David Alston of Radian6 stopped by yesterday and commented on this post.
This video is a detailed explanation of my views on Social Media, Brand Monitoring, and operationalizing and scaling those things in companies.
http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=2576062&server=vimeo.com&show_title=0&show_byline=0&show_portrait=0&color=8f3b55&fullscreen=1
Video Blog 12-19-2008 | The question of Scale & Social Media for Brand Managment from Brian Roy on Vimeo.
I love a good baseball metaphor. There is nothing better than using the lens of baseball to make a point simple, clear and biting.
So let me tell you what I’ve been thinking today. You can’t hit a 5 run homer – it just can’t be done. Doesn’t matter how smart you are; doesn’t matter how talented you are; doesn’t matter how many twitter friends you’ve got.
I’m an optimist – some would say annoyingly so. I believe the best developers among us can code just about anything we want them to. But that isn’t really the point – is it? The point should be bringing the greatest value to the largest number of people possible.
Often, however, you are faced with a dilemma. Your “power users” want functionality that no one but a power user will ever be able to (or more importantly willing to) use. In short – they want you to hit a 5 run homer.
Why is that a 5 run homer? Because you can’t exert 80% of your effort satisfying 5% of the target market. You can’t convert the masses by catering to the few.
So you make a choice – you swing for the fences, or you shorten up and take the ball back up the middle. But no matter how hard you swing… you aren’t driving in 5 runs with one swing.
I’ve been using FriendFeed for several months now. As a matter of fact, with the addition of real-time FriendFeed is now my primary Social Media interface. Why? Because the critical attribute which makes Social Media useful (yep, I’m banging on the adding value drum again) is aggregation, not publishing or networks. Publishing and networks are required – but they quickly become commoditized. An example – Twitter gets popular and up pops Laconica, Yammer, OpenMicroBlogging, identi.ca, …
Social Networks are no different. How many social networks do you have to check every day to keep up? What are the odds that all of your friends (or co-workers) are on the same network?
Social Bookmarking – no different. Friends across multiple networks.
The result is that you – in order to actually use Social Media in a useful way (information discovery) – have to jump through hoop after hoop after hoop to attempt to discover anything.
That is why aggregation is so powerful – and why I was never all that impressed with Twitter’s Track feature (which caused so much angst when turned off). Track was only interesting if you assume all the relevant information was/is on Twitter. In other words – the network drives value, not the information – and that completely misses the point.
FriendFeed gets it. The value is in the information – and providing aggregation of that information and useful tools to locate, consume and re-share that information is the key to providing value. With the introduction of Real-Time FriendFeed completely changes the real-time information discovery game.
FriendFeed allows a user to aggregate all the places they view, track, share, and create information. When you follow a person you follow all of their information – regardless of what network it is generated on. That – to me – is the point of a “follow” – I want to know what you find interesting, because if you find it interesting I might too. I really don’t care how you share the information… and I certainly don’t want to follow you around the inter-webs joining every cool new network to get access to the information you view, track, share, and create. When you join a new service (a.k.a., network) you add it to FriendFeed and viola! I can see what you share there as well…
The introduction of real-time (while admittedly imperfect) is a sea change for real-time information discovery. It transforms it from a network (service) based activity (e.g., I can see what happens on Facebook in real-time in Facebook – I can see what happens in Twitter real-time in Twitter – etc) to person based activity – I see, in real-time – what you share, without the limitations of network/service.
The only thing missing from FriendFeed today is aggregation based on topic. That is, the ability to specify a group (e.g., everyone, my friends, a room, etc) and a topic search (e.g., debate, google, pretty cat pictures, etc) and see only information which satisfies both criteria.
At the end of the day – the aggregation of information a person shares, and the ability of others to “follow” that information stream is Social Media. The social graph is interesting, but it doesn’t add value to people’s lives in any meaningful way (granted it creates a highly valuable advertising platform). Efficient sharing of information and information discovery does. Aggregation is the secret sauce.
Great post today from John Furrier on Furrier.org.
He points out – rightly – that:
I fully agree that it is the best time to start a company both for entrepreneur and the venture capitalist. In fact the angels are out there. I ran into one yesterday (granted I live in Palo Alto and you can swing a dead cat without hitting an angel or VC). There is big interest in seed, super seed, and full blown Series A deals.
