Category Archives: Social Media

Making people share more has always been the core strategy of Facebook. More sharing means more content on the platform, therefore more reasons to visit, & more advertising revenue. It works – this is what I called, in a previous blog post: the law of gravity. The more content you share, the more often people will visit, prompting to share even more, both by people & brands.

With the release of the ‘open graph’, about 1.5 years ago, Facebook slightly departed from that. By enabling easy, social buttons to be quickly implemented on any website, Facebook reduced the need for website & brand owners to massively put ALL their content on Facebook directly, hoping to gain more viral impact. Of course, the content still grew massively on the platform, since those social buttons had an impact on Facebook’s user newsfeed – but the contents & links were driving people away from the platform. The hope was (and still is) that by helping making the whole Web go social, Facebook would become more of the ‘Web’, because at least it would have more content shared, & more information about the users, which would in turn enable better targeting, and why not, social search – using this intelligence to drive you first to content you’re looking for “approved by friends”.

Now, Facebook has released a new version of the ‘open graph’, which is actually less open. Brands (medias, consumer brands, etc…) can now create immersive experiences which will not require any click to have a viral impact. For instance,  you will be sharing to your network the music you are listening too, the article  you’re reading, the product you’re browsing, by simply opening that song, that article, seeing that product. This will require though that you go through a ‘Facebook app’ and grant initial authorization to that app.

As someone put on Twitter: “Facebook changed its status update: it now wants to be an entertainment hub”. Well, I think it definitely wants to drive back more experiences within Facebook and is trying to craft a new value proposition for those brands willing to embark.  But it will need as well to convince people to sign in! That’s the key trick: will people grant access to those apps who are passively sharing information about what they do ? Some will. But many people never use apps in the first place, so I don’t expect a majority of users to do so.

On the other hand, it is secretly preparing a full Ad Network (à la Ad Sense), which will serve you Ads based on what you ‘did’ on the social network, and even other Websites you’ve visited. Actually it’s only a secret for people who don’t look since you can read the patent application in this post. This will be the ultimate Ad server. Of course, it’s patented & based on their immense reach & information: not only  what millions of people do in Facebook but as well all nice Websites who kindly implemented Facebook social plugins  - handing over tons of information in the process.

If it succeeds, this could make it move to an entirely new category, eating even more share of attention and the online ad market. It now is the fastest growing ‘attention eater’ to the US audience (which is still a few percent of share of attention). Tomorrow it could simply be the company with the biggest share of attention & dominating the display ad market….Hold a minute. One year ago, I mentioned the actual target was the most lucrative Search advertising dominated by Google (cfr my earlier blog post). I still believe it, with as main evidence the recent launch of Google Plus.  Ok, so it will be the online advertising business (both display & search). Hold again. Didn’t I mention earlier Facebook is eating attention away from traditional media like TV, by becoming more of an entertainment hub ?Actually, the untold story of f8 is that Facebook is tackling the entire USD600 Billions advertising industry, brilliantly. Unless people start thinking Facebook’s been a bridge too far.

I recently was given the great opportunity to present at the global  ’FIA’ forum in Paris (International Association of motoring & driving clubs). While one of the goal was to provide some education on social media,  I have tried to bring a few additional insights, which, after all, could be relevant to a larger group. You can read the full presentation here

I thought it would be interesting to get your reactions on it.

First, all considered, I could only see 3 fundamental types of social media:

• Social Networks: well, that’s the one most people associate Social Media with: Facebook, LinkedIn, and a flurry of others. Discriminating factor is mutual acceptance – both side of a potential connection need to agree before that connection is made. Typically only real life connections are mapped into the system, but that does not need to be the case
• Micro-blogging & curating: examples are Digg.com (bookmark sharing & voting) and of course Twitter. While it may sound unreasonable to include Twitter with the likes of Digg, I do not think so.  The main criteria is the ‘followership’ principle. You simply follow people (or subscribe to their update), content, & vote for what you find interesting (like retweet or vote for Digg). This enables to ‘curate’ content and of course, in the case of Twitter, many other things (like sharing a picture of what you ate for breakfast or your work-out program – or any other critical aspectof your life you want to share with the world)
• Crowd-sourced media. The main idea is that a small minority of people will create/upload content, and a vast majority watch it (and vote, fund, etc..). Examples are Youtube, Slideshare, and many others focusing on specific niches (e.g. microcredit funding, music financing, t-shirt design like Threadles, etc…)

Sure, there might be other categories, and some sites overlap across categories (see how some sites ‘Twitterize’ themselves so that you can follow anything or anyone).  But it gives a very simple taxonomy to build on. Most of the openings and start-up creations are with the last category. For instance, an interesting one in crowd-sourced media we saw at the FIA is ‘Be-mobile’, which offers a solution in which a small set of ‘passive’ drivers send their position & speed to a central site through a black box in their car, who then do some maths and share traffic information to all registered drivers (eg on their mobile).   Simple yet powerful.

