Octavianworld

Google Buzz: Right On Schedule

As reported in Mediapost today.  Here's my New Year's Day post on Google Wave, predicting what they're calling Buzz.  Interesting, bit not surprising -- no FB integration. 

Grokking Google Wave: The Homeland Security Use Case (And Why You Should Care)

A few people asked me recently what I thought of Google Wave.  Like others, I've struggled to answer this.

In the past few days I've been following the news about the failed attempt to blow up Northwest 253 on Christmas Day, and the finger-pointing among various agencies that's followed it.  More particularly, I've been thinking less about whose fault it is and more about how social media / collaboration tools might be applied to reduce the chance of a Missed Connection like this.

A lot of the comments by folks in these agencies went something like, "Well, they didn't tell us that they knew X," or "We didn't think we needed to pass this information on."  What most of these comments have in common is that they're rooted in a model of person-to-person (or point-to-point) communication, which creates the possibility that one might "be left out of the loop" or "not get the memo".

For me, this created a helpful context for understanding how Google Wave is different from email and IM, and why the difference is important.  Google Wave's issue isn't that the fundamental concept's not a good idea.  It is.  Rather, its problem is that it's paradigmatically foreign to how most people (excepting the wikifringe) still think.

Put simply, Google Wave makes conversations ("Waves") primary, and who's participating secondary.  Email, in contrast, makes participants primary, and the subjects of conversations secondary.  In Google Wave, with the right permissions, folks can opt into reading and participating in conversations, and they can invite others.  The onus for awareness shifts from the initiator of a conversation to folks who have the permission and responsibility to be aware of the conversation.  (Here's a good video from the Wave team that explains the difference right up front.)  If the conversation about Mr. Abdulmutallab's activities had been primary, the focus today would be about who read the memo, rather than who got it.  That would be good.  I'd rather we had a filtering problem than an information access / integration problem.

You may well ask, "Isn't the emperor scantily clad -- how is this different from a threaded bboard?"  Great question.   One answer might be that "Bboards typically exist either independently, or as features of separate purpose-specific web sites.  Google Wave is to threaded bboard discussions as Google Reader is to RSS feeds -- a site-independent conversation aggregator, just as Google Reader is a site-independent content aggregator."   Nice!  Almost: one problem of course is that Google Wave today only supports conversations that start natively in Google Wave.  And, of course, that you can (sometimes) subscribe to RSS feeds of bboard posts, as in Google Groups, or by following conversations by subscribing to RSS feeds for Twitter hashtags.  Another question: "How is Google Wave different from chat rooms?"  In general, most chats are more evanescent, while Waves appear (to me) to support both synchronous chat and asynchronous exchanges equally well.

Now the Big Question: "Why should I care?  No one is using Google Wave anyway."  True (only 1 million invitation-only beta accounts as of mid-November, active number unknown) -- but at least 146 million people use Gmail.  Others already expect Google Wave eventually will be introduced as a feature for Gmail: instead of / in addition to sending a message, you'll be able to start a "Wave".  It's one of the top requests for the Wave team.  (Gmail already approximates Wave by organizing its list of messages into threads, and by supporting labeling and filtering.)  Facebook, with groups and fan pages, appears to have stolen a march on Google for now, but for the vast bulk of the world that still lives in email, it's clunky to switch back and forth.  The killer social media / collaboration app is one that tightly integrates conversations and collaboration with messaging, and the prospect of Google-Wave-in-Gmail is the closest solution with any realistic adoption prospects that I can imagine right now.

So while it's absurdly early, marketers, you read it here first: Sponsored Google Waves :-)  And for you developers, it's not too early to get started hacking the Google Wave API and planning how to monetize your apps.

Oh, and Happy New Year!

Postscript: It was the software's fault...

Postscript #2: Beware the echo chamber

#Foursquare: So Very 2006

All this fuss generally about 2010 as (finally) The Year Of Mobile and specifically about Foursquare reminded me of a post my former Marketspace colleague Michael Fedor wrote in 2006 about the social possibilities of early location-based services technologies like Kmaps (for the Treo 650, which was an early coal-powered smartphone for those of you born after 2007).  Re-reading the post made me (again) proud of Michael, and proud to have worked with him and our compatriots.

