in a short video interview series that will be published soon. One question was about the disappointments of "social media" over the past five or more years.

My answer was that when I started in mid-2004, there was a real excitement in the air, a new spring. We were a small but plucky band of revolutionaries, taking on the gatekeepers of mass media. There was the stirrings of an army of "citizen journalists" arising and contributing to a true democracy of media that would bring greater access to truth and information for everyone.

That dream has long gone and now "social media" seems mostly a sea of "like" buttons and short Tweets, or image shares on Tumbler. No one blogs anymore. The "blogs" such as GigaOm, Techcrunch, ReadWriteWeb, VentureBeat, etc long ago ceased to be blogs and are plain vanilla online news sites with editors, reporters, and all the other trappings of a media corporation.

I still think there will be a place for "citizen journalists" because the economics of online media have not yet been solved, there's clearly more disruption ahead even for the relatively "new" media.

Social media, instead of challenging big media has become an amplifier instead. Many studies have shown that people on social media trade mostly links to mass media outlets. Social media has largely become: Social Distribution Of Mass Media (SoDOMM). Oh well. It was fun, at the beginning at least :)

The Korean law forces web sites with more than 100,000 visitors per day to force users to use their real names. Google got around it by stopping Korean users of YouTube from posting comments and told them to upload video to a neighboring country's YouTube site.

Google Tests The Limits Of Governments - Bars Korean Users From Uploading Videos And Leaving Comments - SVW

Rachel Whetstone, VP of Global Comms, explained: "Google thinks the freedom of expression is most important value to uphold on the internet. We concluded in the end that it is impossible to provide benefits to internet users while observing this country's law because the law does not fall in line with Google's principles."

Why then does Google insist that Google Plus users have to use their real names?

Social Informatics points out:

In April 2011, Freedom House, international human rights NGO, published the report about freedom on internet and digital media. In the report, they describe South Korea as “partly free country”.

They states that South Korea’s internet infrastructure is one of the most advanced in the world, and its democratic institutions, however Real-Name verification policy and a recent series of arrests of bloggers have presented challenges to internet freedom.

UN special rapporteur, Frank La Rue, also concerns regarding Real-Name verification that “clearly qualifies as pre-censorship, restricts freedom of internet-based expression rooted in anonymity, inhibits public opinion formation, and contravenes freedom of expression.”

Real names makes it easier for hackers to steal identities reports Korea Joongang Daily:

Cyber leaks expose cracks in Korea’s Net security - INSIDE Korea JoongAng Daily

These Web portals ask for names, resident registration numbers, birth dates, addresses and phone numbers to join their services, which are accumulated, some of them encrypted, in their servers for at least five years and become attractive “booty” for hackers.

“Instead of mere lists of online accounts, [hackers] could steal the full package of real world identities,” said Nakho Kim, a media researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Due to government policies and industry laziness, many Korean online services tend to collect a lot of personal identity information.”

I look at the links and articles that social media "experts" are sharing all day long on Twitter, Facebook, etc, and it all boils down to this type of message: "Here are ways to turn social media into a lucrative corporate marketing/sales channel."

There are lots of services such as Klout, etc, that help corporations identify the people in social networks that should be targeted as part of online marketing programs. And there are hundreds of books written about how corporations can and should use social media to boost sales, profits, etc.

But social media is not corporate media. This is a very important distinction.

Social media is useful to businesses because it offers what Shel Israel and Robert Scoble call "naked conversations" you can listen-in to customers when previously you couldn't except through expensive market research focus groups.

Listening to social media also preserves the authenticity of what's being said. If people have to look over their shoulder to watch what they say or share, then it will be harder to be authentic. And if their social networks become swamped with corporate media then that will change the original nature of their communities -- their involvement will be lessened.

But there is a very strong push by the legions of self-styled social media experts to persuade corporations to turn social media into a corporate sales channel -- with the warning that if they don't do it their competitors will. And their competitors certainly will.

Which means social media as we know it will be changed as corporations rush to co-opt it to their agenda.

Yes, some corporations are using a light touch but the pressure is on to do more, far more involvement, more engagement, and to intercept conversations. This will damage the fundamental integrity of social media as we know it.

Corporations will try to engage too strongly, or in inappropriate ways; they will corrupt the very influencers that they covet through poorly thought-out marketing schemes; and social media will blend into a mutant form of corporate media.

Social media will survive but not in the same forms or in the same places that we find it today. People will react by moving their conversations into less visible corners of the Internet, into private groups/networks that offer a far higher quality of social interaction, more intimate, and more importantly -- sheltered from the ever vigilant and prying corporate eye.

The News of the World was the first newspaper I bought. I was about seven or eight years old and decided I needed to get serious about life and that I needed to know what was going on the world. I looked around the newsagents for something that could tell me the news of the world, and here was a newspaper that described perfectly what I wanted.

My precious pocket money purchased an issue and I took it home and studied it. But I couldn't find any news of the world in it! It was full of stories about affairs, political scandals and stories about celebrities such as Richard Burton, engaged in drunken acts of violence and infidelity. I didn't understand any of it.

I decided to postpone my investigation of the adult world and went back to buying my favorite comic book "The Eagle" (above) and its science fiction tales of adventure and heroism.

Savviest media mogul...

The demise of The News of the World is just one footnote in the incredible career of Rupert Murdoch, who easily qualifies as the savviest media mogul of all time. He's more Citizen Kane than anyone.

Say what you will about his political views, he is running a media empire that quickly responds to massive changes in the industry and remains relevant during some of the toughest times the media industry has faced in its entire history.

At 80 years old he is a force of nature -- I can't think of anyone, at any age, that has managed to build such an amazing set of achievements.

Born into a wealthy Australian family, he studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford University. Starting with one newspaper in Adelaide, at age 22, he then started and acquired newspapers across Australia, then the United Kingdom, Asia and the US.

From Wikipedia:

Murdoch's first permanent foray into TV was in the USA, where he created Fox Broadcasting Company in 1986. In the 2000s, he became a leading investor in satellite television, the film industry and the Internet, and purchased a leading American newspaper, The Wall Street Journal.

Rupert Murdoch was listed three times in the Time 100 as among the most influential people in the world. He is ranked 13th most powerful person in the world in the 2010 Forbes' The World's Most Powerful People list.[4] With a net worth of US$6.3 billion, he is ranked 117th wealthiest person in the world.

The swift closure of The News of the World could be seen as punishment for unethical behavior by its journalists but it's also a quick way to solve one of Mr Murdoch's business problems: his planned acquisition of full control of satellite broadcaster BSkyB.

Jill Lawless and Robert Barr at AP reported:

His British arm of News Corp. was within reach of gaining the British government's approval to make a bid for BSkyB when the scandal exploded, emboldening rivals and critics, who called on the government to block the takeover.As the week went on, BSkyB's share price sank, reflecting market anxieties there might be no takeover bid.

...