And now: the 4 laws of social media. That came to my mind as I read the last one ‘Zuckberg’s law on information sharing’.  Well, Marc, there are other laws you know very well but share even less. Here they are (including Marc’s):

• Law of networks. This is the most obvious. If you connect to a social media and you don’t find anyone you can connect with, it becomes rather useless. The more people join, the more value. I had this issue with Twitter initially (zero friends on it). On the reverse side, once a critical mass has been reached, those networks will get extra leverage to gain new members and accelerate their growth (they become sooo compelling – what happened to Facebook).
• Law of gravity. I like this one because I made it up (not the real one, thanks Newton). Most social media have built-in sharing to your network/followers. If you do something within it (like a page, comment, etc…), your connections will see it – you don’t need to make extra clicks to share your action.  This means that content progressively moved to social networks, as brand saw the value of the ‘built-in’ sharing of actions by their fans and its viral potential. The more content, the more often people check out the site, and the more addictive it gets. There is more gravity on the earth than on the moon.  This law is particularly true for social networks.
• Law of switch costs. If a competitor of Facebook pop up, with more nice features (or better privacy controls), will you switch ? It takes time & energy to register, build your network, and who knows who will actually follow you once you quit ? You would look stupid all alone in this great new social network, wouldn’t you ? Those are switch costs.
• Zuckerberg’s law of information sharing. Marc Zuckerberg pointed it out in a recent interview. Every year, people share twice as much information as they did last year. People get more confident, re-assured by privacy, the fact that nothing bad happened with those party pictures they shared, etc… The fight for attention is spreading and more people want a share.  Or just have fun with friends. I think for many people who are passive on Facebook (read: most people, like 90-95%), two times zero is still zero, but ok. It does increase.

Those laws explain why social networks have been as described by Marc Zuckerberg, a ‘platform’ game – Facebook has been capable to build a platform that takes the most of the benefits from those laws and overcome the challenges. They excel at each: network laws through e.g., great onboarding (make sure you find whoever you know from your first connection);  gravity (offering access to brands for free, as opposed to e.g. Netlog); switch costs (constantly asking you to grow your network) & information sharing (encouraging to share always more, poke people, etc…). To do that though, you need a long term view and lots of financing (more than $800 USD Millions for Facebook).

My hope ? That this simple taxonomy and the 4 laws might be useful when planning social media actions (please share your feedback), not simply to explain the past. Last, we shouldn’t be scared by them (albeit a little bit).  There are still rooms for ‘traditional’ web sites…but their integration with social media should be tight. This is for another post.

Facebook recently announced, at its f8 developer conference, the launch of its ‘open graph’ API and new features for Web publishers. While most geeks are aware, excited and/or scared at this, here is a simple summary for everyone else. The geeks can jump to the next paragraph.

Fundamentally, the idea is to  ‘open up’ the viral toolbox that exists within Facebook to outside Web sites:

• You could ‘like’ someone’s post ? Now you will be able to ‘Like’ almost anything on the Web, from a Jean’s on Levi’s store to a News article, or even a consumer review on Amazon
• You could see which friends were using such application, member of which group you were browsing at, etc… ? Now web sites will be able to personalize your experience based on what you friends like too: showing relevant items in e-commerce, news, etc…
• You liked to see fan /friends activities ? You can now see it on another site

As a note, many of those social tools won’t even require you to sign in to the Web site. As long as you are logged in into Facebook, Facebook will be able to display the relevant content (without passing your details to the site).

Those announcements have created huge reactions across the Web, from enthusiastic to really scared. So, let me jump on the bandwagon and share a couple of thoughts.