@Chartbeat: Biofeedback For Your Web Presence

Via an introduction by my friend Perry Hewitt, I had a chance yesterday to learn more about Chartbeart, the real-time web analytics product, from its GM Tony Haile.

Chartbeat provides a tag-based tracking mechanism, dashboard, and API for understanding your site's users in real time.  So, you say, GA and others are only slightly lagged in their reporting.  What makes Chartbeat differentially useful?

I recently wrote a post titled "Fly-By-Wire Marketing" that reacted to an article in Wired on Demand Media's business model, and suggested a roadmap for firms interested in using analytics to automate web publishing processes. 

After listening to Tony (partly with "Fly-By-Wire Marketing" notions in mind), it occurred to me that perhaps the most interesting possibilities lay in tying a tool like Chartbeat into a web site's CMS, or more ambitiously into a firm's marketing automation / CRM platform, to adjust on the fly what's published / sent to users.

Have a look at their live dashboard demo, which tracks user interactions with Fred Wilson's blog, avc.com.  Here's a question: if you were Fred -- and Fred's readers -- how would avc.com evolve during the day if you (as Fred or one of Fred's readers) could see this information live on the site, perhaps via a widget that allowed you to toggle through different views?  Here are some ideas:

1. If I saw a disproportionate share of visitors coming through from a particular location, I might push stories tagged with that location to a "featured stories" section / widget, on the theory that local friends tell local friends, who might then visit direct to the home page url.

2. If I saw that a particular story was proving unusually popular, I might (as above) feature "related content", both on a home page and on the story page itself.

3. If I saw that traffic was being driven disproportionately by a particular keyword, I might try to wire a threshold / trigger into my AdWords account (or SEM generally) to boost spending on that keyword, and I might ask relevant friends for some link-love (though this obviously is slowed by how frequently search engines re-index you). 

(Note: pushing this further, as we discussed with Tony, we'd subscribe to a service that would give us a sense for how much of the total traffic being driven to Chartbeat users by that keyword is coming our way, and use that as a metric for optimizing our traffic-driving efforts in real time.  Of course such a service would have to anonymize competitor information, be further aggregated to protect privacy, and be offered on an opt-in basis, but could be valuable even at low opt-in rates, since what we're after is relative improvement indications, and not absolute shares.)

4. If you saw lots of traffic from a particular place, or keyword, or on a particular product, you might connect this information to your email marketing system and have it influence what goes out that day.  Or, you might adjust prices, or promotions, dynamically based on some of this information.

Some of you will wonder how these ideas relate to personalization, which is already a big if imperfectly implemented piece of many web publishers' and e-retailers' capabilities.  I say personalization is great for recognizing and adjusting to each of you, but not to all of you.  For example, pushing this further, I wonder about the potential for "analytics as content".  NYT's "most-emailed" list is a good example of this, albeit in a graphically unexciting form.  What if you had a widget that plotted visitors on a map (which exists today of course) but also color-coded them according to their source, momentarily flashing the site or keyword that referred them?  At minimum it would be entertaining, but it would also hold a mirror up to the site's users showing them who they are (their locations and interests), in a way that would reinforce the sense of community that the site may be trying to foster otherwise. 

Reminds me a bit of Spinvision, and by proxy of this old post. 

Activating Latent Social Networks

This morning via TechCrunch  I read Sean Parker's Web 2.0 Summit presentation materials, in which he says that the future belongs to "network services" that connect people, like Facebook, and not to "information services" that connect us to data, like Google.  My experiences at Contact Networks taught me to think of email patterns as proxies for social networks.  So, the following idea occurred to me.

Google has Gmail.  Google allows people to publish profiles.  What if Gmail had a button that allowed me to "recognize" a recipient by linking to his / her public profile when I send an email to him / her?