Charlie Beckett, director of the POLIS media institute at the London School of Economics, said it was a bold move aimed at resolving a situation that had got out of control. "This is a fantastically brave move to try and cleanse everything and put a stop to it," Beckett said.

Social media's role...

While it remains to be seen if Mr Murdoch's "bold move" will succeed, there are potential "social media" lessons to be learned, according to Dennis Howlett, writing on ZDNet: News of the World shutters. So what of social media? | ZDNet

Mr Howlett points out that this "is exactly the kind of issue that prompts social media activists to encourage brands into engaging with customers by using social media."

But to no avail in this case, "yet still we see so called social media gurus punting the line that engagement is everything. It isn’t."

Social media by itself was bit player in this drama. It was the UK "mass media" in the form of other newspapers, TV and radio that brought this issue to a boil and kept it there until advertisers started to pull out and politicians began to ask questions in Parliament.

Lots of people played their part and shared links and Tweets pointing to the mass media stories about this scandal.

And that seems to be the future role of social media, that it is rapidly becoming: Social Distribution Of Mass Media (SoDOMM). People sharing links to the stories of the day.

SoDOMM links to stories are often scandalous and immoral -- just the way we like them. It's links about celebrity drug use, political scandals, and egregious acts of callous behavior by the rich and privileged. It's just like what you'd find in The News of the World...

The newspaper might be gone but its spirit will certainly live on, in the type of content that people love to share through SoDOMM.

- - -

Please see:

The Demise Of Social Media And The Return Of Mass Media - SVW

Some more thoughts on SoDOMM - the Social Distribution of Mass Media... | ZDNet

Study Shows How Social Media Amplifies Mass Media - SVW

Hi, my name is"Hani Hourani" a typical Arabic name which is apparently not good enough for Facebook.

Today I tried to log-in to my Facebook account and I couldn't because according to Facebook I am using an "Inauthentic Name."

They want my name to be Michael, or Chris but not Hani. Hani isn't an Inauthentic name, there's nothing wrong with it. I feel so offended, it is racism, and prejudice.

Then they ask me to fill in some form to give me 'real' name this time, and I insist to put the same name in the box, unless my name has been changed and I hadn't been told then I did not use a fake name, but this time I get blocked for 15 minutes because again, I entered an "Inauthentic."

After the 15 minutes had passed I tried again and this time my account got permanently disabled unless, and listen to this, unless I send them a copy of my personal ID.

If this is not a bug on their part, and it is indeed their algorithms that actively flagged my name "Inauthentic" then I won't be using Facebook again, even if the account gets restored.

This is just demeaning and completely disrespectful.

If you want proof I can give you my username and password to see for yourself, and you are more than free to share my real name.

I am writing in full faith that you can help me go public with this issue, because I am so deeply hurt and I cannot even navigate myself to an address on which I contact Facebook. The whole way they do business is a farce.

This must be a bug because I don't see how Facebook can claim 700 million plus world wide users without being able to process many non-Christian names.

But maybe it has an Arab filter? In which case, how did the "Facebook Revolution" take place in the Middle East? Were the activists assuming Western names, Todd, or Nigel, as a disguise from authorities (and Facebook?).

Also, if Facebook is demanding "real names" that could put future political activists in jeopardy. There won't be any further Facebook Revolutions if oppressors can easily finger the activists thanks to Facebook.

Let's see if the company's "social media" monitors pick up on this issue and fix it.

Where are the brigades of citizen journalists? What's become of the hope of the grass roots revolt against the gate keepers in our national and local media?

When I left the Financial Times in mid-2004 to become the first journalist to leave a major newspaper and become an independent "journalist-blogger" there was a lot of hope in the air. I felt I was joining a small but very spirited band of media pioneers, a nascent "Homebrew Club" of sorts, which might help usher in a new era in media.

Just as the Homebrew Computer Club, whose members such as Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Bill Gates, took a hobby of building microcomputers and helped build a new industry that toppled the behemoths of their age, there was a similar feeling in the air.

No longer did you need to be a Press Baron, buying ink by the tanker, and having hugely expensive printing plants. The printing press was now virtually free. The distribution system was equally free.

If you produced media content of value the world found it, there was no need to Tweet it out or spam anyone with your latest stories.

At the time it felt l like a meritocracy, that if you had a better mouse trap the world did indeed beat a path to your door.

But over the years things have changed considerably. Just because the printing press is free means little if the access to audience is constrained. The mediasphere has expanded to include blogs and other forms of citizen journalism/media but it doesn't seem to have expanded very far.

Citizen journalism hasn't led to a revolution in media, or changed much about the old order. Mass media is still massive and in the hands of a small number of owners.

And "social media" now represents a tiny sliver of the mediasphere, and one that deals primarily with product or service recommendations among friends. That's very mundane revolution.

If you look at the links people are sharing through social media, much of it is links to the same newspapers and big media organizations that people were reading, listening to, and watching before the advent of social media.

You still see a minority dominating the production of the social media consumed. For example, Yahoo Research recently published a report that showed just 20,000 "elite" Twitter users (out of 150 million) produced 50% of all Tweets consumed. Mass media produced by a minority - and most of that content is shared links to big media.

The term "social media" has lost much of its meaning.

Social media seems to have become just a distribution channel for mass media content -- there's very little media produced by the masses.

To be accurate in our use of words, I propose that the term social media be changed to describe what is actually happening: Social Distribution Of Mass Media (SoDOMM).

But I am an optimist. There are big cracks in the edifice of mass media. The business model transition to a digital world is still in flux and there is no good solution.

There's still a long way to go before mass media, and its small number of owners, can relax and get back to business as usual.

There's a good chance that SoDOMM might fail to arrest the fall of mass media, and that it might just be a transitionary phase on the road to real social media.

I've got my fingers crossed.

- - -

Please see:

The Demise Of Social Media And The Return Of Mass Media - SVW

Study Shows How Social Media Amplifies Mass Media - SVW

Who Says What to Whom on Twitter | Yahoo! Research

The research was conducted by SCNR fellows Don Bulmer (SAP), Vanessa DiMauro and Peter Auditore.

Here are some of the key findings:

- Access to thought leadership content is now the #1 reason why professionals surveyed visit networks and communities.

- Professionals are collaborating with each other via the thought leadership content they generate, curate or share. No longer is collaboration an experience between a limited number of people.

- While nearly all professionals surveyed (97%) use LinkedIn, the use of smaller (niche) professional networks are activity being used to find peers and content specifically related to the work that they do (by role, industry, geography, etc.).

- Professional communities are being used more frequently to inform business strategy and supporting new products and services (much more than in 2009).

- 80% of respondents are able to accelerate decision process and information/strategy development by participating in communities.

- "The Crescendo Effect" in social media environments has great impact on the buying decision. High quality content yields transparency and credibility.

The research also found that actions such as "like" or "retweet" create a culture of endorsement that has become central to business-based social media communities.

