What Matters Online

Folks, I’m sure you’re all tired of hearing about the collapse of Microsoft’s grand plan to buy into Yahoo’s cutting-edge 1998-era business model. As for me, I’ve been puzzled throughout the whole MicroHoo spectacle. After all, who gives a damn about traditionally-structured content portals these days? 

Rather than watch MS and YHOO duke it out, I’m paying very close attention to the evolution of iGoogle. Probably because it’s not being promoted vigorously, iGoogle  has gotten comparatively little attention from the IT and search pundits of the world. But I believe that could change quickly.  In truth, Google is building a new, vibrant business model in plain sight, quietly perfecting its approach gadget by gadget and application by application while downplaying this effort’s strategic importance.

Is iGoogle revolutionary in and of itself? Not at all. The widgets and content the service offers aren’t miracles of technical sophistication, and for any one of the functions it offers (say, Calendar) there’s lots of competition available elsewhere on the Web. Besides, the other search majors offer customization, too. It’s just that they don’t do it as well.

What makes Google special is the simple, clean execution it brings to user-driven content display–which includes an amazingly flexible drag-and-drop feature for arranging widgets on the page, countless options for enhancing the content and a range of useful features which can easily be lumped together.

Taken together, these interface design options are far more powerful than they sound. For example, I’ve found that having the freedom to put Google mail and the Google calendar smack dab on top of one another, as I do, is the perfect way for me to stay on top of my life. It’s not rocket science, but it gets the job done better than just about any other approach I’ve tried. 

Of course, if I didn’t already use a bunch of Google apps, having access to them through iGoogle wouldn’t be much of a benefit. But like most Web workers, I use lots of Google services already, so Google’s got me where they want me. Ultimately, iGoogle gives the search giant complete ownership of my workflow. (Whoops — did I just say that?  iGoogle is scarier than I thought!)

The endgame, ultimately, will come when iGoogle begins to offer you access to proprietary features, such as Google-hosted personal health records. (Trust me, they’re already working on the latter–I saw a demo at a recent trade show, in fact.) When you begin to rely on iGoogle to control your personal health data, read your e-mail, get directions and maps, display your carefully chosen list of news, recipes and gossip and keep you abreast of your local weather, all ordered on the page in a way that you like best, Google now has you body and soul.

So, go ahead, Microsoft, and pursue portals or even a Facebook or MySpace buyout. That’s all well and good. But if you guys are the insanely brilliant people they say you are, you might want to think about Google’s strategy for completely seducing users–and what your role should be in a world where all content is widgetized and used on demand.

Sure, iGoogle’s still young now, but it’s going to kick butt when it grows up. How will you respond?
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Ideally, social media campaigns should have a completely different feel than old-media marketing or even last-gen Internet efforts. While most old-style campaigns talk to (or at) customers, social media marketers need to foster honest, unfiltered communication with current and potential users. 

If you want to know how that looks in real life, I can’t think of a better example than the site “We All Hate QuickBooks,” a unique site mounted by Florida-based software firm Less Everything. The firm, a tiny virtual company with less than 10 employees, has taken candor and transparency to a level you’ll probably never see from bigger competitors–and it’s marvelous to watch.

The WAHQ site, which promotes the company’s LessAccounting software, runs an unfiltered list of Twitter posts (”tweets”) which contain the term “QuickBooks” in them.  Since the posts aren’t censored, some actually offer positive QuickBooks reviews, while others seem to support Less Everything’s contention that the market-leading accounting package is kludgy, hard to use or otherwise a pain in the patoot. (”We’re showing the good with the bad, so decide for yourself!” the site says.)

Online marketing director Rhea Drysdale says that before Less Everthing mounted the site, some of its employees simply lurked on Twitter, and when someone posted a QuickBooks complaint, let them know that there was an alternative. By the way, I asked her whether people complained about being approached this way and to my surprise, she said that they’d gotten no complaints.( Interesting, given the current wave of paranoia over Twitter spam, but I digress.)

The project was a seat-of-the-pants social media project from the get-go. The site was created in-house (using a unique technique known as CSS parallax, for my geekier readers), and promoted exclusively by Twitter posts from Less Everything staffers. Since then it’s gotten more attention from Digg posts and  StumbleUpon links created by WAHQ.com fans, Drysdale says.

While Drysdale isn’t sharing how many people actually signed up for a LessAccounting trial as a result of the project, she says it’s generated “a very nice list.” So yes, the project had an impact. That being said, Less Everything execs see this as something of an experiment. “We’re going to begin moving to formalized press releases, weekly e-mail blasts to existing customers and all of that,” she says. “This is just supplementary, for the fun of it.”  