Let’s start with the positive. As I put in the title, I believe that this announcement is creating what I call a 4th wave of Web development and growth. Don’t look at those waves on Wikipedia, I am just putting this together myself as a personal perspective. Interestingly enough, most of those waves lasted about 6 years:

• The first wave of Internet development is due to the invention of the World Wide Web, to which a Belgian contributed (Robert Caillau), in 1989. I still remember using a ‘World Wide Web home page’ by the W3C back in 1994 – at that time, most of the key links to navigate through the Web still held on a page. It span the world of ‘Read’ web and enabled people to discover wealth of information and content. This itselfs created the need for powerful search engines like Alta vista then Google
• The second wave was born with eBay and Amazon.com, both founded in 1995, so 6 years later. It created a whole new way for people to use the Internet, what I would call the ‘Transact’ web with the rise of ecommerce
• The third wave took a bit more time (dot.com bubble burst explains it). I date it to 2004, the year Facebook was founded. While ‘social’ Web initiatives had appeared before that, Facebook got to become the fastest growing and largest consumer service ever. I call it the ‘Connect’ Web as it enabled to discover and share stuff with people you were connected with in a much easier way. It is best known as Web 2.0 or Social Web.
• The fourth wave is potentially now, or another 6 years later. You will notice that, while all those waves enriched the whole web, they remained relatively independent of each other. Now Facebook is trying to put it all together, to create the ‘Read + Transact + Connect’ (RTC) web. The glue that some people had in mind but none had the scale to impose, nor the ability to create immediate ‘win-win’ between them and publishers (you get more viral effect through sharing, we get more data). Facebook has it.

With the RTC Web, you will be able to move seamlessly across read experience from global and friend news, shop along with friends and see what they like, get personalized recommendations based on your history of ‘like’ and the one of your friends, comment a sport event online while it’s happening, with your friends, etc… In a nutshell, everything is integrated in a seamless experience, to maximize the value of your friend’s recommendation and connectivity, optimize your shopping, and discover new information and experience based on both algorithmic and social power.

Too big for Facebook ? As further evidence that this looks like the ambition of Facebook, let’s ponder on the fact that Facebook, on top of the above mentioned features, is going to push web site developer to include ‘semantic’ data into their page. So Facebook will ‘understand’ that someone who pushes the ‘like’ button does it on a book vs a news items, and will be able to derive much more intelligence from that knowledge (ie ‘And did you read that book too ?’).

It sounds great…or scary. Beyond the usual concerns around the privacy implications, one can be scared that the control of the data about your ‘likes’ are with one company: Facebook. This must be too much power. No doubt. It will either a big success or a major push back, but I would opt for the first choice.

Let’s consider what’s a stake for them. For me (personal  interpretation), it stands in 6 letters: SEARCH. Here a 5 reasons why:

1. By opening the ‘toolbox’, Facebook will actually lose some advertising revenue, since the need to maintain traditional ‘fan pages’ within Facebook will decrease, and traffic will/may go down. The older play of ‘drive traffic to Facebook’ does not apply so much anymore. There must be a bigger game at stake
2. Clearly, the traditional banner advertising is nice but decreasing in yield and amount. Click-rate have decreased over the last years and will continue to do so. The Web is plagued with overcapacity. Yet, so far this has been the main driver of Facebook revenue
3. Search still takes the lion’s share. The main difference is that when you see a banner, even if well targeted based on your geo, socio-demo and the likes, your are potentially less interested because you are doing something else, like checking your friends news. In search, when you see an ad, you are actually searching something related. Click-rates are higher and the value of the click is higher too, because the chances are higher that you are a prospect vs just curious. Search is very attractive and Google has a license to print money at this point
4. Facebook and Microsoft are partners, and Bing can only win with a truly differentiating proposition against Google. Combining ‘social search’ (what your friends have looked at and like) and algorithmic search (like Google) seems like a killer idea
5. A route to achieve search dominance is to become you Web browser’s default home page. With the wealth of ‘likes’ by friends on news and others, Facebook has a good shot at it. Look at this Facebook attempt for a first version

In a way, this would not be bad neither as it would stimulate competition in the search business. Of course, traditional advertising on Facebook would fare better since it would improve ad targeting and open other revenue streams, but I fundamentally think that they are after another holy grail.

Whatever happens, both on the Web and for Facebook, we face exciting times ahead. The Web is still in its infancy and interesting developments will come – let’s watch this space.

Ok, all nice and great, but do you LIKE it ?

It’s been more than a month since Google released its brand new service: Google Buzz.  For those who forgot or aren’t paying particular attention to those kinds of events, Google Buzz is a mix of Facebook and Twitter, enabling people with Gmail account to share latest news, information, etc… about them or the world in general, to their followers (people who are also on Gmail in their contact list).

