Facebook, LinkedIn, Myspace, Youtube, Twitter, Friendfeed, Blogs – State of Social Media

I’ve compared social media to direct mail marketing. Hundreds of social media sites, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Myspace, Youtube, FlickR, Digg, Twitter, Friendfeed, Blogger, and the endless lists – provide means to connect with a community of suspects, prospects, and fans. 

Are these sites all the same?

Each site has it’s own social etiquette, conversation preference, and means to communicate with it’s community. This etiquette changes site-by-site and day-by-day. Let’s examine the current state for a few major sites.

Facebook

Facebook is the largest global social network. Although Facebook started on university campuses as implied by the name, the reach increasingly covers gen-x, boomers, and seniors as the recent graduates have invited the older generation to participate. 

As a boomer, I’ve watched as my connections have grown from a dozen to 350 in eight months. College friends, past employees, lost associates, and current friends have discovered each other via Facebook. In a year, I expect over 2,000 personal connections; and millions indirectly through clients and partners. 

Of course, the latter category is not really a list of friends – more like a direct mail list, as discussed. 

• Facebook imports your email list and connects you with your email contacts.
• Facebook offers networks by school, region, or affiliation; groups by any subject; and fan pages for business entities. Networks are automatic based on your profile. Groups and fan pages can be controlled by Facebook member. 
• Communications occur through Facebook email, discussion boards, wall postings, and shared photos, web page, videos, etc. 
• The mini-feed shares personal interactions on your Facebook profile page. These mini feeds include changes to your profile; postings on discussion boards, walls, photos, videos, games; or personal, minute-by-minute status changes.
• The mini-feed of all your friends is aggregated into a news-feed, personalized for your viewing – as a means to keep up with your friends.
• Recently, Facebook enabled comments on newsfeed items. This becomes a quick way to interact with friends. These comments show on their mini-feed, aggregate into the newsfeed of your friends and the friend’s friends. Thus, they become public conversations shared with friends on both side.
• Most recently, Facebook has released real-time newsfeeds. This means any new information changes the newsfeed without a click. 

After the recent Presidential debate, I logged into Facebook to see the reactions. Quickly, party advocates have already posted articles and feeds on Facebook. Friends comment on the point of view and a lively discussion / argument follows. Some friends participate realtime. Others join days later. 

Facebook enables conversations among friends, friends of friends, and new friends based on shared interests. 

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is also a social network, but more focused on job search and professional connections. Other than a circle of connected friends, LinkedIn has different social etiquettes for reaching out to make friends.

• LinkedIn imports your email list and connects you.
• Traditionally, the LinkedIn profile looks like a full resume – enabling employers and employees to find each other. 
• The Question/Answer board is essentially a forum that allows members to ask questions and receive answers from any other member. 
• More recently, LinkedIn has re-energized their dormant groups, opened group participation to all members, and added discussion forums and shared news. 
• LinkedIn has a newsfeed that is your home page. It shares profile and friend changes, group discussions and comments, and shared news. It does not allow direct comments as an easy step to join a conversation or discussion. 
• LinkedIn content is available to the robotic web, an important distinction for SEM experts.

Both the QA and group forums have been effective means to reach members with similar interests. Unlike Facebook groups where conversations break down into spam and meaningless chit-chat, the exchange is more relevant. Like comments on Facebook newsfeeds, the conversations do become useful.

My personal list started with a couple of dozen one year ago, and has grown to 350. Unlike Facebook with connections to boomer friends, most of the LinkedIn contacts have been new professional affiliations. I expect this list to also grow into the thousands.

FriendFeed

This is a small, but emerging social network. It started as an infrastructure service to aggregate RSS feeds. Like all social networks, the core piece is a circle of friends or fans.

• FriendFeed aggregates all your feeds from blogs, photo share, video share, review share – any site that feeds your participation via RSS. This becomes an RSS feed.
• FriendFeed aggregates all you friends feeds into an RSS feed.
• Your feed or your friends’ feed can be installed as a panel on Facebook.
• Recently, FriendFeed added commenting on incoming articles. Further, their is a beta real time feed.

Essentially, FriendFeed has morphed into a real time, multi-subject chat room. Unlike traditional chat where conversations become meaningless and off-topic, the subject is triggered by the postings from a friend. Comments show reactions and amendments to the posted matter. Thus, comments stay on-topic.

