Why traditional advertising won't work in social networks - and what will

Finally got round to doing a slidedeck which I hope graphically demonstrates why traditional ad models are bound to fail in social networks.
It also illustrates the ways messages ought to be released into the wild if you expect them to survive (succeed) in a group-forming environment.
Of course, we don't just form groups in the digital world, but the internet is a more rapidly enabling environment on a global scale than most physical ones. But the two are coming together.

Further inspirational reading:
Herd,
Here Comes Everybody (now only £8 gah!),
Everything is Miscellaneous.

Legendary 'visuals' dude Dave Armano tweeted of this slideshow: Armano @davidcushman nice visuals. Like the happy faces. Social networks are made of shiny happy people (holding hands)...
Who said Americans couldn't do irony?

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Eat'n'Tweet: Introducing it and us

A handful of interested/interesting people who have found each other through the power of the network (blogs, twitter etc) are getting together for an informal meet at lunchtime on Thursday July 3. If you've found this you're interested and almost certainly interesting - so you can come too!

You'll find us, on this occasion, at The Couch in Dean St, Soho, London from 1pm (well, that's when I'm aiming to get there).

If you can't make this one, I'm planning one in Cambridgeshire in the near future, too, with colleague badgergravling.

View Larger Map

Tweet ups by their nature our generally adhoc and self-forming. I'm just giving this one a little helping hand with this blog post, too.

Anyway, zeroinfluencer asked if I'd do a few intro's ahead of time. The following are links to the individuals' twitter account - where you'll usually find a little bio and a link to a blog or similar. So, here we are (so far...)

chrsoz

zeroinfluencer

ivan007

EaonP

chrisglynne

J_mac

bakerash

andrewgrill

adriana872 Sean Briggs

davidcushman (that's me)

Also attending: Tim Russell from yospace

Other possibles include:

Technokitten

Spanx

Social tools in the enterprise. Contradiction in terms?

Just added a new post to /message. All thoughts welcome!

Lessons in co-creation. Ignore them if you want to fail

James Cherkoff shared the June 2008 McKinsey Quarterly document via twitter. The Next Step in Open Innovation (by Jacques Bughin, Michael Chui and Brad Johnson) includes these gems:

• "25 per cent of Western Europe's internet users now post comments and reviews about consumer products of all kinds."
• "User-Generated media sites are growing in numbers of visitors and participants by 100% a year, traditional sites by 20-30%."
• "40% of would be co-creators will refuse to co-create with companies they don't like or trust."

Lesson one: Don't assume co-creation is for the geeks. It's rapidly going mainstream. The majority is no longer silent - it is a participating thinking outloud one.

Lesson two: Don't slap yourself on the back for a 20-30% growth rate in visitor numbers. As Professor Malcolm McDonald reminded me this week, we often fail to look at what the whole market is doing and how we are performing against it. The whole market in this case is growing at a rate of 100% a year. Anything less and you're falling behind, failing.

Lesson three: Trust in your brand is worth 40% of the new value co-creation is unlocking. Work at it, invest in it. Never abuse it.

What do you pay for when you use ITunes?

I was on a panel at Digital Asset Management in London yesterday and threw into the ring that perhaps the 'assets' that we aim to manage don't have value (at least not in and of themselves).
I was talking, of course, about the Because Effect. You might not make money with content but you're likely to because of it.
In other words Prince understands that his music is freely shared so he gives it away for free. That which was scarce has become abundant.
The because effect is that more people hear his music and he creates more demand for the thing that he does have that is still in limited supply - live concert tickets/ merchandise/limited edition this and that...

Someone asked, but what about ITunes? People pay for content there - and the success appears to continue to grow.

I don't think its the content we are paying for on Itunes - it is the service (with the experience intertwined in this).
You could go and find the same music freely shared somewhere else. You could. It might take you a while. You could find ways to get it on to your ipod. You could.
But it's all time consuming and clunky.
You pay itunes to take all that hassle away and make the download quick, easy and beautifully done.