Sounds familiar ? Yes, it should. After all, it’s another ‘me-too’ in the crowded space of social sharing sites and tools, which almost everyone uses, at least through Facebook. The intriguing element is that the initial release on February 9 generated a lot of bad buzz on the Internet. Google had off course the desire to get all Gmail users on board as quickly as they could. In the process, they automatically turned off lots of privacy settings. Some of them had the unintended effect to share your address book to many people, or even almost share your email address to the outside world.  Not good, since the email is still considered as ‘protected territory’ when it comes to privacy.

A few days after the bad buzz, Google quickly launched a second version, with improved on-boarding process for privacy adjustments. A few days ?  Yes, that was fast.

The usual debate around this was on the typical ‘tension’ between privacy defenders and the Web companies, for whom the more  a service is ‘open and shared’, the better it is for the service, since users will see more content popping up and come back more often. Google pushed this to max, going too far in its first release. It is certainly part of the explanation.

The theory of this post now, is that this bad buzz was all intentional. Google did it on purpose, perfectly knowing about the bad buzz this would generate. Off course, it’s a theory, but let’s explore it for some time. As a note, this is why I did not write about it earlier – didn’t want to be part of that…the other reason is that I was simply slow to get back writing.

First, Google was really, really slow on that opportunity. Social sharing was, as far as I remember, invented not by Facebook but StumbleUpon (apart from few earlier failed attempts), which was built with the idea of letting people share and discover new web sites by sharing and voting for them in the community. It was founded in 2001. In 2010, or a whole 9 years later, which is about 20 years in Internet time, Google Buzz follows Facebook, Twitter, and all other social sharing sites which themselves followed StumbleUpon, in some shape or form.

Further, when Yahoo! Buzz was launched in Feb 2008 (yes, two years ago), it did not create that much noise. You could hear some ‘Ah, one more’ or ‘Eventually’ but it was it.   Well, it’s already not easy to be a ‘me-too’, then if you launch something about ‘Buzz’, it might be smarter to create some by yourself, right ?  Or people will laugh about you. It’s clear that the features by themselves won’t generate much chat, apart within the geek arena. So, you are the Google marketing guy in charge of the launch and you scratch your head: get buzz or get sacked. But buzz is not something you buy, it’s something you hope for. How to improve the odds ? Well, let’s put some stuff that people will really talk about, some dynamite into it.

In addition, isn’t 4 days really short for changing something so big and used by millions (ie many of the gmail accounts)  ? No, this improvement wasn’t ‘ready and put aside’  in case, was it ? Well, maybe, maybe not.

That’s two hints. Now you may argue that creating bad buzz is stupid, because it will negatively affect your reputation. Yes and no. Off course, killing someone is a bit the extreme, silly version of buzz-creating actions and would be unwise, even if you’re desperate marketer.  But some actions, or the overall story, can show you under a nice image, after all.

The famous case is in point is of French politician Ségolène Royal, which revamped her site ‘Désir d’avenir’ under a terrible design – the web site was just awfully ugly.  It created so much buzz on the  Web  that the site went actually down for a few days.  Lots of parodies got created around in a matter of days. Now, the rumour went on at some point that, as she is a prominent politician surrounded with some of the best known figures in the French Web, it couldn’t possibly have been a tragic mistake. This was just too much, ‘trop gros’. For those who know the Ségolène character from the press, the idea that she authorized this to create the buzz on her was tempting.  It did not hurt her, she just looked amused and changed it – and after all, it was just about an ugly background image someone in her team had chosen.  But the site was cross-linked from everywhere (Search Engine optimization for free) and it is still known by many.  She even made a listing of the parodies on her site. (Thanks to Chris for sharing this story)

And for Google Buzz ? The whole story is: “We did not tune well the privacy settings. We heard your feedback and four days after the launch, we’re rolling out big improvements, wiping out all concerns”. Looking at it, the story is not that bad. As our research showed, there is no or few better image improvement actions than showing that you listen to your customers.

So, well done to Google – but remember this is only a theory.

Bad buzz can be good. Ok, let’s put it that way: bad buzz is better than no buzz. Next time you want to get heard but your creativity is running out and the product is not going to sell by itself, think about it.  What would you have done if you were the Google employee in charge of this?