There is more information here.

And here is a Slideshare deck:

(Cathy Brooks Tweets while listening to Brian Solis (standing) Susan Etlinger, Tim O'Reilly and Jodee Rich.)

I popped into PeopleBrowsr's SF event which featured a panel moderated by Brian Solis and featuring Tim O'Reilly, Susan Etlinger from Altimeter Group and Jodee Rich, Founder and CEO of PeopleBrowsr.

The topic was: "The Evolution of Listening: From Monitoring to the Collective Intelligence."

Here are some of my notes from the event:

Susan Etlinger: It's a mess what companies try to do with listening to social media. Many don't know what to do. It needs to go beyond silos and what it means to the company as a whole.

Jodee Rich: The trend I'm seeing is that the world is evolving from a social graph towards an interest graph.

Tim O'Reilly: Listening works best in organizations where everyone is empowered to act as if they are the CEO and help in customer service.

JR: We see brands being mentioned 2 million times a day and that's just on Twitter. 70% of the time the response in good.

JR: Do you know what mommy bloggers write about the most? Saving money, next is love.

TR: We need to move beyond business intelligence and reports. We need algorithms that can provide some autonomic responses.

JR: Search will change, right now it is basically PageRank combined with some tweets, it is upside down. But in the future you will search your friends first, then your city, then wider.

SE: I see social graphs and interest graphs converging. FOr example, people into fashion conecting online and going to events together.

TR: I'm not interested in listening to someone based on how many followers. I'm interested in what is interesting and true -- even if that person has 1 follower.

Brian Solis: Leadership has to be earned and it has to be earned every day.

TR: Listening is not about "whack-a-mole" - responding to everything that comes up. Listening is about what does it make me think about? What ideas does it spark? The result is often non-linear.

TR: The secret of AI is that the human is the "last mile." You have to make the final decisions, search/analytics, etc can only get you into the right proximity.

SE: The onus is on the business to decide what things mean.

TR: Smart companies make money because what they do is useful to people.

Manage Your Major Social Networks

Follow your updates on multiple Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin accounts at the same time. Run searches, monitor userlists and share what you're doing to dozens of networks through Ping.fm. Use the smart account selection to manage your responses.

Here is a video:

The Twitter client market has become very competitive because of Twitter's own applications but Seesmic, under the leadership of Loic LeMeur, has managed to keep ahead of the pack by making Seesmic into a multi-purpose client.

Please see:

Alert The Enterprise: Seesmic Integrates With Salesforce Chatter

Seesmic Desktop Goes Beyond Twitter: Becomes a Platform for All Things Real Time

Vanessa DiMauro, CEO, Leader Networks and I are leading this research as part of our 2010 Fellowship with The Society for New Communication Research (SNCR).

This annual study, is designed to explore how social media is impacting business by better understanding how business leaders use social media and social networks to support and inform their decisions.

When we understand how social media changes professional decision-making, organizations can be more efficient, timely and supportive in how they interact with customers- ultimately leading to better engagement and decision-making in business.

Participants in this year's study will receive a free copy of the results. A link to the survey and last year's findings can be found on the research website.

About the Research

The New Symbiosis of Professional Networks is an annual research study designed to benchmark the impact of social media on enterprise decision-making.

The social nature of decision-making has increased significantly, connecting generations of professionals to each other--changing the dynamics of customer relationship management, marketing, and communications - forever.

In the first study, we focused on professionals' use of social media--and it all comes back to the strength of the relationship. Human relationships and peer-to-peer decision-making are inherently interrelated.

Professional networks facilitate vast interactions, connections, and networks of people by enabling collaboration anywhere and at any time.

Communities of practice, professional networks, social media, email, and SMS are among the tools that enable multi-channel access for individuals (employees, customers, partners, and suppliers).

In this second study (in the series) we will further examine the role of social media on decision-making among enterprise users and explore the dynamics of trust as well as the value of engagement and collaboration to support decision making and innovation across company operations for internal and external purposes.

The study explores the following questions:

The methodology for this study will be a two-pronged approach. A survey will be issued to gather quantitative data about professionals perceptions and experiences with social media in support of their decision-making. Following the survey, select interviews will be conducted using a semi-structured interview guide among a set of survey respondents who are willing to participate in the second phase of the study. The final study report will blend the survey research findings and the interview results to offer a well-rounded examination of the social media for decision-making process and opportunities.

It is worth emphasizing that HP's studies are designed to the highest scientific standards; they are not isolated case studies or the musings of a "social media expert." They typically involve the study of very large numbers of people and thus they reveal some fundamental aspects of our increasingly online culture, and our common humanity.

The latest study from Dr Huberman and team is on what makes a Tweet or a Twitter user influential. More than 22 million tweets were analyzed and it has led to the creation of the IP Algorithm, which measures the influence and passivity of Twitter users.

The study found:

- Most Twitter users are passive, they do not re-Tweet.

- There is a difference between popularity and influence. High numbers of followers does not equal influence because those followers do not re-Tweet.

- To become influential, Twitter users must somehow persuade their followers to re-Tweet.

To measure influence, the study looked at how much traffic a Tweeted URL received, using the Bit.ly shortening service, which also tracks clicks.

From the paper Influence and Passivity in Social Media - HP Labs Research:

This reveals interesting implications about the relationship between a person's popularity and the influence she has on other people. In particular, it shows that having many followers on Twitter does not imply power to influence them to even click on a URL.

The Conclusion:

Given the mushrooming popularity of Social Media, vast efforts are devoted by individuals, governments and enterprises to getting attention to their ideas, policies, products,and commentary through social networks.

But the very large scale of the networks underlying Social Media makes it hard for any of these topics to get enough attention in order to rise to the most trending ones.

Given this constraint, there has been a natural shift on the part of the content generators towards targeting those individuals that are perceived as influential because of their large number of followers.

This study shows that the correlation between popularity and influence is weaker than it might be expected.

This is a reflection of the fact that for information to prop-agate in a network, individuals need to forward it to the other members, thus having to actively engage rather than passively read it and cease to act on it.

Moreover, since our measure of influence is not specific to Twitter it is applicable to many other social networks.

This opens the possibility of discovering influential individuals within a network which can on average have a further reach than others in the same medium regardless of their popularity.

Foremski's Take:

The fact that this study's findings can be applied beyond Twitter is fascinating, especially applied to the work of PR and advertising firms.

For example: If a PR firm succeeds in placing a story abut a client on a popular news site, it means little in terms of that story being influential and reaching potential customers, investors, or others.

Popularity and influence are two separate issues. Targeting the right media outlets based on influence is more important than the popularity of any one publication.

The same can be applied to online advertising. Advertising agencies buy "numbers" when placing ad buys. But they should be concentrating on targeting in regards to influence.

The HP study shows that there is a significant arbitrage opportunity for those PR and advertising firms that understand the distinction between popularity and influence -- and know how to act on it.

