Best Practices Not Included

If you build it...they might not come

I'm pretty pissed off right now, I just spent over an hour typing a long post on social networking. I was doing some formatting when I hit a link in my post and it was gone, everything was gone. This happened to Fred a few months ago and at least now if it ever happens to him again I can tell him that I know how he feels. Typepad needs to implement some sort of automated saving feature within their software. This sucks, I'm drained and unmotivated to redo everything. But I guess I'll write the gist of what I wanted to share.

I ran across some interesting statistics on web traffic for social networking sites. According to Hitwise, market share in the U.S. for Internet traffic on the top 20 social networking sites grew 11.5 percent from January to February 2007. In addition, this accounted for around 6.5 percent of all Internet traffic in February 2007. What's amazing is how dominant MySpace, with it's 80% share is to it's competitors. On paper, even Facebook's 10% seems amateur when it comes to MySpace. 

 

Market    Share of US Internet Visits to Top 20 Social Networking Sites February 2007*
Rank	Name	Domain	Market Share
1	MySpace	www.myspace.com	80.74%
2	Facebook	www.facebook.com	10.32%
3	Bebo	www.bebo.com	1.18%
4	BlackPlanet.com	www.blackplanet.com	0.88%
5	Xanga	www.xanga.com	0.87%
6	iMeem	www.imeem.com	0.73%
7	Yahoo! 360	360.yahoo.com	0.72%
8	Classmates	www.classmates.com	0.72%
9	hi5	www.hi5.com	0.69%
10	Tagged	www.tagged.com	0.67%
11	LiveJournal	www.livejournal.com	0.49%
12	Gaiaonline.com	www.gaiaonline.com	0.48%
13	Friendster	www.friendster.com	0.34%
14	Orkut	www.orkut.com	0.26%
15	Live Spaces	spaces.live.com	0.18%
16	HoverSpot	www.hoverspot.com	0.18%
17	Buzznet	www.buzznet.com	0.18%
18	Sconex	www.sconex.com	0.14%
19	MiGente.com	www.migente.com	0.11%
20	myYearbook	www.myyearbook.com	0.11%
Note    - data is based on custom category of 20 of the leading social networking    websites ranked by market share of visits, which is the percentage of    traffic to the site, based on Hitwise sample of 10 million US Internet    users. The percentages represent the market share of visits among the    websites within the custom category.
Source:    Hitwise

MySpace's success would at this point seem to have little to do with the sites features and overall usability. Let's face it, the site itself is crap. From spam, to hacking, and of course how could we forget that ad clutter. These are all huge reasons why I never spend any time on the site. None the less, MySpace seems to transcend it's reputation for poor user experience. There's a plethora of alternative social networking sites out:

As a platform for social networking, it wouldn't be hard to offer features, tools, and settings better than the those available on MySpace. Your overall level of usability might result in a better user experience than that offered by MySpace, but at the end of the day, social networking is about the network. The reality is that most people won't join a network that their friends are not a part of. For example, I'm a member on Virb. I think it's one of the better designed social networking sites out there. But I almost never spend any time on Virb because I hardly know anyone who networks there. It just goes to show you that social networking will always be about the people. You can have all the tricks and trinkets in the business, but that doesn't mean people will show up. Facilitating the interaction is hard enough. But even though MySpace is sitting pretty right now, as they continually show that they have little taste for user experience, their market share will eventually start declining. It's inevitable, MySpace will lose favor over time!   

The End Is Near

I just ran across a short film called Epic 2014. This short flash piece was made by Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson for the Museum of Media History in 2004. The movie its self takes place in of course the year 2014. Charting the Internet's history, the evolving mediascape, and how traditional news was affected by the growth in online news, EPIC 2014 offers an interesting perspective into what a future of consumer empowerment might look like. While some parts of the film seem far fetched (Google and Amazon merge to from "Googlezon", and the creation of "Google grid"), the principles behind the piece are not that far off from the progressions we will continue to see in proliferated media consumption. There is also an updated film called 2015. This covers many other new media variables (podcasting/GPS etc.) that are/will affect our world as we know it.

It's been over a year since Adam Curry was quoted saying that “in five years, 50% of the media content consumed by consumers will be produced by consumers.” This is an amazing statistic, and an alarming one at that, especially if you have a big media concern. The reality is that right now, Google is unstopable, they are swallowing up new media tool companies at an unprecendented rate of one aquisition every two or three days. I just read today that Rupert Murdoch is trying to buy The Wall Street Journal. What about Microsoft's purchase of aQuantive, Google's Feedburner acquisition. This modern day Gold Rush will only continue to accelerate until we consumers are left with platform of integrated and consolidated media tools. Side note: there was a great article concerning Google in the Times this morning: Inside the black box. Being the epidemy of the anti-brand, we should at some point start seeing government intervention into Google's empire, I just don't see how this can continue for much longer. As a marketer, my career as well as yours could be at stake. The internet is commoditizing the 4 P's. Consumer's know what to buy, where to buy it, and how much to pay for it. A paradigm shift in the philosophies and practives of marketing and communication will have to take place. As a brand, you have very little control over your own message. If new media is about consumer empowerment, then new marketing needs to be about participation. Companies should come out from behind their brand guises and join this participation age. In this day and age, for marketers it doesn't have to be about creation. You don't have to start the conversation, you just need to join one that's already there. Even though EPIC 2014 and EPIC 2015 might be "fictional", the inevitable will happen and the film's underlying message to big media is inherent.