Services around the effective delivery of the right content? Now there's a thought for media.

By the way, I've posted this from an I-google gadget (in other words without leaving my google homepage).

Cool little widget. A service I have taken with me on my journey - one which treats the user as the destination. Neat.

What world 2.0 looks like.

If you have the time... appappeal has the links. This image (at least the version here is) is made up of thousands of links to 2.0 apps and links. Roll your mouse around and up pop the logos of web2.0 - complete with links to them.
So this is what world2.0 actually looks like?

Why hits MUST have less value in the networked world

I spoke at Digital Asset Management in London yesterday, on a panel in the morning and on my feet in the afternoon.
I also had the good fortune to hear Professor Malcolm McDonald speak about marketing (a real pleasure - you really should check him out if you haven't come across his work) and to be interviewed by the clearly brilliant Michael Moon - in for the event from San Francisco.

Once again during the Q&A sessions I was involved in I found myself trying to explain the 'reason' why hits MUST have less value in the emerging networked world. I've never included slides for this in any of my presentations. So, I thought I'd better whip some up.

They are shown below (and on slideshare). Your thoughts, as always, actively welcomed. Apologies for the quality - hope the relevance counts!

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We're All Publishers Now: My presentation for Digital Asset Management?

I'm speaking at Digital Asset Management in London, tomorrow, June 25.

I'm on a panel in the morning and due to speak, on the topic "We're All Publishers Now" just after lunch - pay attention you at the back!

Please come and say 'hi' if you are attending.

The presentation I'll give is very similar to the one I gave in New York last week at widgetwebexpo - Media Transformative.

Here's the slidedeck for it (below), together with a transcript of my notes. Your comments, as always, very welcome.

Delighted to say SlideShare selected it for the top of its 'featured' list on the homepage on June 26.

The power of the network changes the traditional media model through two key disruptions. First it disrupts how, and by whom, content is created.

Second it disrupts how, and by whom content is distributed. Together these offer an opportunity for the traditional chasm between advertising and content to close. This session will consider how 'media' companies can reform themselves to change both what they do and the way they go about it to deliver products and services which are a better fit with the inhabitants of the networked world.

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Slide 2
One of the few images we have of William Shakespeare comes to us not because the artist charged with making the image was selected as the finest of his day, nor because this was the image chosen by Will’s adoring audience as the most accurate or representative (SMS voting of the American Idol variety hadn’t quite hit London in the early 1600s).

William Shakespeare was the most important play-write of his day – and this was a day when the play was THE primary form of entertainment. He was a big deal.

And yet the picture we have of him is… well it’s a bit rubbish really.

The creator was a young man named Martin Droeshout. And while he may not have been possessed of a huge artistic talent, he did possess something more fundamental to his ability to form the rare and enduring image we have of Shakespeare. He owned the brass-plate printing gear required to print Will’s mugshot on the famous first folio.

He who had control of the means of production got to control the information – even if that information wasn’t particularly great.

The information, in this particular case was packaged up in books by the media business and distributed by the media business.

Slide 3
And this remained the case as media revolutions swept through the 20th century – print was followed by audio recordings, radio, cinema, TV.

And the model remained the same, the same rules applied.

Media controlled the production of content. Media controlled the distribution of content.

This was true right up until the arrival of the internet. Even while the internet remained in its 1.0-pre broadband incarnation it was still essentially true – while publishing remained relatively complex and expensive.

Slide 4
But with the arrival of web2.0, with its really low technical barriers and promise of the ubiquity of tools for creating and sharing, the grip on control has been shaken, loosened… broken.

There are new ways for people to gather.

Now we can all sit on the global hotdesk, forming into adhoc communities of shared purpose, sharing and learning in real time on a global scale.

As Stowe Boyd puts it: “I am made greater by the sum of my connections, so are my connections.