If I have a public profile and the recipient has one too, by pressing this "recognize" button I would make our relationship "provisionally acknowledged" (like a "friend request"); the link would become "acknowledged" if the recipient agreed.  Further, either side (with mutual agreement) could choose to "publish" this relationship in multiple social nets they participate in: Facebook, LinkedIn, Orkut, or they could even make it fully public.

The more two-way email traffic there is between the two users, the stronger the link is assumed by the service to be.  Note that this wouldn't be scored in a linear way.  Probably some sort of recency and frequency considerations would be involved, just as we had at Contact Networks.

Taking a page out of PageRank (pun partially intended), the scoring algorithm could also consider the popularity of the URLs I associated with my Google profile to consider the "centrality of my node" in the uber-network, and therefore the "value" of my "acknowledgements", when given.  Link-love could be configured by each user to be given by-the-message or by default to different email recipients.  Recipients could also "transfer" this link-love, with permission, to their other web presences (e.g., blogs).

The idea isn't limited to the major mail platforms, either.  Any media firm with an online community has a latent social network that could be defined by the response patterns in forum posts.  Users wouldn't experience the pain and inconvenience of joining YASNS, just a minor modification -- perhaps a welcome one, if accompanied by a little extra valuable information -- to how they interact already in the communities they belong to.  "Activating" such social networks through mechanisms similar to the ones described above would enhance the viral marketing potential of the communities, which would appeal to advertisers.

Since basically everyone uses email, doing this would also "democratize the social graph".  What I mean is that today there are two kinds of networks.  Either they are private -- owned and run by Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. -- or they are "public-but-elite", defined by the link structure of the Web.  In the former case, if amigo ergo sum ("I friend therefore I am"), I exist at Facebook's whim.  In the latter case, only folks who take the time to establish a public web presence and get linked to (say, through a blog, or a social net public profile) exist.  (Reminds me of Steve Martin's excitement at making it into the phone book in The Jerk.)  An open, more inclusive social graph mechanism than either of these currently provides would help bridge the digital divide, among other benefits.

Who's doing this?  The idea isn't entirely original.  Partially relevant: Facebook has just updated its News Feed to consider interactions between users as inputs for how to filter items to each user.  I'm sure this must have occurred to the major portals with email services.  Seems like a natural feature for Google Wave, for example, though I haven't seen it.  Surely (as with Contact Networks) it's also valuable to large organizations to establish "enterprise social networks", inside and beyond. 

Postscript: Gather.com CEO Tom Gerace commented they are working on a patent-pending capability they call PeopleRank that will do what I describe above in the online community section of this post. Google's been thinking about this for at least a year -- how come we haven't heard more yet?

Twitter Idea Of The Day

I just read Clive Owen's piece in on wired.com describing the rise of search engines focused on real-time trend monitoring, as opposed to indexing based on authority.  It's good, short, and I recommend it.

Building on ideas I had a while back, it provoked an idea for a web service that would allow a group sponsor to register Twitter feeds (or, for that matter, any kind of feed) from members of the group, do a word-frequency analysis on those feeds (with appropriate filters of course), and then display snapshots (perhaps with a word cloud) of popularity, and trend analysis (fastest-rising, fastest-falling).  You could also have specialized content variants: most popular URLs, most popular tags.  Clicking through from any particular word (or url or tag) you could do a network analysis: which member of the group first mentioned the item, who re-tweeted him or her, either with attribution or without.

The builder of a service like this would construct it as a platform that would allow group sponsors to set up individual accounts with one or more groups, and it would allow these sponsors to aggregate groups up or drill down from an aggregate cross-group view down to individual ones, perhaps with some comparative analysis -- "show me the relative popularity of any given word / content item across my groups", for example.

Twitter already has trending topics, as do others, but the lack of grouping for folks relevant to me makes it (judging by the typical results) barely interesting and generally useless to me.  There are visual views of news, like Newsmap, but they pre-filter content by focusing on published news stories.

An additional layer of sophistication based on semantic analysis technology like, say, Crimson Hexagon's, would translate individual key words into broader categories of meaning from all this, so you could, at a glance, in what ways and proportions your group members were feeling about different things: "Well, it's Monday morning, and 2/3 of my users are feeling 'anxious' about work, while 1/3 are feeling 'inspired'  on vacation."

