Archive for the ‘social media’ Category
Old Media vs. New Media
Posted by Jamie Hutson | Filed under Local Search, Mobile, advertising, social media, web 2.0
The world of old media is degrading faster than ever. Newspapers have been suffering more than ever before, and are losing necessary traction in local markets. TV is beginning to embrace digital media as an alternative source of media, but as a new member of media is a step above print in the food chain.
So where does this lead us? How do the old guys (read newspapers, but include old TV guys), compete on a level playing field where consumers are more and more determining their place and time to consumer their media. (A great discussion of this topic can be found at Screenwerk)The rise of the internet, and mobile specifically should be seen by these players as bountiful opportunities. They have strong brand presence in their market, established goodwill and existing relationships in their respective communities. Except there is one thing missing from them: awareness of the opportunity vs rather than observation of the threat.
I had a meeting recently with some “old guys” interested in reaching a more engaged, younger audience via a partnership through with local search. They were smart, experienced and were using a pretty good model and having success with it. But 10 minutes into the meeting, I could tell they didn’t get it. They knew what I was talking about, but they didn’t get how the differentness of what we were discussing made it better. A classic “old way of doing something with new technology, vs new way of doing something” issue. And it wasn’t the first time I saw it.
Newspapers are still in trouble and now seem to be past “denial” of the threat the web poses to them, but they remain stubborn in embracing it. Local content should be celebrated and contributions should be encouraged, however the model of user generated content and social collaboration that has made so many online organizations successful continues to be rejected. Until Web 2.0 is embraced by old media, newspapers in particular, they will continue to falter.
Newspapers more than any other medium are most well positioned to capture value out of their local markets with the web. The lack of their expansion into other verticals is a prime example of their stubbornness. They would have to sack it up and realize that there is potential revenue through a different medium. Hundreds of other companies have realized this and have capitalized on these gaps. Yelp, every version of the yellow pages and all local directories are in existence today because the big players (newspapers) failed to act.
Now what is the next space that the new, big players will fail to act in?
A review of NewsCred
Posted by Jamie Hutson | Filed under Life, Start Ups, Syndication, analytics, sharing applications, social media, web 2.0
After posting about the growing amount of information and its consequential devaluation, I received a chance to use and review a new service - NewsCred - All the world’s credible news, in one place, a new aggregator that allows registered users to vote on articles and choose to “Credit” the author or article, or “Discredit” the author or article. It is actually similar to my iGoogle homepage in that I can select the news sources and blogs that I want to follow, and track the creditability of. They are out to filter the “Signal to Noise” ratio…
One of the really cool things about the service is that they allow anyone to rank the credibility of an article, an author, or a source (newpaper, blog, etc) based on credibility, quality, transparency and accuracy. The voting process is compiled using their “credibility waterfall algorithm” which although, I don’t like the name (is that a technical term), is a neat concept. It allows the creditability ranking of a specific article to affect the creditability ranking of the author, which in turn affects the creditability ranking of the article’s source. Overall this will theoretically serve you the highest quality and credible news from all across the web. It seems to do a pretty good job of that.
One thing I feel the site needs to really become successful is the proliferation of a “digg” style badge. The relatively new plethora of sharing sites across the internet need a way to tout their creditability, and if the NewsCred “Creditability” ranking badge could furnish this demand, then NewsCred could truly have something remarkable on their hands.
The two largest threats I see for the site are one, reaching a critical mass where they have enough users to rank and “credit” articles which I might read or be interested in; and second, someone else doing that sooner. If the site never really catches on, I don’t really see it becoming anything special, that may go without saying, but here is another 2.0 player in need of user volume.
Its definitely a cool site, one worth checking out. They clearly have a good vision of where they want to be, and how they want to do it and I think it can be successful.
Thanks to the guys at NewsCred for working on something that might actually improve the quality of news out there.
A little break, but not from my BB
Posted by Jamie Hutson | Filed under Life, Local Search, Mobile, Mobile Web, advertising, marketing, social media
Last night Ryan Seacrest was on Larry King, and was speaking on a variety of issues, including the usual useless gossip, but he also touched on his BlackBerry Addiction. Larry asked him about the several businesses he runs and how he manages to keep them all together and when he sleeps. His response was basically that he turns his BlackBerry to silent, but wakes up routinely to check it through the night. I was watching this with my girlfriend and she informed me that Ryan’ BlackBerry use sounded an awful lot like mine.
Took a fairly last minute trip to North Carolina to visit my Grandmother, and we crushed the BlackBerry on the way here. Same old stuff for me that I’ve written about before, but it emphasizes how relevant it truly is. AT&T has announced that it will subsidize the release of the 3G iPhone this summer by as much as $200. BlackBerry announced its new “Bold” device (with 3G). Overall, the market for mobile phones and web-rich devices is growing enourmously. If people are able to buy iPhones for 2 or 3 hundred dollars, imagine how many they will sell.