Slides 5-6
Who gets to control production of content now?

Anyone and everyone. Good and bad. It’s all relevant to someone.

Social networks are made of small groups of purpose. Groups of people looking at each other – not at you! This is not an audience.

So congratulations on the scale of the gathering - but you have to understand these are an aggregation of small groups sharing separate purposes.

Slides 7-8
Who gets to distribute content now?

Anyone and everyone.

Shared with who they choose, chosen by who wants to share.

Widgets lower the technical barrier of this and make the disruption explicit.

Those twin disruptions are serious for every media business model. Not just for content producers either, but for anyone employed in the business of being the middle layer, the mediator, the middle man.

We now have a way around you!

Slides 9-10
Who gets to control the user experience?

With a print publication we produce the content, we control the distribution, and through our editorial selection, our choice of what to include and how to present it, we control the user experience.

Same applies to broadcast media. The programme maker decides.

But in the digital space that control is lost. Building intuitive user journeys remains a wise investment of time, but we cannot rely on users following our breadcrumbs. In fact, expecting them to is a bit patronising – as if we think they are too stupid to work out where they want to go.

The digital world is formed of discreet units each of which can be accessed from any other and in what ever order the user chooses. The user controls their own A-Z journey. Actually it’s A-Anywhere now.

The old model was based on building destinations and harvesting eyeballs. In the digital networked world we continue to try to build destinations

The new world is a very different place…

Slide 11
If you want to evolve to survive in this world then your first step has to be to live in its environment.

So write a blog and you’ll understand how easy it is to be a publisher, how easy it is to create and share content, how easy it is to form groups of shared purpose in networks of trust, how easy it is to find relevant content and for relevant people to find you.

Build a widget and the process will illustrate that we are all distributors now.

You have to start by trying to guess who might choose to share your widget or be enthused or impressed enough to pass it on.

And that reveals something of the new challenges and opportunities for media.

Slide 12
Think about this in the context of traditional advertising (and by association we'll realise we face the same issues with content, because as we discover over and over again, in this world they are heading towards becoming the same thing).

My first thought, on discovering that I could build my own basic widget through the likes of Sprout Builder (I don't code) and publish it, and all for free, is to consider ways the media company I work for can take advantage of this for low-risk experiments in widget making.

A quick easy option: RSS feeds gathered into an easy-grab widget that users can place where they choose.

In other words, offer a simple way for users to choose to disaggregate our content and make it portable. RSS enables this itself, of course, but grab-this-widget functionality and sharing through the likes of facebook make this a possibility for those who find the technical barrier of RSS still a little high – and I don’t underestimate how many people that still includes.

This extends our reach and (if we limit the RSS character count) it calls those interested in particular content back to our sites where they could be fed in-context related ads. All good.

Slide 13
But what about revenue models integrated with the widget itself?

When I choose to distribute a widget that's been made on Sprout Builder every iteration carries a link back to Sprout. Want to make your own? Click here? Every YouTube video functions in a similar way. And if you have Google Adsense enabled on your site then it will display related advertising, too.

But these models still treat the ad and the content as separate entities. The distribution of the ad message relies on users choosing to view and to participate in the distribution of a separate ‘editorial’ content.

The ads piggy-back on the content that the user actually wants. Perhaps this is a bit parasitical, a little like sneaking in the back door?

Slide 14
What if the advert was the content the user chose to distribute? That makes life interesting, doesn't it?

If ads and content are coming together, and everyone is a content producer now… doesn’t that make everyone an advertiser now?

With that in mind,would anyone choose to place 95% of 30-second slot TV, banner ads and the usual 'creative' solutions on their own (user-generated) content? Would they choose to grab it from where they see it and share it with others?

Slide 15
Take my simple widget (please!); it is an editorialised version of how widgets should be. First – I've decided the content. I have edited your choice, I've been the filter on the way in.

And that's hardly enabling a personalised outcome.