Early this month, my car was set on fire, just in front of my home, while the whole family was asleep.  I did not mention it on Twitter nor on Facebook nor on whatever, since really I did not how to react about it. Angriness, sadness, anxiety, or fear? Hoping to clarified my doubts, I told the story to a few friends, watching their reactions to pick up the most healthy one. A few examples:

• “Why your car?” (“Desperate housewives” fans)
• “How did they do it?” (Engineers, or “Bones” fan)
• “Who did it?” (well, Sherlock Holmes is out at theatre nearby…)
• “Gosh, my GOD!” (Car fans, private property lovers)
• “Hum…ok” (mostly women with no interest whatsoever in cars)
• “What type of car you had again?” (Financial-types)

That did not help me prepare my Twitter entry, nor this blog, nor any Facebook entry. Reading, in deep reflection, the Twitter question “What’s happening ?” and the Facebook question “What’s on your mind?” didn’t help much neither. So I left it silent for some time. At the age of instant news spreading like wild fire (not that I wished that on my car story – enough fire thank you), I kind of withdrew from the system.

But seriously, that left me with two questions.  First, what is the purpose of Twitter, say again ? In the US  “Tweet” was elected word of the year, (and Google word of the decade) so I guess it’s good time to reflect on the buzz.

For an instant social media like Facebook or Twitter to succeed long-term, you will probably need what every media needs, which are two things: an audience and relevant content. Ok so far no ‘Waw’ in the crowd. Facebook is clear: news on your friends by your friends, things to do with friends + some communities. Yes, I could have put something like ’2010 off to a bad start…no car anymore’

And Twitter?  Do people who follow me care about my car in the first place?  Not that I have a huge list of followers, but still. More fundamentally, what I am supposed to put in there again ? Expert user’s answer usually is: Twitter will be what you make out of it (ie you choose who you follow, updates you find relevant). Fair point. But short point (Twitter-like).

So let’s think about if for a second. Over its short life, Twitter changed its question from ‘What are you doing?’ to ‘What’s happening?’. Yes it helped removed some of the mundane activities people were posting (ie it’s not because you are out in your garden making a barbecue that people can see you on Google Earth, so don’t bother tweeting it).  It did also help to spread relevant news and stories before the official agencies could release them. But it also opened up a big avenue to a slightly more annoying habit, not mentioning the spammers (which would be there no matter what): advertising and push.  But you’ll say ‘I control it – I stop follow if it’s too much advertising’. Yes but what if do you appreciate some of the tweets of that person ?  Actually, as Guy Kawasaki put in an old blog entry, ‘once you start to have many followers, it’s becoming impossible to follow’. What is essentially a two ways micro-blogging channel is becoming a 1-way channel in wich big guys are pushing updates to small guys. As the élite grows its follower crowd, it realizes how great an advertising channels this is for interesting or sponsored links about whatever.  It’s almost like a social bookmarking tool (e.g. Digg.com) except that it’s not about the number of votes on a given link, it’s about who sent it – a kind of ‘elite social bookmarking’.  For the small guys, either they are interested in this concept or they drop out (which many people, unfortunately, end up doing).

My second question now: what can you do with 140 chars? I love that idea of being concise, but since the Web is about hyperlinks, it’s as well a great incentive to put a catchy phrase and a link – see the title of this post for instance. A phrase and a link ? Looks like Google ad words to me. Again, advertising is back with a revenge, or at least the ‘elite social bookmarking’ idea.  The second problem is that while 140 char is the limit, there are no limits to the number of Tweets one can do – which is a paradox, let’s face it. Well, I don’t have a solution for the character limit nor the tweet limit question, but I would not demise the idea of Twitter with double or triple that amount, with no link allowed (or some filtering)…

Net, I hope Twitter is not becoming an “elite social bookmarking”.  Because I like it – for me it’s a way to follow and hope to connect with people I would otherwise not have access to. But I am concerned about its future, especially since other services have ‘Twitterized’ themselves (Facebook, Google, LinkedIn,…). Their thicker value proposition is creating a sort of gravity (ie the fireplace feeling) that Twitter does not have…

Yes, Twitter is what you make out of it. I just hope there would be a little more order to it. Or maybe a purpose? So do you agree with the question and what’s the solution – any thoughts?

By the way I don’t know the answer to most of my friends’ questions neither (e.g. who did it?). But if you do or happen to have a nice car for sale, send me an email…