In these downturn times the opportunities just fall out of the trees. In a downturn the noise level is reduced and it’s all signal. Thanks to the memo from Sequoia which was a strong signal from the Silicon Valley elite money machine on which behavior will be tolerated (translation they want less Seesmics and more real companies). The other them is that innovation is coming out strong. The real opportunities are presenting themselves. The real web 2.0 will emerge from this downturn.
Or – in the language I would use:
If you are building a startup that delivers real value to your prospective customers – real value they will pay for – now is a great time to get started. If you have a cool idea that lots of people will sign up for, but you are not sure anyone would pay for – keep your day job.
The idea that you can do something cool and aggregate subscribers and only then “monetize” the subscriber base is dead (and hopefully gone for good).
I can’t take it anymore – I just can’t.
NOTE – this post was triggered by a fine post (and subsequent FriendFeed discussion) by Mark Evans – which you can find here.
The idea that you can create a “cool” service, attract massive numbers of subscribers, and then monetize the subscriber base is insane. Always was, always will be. But it is the Google model. They created a web search service (cool) and then once they became a powerful player in web search they became an ad platform (monetization) – right?
That however, is a myth. The reality is Google was solving a real, important problem. The web was growing really fast. Creating a way for people to find the content they were looking for was a known problem with existing solutions (remember Yahoo and Excite were already out there). The existing solutions were already generating revenue – by placing adds in their content (remember the whole aggregating eyeballs thing?). What Google did was create a better search solution (product innovation) and refine the exiting business model from ad placement (putting ads on your blog) to becoming an ad platform (business model innovation).
So the reality of Google is that they solved an important problem via product innovation and solved an important problem via business model innovation – by creating an advertising platform which could be leveraged by any advertiser.
But the myth is so much more fun – couple of guys create a really cool way to index the web for relevance and everyone wants to use it. Now they can figure out how to make money. We all took the bait. The Bubble 2.0 story became “create a cool service, generate buzzz, aggregate tons of users, and then generate revenue”.
Here is the bad news – that is the same myth that created Bubble 1.0 – remember? Bubble 1.0 said – “Don’t worry about revenues – just grow really, really fast – once you have lots of growth revenue and profits will come.”
As Britney Spears would say “oooops, I did it again“.
What is real is that the winners solve important problems that have enough value that people will pay for them. Finding a business online (Google) – huge problem, great solution = $$$. Selling stuff I don’t want/need to someone, anywhere who does want/need it for as much as possible (eBay) – huge problem, great solution = $$$.
So let’s make a deal. Let’s stop talking about “cool” services, how fast they are generating page views or subscriber growth or any other measure until they tell us how they are going to make money. Let’s get back to creating services that generate value for the prospective customer – value that they are willing to pay for (again – ad placement is just a way of getting your user to pay for the service).
It isn’t important that the first business model is the “right” business model. What is important is that we are re-focusing all of our frenetic energy on what really matters.
VALUE = REVENUE
I use – as does cosinity – SMS for a variety of communications. This morning – my SMS service provider Clickatell – notified me this morning that Verizon had decided to charge an additional 3 cents each for SMS sent from an “application”.
That means the average SMS sent to a Verizon user will cost between 5 and 7 cents.
Obviously this is highway robbery and completely unjustified. As has been pointed out hundreds of times – SMS is the lowest network usage and network cost to a provider – so this has nothing to do with increasing costs, it is pure profit.
If this isn’t reversed I’ll be forced to discontinue SMS services for Verizon Wireless users.
I’ve included the email below.
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From Seth Godin – this is how communications applications create value.
“My computer will call your computer…”
Lisa points us Fonolo, a company in beta that spiders phone trees at big companies and promises to make it easy for you to go straight to the spot you want. Then it calls you when the phone is answered and records the call so you can keep a record.
Bringing symmetry to asymmetrical relationships is a huge opportunity for a technology company. I think there’s room for a union of top high school students, for example, to give some leverage in the recruiting process. And of course, stubhub took the power away from ticket scalpers.
[From Deep dialing]
Now the question is what will people pay for it. Different things value and price.
The trick is to create solutions that have more value than a nominal price. Does Fonolo do that? I’m not sure. Perhaps if the price is having to view or listen to ads…
So here is the question:
Would you trade ads for navigating a phone tree?
Brian Roy 