As for making money, buzz-tracking services are already bought by / licensed by / subscribed to by a number of organizations.  I could see a two-stage model here where group sponsors who aggregate and process their members' feeds could then re-syndicate fine-grained analysis of those feeds to media and other organizations to whom that aggregated view would be useful. "What are alumni of university X / readers of magazine Y focused on right now?"  The high-level cuts would be free, perhaps used to drive traffic.

MITX "What's Next": Mid-Year Digital Marketing Zeitgest Check (#MITXDT)

This morning I went to MITX's "The Current Digital Market and the Outlook for What's Next" event at Microsoft in Cambridge. The event was well-attended.  Before the  panel discussion, I enjoyed talking with Allen & Gerritsen CEO Andrew Graff, who helped us at ArsDigita, and iProspect CEO (and ex-Bain colleague) Rob Murray.  Andrew reported that business was surprisingly strong, and Rob validated trends toward multi-channel attribution analysis and optimization.  I also had the chance to meet Forrester's Shar van Boskirk briefly; the 5-year interactive marketing forecast of spend across display, search, email, mobile, and social she / they released yesterday, projecting digital to grow to 20% of an otherwise flat market, with social growing by a factor of five, sparked a spirited conversation on Josh Bernoff's Ad Age article about it yesterday.

Shar moderated a panel that included Dace Venture's Jon Chait, Fidelity Labs' (and Razorfish alum) Hadley Stern, and Razorfish Client Partner Kristin Marlow.  Jon's got a $75M debut fund focused on consumer marketing solutions; Hadley's job is to develop things for Fidelity customers that will be ready for prime-time in 12-18 months, and Kristin runs the Razorfish relationship with T. Rowe Price.

Shar's summary / synthesis of the panelists' themes:

• the marketing organization's function has been transformed into one of "conversation stewardship"; marketers need to take their efforts to plant and nurture conversations to where audiences are (e.g., syndicate, Hadley's main point), and be prepared to have it be a real 2-way communication (Jon's primary point). (FWIW, maybe "2-way" should be "n-way").
• There's a tight focus on performance right now; investments in data management / integration are taking precedence over investments in new media

Panelist comments I noted:

• Kristin: Interactive marketing budgets are on the sideline, waiting for performance to come back; what is getting spent is very close to conversion, and is very closely watched and analyzed
• Kristin: Quantcast is hot, people like the idea of being able to buy cookies  
• Kristin: Attribution analysis for display v search spending optimization is a growth area 
• Kristin: There's also lots of attention to the "on-domain experience" 
• Kristin: Lots of focus on social, because people think it will be largely free, but it's not
• Hadley: "97% of Fidelity's business is done online" [stunning stat, I'd be very interested to better understand how that's bounded / qualified] 
• Hadley: Given that, his big theme is syndication -- "Fidelity Everywhere" -- building applications for the desktop, iGoogle, iPhones, etc. that allow Fidelity customers to do what they need in the places they are most comfortable, which doesn't always mean coming to the website 
• Hadley: Fluid times -- "Feels like every six months we're trying to make big decisions without much information."
• Jon: Trend is toward 2-way marketing , most cost effective ways to maximize engagement with the right people. Seeing 5-14% CTR on display ads in these media
• Jon: The trend is real -- his portfolio companies serving these needs have had their strongets revenue growth ever since Q4 of last year 
• Jon and Kristin: establishing credible social presence takes commitment -- can't dabble.  
• Jon -- entry price for credible social media effort = $250k-350k/year, sustained effort will be seven figures / year
• Kristin: There's a tradeoff between engagement and scale [Note: my presentation at IBM Research on Monday was partly about how you reconcile the two]
• Shar: there isn't and won't be any fully integrated platform for marketing analytics and execution -- the key is to work with vendors who play nice with each other, through adherence to "open data"  

Questions I wished I'd asked:

• How much of decision-making by clients right now is based on modelling versus testing?
• Given the decline in unit prices for media, as well as lower creative costs, the cost of analytics and tracking for any given campaign are getting bigger -- to what degree are marketers factoring these into campaign ROI? [I'm not seeing that yet, but I suspect it will begin to become an issue in the next 12-24 months.  If in the past the medium was the message, the measure may well be the message in the future -- meaning what each target consumer experiences will be personalized based on complex algorithms drawing conclusions about him or her.]  