I would have preferred to make it a 'my favourite fasterfuture post chooser' in which you could make up your personal outcome from the full selection of my outpourings. Maybe those posts that get chosen most often would rise to the top of the list the community of users is then offered? You get the general idea.

The widget should allow the user to make the choice: That which we create we embrace. If we participate in the process we're more likely to share the outcome and to actively promote it.

This is obviously true of the marketing, too. I am more likely to choose to display the results of my personal choice of content and my personalised version of that content (or advertising message).

Because that which we create, we embrace (Alan Moore, et al).

Slide 16
It’s worth noting that this works because we live digitally in a community context. It's what the network is all about.

There is little point in me sharing what I think is cool unless I expect you might think it’s cool, too. We do this by sharing within our networks of trust. Just as we share links in twitter or thoughts on blogposts.

There is residual mass media thinking in the notion that you should create a place on the web for people to show off what they have done with ‘your content’ – for example the ‘for everything else there’s mastercard’ campaign - (all those personal outcomes) as if just anyone, any old set of eyeballs, might be interested.

The collective site might not rate your personal take – your friends will.

The real value is in the sharing of results with friends, who will be interested because that personal outcome involves a friend - in whom they are personally interested.

Then if they take the results and create their own personalised iteration, they'll have friends they may choose to share with, and so the iterations repeat, amplifying the original.

This builds on the understanding that the advert transitions into a recommendations. This is most likely to occur in communities of purpose, places where people share cool stuff with others because they believe those others think it’s cool, too.

The receiver decides if the advert is a recommendation – not the would-be recommender (the sender).

Marketing is not done to you, it’s done by you.

Slides 17-21
The outcome relies heavily on three things:
1. A willingness to relinquish control.
2. Toolkits users can play with.
3. Creative users.

2 and 3 are in place. Are you ready for No1?

The people best-placed to make the most effective iteration for their peer group are outside of your control.

Slides 22-26
The disruption to control revealed by widgets brings us back to that really tough question:

If media’s role is no longer about controlling who makes the content, and it’s not about controlling how content is distributed and it’s not even about controlling the user experience, what role can media play?

I think there are three potential plays.

Slide 27
1. Be the thing that’s paid for at the end of the ‘user experience’
2. Be a discreet element of the digital experience
3. Be the menu from which those experiences are selected.

1. Is obvious. 3. Is our default2.0 response: we are the aggregators – the nuancers of your experience. And there’s certainly mileage in this.

Number 2 is the part that we often neglect and it is the part that can be well served by widgets. Create something so useful that users choose to make it part of their own personal user journey from A-anywhere. A service.

And if you can do all three, be the menu, be on the menu and be the meal that’s consumed and paid for as a result, media has a great triple play.

Slide 28
It’s worth us getting our heads round this and perhaps more rapidly than we may have thought necessary. I’m starting to believe the impact of change wrought by the internet has been seriously underestimated while the impact of social networks has been underplayed.

This has much to do with how tools turn from geeky high tech oddities to the familiar items of everyday life.

Slide 29
The telephone didn't make us communicate. It’s a tool for communication. The internet doesn’t make us form groups. It’s a tool for us to do this through.

Yes, the internet is a tool for forming groups.

The tool that is the telephone didn’t change the way society functioned - until it was in the hands of the majority - and until that majority was comfortable using it.

It moved from being an odd piece of high technology to being a familiar tool. We certainly needed the network in place for this to happen. But we also needed a really easy way for us to understand how to use that network - an interface.

Once we had both, everything changed; from how fast news travels through networks, to how widely it gets distributed, to how many bank clerks and insurance salesmen need to be employed (witnessed through the dread edifice the 'call centre'). Emergency services, journalism, military activity, shop delivery systems, politics... you name it, the ubiquity of the telephone as a tool alongside a wide network to make that tool useful, changed our world.

Telco networks aren't a tool, they are the medium. The handsets are the tools.