Even if this was mostly an experiment for Less Everything, I predict that its smart little site will be seen as visionary in coming months. Let’s hear it for people who actually have the guts to put uncensored end user commentary front and center!

Meanwhile, readers, if you’re aware of other intriguing social media marketing efforts, I’d love to hear more. Comment when ready! (If you want to reach me directly, please feel free to tweet me at @annezieger.)
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Like what you see in What Matters Online? Want to stay up to date on the latest in Web 2.0, social media and old-school interactive marketing? Get notified of our latest updates by e-mail or RSS. I will never sell or exchange your information, and I won’t deluge your inbox — I promise!

Folks, I’ve tried to stay out of this, as I know my opinion isn’t popular, but I just can’t take it any more.  Over the last few weeks, I’ve increasingly seen the term “spammer” used to describe some users on Twitter. That’s true despite the fact that you’ll never see a single tweet (post) unless you choose to follow that person, and moreoever, that nobody can even follow you unless you give permission. In my view, the whole thing is paranoid almost beyond belief.

Sure, it’s annoying to get e-mail notifications that someone is following you if you don’t consider the follower to be welcome. And yes, I can imagine a world in which we Twitter users (I’m @annezieger) are swamped with thousands of followers, which effectively translates into e-mail spam since the notifications land in our inbox. (I do hope Twitter’s management is prepared for that eventuality, and has tough enough security in place to prevent mass follows by creepy folks.)  So I understand why people are concerned.

That being said, why on earth has a segment of the Twitter community decided that virtually any follows by corporate Twitterers (say, @JetBlue) constitute spamming? 

What right has any one segment of the Twitterati to decide that they, alone, know how many people you should follow and how many must follow you if you’re to be a “legit” Twitter user?  (What, you didn’t know that the Twitter clique plans to ostracize you if you follow too many folks and they don’t follow back? Well, guess what, they do.)

And how dare some self-appointed zealot(s) create a Twitter “blacklist” which purports to protect me from undesirables? I’m quite offended by the idea. OK, I realize that some people are thrilled to ‘make the list’ and dub it a piece of cheap PR for them, but I doubt the list’s creators had that in mind. 

You know, we went through this whole thing almost 15 years ago or so when the Internet started being swamped by commercial interests. (Remember Canter & Siegel spamming Usenet in 1994?) People went insane and started turning on each other in much the same way we’re seeing today–and look how effective that was!  E-mail spam disappeared for good, right? (Uh, not exactly.)

Haven’t we learned anything from the experiences of the last decade and a half?  If the first wave of spam showed us anything, it taught us that you can’t change a medium by lashing out at people who use it in ways you don’t approve of–it’s a waste of time and often, changes the character of the medium in ways that do significant damage.

Please, please, let’s be smarter when it comes to Twitter?
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Like what you see in What Matters Online? Want to stay up to date on the latest in Web 2.0, social media and old-school interactive marketing? Get notified of our latest updates by e-mail or RSS. I will never sell or exchange your information, and I won’t deluge your inbox — I promise!

Over the last few weeks, I’ve seen a growing number of marketing pros tag themselves as “social media marketers,” but few stop and define what they mean by that. The question is, what defines a social media marketer, anyway?

Here’s my take on the ideal social media marketer:

*  They’re people who are intimately familiar key social media communities (e.g. Facebook, MySpace, Twitter), with lots of real connections there and experience with a given service’s back channels.

* They’re knowledgeable about social network advertising options, including Facebook pages, apps and PPC-style ads, MySpace pages, video advertising on YouTube and PPC ad integration on B2C services like Flickr and Squidoo.

* They’re experienced at (or at least familiar with) Internet marketing in other contexts, including banner placement, e-mail, SEO, PPC campaigns, copywriting for the Web and affiliate marketing.

* They’re extremely current with Web 2.0 news, both traditional and bloggish, and can shift strategies on a dime based on what they learn.

The big question I haven’t addressed here is whether one can call themselves a social media marketer if they’ve never run a major campaign on these networks. (People who specialize in B2B, like myself, are particularly unlikely to have run such campaigns–our clients are not usually the early adopter type.)  

Should we stay out of the fray until we’ve spent real money on this medium? Sounds good in theory, but that would pretty much shrink the profession down to a few fortunate folks whose clients/employers are way ahead of the curve.