- - -

Please see SVW:

Twitter Study: Interview With Bernardo Huberman, HP Social Computing Labs Chief


HP Study Shows Twitter Predicts Success Of Movies

Thought Leader - HP's Bernardo Huberman: Studies Of Mass Social Behavior On The Internet

HP Labs: A Gold Mine Of Original Research Into Online Social Behavior

HP Labs : Research: Social Computing Lab

Video: Social Dynamics In The Age Of The Web

...60% of companies with a Facebook page used it purely as a distribution channel, 57% of companies with a Twitter account used it solely for one-way marketing activity and only 25% of blogs received comments on a regular basis.

66% of Facebook pages in our study received comments from users, with each comment presenting an opportunity to engage and to build brand advocates. However, 75% of technology companies with a Facebook account failed to recognise this opportunity and left comments unanswered.

... only 3% of the tweets in the study were retweets and just 12% were replies.

Shockingly, 43% of brands with a Twitter account had never replied to a tweet.

Nearly all (90%) of the tech companies in our study had a presence on two or more social networks. Twitter was the most popular, being adopted by 74% of brands in our study, followed closely by Linkedin (72%), with Facebook lagging far behind, with just 20% of tech companies having a Facebook page. Just under half of the companies in our study (48%) had a blog.

...technology brands are dipping a toe in the water, but are missing opportunities to realise the full potential of social networks to engage, build community and amplify brand awareness.

TechEye reports:

You'd think tech companies in particular would be clued up enough to realise this, but the fact is, they're not. Plenty of companies are signing up official company profiles across the board because they've heard somewhere, maybe on a blog, maybe down the pub, maybe after a meeting, that they have to.

...we suspect because the social medium is free to sign up to brands and companies think it's worth a shot. But what may cost in the end is the negative reputation a brand may acquire by appearing stuck-up or disinterested to potential interested parties.

If tech companies are struggling with social media you can bet that most other UK brands are faring worse. It shows that we are still at the very early stages of how businesses use social media to boost their sales.

Please see: Corporate Social Media Is Not Social -- It's Sales Media

What a great quote from Jeff Bezos talking to Charlie Rose:

""Before if you were making a product, the right business strategy was to put 70% of your attention, energy, and dollars into shouting about a product, and 30% into making a great product. So you could win with a mediocre product, if you were a good enough marketer. That is getting harder to do. The balance of power is shifting toward consumers and away from companies...the individual is empowered... The right way to respond to this if you are a company is to put the vast majority of your energy, attention and dollars into building a great product or service and put a smaller amount into shouting about it, marketing it. If I build a great product or service, my customers will tell each other."

Here is the interview and transcript: http://www.charlierose.com/view/content/11138

Social media marketing then, is about enabling your customers to communicate what a great product they have.

Social media marketing is not about being a clever marketer but about how best to represent a company with a great product.

And here's my contribution: evangelists come free with every great product or service.

But is Jeff Bezos saying something new? Great products have always had their fans; Apple is a great example of how a company with a less than 5% market share managed to prosper.

Also, Amazon is the pioneer of the affiliate marketing model where you get others to do your marketing for you.

Amazon sells other people's products; it doesn't distinguish between good or bad products. The only product Amazon makes is Kindle, whose sales volume is tiny and doesn't even register on its quarterly earnings.

What Amazon does "sell" is great customer service and I can vouch for that.

Still, what Mr Bezos says is true. And it is important to remind marketers that "you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear." An expression that dates back to the mid-1500s."

UPDATE: Mitch Joel at Twist Image writes about the Jeff Bezos interview plus he hosts a great discussion:

Product Is The New Marketing | Six Pixels of Separation

A mediocre product with great Marketing is only going to create a lot of attention and conversation around the fact that the product is mediocre. Now, Marketing comes full circle to support the story of the brand and the products, and not just to oversell something mediocre.

Bezos makes it sound like this is the end of Marketing? ... or is it just the beginning?

Chris Heuer explains:

While we will still hold onto the open roots upon which we have grown, we will also emphasize the importance of membership dues to provide the funds needed to operate a non-profit on a global scale. These funds will enable us to provide an honest view on the social media industry, support the establishment of professional standards of conduct and expand our educational initiatives to further media literacy. The crucial step in making this vision a reality involves bringing our loosely affiliated 'chapters' closer together, but first we had to find them.

With the help of Yong C Lee and Jessica Murray, we have just finished the SMC Global Census, resulting in a blog post for each local chapter on SocialMediaClub.org. Each post directs you to their existing social channels across the web and now also aggregates their blog posts (if they have one) onto the global Web site. So if for instance, you want to find out how many people are involved in Social Media Club in Moscow, all you need to do is visit their chapter page. Same thing with Seattle, Brisbane, Miami, Kansas City, Washington DC and Kuala Lumpur.

Now that we know where everyone is, we also have a better idea of who you all are. At present we have 230 local chapters around the world with a total potential reach of 158,558. Accounting for overlapping channel participation between their various Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other sites, this gives us an approximate reach of 100,000+ unique social media enthusiasts and professionals.

On a global basis, Social Media Club HQ has a total potential reach of 87,146, with 68,000+ Twitter followers, 7,800 Facebook Fans, a mailing list of 4,300, a LinkedIn Group with 3,400+ members and an RSS subscriber base of 8,500+. As we launch our membership drive to start promoting the organization with more marketing then just stickers in the weeks ahead, we expect these numbers to grow dramatically. Especially in light of all the new content we will be providing through our consolidated calendar of social media events and the launch of Social Media Journal and Social Media Observer.

Coming up: Social Media University, November 10-13 in Orlando, FL.

Plus the launch of a consolidated calendar of social media events and the launch of Social Media Journal and Social Media Observer.

More details here: From The Clubhouse | Social Media Club

I'm really interested in the doers rather than the sayers. And I want to create a list of those people.

Jeremiah Owyang, from Altimeter Group, has put together an excellent list of people who are working within corporations as social media strategists - I'd be interested in more such lists if you have them.

I'm republishing just a very small part of Jeremiah's list, dealing with the tech sector, there is plenty more over at Jeremiah's blog: Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang | Social Media, Web Marketing.

I've also created a Pearltree around this topic, that lets you browse the LinkedIn profile of each person on the list.

By the way, if you are unfamiliar with Pearltrees it's a great media technology, it allows you to create your own curation of the web. Also, you can easily add this Pearltree to your own and it will be automatically updated with new names as they are added (in real time).

Here is just a small part of Jeremiah's list, this one is on the tech sector:

Electronics, Devices, Mobile

Technology, Hardware, Networking, Component, Computer

Technology, Software, Internet

Jeremiah is looking for new names for his list.

- - -

Please see: Every Company is a Media Company - EC=MC - the transformative equation for business.

- 29% of all parents don't allow texting during family meals. 36% of parents of teenagers don't allow texting during family meals.