It’s too early to forecast the future of FriendFeed. A-listers, i.e. top bloggers, love their service. The danger is that larger networks could deploy similar features to eliminate the need. Friendfeed’s challenge is to build loyalty and keep the fans at Friendfeed, rather than just a pipe for distribution of information.

Twitter, Myspace, Instant Messaging, Hola-Hoop

Many web features have become hola-hoops like chat rooms, instant messaging, forums, or email groups. Where the conversations could not stay on topic or change with conversation changes, these rooms, groups, and forums have grown and died. 

Today, IM is used by high schoolers to talk about homework. Forums and email groups with niche topics that are still relevant have survived. This includes coding forums. Others that could not sustain the conversation have disappeared.

Twitter extends conversations with SMS postings and reports. They report huge flows that have frequently broken their servers. More challenging than server reliability, Twitter needs to convert idle chatter into relevant conversations. If not, Twitter becomes the next hola-hoop.

Myspace is the largest social network in the US. Much of their traffic is based on social chit-chat, spam, and sex solicitation. Their recent growth is essentially flat. Myspace needs to convert their social network into targeted conversations.

Social network, itself, is not a hola-hoop since it displaces the pain to track email addresses. In a social network, each member updates their own. Connections automatically have updated addresses and phone numbers. This decentralized approach is more efficient than contact lists maintained by each owner.

Conclusion

These are a few of the social media sites on the Internet. Hundreds more have interesting communities and conversations. 

Websites are not the same. Social media marketers need to learn each site’s etiquette and methods. Effective operators know what works with each social network. It’s a dynamic task that changes day-by-day.

Share your knowledge of a community and its etiquette in the comments.

Lead Generation, Direct Mail, eMail, Word-of-Mouth, Buzz Marketing, Social Media Compared

Much has been written about social media, conversational marketing, buzz marketing, and shared networks. Let’s compare social media to direct mail, email marketing, word-of-mouth, referral marketing, lead generation, coupons, and other traditional marketing.

Let’s simplify.

What is Social Media?

Wikipedia defines social media as:

Social media are primarily Internet-based tools for sharing and discussing information among human beings. The term most often refers to activities that integrate technology, social interaction, and the construction of words, pictures, videos and audio. This interaction, and the manner in which information is presented, depends on the varied perspectives and “building” of shared meaning among communities, as people share their stories and experiences.

Huh!

Let’s try English.

Social media websites enable sharing – Youtube for video; FlickR for photos; Blogger for blogs; Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace for friends; Digg, Stumbleupon for recommendations; Yelp for reviews; … the list goes on with hundreds of sites.

Many support fan-bases, friend circles, or other viral marketing tools that become distribution channels for your marketing messages.

Over one billion people access the Internet daily. More time is spent on social media websites than email, search, and other Internet uses combined.

It’s hot!

What Businesses Want

What’s the relevancy of social media? How do we integrate social media with business?

Any business wants reach, brand recognition, and mindshare that generates more orders. If you can reach 100,000 customers, and have a recognized product or service – then, each time you reach the customer with a message, they are more likely to respond. These orders can be online or offline through retail.

Reach, recognition, and mindshare lead to results. It’s simple.

Traditional Marketing

Traditionally, businesses gather addresses or email addresses and send ; or pay for flyers, coupons, or ads through publishers who have the mailing addresses. These have been high cost, high friction activities.

• A stamp costs $0.39 and is rising. Total mailing budgets cost $2.00 plus and rising.
• Effectiveness of direct mail is declining. Few open unsolicited mail.

eMail collection and management is high friction, high decay, and dropping in effectiveness.

• Users are reluctant to register and give you an email address. Registration is high friction.
• eMail addresses decay 20% per year. An unmanaged list decays to uselessness in two years.
• Spam blockers prevent bulk mailings – most bulk email don’t arrive.
• eMail formatting is limited and complex. No flash, video, or interactive component.
• Few people read the email – deleting without reading.

Not surprisingly, return on investment (ROI) on a direct mail campaign has dropped to insignificance.

Social Media – the Low Friction Approach

Effective use of social media replaces the list building, message sending, and mindshare maintenance functions. A blog is your media archive – with multi-media postings and an RSS subscription mechanism. Your presence at social networks like Youtube, Facebook, or LinkedIn are like magazine racks at popular cafes to reach fans, friends, and interested parties.