What did I miss? 

Caption Contest

Online Surveys & Market Research

Facebook at 250 (Million): What's Next? And What Will Your Share Be?

Facebook announced last week that it had passed 250 million members.  Since no social network grows to the sky (as MySpace experienced before it), it's useful to reflect on the enablers and constraints to that growth, and on the challenges and opportunities those constraints present to other major media franchises (old and new) that are groping for a way ahead.

"Structured Collaboration" principles say social media empires survive and thrive based on how well they support value, affinity, and simplicity.  That is,

• how useful (rationally and emotionally) are the exchanges of information they support?
• how well do they support group structures that maximize trust and lower information vetting costs for members? 
• how easy do they make it for users to contribute and consume information? 

(There are of course additional, necessary "means to these ends" factors, like "liquidity" -- the seed content and membership necessary to prime the pump -- and "extensibility" -- the degree to which members can adapt the service to their needs -- but that's for another post.)

My own experience with Facebook as a user, as well as my professional experience with it in client marketing efforts, has been:

• Facebook focuses on broad, mostly generic emotional exchanges -- pictures, birthday reminders, pokes.  I get the first two, and I admire the economy of meaning in the third.  The service leaves it to you to figure out what else to share or swap.  As a result, it is (for me anyway) <linkbait> only sometimes  relevant as an element in a B2C campaign, and rarely relevant in a B2B campaign </linkbait>
• Facebook roared past MySpace because it got affinity right -- initially.  That is, Facebook's structure was originally constrained -- you had to have an email address from the school whose Facebook group you sought to join.  Essentially, there had to be some pre-existing basis for affinity, and Facebook just helped (re-)build this connective tissue.  Then, Facebook allowed anyone to join, and made identifying the nature of relationships established or reinforced there optional.  Since most of us including me are some combination of busy and lazy, we haven't used this feature consistently to describe the origins and nature  of these relationships.  And, it's cumbersome and awkward to have to go back and re-categorize "friends". (An expedient hack on this might be to allow you to organize your friends into groups, and then ask you which groups you want to publish items to, as you go.)
• Facebook is a mixed bag as a UI.  On one hand, by allowing folks to syndicate blogs and tweets into Facebook, they've made our life easier.  On the other, the popular unstructured communications vehicles -- like the "Wall" -- have created real problems for some marketers.  Structured forms of interaction that would have created less risky choices for marketers, like polls, have come later than they should have and are still problematic ( for example, you can't add polls to groups yet, which would be killer).  And, interacting with Facebook through my email client -- on my PC and on my smartphone -- is still painful.  To their credit, Facebook opened up a great API to enable others to build specialized forms of structured interaction on its social graph. But in doing so it's ceded an opportunity to own the data associated with potentially promising ones.  (Like prediction markets; Inkling Markets, for example, lets you syndicate notices of your trades to Facebook, but the cupboard's pretty bare still for pm apps running against Facebook directly.)

The big picture: Facebook's optimizing size of the pie versus share of the pie.  It can't be all things to all people, so it's let others extend it and share in the revenue and create streams of their own.  Estimates of the revenues to be earned this year by the ecosystem of third party app developers running on Facebook and MySpace run to $300-500 million, growing at 35% annually.  