- 30% of parents think 13 - 15 years old is the right age to get a social media page

- 36% of parents think 16 - 18 is the right age to get a social media page

- 26% of parents say over 18 is the right age to get a social media page

- 8% of parents are okay with kids under 12 having a social media page.

- Only 12% of parents ban social media as a form of punishment. 18% ban all internet usage. 47% talk with their kids as a form of discipline.

- 48% of parents on Facebook are "friends" with their kids. 52% are not.

Andrew Eisner, director of content at Retrevo adds, "It looks like more parents with teenage children are more likely to be friends with their kids, although many admit it can be awkward at times but they say they do learn a lot about their teenagers, which is probably why children are so hesitant to friend their parents to begin with."

The study questioned 1,000 people across gender, age, income and location.

The study analyzed 2.89 million tweets from 1.2 million users referencing 24 movies released over a three month period. The researchers discovered that the rate of Tweets could predict the success of movies prior to their release, and also spot sleeper movies that grew successful over time.

The quality of the predictions was significantly better than any other measure such as the Hollywood Stock Exchange.

HP believes the same methods could be used to predict product success and election results. [Please see: HP Study Shows Twitter Predicts Success Of Movies]

I spoke with Bernardo Huberman, head of HP's Social Computing Lab, about the Twitter research project. Here are some notes from our conversation:

- We're very interested in social attention and how attention is allocated, especially in a very fragmented media world that we now have.

- Also, the study is about the wisdom of crowds and collective intelligence. I'm not sure about the 'wisdom' part, but on average, there does seem to be a collective intelligence.

- We are interested in how agendas can be set when the influence of traditional media is waning. In the past, for example, the editors at the Wall Street Journal or Financial Times, or CNN, would decide which stories they would publish and that's what we would see but now the world is fragmented.

- The Twitter movie study helps to show how agendas can be established and how it could be applied elsewhere.

- The Twitter movie research was very difficult, we looked at a lot Tweets. We made use of Mechanical Turk for sentiment analysis, hiring thousands of workers.

- The Twitter movie study was interesting, we have some departments within HP that want to use the same methods for predicting the success of products. We have applied for a patent on the process.

- I don't think the movie tweets could be gamed because we looked at a very large number from a large number of people.

- We have thought about looking at financial information such as stock market tweets and also at where other online conversations are happening.

- I'm very interested in the problem facing media companies, how to monetize content. In a world where everything is free, information rapidly becomes commoditized and when everyone has the same information, it has little value. Our studies have shown that if people pay for information they value it more highly, they have something others don't have. It's a very hard problem. I'm not yet sure how to tackle it.

- - -
Please see:

Thought Leader - HP's Bernardo Huberman: Studies Of Mass Social Behavior On The Internet

HP Labs: A Gold Mine Of Original Research Into Online Social Behavior

HP Labs : Research: Social Computing Lab

Video: Social Dynamics In The Age Of The Web

The paper "Predicting the Future With Social Media" by Sitaram Asur and Bernardo Huberman, analyzed 2.89 million tweets from 1.2 million users referencing 24 movies released over a three month period.

The study looked at the pre-launch buzz such as the release of trailers, it found:

- Very few retweets because "people tend to describe their own expectations and experiences, which are not necessarily propaganda."

- Urls in the pre-release tweets didn't seem to have much effect on popularity of the movie, a surprising discovery since pre-launch publicity should contribute to success in the box office.

The study then looked at the first week of release and found a high correlation between the rate of pre-launch tweeting and the success of the opening weekend.

The study authors compared their findings with the Hollywood Stock Exchange (HSX)-this is considered the 'gold standard' in predicting the success of movies by offering a trading platform that allows people to buy and sell virtual shares in movies.

The study was "consistently better at predicting the actual values than the historical HSX prices."

The researchers also applied a sentiment analysis on the tweets, classifying them as positive, negative, or neutral. They hired thousands of people through Amazon's Mechanical Turk, to perform the sentiment analysis.

As would be expected, a majority of positive sentiments in Tweets predicted movie success. However, a movie could have a poor opening weekend but then win a growing audience in the following weeks, a trend predicted by positive tweets.

The study authors say that this method could be used for predictions for many other topics, including the outcome of elections:

While in this study we focused on the problem of predicting box office revenues of movies for the sake of having a clear metric of comparison with other methods, this method can be extended to a large panoply of topics, ranging from the future rating of products to agenda setting and election outcomes. At a deeper level, this work shows how social media expresses a collective wisdom which, when properly tapped, can yield an extremely powerful and accurate indicator of future outcomes.

Coming up, I interview Bernardo Huberman, head of HP's Social Computing Lab, about this study.

- - -
Please see:

Bernardo Huberman, Director, Social Computing Lab, HP Labs

A Gold Mine Of Original Research Into Online Social Behavior

Video: Social Dynamics In The Age Of The Web

That's what seems to be happening. MG Siegler spotted this Tweet from a Twitter software engineer:

"If you had some of the nifty site features that we Twitter employees have, you might not want to use a desktop client. (You will soon.)"

Sure, Twitter client developers might be able to keep a step or two ahead of Twitter, they might be a little more nimble but eventually Twitter will catchup.

Some users of Twitter clients might not want the switching costs -- it might be difficult to transfer some of their favorite lists, or other things such as the look and feel of their favorite Twitter client. But that would be a fairly small group of users out of the total number of users in the future Twitterverse -- probably not enough to build a sustainable business.

Henry Blodgett sums it up well:

...it's the difference between Google Sites revenue (Google.com), in which Google keeps 100% of the money and Google Network revenue, in which Google has to hand over 50%-80% of the money to a distribution partner.

Foremski's Take: If I were Twitter I wouldn't rush into swallowing everything up too soon -- it's good to have third-party developers testing out markets and also evangelizing those markets -- then you can step in and suck those business ideas into your black hole. Unless, that is, that third-party developers get wise and decide not to do your dirty work for you.

A better tactic would be to buy some of those third-party developers instead of pushing them out of the way.

That will encourage other developers to be creative and to do the hard work for you, in the hopes that you might buy them.

[When web services go bad: Ticketmaster's outrageous tax on culture - it harms society | Tom Foremski: IMHO | ZDNet.com]

I Tweeted earlier today about a New York Times article:

"I hate Ticketmaster - "Ticketmaster Settles With F.T.C. Over Springsteen Tickets" http://nyti.ms/aUZMHo"

I got a response from a service called Amplicate, which pulls together positive and negative comments about brands. It made a page called Ticketmaster Rocks, where it collected supposedly positive Tweets about Ticketmaster, and one called Ticketmaster Sucks, where it collected negative Tweets.

But if you look at the Ticketmaster Rocks page, most are negative. The service cannot distinguish sarcasm. Take a look:

I bet this is pretty common at other brand monitoring services.