• Readers discover you or your products by friending or subscribing. Compared to registration or supplying an email address – these actions reduce the friction to join to clicks – no typing, easy decisions, less commitment.
• Lists are decentralized. Each member maintains their own current address. The connections – whether a friend or a subscription – are maintained automatically. The list stays fresh.
• The lists scale – to millions. With addresses, the cost to mail a million is prohibitive – not scalable. With emails, blocking of bulk mail stops scalability. (ed: Obama leveraged his ad budget with social media to impact 4 million voters per month.)

Like traditional media, the likelihood that a member would see/read a social message is low. However, social media compensates with:

• Scale. Your lists sum to millions of connections.
• Frequency. You can publish 1, 2, … 10 messages a day – thus increasing the chance that a fan would see your message.
• Format. The message can be video, interactive, musical, or otherwise capture the attention of a fan.

Social Media’s Impact on the ROI

The bottomline measures results relative to costs.

Although the creative costs can be the same as traditional marketing, the distribution costs is zero dollars. This means you can send more messages, test messages, and actively manage the message flow with very small investments.

Returns are measurable at each step in the sales funnel.

• Cost per action advertising, such as Google CPC or tEarn CPV, reduces the cost to bring a suspect to your website or blog.
• Low friction capture of prospects increase the likelihood for first stage engagement.
• Frequency of contact builds recognition and mindshare.
• Social referrals from existing customers among your social networks accelerate decisions by prospects to buy.
• Online convenience leads to quicker purchases.

With lower investment and higher returns, social media improves ROI. Most importantly, the solution scales from a few customers to millions.

Conclusion

What is social media? It’s an efficient replacement for direct mail marketing.

Every business needs to learn. What do you need?

Buy Low, Sell High – With Bad Economy, Is it Time to Buy?

Savvy investors know to buy low, sell high. Is it the right time to buy?

What  are the Big Problems

Wall Street has tanked. Global markets have followed. Obama and McCain openly debate our economic woes, busy shifting blame to the other party. Venture capitalists are telling their portfolio to cut back. Chicken little pundits squawk even louder.

Our leaders tell us that we are failing. 

Sad.

As a macroeconomist who has built input-output models to analyze the economy, let’s take a look at the immediate sector issues.

• The financial crisis is mired in underwater mortgages. As an economist, I have no interest to shift blame. Rising property values solve the problem. The $700, $800 billion bailout provides the short-term cushion for financial stability. Inflation and the low value of the dollar compared to foreign dollars drive investment into real properties like gold, real estate, and capital assets. These investments come from US and global sources. Foreign goverments have joined the effort to provide liquidity. No nation has the interest to see the global problem get worse.
• Oil prices are high, but declining. Products that depend on gasoline for transport have not dropped prices. Thus, businesses that have not suffered volume drops gain margin relieve. Savvy businesses should pass the savings to consumers to gain share. This would be a form of the buy low, sell higher volume strategy. For example, expect Apple to introduce a low price Mac laptop to gain share.
• Both political candidates have made energy independence a high priority issue for national security, green environment, and growth stimulus. 
• Statistical reports show lower, but steady growth in income and consumption. Aside from driving less, people have not changed their spending habits.

Lack of Leadership

So, what’s the real problem? 

Leadership vacuum.

The timing of the economic problems, a lame-duck president, and an election that is four weeks away has created a vacuum of leadership. The fallout impacts both national and global markets. 

We agreed to a bailout, but voters don’t trust that Washington has made a choice that is in the best interest of the country. During the debates, our leaders acknowledge the many problems. In fact, they hype the problem to shift blame – hoping to get elected. We have real issues, yet the candidates argue over the details where few understand the tradeoffs. Neither candidate can convince the majority of independents that their solution solves the problem. Thus, we have stalemate for a few more weeks.

The democratic process, at a time of economic pressure, disturbs the stability needed for people to keep their eyes on their business and maintain growth. 

What’s the Solution

Fortunately, the election debate ends soon. Once we have a winner, the public laundering of economic woes will end. The leadership vacuum ends; and the promise of a new leader cheers on the working folks.

Of course, politicians will continue to argue details and shift blame – but the economy will be allowed to set its own course for recovery. 

Buy Low, Sell High

We’ve told that things are bad. Have we hit bottom? Is it time to buy? 

Input-output analysis tells us to choose our markets. Choosing wisely, it is time to buy.

For those in the Internet-related, technology industries, take a look at the basics.