Them's not "digital dimes", especially in the context of steep declines in September ad page trends in, say, revenues of leading magazine franchises, as well as stalled television network upfronts. But, folks might argue, "Do I want to live in thrall to the fickle Facebook API, and rent their social graph at a premium?"  The answer isn't binary -- how much of an app's functionality lives in Facebook, versus living on a publisher's own server, is a choice.  Plus, there's ways to keep Facebook honest, like getting behind projects like OpenSocial, as other social networks have done. (OpenSocial is trying to become to Facebook's social graph as Linux is to Windows.  Engineer friends, I know -- only sort of.)  And, for Old Media types who don't feel they are up to the engineering tasks necessary, there are modern-day Levi Strausses out there selling jeans to the miners -- like Ning, which just today raised more money at a high valuation.  Still too risky? Old Media could farm out app development to their own third party developer networks, improving viral prospects by branding and promoting (to their suscriber lists) the ones they like in exchange for a cut of any revenues.  In this scenario, content gets added as an ingredient, not the whole main course.  

What is true in the new environment is that reach-based ad network plays surfing on aggregated content won't pay any more.  Rather we have to think about services that would generate more revenue from narrower audiences.  The third-party games created by Facebook app developers referenced above demonstrate how those revenues might stem from value through entertainment.  As we speak, Apple and its developers are earning non-trivial sums from apps.  Phonetag has its hands in folks' pockets (mine included) for $10/month for its superuseful -- albeit non-social -- transcription service.  Filtering for relevant content is a big challenge and opportunity.  Might someone aggregate audiences with similar interests and offer a retail version sourced at wholesale from filtering service firms like Crimson Hexagon?  Looks like Porter Novelli may already be thinking down these lines...

Let's push the math: a winner service by anyone's measure would earn, say, $50M a year. Four bucks a month from each person is roughly $50/ year.  You'd then need a million folks, 1/250th of Facebook's user base to sign up.  Reasonability check -- consider the US circulation of some major magazine titles. 

If your application service is especially useful, maybe you can get $2/month directly from each person.  Maybe you can make the rest up in ecommerce affiliate commissions (a 10% commission on $125 in annual purchases by each person gets you ~$1/month) and ad revenue (the $12 million/year nut would require one dollar per member per month; a $10 CPM would mean getting each of your million users to account for one impression on your service a couple of times per week, more or less, to cover that nut.)

We also have to be prepared to live in a world where the premiums such services earn are as evanescent as mayflies, especially if we build them on open social graphs.  But that's ok -- just as Old Media winners built empires on excellent, timely editorial taste in content, New Media winners will build their franchises on "editorial noses" for function-du-jour, and function-based insights relevant to their advertisers.  And last time I checked, function and elegance were not mutually exclusive.

So, even as we salute the Facebook juggernaut as it steams past Media Beach, it's time to light some design workshop campfires, and think application services that have "Value, Affinity, Simplicity."

Structured Collaboration in Social Media: Design For Analytics (IBM Research Talk Recap)

At Kate Ehrlich's invitation, I gave a one-hour talk yesterday at IBM Research and the Center for Social Software titled "Structured Collaboration in Social Media: Design for Analytics".

The presentation made three main points:

• Social marketing today is limited by the (un-)structure of social media. (And, most marketers accept the constraints of these media as they exist today, and "reasonably" adapt themselves to them.)
• Applying "Structured Collaboration" principles to social media design ("unreasonably" adapting the medium) can expand and improve user engagement.
• These same principles can inform the design of "engagement" for marketing analytics, to make segmentation and targeting easier and more effective.

The presentation included a survey and evaluation of the social marketing landscape today, and described two important shortcomings that limit what marketers can do with it:

• "Off-the-rack" collaboration structures that don't align -- and often work against -- what marketers are trying to accomplish 
• Sample bias given the "1-10-90" nature of participation 

The presentation then described and illustrated "Structured Collaboration" principles, and talked about how marketers like Nike are realizing significant results through initiatives that reflect them.  Then, we discussed how the design of these initiatives can reveal segmentation and targeting insights much more readily than the typical application of marketing analytics to conventional social media.

Finally, the talk offered some existing examples for how to exploit these principles cheaply, as well as some ideas for how several firms could apply them to realize their own versions of what Nike, and more recently others like Fiat, have done.

Thanks once again to Kate, Ethan, and Irene, and to all their colleagues for participating!