I'm going to Tweet "I love #Amplicate - it is so good at understanding sarcasm!" Let's see which page it ends up on, Rocks or Sucks :)

Irving Wladawsky-Berger: The Business Value of Social Networks

Mr Wladawsky-Berger has a lot of experience with the business use of social networks from his long career as a senior executive at IBM. The company was one of the first to embrace blogging and social networks.

He discusses fears that businesses have regarding their employees broadcasting inappropriate comments. He points out:

"Employees already have access to social networks through their personal PCs and mobile devices, so they need not wait for corporate sanctioned channels should they wish to post inappropriate comments. Better to deal with the issue directly, by providing guidance to employees on the proper use of social networks."

Several years ago IBM put together an excellent guide for employees: IBM Social Computing Guidelines.

Another concern companies have with social networks in business, is losing control over their employees, "who now have tools that enable them to easily collaborate with colleagues and friends inside and outside the company."

But, "such individual and community empowerment is precisely the key value of social networks."

Indeed.

Rupert Murdoch's $580 million MySpace purchase has outlived not only its utility, but has also finally hit its expiration date. That last step came with the announcement this afternoon that Owen Van Natta was stepping down as chief executive of the company. This was nine months after he joined the Los Angeles-based venture. It's circling the drains, if you ask me.

Changes in leadership do not mean MySpace is dead. It's still a very large business with many users. It's not going away anytime soon.

As one of the commenters on Mr Malik's post pointed out:

If you check the most recent comscore, MySpace has grown 2 months in a row, and is back up to 120MM users worldwide. That may not sound huge compared with Facebook's 350MM, but it is still 2X twitter's audience, and blows almost any other site out of the water. We in Silicon Valley tend to think that when something is not hockey-sticking anymore than it is dead. That is not true. If MySpace lost 1MM users a month it would take 10 years to disappear. That still gives them some time to figure out what to do.

Brian Zisk, co-founder of Collecta, a real-time search engine, recently pointed out that the MySpace message stream is five times the volume of Twitter.

The demographics of MySpace are different from Facebook and Twitter. It mostly attracts a young teenage audience and it has become a very large music site, and music fan site.

MySpace remains a large and viable business. It is far from being dead.

The research was conducted by Don Bulmer from SAP and Vanessa DiMauro.

Some of the key findings:

- Professional decision-making is becoming more social - enter the era of Social Media Peer Groups (SMPG)

• Traditional influence cycles are being disrupted by Social Media as decision makers utilize social networks to inform and validate decisions
• Professionals want to be collaborative in the decision-cycle but not be marketed or sold to online; however online marketing is a preferred activity by companies.
  

- Professional networks are emerging as decision-support tools

• Decision-makers are broadening reach to gather information especially among active users

- Professionals trust online information almost as much as information gotten from in-person

• Information obtained from offline networks still have highest levels of trust with slight advantage over online (offline: 92% - combined strongly/somewhat trust; online: 83% combined strongly/somewhat trust)

- Reliance on web-based professional networks and online communities has increased significantly over the past 3 years

• Three quarters of respondents rely on professional networks to support business decisions
• Reliance has increased for essentially all respondents over the past three years

- Social Media use patterns are not pre-determined by age or organizational affiliation

• Younger (20-35) and older professionals (55+) are more active users of social tools than middle aged professionals.
• There are more people collaborating outside their company wall than within their organizational intranet

Foremski's Take:

These are interesting findings particularly the level of trust that decision makers have towards their online communities, it is much higher than for other types of online information.

Also, the finding that age is NOT a factor in social media use is very interesting. There is a myth that younger people are heavier users or have mastered social media to a greater extent. This shows that age is not a factor and it should lead to broader adoption of social media for decision support.

There is more information here on Don Bulmer's blog: Everyday Influence: SNCR Research Reveals Social Media's Impact on Business and Decision Making

[I'm a Founding Fellow of SNCR - a Palo Alto based think tank focused on research into emerging media technologies.]

- - -

The methodology for this study involved a mixed methods approach supported by quantitative data gathered via online survey of 356 professionals to understand their perceptions and experiences with social media in support of their decision-making. Select interviews of 12 professionals were also conducted using a semi-structured interview guide as part of the second phase of the study.
Key demographics of the research include:

• Close to a quarter (23%) of respondents identified themselves as CEO of their organization; 50% as "Director" (24%) "Manager" (24%)
• Company size ranged from less than 100 to over 50,000 full-time employees
• Age was well distributed with the greatest proportion in the 36-45 range
• 25 countries were represented, with 58% of respondents living in the US
• All respondents were either the decision makers or influenced the decision process within their company or business unit

I recently met with Ijad Madisch, the founder and CEO of ResearchGate - an online community of more than 180,000 scientists sharing research results, helping each other with research problems, and networking within and beyond their fields of study.

Mr Madisch is a doctor specializing in virology. He grew up in Germany from Syrian parents. He lives in Boston.

Here are some notes from our meeting.

- ResearchGate was inspired by FaceBook. Mr Madisch noticed that one of his friends listed his research in his profile and that eventually led to another scientist being able to offer helpful information for his research project.

- The goal is to help scientists help each other with research and to prevent duplication of research projects. This can speed up the overall process.

- The site is growing at more than 1,000 new members every day.

- Members are rated on the quality of their comments and contributions.

- ResearchGate wants to encourage scientists to write up their research even if it failed. There is a lot of valuable information in creating a large database of scientific research even if it didn't fulfill expectations. 90% of research is not published. A searchable journal of failed research would be very valuable for designing future research projects.

- ResearchGate offers access to seven databases of scientific research. It also publishes the research papers of scientists. Research periodicals are very expensive but scientists are allowed to publish their research results on their personal sites -- ResearchGate profiles act as the personal sites for scientists. Otherwise you have to pay $35 per research paper.

- Some universities are using ResearchGate for private networks. This is a potential revenue source.

- Other revenue sources are an "Amazon" for lab equipment with user ratings and reviews. And job postings. It will never sell user data.

- ResearchGate plans to offer collaboration tools for scientists.

- The largest research sector is biomedical. Next is computer science.

- Future plans include online scientific conferences; a peer reviewed online journal; and more that cannot be discussed just yet.

- The company is angel funded. It has a development team in Boston and in Berlin.

- Mr Madisch's visit to Silicon Valley was to meet with potential partners such as a video streaming company, and others.

The results are very interesting and raise questions about the effectiveness of viral marketing; they reveal patterns in e-mail messaging; the half-life of popular stories on Digg (about 70 minutes); the influence of ratings on popularity; changing sentiment in reviews, how public opinion can be manipulated, and much more.

Don't be put off by the date of this talk: January 2008. It remains relevant because the studies are focused on behaviors of large numbers of users at sites such as Amazon, Facebook, and Digg - and haven't changed. They reveal what appear to be fundamental behaviors that could very well be hard-wired into our humanity - or at least our online humanity.

Here is my recent interview with Mr Huberman.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4997790860449660566#

Mr Huberman and his team have been publishing the results of their studies. Here is a selection and it all looks fascinating. This is much better material than the hype and spam driven social-media-expert-type drivel out there that pretends to know without running tests and experiments.