Once everyday people, not just the early adopters and business savvy customers, but everyday Jones is able to access rich, mobile internet - then we will see the explosive growth in mobile advertising. I’m very excited to see what happens in the 4th quarter this year…
Update on the Info Post
Posted by Jamie Hutson | Filed under Life, social media, web 2.0
I swear to you I didn’t read this post from TechCrunch before I wrote the piece about devaluing information and finding a trusted source.
http://www.techcrunch.com/…how-trustworthy-is-your-favorite-blog/
I guess great minds do think alike. However I rest my case per my post below,
Information Down 3 Points Today
Posted by Jamie Hutson | Filed under social media, web 2.0
Thanks to the proliferation of the internet into our lives, Information is losing its value. Alot of this is due to simple economics (supply vs. demand), while the demand for information isn’t necessarily growing any more rapidly, the supply of information and the relative ease with which it is found is making information less valuable. Let me be clear, I think this is a good thing.
The amount of information online is more than all of the information everywhere else, in every other medium combined. People can find what they want in an instant. The problem with all of this is that the trust value of this information is going down with it. Wikipedia, is a great resource (one of my favorite) however it is a collection of different people’s thoughts and explanations on a topic. But it is not a primary source, it is a secondary or often an indirect third source, which brings into question its reliability. Not as a quick reference, but as a solid, money on the line, reference.
The ability for literally anyone to contribute to wikis and blogs, combined with a plethora of search options (Google, Yahoo, etc) and mix in a growing selection of aggregators (digg, mashable, RSS…) and you have so many different options to get your information and news from, it can be hard to handle. Much of it is the same, but today it takes some human filtering to get down and find the exact information you want, from a source you trust.
Today, many people reported that Twitter beat the USGS in reporting the earthquake in China today, so there is clearly huge value in these instant communication services. I see there being a huge future in aggregation or search that can filter out all the noise and select the most relevant and trusted sources to provide us with the information we are seeking.
Connecting Outside of Your Social Network
Posted by Jamie Hutson | Filed under Life, login, social media, web 2.0
Over the past week several of the major players online have announced the opening of their social networks. MySpace’s “Data Availability,” Facebook Connect, and Google’s Friend Connect. While I am slightly skeptical about the immediate implications of these new applications, the long term ramifications are huge. I have been searching for a way to prevent users from creating a new login, a new identity, and the overall hassle of creating another account with in our community. And here I am today with several options before me.
Of course, in typical media war (in this case social media) fashion, everyone is quick to announce their latest and greatest new development, with out actually releasing it.
“We expect that Facebook Connect will be available publicly within the next several weeks.” - Facebook Official Release;
“With Google Friend Connect (see http://www.google.com/friendconnect following this evening’s Campfire One),” - Official Google Release;
these both come a few days after MySpace’s annoucement regarding their new data availability program. The reason for the haste, is fairly obvious, but it is absurd nonetheless. I digress…
The huge potential impact of these new programs brings a solution to many developers’ and publishers’ dilemmas: “how do we reach social users with out disrupting them out of their routines?” Well here it is, now we can allow users to log in using their original passwords, allow them to quickly, easily, and natively bring their friends with them and truly build on the idea of an open social network and create true connectability across websites.
I am extremely excited about this and will have at least one if not all three of these new technologies up and running as soon as they become available and I have a chance to figure them out.
Ahh, the cure for my login addictions (well, maybe not..)
Early Adopters and You/Me
Posted by Jamie Hutson | Filed under Mobile, Small Businesses, advertising, marketing, revenue models, social media, web 2.0
Today’s Fast Company Big Idea is:
“Anyone who says early adopters don’t matter needs to go back to business school. Facebook and Twitter are beginning to impact business just as much as advertising ”
I follow these daily thought provokers from Fast Company because they are usually fairly interesting. I think this one is excellent. I don’t consider myself to be an innovator, but a late moving early adopter, I am becoming more early in the adoption cycle, but still I’m typically a little behind (particularly in the larger technology space, which I am still new to).
But the importance of early adopters has never left my thoughts. The early adopters are the business owners we seek out first when entering a new market, and they are precisely not the end users that we seek to reach on our website. They are the people who determine whether new technologies fail or succeed and build momentum for those that do. So I wait for the early adopters to try things out see if they fail. Early adopters are the front line in end user technology, and they need to be taken seriously.
A few days ago, I mentioned Lewis Black (ok, I’ve been a little harsh on Lewis, but I’m actually a huge fan) and his mocking of internet addicts - essentially early adopters. Again, a prime example of the lack of understanding most people have of how new technologies can help us do things better and faster, or sometimes just have more fun doing them. MySpace, turned into Facebook, then Twitter became the next hot thing.
Many of my clients are now “working” on a Facebook page, and already have a MySpace page. Do these pages help them at all? Not measurably, but the point is that even these late adopters and slow moving businesses now see that they “really should” be on Facebook. Do a quick google of “Facebook Marketing” (an auto suggestion in firefox!) and you can see that people are making entire businesses out of advertising consulting for Facebook.