Protecting Community Content

The Flickr community has been on the radar screen as some interesting things have happened over the past week. One of Flickr's most talented photographers, Rebekka Gudleifsdottir, is an art student and single mom living in Iceland. It's hard to find words that fit in describing Rebekka's work. Being a Flickr member, I stumbled across her work more then a year ago and have been following her photostream ever since. The landscapes and self-portraits she produces are moody, dark, eccentric, and nothing short of some of the most amazing photography I've ever seen. Indeed, her pictures keep me coming back to the Flickr community, check out Rebekka's photo stream. Her talent has attracted more than three million views on the photo sharing site. So, why does it seem inevitable that her success has led to some poor behavior on someone else's behalf. Basically what happened is Rebekka found out that a company in England, who will remain nameless for the time being (if you really want to know you can figure it out), was selling copies of the images she uploaded on Flickr, without her permission. To date, they've sold thousands of dollars worth of her images. Rebekka confronted them about it, and the store owners claimed that they'd bought the photo's from someone claiming to be the photographer, they wouldn't reveal this alleged crook's name, and they weren't going to offer her any sort of compensation. Now she doesn't have the means to pursue this matter in court, especially because it's an international incident. So, amidst her frustration, like anyone with a large community would do, she posted about her experience on Flickr. The flickr community responded, her story has been all over the front page of digg, and the particular photograph that was ripped off has had hundreds of thousands of views and supportive comments left. What's also happened is the infringing company has got some nasty messages from Rebekka's supporters. This is were it gets really interesting, the company apparently contacted Flickr and Rebekka's post, along with all the community's comments were without any explanation, deleted. Rebekka posted Flickr's reponse to her, on her blog.

From Flickr:

"Flickr is not a venue for to you harass, abuse, impersonate, or intimidate others. If we receive a valid complaint about your conduct, we will send you a warning or terminate your account."

The Flickr community, like the Digg community a few weeks ago, went into an uproar. It wasn't until Rebekka hinted that she might leave the site when Flickr realized that they had really fucked up. This prompted Stewart Butterfield, one of the co-founders of Flickr to respond. This was the gist of it:

"... I have a pretty good idea that we screwed up -- and for that I take full responsibility (actually, several team members are fighting to take responsibility).

There are several policies which will be changing as a direct result of this incident and the goal is that nothing like this ever happens again. Any errors from now on should be on the side of caution.

It's important to be clear why the photo was deleted: it had nothing to do with a desire to silence Rebekka from calling attention to the outfit which had reportedly sold copies of her photos without knowledge or permission and without compensating her...

So, to Rebekka: Our apologies. I'm sure you did not intend to bring on the firestorm to the extent it developed, you were not in the wrong and it was our fault to suggest that you were."

This incident in it's entirety raises many questions surrounding the censorship of content in the social media and networking space. Who's content is it anyway? Yahoo, who owns Flickr, needs to ask themselves this question. This was not a good move, they alienated an entire community. Why would Yahoo make the entire situation even more personal by deleting the community's comments that succeed Rebekka's ripped off photo. The post had over 450 comments about why selling other people'€™s stuff for profit is criminal. In addition, these posts included suggestions and advice on how to deal with the incident. Guess what Yahoo, now everyone feels ripped off! What a surprise, they clearly didn't think this one through. A prime example of an old school best practice of protectionism and censorship that will not work with web 2.0. Did someone say ripple effects? Bottom line: don't alienate your community, Yahoo should have known this by now. Also, companies/organizations need to realize that censorship will not work, it only makes things worse and accomplishes the exact opposite of what it's supposed to do.

(Photo by Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir)

Super Bowl Ad Review: 2007

Well, this year's Super Bowl Sunday has finally come to a close. After all that went on, I'm still lamenting over who I feel more sorry for: The Bears (specifically Rex Grossman cause he sucked), The Advertisers (because they each spent at least $2.6 million and combined $100's of millions of dollars on another unmemorable year of Super Bowl commercials),  or is it The Viewers (who had to not only watch a pretty boring game but ended up sitting through all of these unimpressive ad's). Now, this is not to say that there weren't some memorable ad's but for the most part I was unimpressed. The Super Bowl is the one event of the year in which we as viewers and consumers actually view the advertisements as positive content supplements to the actual event itself. Seth Godin talks about Permission Marketing and that's precisely what Super Bowl ad's are about; they're the pinnacle of mass marketing. Nonetheless, we can learn a few things from this year's line up.