I picked out the following from a longer list that you can find here:

HP Labs : Research: Social Computing Lab

»Feedback loops of attention in peer production
Fang Wu, Dennis M. Wilkinson and Bernardo Huberman
Why does the distribution of user contributions obey a power law?

»Stochastic Models of User-Contributory Web Sites
Tad Hogg and Kristina Lerman
Fans, the law of web surfing and users' interests combine to promote and rate stories on Digg.

»A Persistence Paradox
Fang Wu and Bernardo Huberman
How persistence does not lead to success

»Effects of feedback and peer pressure on contributions to enterprise social media
Michael J. Brzozowski, Thomas Sandholm, and Tad Hogg
Attention matters in motivating contributions to enterprise social media. But some types of attention matter more.

»Social networks that matter: Twitter under the microscope
Bernardo A. Huberman, Daniel M. Romero and Fang Wu
the social network that matters is not the one you declare.

»Predicting the popularity of online content
Gabor Szabo and Bernardo A. Huberman
popularity, youtube, digg, attention, predicting future downloads.

»Social network collaborative filtering
Rong Zheng, Dennis M. Wilkinson and Foster Provost
User-generated social networking links can be as predictive as algorithmically identified "neighbors" in recommender systems

»Crowdsourcing, Attention and Productivity
Bernardo A. Huberman, Daniel M. Romero and Fang Wu
How to solve the digital commons dilemma.

»How public opinion forms
Fang Wu and Bernardo A. Huberman
How web discourse evolves. To appear in the Proceedings of the Workshop on Internet and Network Economics-2008

»How Do People Respond to Reputation: Ostracize, Price Discriminate or Punish?
Kay-Yut Chen, Scott Golder, Tad Hogg and Cecilia Zenteno
How people use reputation information.

»Popularity, novelty and attention
Fang Wu and Bernardo A. Huberman
Whether to use popularity or novelty to elicit attention

»Novelty and Collective Attention
Fang Wu and Bernardo A. Huberman
How does novelty affect the attention of large groups

»Comparative Advantage and Efficient Advertising in the Attention Economy
Bernardo A. Huberman and Fang Wu
Comparative advantage in the attention economy can be used to maximize the revenues a company gets from advertising.

»The Economics of Attention: Maximizing User Value in Information-Rich Environments
Bernardo A. Huberman and Fang Wu
Deciding what to display.

»Bootstrapping the Long Tail in Peer to Peer Systems
Bernardo A. Huberman and Fang Wu
How to provide any content over the web while avoiding free riding.

»The Dynamics of Viral Marketing
Jure Leskovec, Lada A. Adamic and Bernardo A. Huberman
How effective is viral marketing?

»Management Fads, Pedagogies and Soft Technologies
Jonathan Bendor, Bernardo A. Huberman and Fang Wu
What makes fads come and go?

»Social Structure and Opinion Formation
Fang Wu and Bernardo A. Huberman
How do opinions form?

»The Dynamics of Reputations
Bernardo A. Huberman and Fang Wu
How reputations get established, grow and decay.

»Status as a Valued Resource
Bernardo A. Huberman, Christoph Loch and Ayse Onculer
Why do we seek status?

»Competitive Dynamics of Web Sites
Sebastian M. Maurer and Bernardo A. Huberman
Competitive dynamics on the web unfold in surprising ways, leading to a sudden transition to winner-take-all markets.

»The Economics of Surfing
Eytan Adar and Bernardo A. Huberman
Information providers can exploit the differences in surfing behavior exhibited by web users.

But I'm not sure employees will be too pleased by such moves. It is easy to track who is active and who is not. That's certainly going to be a factor in promotions and pay raises.

Also, because of the blurring of personal and business lives, this means employees will be spamming their friends and family as they prove their worthiness to their bosses.

User generated layoffs...

Companies are also using social media to replace employees because of volunteers among their customers. Intuit is a good example of what could be termed "user generated layoffs."

Here is a video I took from last year's Brainstorm conference of Brad Smith, CEO of Intuit talking about the potential job savings.

Here is a recent BusinessWeek article:

How Intuit Makes a Social Network Pay - BusinessWeek

For the company, this volunteer army means less need for paid technicians.
...Customers were not only asking technical questions, they were often outshining Intuit's own tech support staff by answering 40% of the queries themselves.
...In early June the company said it is laying off 4% of its 8,000 employees. Executives say the job cuts didn't stem directly from Live Community's success, but Wilder points out that since Intuit's community outreach began, "the number of calls to our customer service lines has been reduced. We don't give out numbers, but there have been cost savings."

This is great for Intuit but for how long? If its customers realize that their enthusiastic participation in answering questions results in job losses will they continue to be as enthusiastic?

Also, volunteers do it because they feel like it and then they generally move on to something else. Relying on a fly-by-night army of volunteers could become a problem.

This is the same difference as between bloggers and journalists. Bloggers (citizen journalists) have a day job and they don't have to do it every day. Journalists do it every day (that would make a great bumper sticker :)

What happens to Intuit, and to other companies emulating its example, when their volunteer army doesn't show up for work?

What was interesting was that there was no response from Apple. And five weeks later, that post continues to be discovered and continues to attract comments -- sometimes in large batches as it gets picked up by services such as StumbleUpon.

Yet there is still nothing from Apple, which is surprising because by not leaving a comment, Apple comes across as arrogant, and that it doesn't care that there is a conversation going on about its warranty service.

This flies in the face of "proper" behavior by corporations on the social web. There are a gazillion social media consultants that advise the largest of corporations to listen out for such conversations and to become involved pretty damn quick. In fact, they should be monitoring the web in real-time.

Yet it seems Apple can be successful without being involved in the social web in any manner at all. I have never seen an Apple representative leave a comment anywhere! Granted, I haven't gone out of my way to look for Apple branded comments, but whenever I've seen Apple discussions I've never seen any Apple representatives.

This means that either Apple is arrogant and doesn't care or it has a policy of not allowing its representatives to be involved in online discussions.

This is a mistake because my post will continue to be surfaced by search engines and sharing services, time and again. My post will continue to gather stories about Apple that are not beneficial to its brand.

And these are stories that are thoughtful, and well written, these are not the rambling nonsense of trolls.

You would think Apple would want to take part, even just something along the lines of: "Thanks for sharing but unfortunately there is nothing we can do, we have to stick to our policies. But we value your custom etc." At least it would show that someone is listening -- that can go a long way in helping to defuse bad feelings.

How about it Apple? Anyone out there?

And there are a gazillion social marketing "experts" out there hawking social media marketing strategies to corporations.

This is a mistake. Corporations are not people. They are made by people, and people work there, but they aren't people.

A while ago Seagate, the hard drive company, asked me to be its friend on Facebook. Then it asked me to be a "fan." I use Seagate so I clicked yes both times to see what was up. But do I really want a social relationship with my hard drive? No.