OK, now it’s your turn. What core skills do you think marketers should have before they hang out the “social media marketer” shingle?  Why?  And do you think the social media marketing profession needs an association of its own? 

Please feel free to comment or write to me at annezieger at gmail.com…I definitely don’t want the last word here!
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Like what you see in What Matters Online? Want to stay up to date on the latest in Web 2.0, social media and old-school interactive marketing? Get notified of our latest updates by e-mail or RSS. I will never sell or exchange your information, and I won’t deluge your inbox — I promise!

Well, it was inevitable–but I’ve got to say that I’m a bit surprised at how fast things are moving. While it’s still very early in the game, it looks like advertising and marketing activities are beginning to creep onto Twitter.

As regular readers of this blog know, I believe that Twitter can support advertising without ruining the experience. That doesn’t mean, however, that all models are equal. As in any other Net medium, spam is a pain, and reports are already surfacing of spammy advertisers following people. On the other hand, I do think Mashable’s story, headlined “Twitter Spam Spirals Out of Control,” goes a bit overboard, as I, for one, haven’t attracted any spam followers yet.

More interesting than the spammers, by far, is the eBay auction by Twitter user @andrewbaron, who’s selling off his Twitter account and nearly 1,400 followers. With nearly a week left to go on the auction, Baron has already attracted 40 bidders. What’s more, the bids have now topped $1,500–valuing the followers at more than $1 each. While Baron doesn’t describe his follower list as a marketing opportunity, I’m doubting the people bidding on it see it as anything but that.

Then, you have rumors floating around that Twitter has begun testing out short advertising messages of its own over the past few days, allegedly within friend feeds. The company roundly denies this, and execs may be telling the truth, but it does seem likely that Twitter will need to try something like this fairly soon, as it’s currently not making money despite its smash success with users.

 As for me, I’m enjoying the innocent, ad-free days of Twitter, but I’ll be OK with it when those days end. I suppose it’s possible that Twitter will monetize its users some other way, but advertising is so dead-on obvious a play that it seems inevitable. 

You know, I never thought an ad medium would develop which makes PPC ads seem like novels. Writing for tiny Twitter spaces is going to be an art form all its own.

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Like what you see in What Matters Online? Want to stay up to date on the latest in Web 2.0, social media and old-school interactive marketing? Get notified of our latest updates by e-mail or RSS. I will never sell or exchange your information, and I won’t deluge your inbox — I promise!

At first blush, I liked the idea a lot. Brooklyn-based start-up LifeAt has built a social networking platform apartment communities and other housing developments can use to connect residents with each other, the management and the neighborhood. With the help of some persistent PR reps, the idea has gotten some attention, including a feature in The New York Times.

Conceptually, the model makes a great deal of sense–and I’m guessing that the real estate investors behind the venture can keep it afloat for quite some time–but as I looked things over, I realized that I have some problems with LifeAt’s execution.

First, the basics. LifeAt, which developed all of its technology in-house, charges building managers a flat $6,000 to get access to the platform, which includes templates for personal profiles and “friend” connections, a community discussion forum, profiles of local stores, restaurants and services and a “marketplace” where residents can post free classifieds. To make sure only residents access the sites, no one can enter unless they get a username and password from the property manager.

As of late 2007, when the Times wrote its profile, almost 1,000 communities were live or scheduled to go live within a few months.  (Note: While CEO Matthew Goldstein didn’t say how many, at least some of the buildings are those already owned by the investors behind the project.) More interestingly, at that point more than half of residents in the already-launched properties had created personal profiles. In other words, yes, people do use the service.

So, other than the one-time $6,000 fee–a pittance as software development licenses go–how does LifeAt plan to support itself? Well, there’s the rub. Goldstein told me that the company plans to sell local advertising on the sites, something I very much doubt will work over the long term.

I’m skeptical of the local ad sales model for a few reasons. First, there’s already a huge array of local advertising options available to national companies who might want to go local, so the competition will be stiff there. Second, the local businesses immediately adjacent to the building are not exactly lacking in local channels either. Among other plays, there’s local newspapers, big city newspapers like the Times, Yellow Pages (both online and offline), ValPak and its ilk, plus local Web advertising plays by radio and TV stations. And unlike these local players, LifeAt’s sales folks aren’t going to be intimately woven into the life of that community (unless they have plans to hire thousands of local salespeople).

Sure, they’ll sell the “our people are more engaged” concept, but I don’t think merchants will be that impressed. After all, unlike the Facebook communities they imitate, as far as I know they’re not selling advertisers in-depth demographic and behavioral info on their users. So it’s just plain-vanilla advertising, even if sold by nifty partners (and it does have more than a dozen of those).