For the commercials as a whole, humorous violence was the overwhelming theme as seen in ad's like Bud Light's Rock, Paper, Bud Light and Bud Light Slap, Blockbuster's Click a Mouse, FedEx's Moon Office, Garmin's Evil Mapasaurus, beatyourrisk.com's You Gotta Have Heart and the slew of ad's from careerbuilder.com including Promotion Pit, Office Survivor and Workweek Survivor. This  seems to be somewhat of a transition from the sexual theme's we've seen in recent years.

Also, with 2006 being the year of CGC with the YouTube's and other social media alike, we saw the 3 winning CGC entries including:
Car Wash by Chevrolet. Now to be generous, it was almost funny. But, it was poorly executed, involving a bunch of guys taking off their t-shirts crowding around a car and going crazy. There's a lack of clarity, what are they going crazy for the car or the girls in it? My understanding was that this contest only involved the conception and not shooting or editing the actual ad itself. This is a pretty weak attempt in terms of extension and vertical integration. How much interaction with the brand could have been going on if the contest only involved conceptualizing the idea? Also, this is a new car, the HHR I believe it's called, so what the hell was Chevy thinking by picking an idea that doesn't allow for showcasing the car. Decide for yourself:

The NFL's Hard To Say Goodbye was probably the best entry of the three. It really captured the moment of the end to the football season. One discrepancy though, at the end it shows Brett Favre as if he is retiring but he did announce that he is coming back next season. Even though this commercial was most likely shot before the announcement it was still confusing none the less.

And then there was the Dorito's CGC spots. First off all, there were 5 ad's that were finalist for the contest out of over 1000 entries and I think the chosen winner and runner up were in my opinion the weakest spots of the group. The winning ad could be described as nothing more then a recycled idea that we've seen many times before. "Guy gets caught staring at girl and crashes his car." This was nothing new. Was this really the best they could come up with out of 1000 ad's? Why did people vote for these?

The other Dorito's ad Check Out Girl that was also shown:

My favorite of the finalist which wasn't shown had to be Mouse Trap. Check it out:

At the end of the day I think that this year's CGC entries into the Super Bowl were for the most part boring and they did raise some questions as to what their place should be on advertising's main stage. I just felt it was disappointing when you think about all of the brainpower and effort that went into making the spots that were submitted. Were those really the best one's? Also, besides the quick and subtle references to the creator of these ad's in the commercials, no one can tell that these ad's are CGC. Not one of the 15 people I was watching the game with knew about any of it. These ad's look exactly the same as the in house or agency created ones. So everyone is ranting and raving that CGC is better for the extension and vertical integration purposes, and while this is clearly the case, especially in light of all the time spent by the CGC creators with brand's like Doritos, I think CGC is presently overinflated because the extension is just not taking place on such a large scale. Bottom line: CGC's place in mass marketing doesn't seem to be a very effective one.

Finally, my picks for this year's best and worst Super Bowl spots. We'll start with the best.

My vote for the best commercial of this Super Bowl has to go to the controversial but flat out hilarious Nationwide spot featuring the Britney Spears ex Kevin Federline as a part of the "Life Comes At You Fast Campaign". I thought this commercial was great and it really seems to connect with the younger generations who conclusively hate K Fed. This commercial will most definitely have post life and let me just say prop's to K Fed for working with Nationwide to film this. Thanks for making yourself vulnerable and the butt of jokes for millions of viewers.

My pick for the worst commercial of the night has to be a tie between the salesgenie.com ad and the robot ad by GM. First, the sales genie ad sucked. I mean it really did. What the hell were they thinking. Who created it and who signed off on this stupid thing. Do they really think consumers are that gullible? What a horrible first impression, trying to use the GoDaddy formula, it surely didn't work. It was only a waste of everyone's time and a waste of $2.6 million. Enough said. Second, the GM ad I must say was thoughtfully put together from a production stand point, but at the end of the it's all about the context of your message. So here's the premise: this robot drops a bolt and is fired at the end of the day for being clumsy. But what was this ad really saying? Well, it says a couple of things to me. First, the message of "GM is obsessed with quality" is instead interpreted as "GM sucks at making cars so bad that even their robots screw up." And, this idea that "General Motors is the place where everyone including our robots  gets fired". In addition, the robot commits suicide and even though this might be an extreme point, what is this saying to all of the GM employee's who have been laid off as of late. WTF?

Honorable mentions have to go the careerbuilder.com and Coca-Cola for their contributions of great ad's. In the case of Coke, it's just a shame that they are plagued by a poor product line because their marketing department is producing excellent content and doing some innovative work with social media. Furthermore, the most memorable punch line of the night might be "everyone wants to work in marketing" by GoDaddy.com's spot. However, this is actually saying very little because this ad features the same played out claim to fame of using sex to sell domain name's. One more thing, CBS, no one cares about your stupid self promotion of your network. Surely a waste of everyone's time. Although, the short Letterman/Oprah spot was hilarious. Your 1 for 50.  All in all, it was mixed reviews from the center stage of mass marketing as we witnessed yet another year of advertisers making their individual contributions to the overall level of wastage that is the Super Bowl.