Slide 30
And social networks are to the internet what the handset is to the wires of the phone network. They are the easy-to-use interface which allows the majority of people to access the disruptive power of the network.

Email 'newslists' and forums may have been with us since deep into last century but there was a reason people who used them were considered 'geeky' or 'nerdy'. You had to be of a particular type to early adopt. They were flat two-dimensional implementations brought with us from a flat broadcast world.

Social networks have been spluttering into existence since about 1995 but they certainly weren't ubiquitous back then. It took lesson-learning and the explosion of broadband to move them into the 'familiar tool' category.

By 2005 MySpace was clocking up more page impressions than google.
This perhaps marks the watershed in the move out of 'geek' and into 'familiar tool' for social networks.

Slide 31
In other words, we haven’t had 15 years of disruption caused by the internet – we’ve had 3.

Social networks reveal to the users the new and very disruptive low overhead cost of forming groups. Easy-to-use social networks reveal this, and allow large numbers of people to experience this, in ways that previous connecting software and technologies could not match.

And as more and more people become more and more familiar with the power of the network through the familiar tool of the social network, so the disruption will bite deeper - the one that will remove the mediators in supply chain after supply chain as new networks form supply and demand webs. It will remove the mediators.

Slide 32
The 'familiar tool' social networks (of which facebook and twitter appear to me the easiest to use and best at revealing its group forming nature) do a different job. They put group-forming at their heart. They allow the user to dial D for disruption the moment they start a group.

How fast does the change happen when ubiquity arrives? I spoke at EPublishing in London in May, where Vin Crosbie gave the keynote.

Vin showed pictures of a London street just before the internal combustion engine became ubiquitous. Streets filled with horses, a transport infrastructure to support all those horses, how far and how fast people, goods and ideas travelled controlled by those horses. 20 years later the horse was all but gone from London's streets. They were filled with cars, buses, taxis and trucks.

What do you expect the pace of disruption to be in the digital space in the 21st Century?

Consider this. YouTube launched from scratch a little over 3 years ago. How differently do we think about TV three years on?

Dr Mike Wesch says 83% of YouTube content added in the last six months is user generated. This accounts for more content than has been broadcast on TV – ever. More than half of teenagers are creating UGC.

We are only a few short years into the real disruption – the one being wrought by the arrival of the social network as a familiar tool.

Slide 33
How many people are familiar with using social networks today?

Among online American teenagers, according to Pew a year ago, 55% were using social networks. Comscore stats in April this year suggested 60% of Latin Americans online use social networks.

40% of US Mothers are on MySpace.

Facebook claims 40% of online canadians use its service, alone.

In the UK, Ofcom found a quarter of 8-11-year-olds already have profiles on social networks. They are growing up fast and they are growing up connected in Total Communities – communities in which to take part you have to create part.

They are growing up understanding the power of self-forming communities of purpose - with a tool in their hands to access it.

They are growing up with different expectations not only of media, but also of business, politics, education and society and their own role within each of these. And this will change everything.

The silent majority have had their day. The participating majority are coming.

Slide 34

Widgets give us a mainline into the DIY distribution element of this revolution – an opportunity to enable and facilitate.

And through this we will discover our place in the new world.

Through this we may adapt to it.

Through this we may earn our place in it.

Wanted: Web Producer with a passion for two wheels

Once upon a time I was the editor of motorcyclenews.com
The guys there are looking for some new members of the team and I'm happy to point you in their direction.

Here's the job ad:
"Got a passion for the internet? Love motorcycles? Want to develop your skills with the backing of a major UK publisher working on the UK’s biggest motorcycling website and the world’s biggest selling motorcycle weekly?

"We’re looking for a Web Producer to join the team producing www.motorcyclenews.com. You’ll get to write, edit and publish content viewed by the biggest audience in motorcycling as well as learning how to create, edit and produce multimedia content.