But now, the innovators are moving elsewhere, which means the early adopters will be soon to follow. Where will they go, and what will be that next cool technology that will be affecting the way people to business? I would say mobile, but the iPhone already happened and the flurry of 3G phones coming out this summer will blow that away. Its not a new social network, because I believe people are getting fatigued. Semantic Web 3 dot 0, fancy buzz words? I think we are a year or two away from anything drastic coming across the radar.
Any thoughts…
Engagement! (ooh buzz word)
Posted by Jamie Hutson | Filed under analytics, marketing, measurement, sharing applications, social media, web 2.0
The term engagement is flying around pretty freely these days. How do we measure engagement? Can we measure engagement? What exactly is engagement? Well, if none of these people know, then how do we go about defining it, measuring it and building a model to capitalize on engagement?
My take on engagement falls similarly to what Lester Wunderman wrote about engagement. I would define engagement as: Choosing to interact or involve yourself in something. That something can be a website, a brand, a store, a blog, or a television station. The interaction or involvement can be a comment on a blog, a post in a forum, a complaint or experience card in a restaurant, changing the TV chanel, speaking with a floor salesperson at Target. Engagement is interaction with a brand or service by choice.
The web, especially 2.0, as brought the world the ultimate (to this point) platform for engagement. People spend hours a day online, engaging themselves with different brands, different sites and people from all over the world. Search engines allow us to target our engagement even further - they bring us a higher degree of engagement, we make a conscious decision to search for a topic, and then choose to visit one site over the other and spend our time engaging that site.
I believe this engagement will soon be the best measure of an advertisers campaign online. I’m not quite sure how it will work, but measuring engagement is a great way to get a sense of if and how people are interacting with your online campaign.
Here is a “For instance”, if Coca Cola creates a virtual world, and they measure engagement by counting how many people create an avatar, and then compare that to how many of those people come back and use that avatar again, Coca Cola could then measure engagement as a function of ‘# of avatars, frequency of use, and abandonment.’ (Lets say: 1000 avatars created; 600 came back 2 or more times; 200 never came back; your level of engagement could be 600/(1000-200) or .75.) This can be interpreted however you want (in this world of spin we live in - who knows..) perhaps you could use this to say that 75% of the people who responded to your promotion where “relevantly engaged” and 20% were not. I don’t know if this makes any sense to marketers and I’m sorry if I lost you…
Or you could measure engagement by counting interactions purchases, perhaps a redemption of a coupon.
I found myself using engagement in a pitch to an advertiser today, he asked me what I meant by engagement. I said “a website visitor choosing to interact with the site or to take an action that wasn’t necessarily related to why they found themselves on this site.” (I was referring to user submissions as engaging).
After all this I think that maybe engagement is just a different way of saying Web 2.0.
Posted by Jamie Hutson | Filed under Life, sharing applications, social media
I was Just doing some late evening reading here and I discovered this post by Andrew Parker.
It speaks of twitter, which I have been admittedly skeptical about. Until now. I am posting the video I found there below. After watching this I am going to join the twitter phenomenon and see what its all about.
Twitter in Plain English from leelefever on Vimeo.
How cool is that animation? Very cool if you ask me. Ha, social social social, just like the Roaring 20’s.
Login Addiction
Posted by Jamie Hutson | Filed under Life, advertising, login, revenue models, sharing applications, social media
Do you have log in addiction? I’m pretty sure that everyone I know has log in addiction, and the growing influence of social media online is only compounding our problems. Do you find yourself refreshing gmail to see if you have any new emails? Logging into facebook to check the updates? Refreshing your homepage to check for any updates on your RSS? I do, and so do you.
Seemingly every day I come across something new to sign up for, log in to, and then gage my response from. Do any of these applications actually add value to my life? - That is the question on many people’s mind these days, but does it really matter? As all of these new sharing programs emerge and millions of people are logging in every day, what is the world coming to?
My question is how will all of this ever be monetized? There is no way to charge for it, because users will immediately reject that and move to a similar and equally useful/less service that is free. Do we fill the application with advertising? If so, how do we measure the value and effectiveness of these ads? Will marketers really want to pay to reach these tiny niche markets that have suddenly become giant flat, almost muddy, fields?
As I sit here writing this I have 5 other tabs open on my screen, all of them require a log in, a sign up, an email, a profile, something to connect me to all of the anonymous users out there pleasantly sucked in by their ceaseless need to log in. But what is the value of this to me? To you? Facebook has billions of pageviews a month, yet they are losing money. Sure the potential value of those views is huge, but how will they make it happen. What will be done to address these revenue models?
Five websites I’m on. Simultaneously. Two of them have advertising on them. Three of them do not. Why do these websites exist, and how are they going to make money.
If you build it they will come… well if they come, how will you get them to stay long enough to make money? The answer is simple - login addiction. We love connecting ourselves so much, in this increasingly disconnected world, that we will try anything that is fresh, cool and can keep us in touch with the people we care about.
Facebook, Gmail, MySpace, Blogs, Forums, Chat Rooms, Twitter, YouTube, on and on and on, until we stop liking each other. Oh, by the way, don’t forget to subscribe to my RSS feed…