Meanwhile, another big issue is that LifeAt is relying on residents to create the local business content which plays a key role in its model.  As local search gurus know, it can be fatal to wait for people to create good content–especially business content. Instead, I think LifeAt’s going to have to eventually break down and license Internet Yellow Pages or other neighborhood business listings content from somewhere else. Then, they’re still providing a nice variety of local business content even if residents aren’t review-happy.

Ultimately, I think LifeAt will end up having to raise its initial charge significantly and make all of its money there as a white-label social media network technology player (albeit a rather specialized one).

But we’ll see…I’ve been wrong a gazillion times. Hey, I though Yahoo was a big waste of time in 1995, and look, it’s still alive!

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Like what you see in What Matters Online? Want to stay up to date on the latest in Web 2.0, social media and old-school interactive marketing? Get notified of our latest updates by e-mail or RSS. I will never sell or exchange your information, and I won’t deluge your inbox — I promise!

Let me preface the following by saying that while I’m not a local search expert, I did pretend to be one on TV for a while, while doing an extended marketing communications consulting gig for the cool local search peeps at Localeze.com. (Hi guys!)

Now, with that consumer warning in mind, check this out. Having poked around Facebook’s advertising options for a week or so, I’ve drawn the conclusion that they may be competitors in the local search space before you know it. Specifically, if you look at their free “Facebook Pages” advertising option, you’ll see that it allows businesses to offer as much information on themselves as many basic Yellow Pages or directory listings.

To see what I mean, visit my sample Facebook page, “My Business.” If you’ll check out the “Information” section, you’ll see that I’ve entered a dummy address and one set of business hours just to illustrate my point.  When I set things up, Facebook collected this information into a back-end database. Given this set-up, Facebook’s almost certainly capable of indexing local business data and spitting the information out in the way, say, Yahoo Local does when it’s ready. 

Don’t get me wrong, Yahoo Local and its ilk are way, way ahead of Facebook in this regard, as they’ve already developed beautiful local search interfaces, amassed tons of local reviews and integrated mapping, tag clouds, sophisticated business classification schemes and other cool functions. 

More importantly, to my knowledge Facebook entries aren’t currently searchable from the outside Web, which limits their current value despite the social network’s huge size and reach (69 million current reasonably engaged users at last count). That’s certainly a large obstacle.

Still, I don’t think a company with Facebook’s clout and resources will be held back by technical issues when they’re ready to fight for local business/search market share. All they’ll have to do is figure out how to monetize the pages effectively, and you know what, I’m pretty sure that they will.

Watch out, local search folks! Facebook’s a’ comin, mark my words.

Like what you see in What Matters Online? Want to stay up to date on the latest in Web 2.0, social media and old-school interactive marketing? Get notified of our latest updates by e-mail or RSS. I will never sell or exchange your information, and I won’t deluge your inbox — I promise!

A few years ago, the marketing world was rocked–ok, at least nudged–when multimedia content pioneer and social networking entrepreneur Marc Canter floated the idea of paying bloggers to blog about specific products. The shock! The horror! People were aghast, or pretended to be, at the notion of bloggers writing for pay (while disclosing their affiliations and paycheck sources), violating ironclad journalistic principles.

One leading practitioner was content management system vendor Marqui, whose paid blogging squad posted buttons prominently stating “I get paid to talk about Marqui.”  

I think you can tell that I think the outrage was a bit misplaced, to say the least. To my knowledge, over the past few years this practice has become fairly common, with herds of low-paid writers churning out product information.  I don’t think anyone confuses it with “journalism” (in the paid-to-be-neutral Associated Press sense).

Now, ProBlogger author Darren Rowse suggests, in an April 1 post obviously intended to be an April Fool’s Day prank, that he’s organizing a “PayPerTweet” ad network which would organize heavily subscribed-to Twitter users to mention products and services to their legions of followers. He even introduces the notion of a Cost Per Thousand Follower fee structure. I know, funny stuff…or is it? Maybe not.

As I see it, Rowse has given us some nice food for thought, even though he may have had his tongue firmly in cheek here.  Think about it; if you’re a Twitter user, don’t you absorb a lot of new information by clicking on links supplied by others you follow?  And if that “leader,” if you will,  posted items now and then which were somehow tagged as ads, might you still not click now and then?  As with the paid blogging, leaders wouldn’t be forced to praise the product or service, only to mention and comment on it.  Seems to me that this could actually work in some form, even if the scheme Rowse lays out is mostly for fun.