I interact with a 100 different brands throughout my day. If they all jump onto the social media bandwagon what happens then? Am I going to check out the Facebook status of my toothpaste? Will I wonder what parties my microprocessor is going to tonight? Hey, my jeans just uploaded some new vacation photos.

I don't want to socially interact with my hard drive or my dishwashing liquid. Managing social relationships is tough enough, I certainly don't want to do it with my products. I just want them to sit quietly and not engage with them. I paid for them, now I just want them to sit there and be inanimate. Don't send me emails, Twits, or try to engage with me. Thank you.

Same for adverts. There's a ton of jabber about "engaging" advertising. I don't want to engage with adverts, either. I don't want to engage with products. I like to engage with people.

I don't want to be harsh on Seagate or other brands. These are all very early days and I like to see people experimenting and seeing what works. There is a way for corporations to interact with social media but it's not the way it's being done so far.

I know many people, young and old, that are passionately determined never to join any social network. They are often adamant. I admire their stance but I don't understand it.

This is a chance to take part in a social experiment that is totally unique. Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Friendfeed, etc, are part of a unique global experiment that involves tens of millions of people in ways that we have never experienced each other. Tell me that's not interesting, or fascinating. Tell me that's not a reason to get out of bed. It's all fresh footprints in the snow.

42 Rules of Social Networking for Businesses

Speakers include:

Frank Cutitta, General Manager at IDG Connect

LaSandra Brill, Manager, Web & Social Media at Cisco

Dave Evans, VP of Social Media at Digital Voodoo

Jerry Hart, Partner/VP of Sales & Marketing at Power to be Found

Chris Kenton, CEO of SocialRep

Bill Hartzer, Social Media Marketing Expert at Vizion Interactive

Edith Yeung, VP of Marketing at Clue Market Inc and Founder of SFEntrepreneur.com

Sean Mulholland, Director of Emerging Media at Atomic Public Relations

Mary Lou Roberts, Harvard University Extension School; author at DIY-Marketing and eBrandMarketing

Jennifer Jacobson, Author of 42 Rules of Social Networking for Businesses

Brian Offenberger, (a.k.a. RSS Ray), CEO of BizGrowth Search Engine Solutions

Charles Wells, Managing Director, Kinship Network

If I had an online doppleganger that would be cool. I certainly wouldn't want to marry them or even spend much time with them (or let them join any of my clubs) but I might kick back a bit and rely on them to sort out a few recommendations for me, maybe even write a story for me occasionally :-)

I might be able to find my online doppleganger if Plista, a startup based in Berlin, Germany is successful. I recently got a demonstration of its technology from its charismatic CEO Dominik Matyka.

Berlin's Plista.com . . .

It's not often that I come across startups that make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I meet with a lot of companies and most have one or two nuggets of interest but Plista is different. It looks to be one of those exceptional companies that has figured out how to capitalize on the social network trend in a way that will likely lead to a plethora of fascinating web services across all types of desktop or mobile digital devices.

The simple description: Plista has a technology that provides users with recommendations around what they are doing online and across all types of web sites. In some ways it is similar to Amazon or NetFlix recommendation systems but goes much further. If you liked that TechCrunch article you'll probably like this one too. If you liked this type of product you'll probably like this one too. That kind of thing but across any web site.

What is interesting about Plista is how it publishes its recommendations to users and how it models user behavior and preferences.

Overlaying any web page . . .

Users simply download a plugin to their Firefox browser and the recommendations are presented seamlessly within the web page they are looking at. It overlays onto the actual web page and copies that page's colors and typefaces to blend in as if it were meant to be there all along. It doesn't require the web site owner to integrate its technology.

The Firefox Plista plugin will push out of the way any content to show a couple of lines of recommendations, or a larger number of recommendations within a side column. If there's an advert in that side column, it will be pushed down the page.

Publishers will probably not like the fact that Plista users are overlaying their web sites but they can participate and make money if they integrate the technology into their sites through a simple widget (see further).

The recommendation engine is really good despite the service currently still in testing and having only about 50 users. Its quality of service will improve tremendously once more people are using it.

Moody mornings . . .

Behind the scenes Plista's technology creates models of user behavior -- it even has a mood filter. "We can tell if you are in a grumpy mood in the mornings and we can factor that into your ratings," says Mr Matyka.

Plista also has a social network component so that you can share your recommendations and find and follow people with similar tastes.

Its initial revenue model is to have web site publishers pay Plista to integrate the technology into their sites. Those publishers can then take part in revenue sharing from cross-site recommendations.

Using Plista, web site publishers would also gain a deep understanding of their readers because they could see their recommendations and other social behavioral data.

I can see plenty more business opportunities for Plista. Creating an ad network is one of them, and much, much more.

That's not all . . .

Plista also showed me a lot other stuff that is in the works, and wisely, the company is not going to roll out everything at once because it could be confusing.

If you can integrate your social graph into that kind of system--which Plista does enable--you have the makings for some very interesting businesses. There's a chance to create a platform that would become a unique social commerce engine.

Facebook is trying to build its social commerce engine but it is spluttering, and MySpace has similar challenges.

Plista doesn't need to spend $18bn to buy Facebook, nor the bargain priced MySpace that cost Rupert Murdoch's News Corp $580m. Plista can overlay a recommendation based social commerce engine over any web site whithout having to own the content. Plista's recommendation technology could be combined with services, such as ad serving, lead generation, and traffic flow, and boost revenues for online publishers. Plista's approach could raise the value of some web sites.

I didn't make it to the recent TechCrunch50 conference due to a sudden massive attack of boredom with anything related to TechCrunch or DEMO in that week. However, if I had gone, I'm sure that Plista would have been my pick of the show (rather than Yammer ).

I'm very impressed with the company, its team, its ideas, and its technology. It's also a young team and one that I predict will be going places.

The service goes into private beta on 10-10-2008. You can sign up here: http://plista.com/?pageID=1&

However, in other areas, especially when it comes to press releases and business software, "social" seems to be an inappropriate use of the word.

I've been one of the key evangelists for what I've called the "new media release" it is a news release that includes links, tags, photos, graphics and video. Lately, people have been calling it a "social media press release." I'm not a fan of that term and I'm not the only one.

Tamera Kremer over at her Wildfire Strategic Marketing blog says it well in a post titled: What's so 'social' about product pitches?

The title says it all, imho. But here is an extract:

Let's be realistic and clear-- Social Media Press Releases are micro-sites for a product or announcement. This isn't "game changing", it's just borrowing from what interactive advertising was doing 7 years ago and adding RSS and API feeds and using it as a landing page to direct bloggers and journalists to. That's hardly something that deserves the amount of air-time it's been getting if we are being honest (and doing more than patting each other on the back within the echo chamber).

Let's just call them commercial product pitches . . . a media release with links...(!)