• Web use continues to grow. High energy costs encourage more virtual travel.
• Smartphones continue to grow. Again, high energy costs encourage phone calls over face-to-face meetings. Devices that enable browsing, messaging, and talking like the iPhone become indispensible tools for business productivity. 
• Consumer electronic devices continue to drop in price while gaining more function.
• Online ads continue to grow.

What about your sector? 

Is it time to buy?

World Markets Smashed, Massive New Bailout Talks

from Silicon Alley Insider by Henry Blodget

From Clusterstock: Huge new bailout plans may guarantee all bank deposits and interbank lending, recapitalize banks, and, possibly, head off global economic catastrophe. They may also put western governments in serious financial trouble.

Sequoia Capital’s 56 Slide Presentation Of Doom

from TechCrunch by Michael Arrington

CEO_ALL_HANDS_10-7-08_FINAL - Get more Business Documents

We were able to track down the presentation that Sequoia Capital gave to its portfolio company CEO’s earlier this week (and so did VentureBeat). It’s a long, 56 slide Powerpoint message of doom and gloom in Silicon Valley that we covered yesterday along with an email that angel investor Ron Conway sent to his 130 active portfolio companies.

The final text slide reads “Get Real or Go Home.”

Benchmark Capital jumped on the band wagon today with their own email to portfolio companies. The messages are all similar – companies need to stay ahead of the curve as much as possible. Cut costs now, and raise capital if you can. If there’s someone out there willing to buy you, do it. Etc.

Of course all this negativity helps create the very downturn that venture capitalists are warning their companies to defend themselves against, perpetuating a sort of vicious cycle downward. But that’s ok, sometimes the hedge needs to be pruned. And this is what makes Silicon Valley its ugly, beautiful self.

Why This Slowdown Is An Opportunity

by David

The news is full of doom and gloom these days and it is, quite frankly, pissing me off. The problems in the economy are real. People are feeling it. However, the problem is that people might start to feel as if it is all outside their control.

It isn’t.

Now is the time that people should be looking into new opportunities. And the Internet is perhaps the best platform out there right now for the average person to make a supplemental or even a full-time income. I’ve been making my living online for years. And I’ve seen people get started after me who are now doing much better than I am. The Internet is a truly open medium with pretty much no barriers to entry. Take it from me – ANYBODY can make money on the Internet. All it takes is a drive to do so…

Look Who’s On Top for ‘Economics of Advertising’

Ed: After 8 months and 1,000 posts extracted from 10,000 articles, guess who is number one on the new Blog Search from Google?

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Related Blogs:

New Economics of Advertising - Simplify the technologies behind the new economics of buying and selling advertising. The New Economics of Advertising - Simplify the technologies for buying and selling advertising. Clickety Clack: Online Advertising Economics - My experience in online advertising and venture capital

“Pre-emptive Rounds”

6 hours ago by effective cpms   Looks like they’re battening down the hatches: Social-network apphaus Gigya has raised $11 million in a Series C funding round led by DAG Ventures. President and co-founder Rooly Eliezerov called it a “pre-emptive round” in a release … Clickety Clack: Online Advertising Economics – http://ecpm.typepad.com/clickety_clack/ [ More results from Clickety Clack: Online Advertising Economics ]

New York Computer Science and Economics Day (NYCE Day), Oct 3 2008

7 hours ago by joly   The revenue generated by advertising provides incentives for online publishers to create high-quality content. The problem of allocating advertisements to online page views is extraordinarily complex. On search engines, millions of … isoc-ny.org – http://www.isoc-ny.org

TechCrunch50 and Demo 72

9 Sep 2008 by Editor   Burt (CB) — Collects user data to tailor individual advertising campaigns and target users more effectively; Adgregate Markets (CB) — Brings online stores to consumers through a display ad that is a fully transactional widget … New Economics of Advertising – http://adecon101.blogspot.com/ - References [ More results from New Economics of Advertising ]

Google Launches Its Own Memetracker

Google has just launched a new homepage for its blog search that bears a strong resemblance to Techmeme, Memeorandum and their “memetracker” counterparts. The site displays a listing of the top stories from across a variety of topics including business, politics, technology, and entertainment.

Memetrackers identify emerging trends on the web, especially across blogs. They are often the best way to learn about breaking news stories, as they can automatically monitor hundreds (or more) news sources at once. Major news outlets and user-submitted content sites like Digg often trail memetrackers by days…

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