Honestly, Tweetvertising sounds like a neat idea to me.  Hey Darren, sign me up for as many impressions as you can sell me at $10 CPTF?

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Like what you see in What Matters Online? Want to stay up to date on the latest in Web 2.0, social media and old-school interactive marketing? Get notified of our latest updates by e-mail or RSS. I will never sell or exchange your information, and I won’t deluge your inbox — I promise!

Here’s an example of a site which is using social media technology to build a community–but not the friend networks we’re used to reading about of late. There are many interesting things about WorthPoint, an emerging Web community which hopes to greatly improve on the eBay model of selling collectibles–but for the purposes of this blog, the most interesting is the way in which it’s building social knowledge-sharing and accumulation into its business model. 

I spoke to founder and CEO Will Seippel yesterday about the site, which should be in beta until late summer. Seippel, a serial entrepreneur with a serious passion for sports memorabilia, intends WorthPoint to serve not only as a mechanism helping collectors to buy and sell their things, but also as a place where people share knowledge, Wiki-style, on individual antiques and collectible categories.  “eBay is a very good market for things where you can tell clearly what they are,” Sieppel says. “But it’s gotten away from its roots in collectibles.”

In addition to sharing knowledge, also expecting people use the site to determine what a piece is worth. The site provides price and descriptive data on collectibles from 500-odd auction houses, something which must have cost the company considerable time and money.

Still,  from our talk, it sounds to me as though Seippel expects the intangible knowledge in the “Worthopedia” wiki to be what keeps them coming back. I agree with him–the mere fact that social media networks continue to grow despite the overkill out there speaks to people’s deep need to share information and connect.  Focusing on one specific passion only makes the appeal stronger.

For the moment, the site isn’t actually hosting auctions or sales like eBay or Amazon (which, honestly, raises the question of how it plans to monetize the site beyond a handful of undistinguished banner ads). But my bet is that if Seippel succeeds in harnessing the passion of dedicated collectors to create a rich wiki, that alone will be a very valuable asset. And if he succeeds, look for other vertical sites to emerge focusing on this knowledge-accumulation model. All in all, an interesting venture with a unique niche.

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Like what you see in What Matters Online? Want to stay up to date on the latest in Web 2.0, social media and old-school interactive marketing? Get notified of our latest updates by e-mail or RSS. I will never sell or exchange your information, and I won’t deluge your inbox — I promise!

Remember when people started getting really upset that AOL’s Instant Messenger wasn’t compatible with competing services, oh, I don’t know, in, maybe, 1998 or ‘99?  Within six months or so, the number of software companies started creating clever workarounds grew exponentially (OK, arithmatically at least ) spawning the birth of  an IM-based tidal wave of innovation which still hasn’t crested today.  You know what? I think we’re about at that point with social networking and mobile now.

Heaven knows there’s a growing number of services that are layering social networking onto other forms of communication.  Look at highbrow blogs like /message, written by neo-artiste/Web shaman Stowe Boyd, and you’ll hear talk of “the flow,”  effortless streams of social intelligence which mount up to an integrated feed. (At least, I think that’s what Stowe is saying; as much as I admire the man, with whom I once had a wonderfully cordial lunch, he’s a bit opaque for me.)

On a more practical day-to-day level, deals like the following seem to be a pivotal step toward integrating social networking as a permanent part of wireless comunications. If I’m understanding Mashable right, Verizon’s going to embed social mapping service Loopt into some of its services in a way which connects users with both their AIM buddies and social-networked friends. Loopt, which looks very cool, allows users to find friends based on their location, share status information and photos, and highlight places and events they’re suggesting that their friends use.

The thing is, I’m not sure how Loopt (or any other service) is going to get past the barriers preventing people from creating a single “social map” for people’s friends on all of the major social networks–which has to be the ultimate goal. After all, social networking is like networking of any other kind; the more connections you have, and the richer connections they are, the more valuable the network is. Verizon execs have everything to gain, too, by fostering these connections, as they addict people to a valuable service by doing so.

Now, the question is whether Verizon–or another carrier–believes in this strongly enough to buy a major social network of its own. I know people haven’t really been surfacing this idea, but think about it–wouldn’t VerizonBook make more sense than MicroHoo?  I say yes, most definitely. How about you?
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Like what you see in What Matters Online? Want to stay up to date on the latest in Web 2.0, social media and old-school interactive marketing? Get notified of our latest updates by e-mail or RSS. I will never sell or exchange your information, and I won’t deluge your inbox — I promise!