"You'll be bursting with new ideas to drive people to the website and ways to market the website throughout the internet, whether it’s on social networking sites, video sites, or an entirely new way to reach more motorcyclists.

"You’ll also have the opportunity to contribute to the print edition, travel to bike launches and events in the UK and abroad, and even take your motorcycle licence and test the latest bikes.

"Writing or blogging skills are essential and previous experience in website production is preferable, as is a love of all things motorcycling .

"The position is based in Peterborough, UK.

"To apply, please email your CV and any examples of previous work to angus.farquhar@bauerconsumer.co.uk"

I'm now collaborating with Stowe Boyd at /message

I'm pleased to share that I've become a contributing blogger at Stowe Boyd's /message.
Stowe and I have met before (in London) and followed each other's work for some time.
But it was after seeing me present at WidgetWebExpo that he asked me to join in at /message.

You can read my first contribution here. It's titled Twitter Isn't About Conversation, It's About Forming Groups.

Stowe's a legend and I'm genuinely delighted to collaborate with him (and a handful of others - look out for their contributions, too) over at /message.

This doesn't mean this is the end of Faster Future - far from it. It simply means that from time to time I'll invite you to join in the conversation at another url. Hope you'll join in?

Carnival of the Mobilists #129

Delighted to say the presentation I was due to give at Mobile Advertising in Brussells on Monday is gaining a wider audience.
I had to cancel my speechifying at quite late notice so decided to share the slidedeck and what I was going to say here.
And that post has been selected as part of this week's Carnival of the Mobilists.
The Carnival celebrates the best of blogging about mobile and is hosted at a different blog each week.

To advertisers: stop targeting, start broadcasting

We're getting better and better at targeting advertising - at sending users messages we think they'll actually find quite useful.

But the increasingly free expression of metadata changes the game regarding the way we 'target'.

Indeed, it may reveal that who-does-what-to-whom in this relationship can and should be turned on its head.

In the process we may have to let go of one of the grand promises of the digital world - that we can target individuals with such precision that they'll always want what we target them with.

In this world of freely-exposed metadata by all parties advertising is not about targeting, it is about making a message available as widely as possible.

Sounds counter-intuitive in the digital age, right?

But it starts from the notion that recommendation happens in the mind of the receiver, not in the mind of the person making the recommendation.
Simpler still: Marketing is not something advertisers can do to people (ie target and deliver at them), it is something people (with the assistance of other people) do to themselves.

A TV advert is a broadcast of metadata. If some of that metadata hooks up with your own then you find it useful. The advert transforms into recommendation in your mind. When it achieves that status you may transmit how useful you find it to other people.

Trouble is, you can't share how useful you've found it while sat alone in front of the TV.

Which is why the best place to broadcast advertising (as metadata) is in a digital social network. Again, sounds counter-intuitive, doesn't it? Banner ads etc have failed miserably in social networks (certainly in terms of click-thrus and/or engagement).

So, let's be clear. I'm not advocating broadcasting any old-style, fixed, centre-out message will get you endorsed by an adoring public.

No. You have to understand that when you are invited into the 'huge crowd' of a social network you are invited into one of thousands of small groups, each one made up of people looking at each other - not at the stage.

Getting the signal right for each of those small groups is close to impossible (hello 0.01% CTR!) - if you try to do it yourself.

So let the receivers' adapt it. Let them shape it so that its likelihood of being passed on within that receiver's peer-group goes through the roof. Who better to put the message in the most effective terms?

Nutshell: I pass things on that I think are cool, to people who I believe will also think it is cool.

If I get this wrong I lose some of the trust and authority I have built up with my group. So I do this with care and judgement. Much more care and judgement than the one-size-fits-all brand-control-driven centre (the broadcaster of a traditional ad message) can hope to muster.

Critically, emotions are at risk. I don't want to look bad to my peers. I'm a social creature. A human being. An ad message is not. This informs my decisions about what to pass on. Data has a hard time understanding this.

By targeting, the advertiser starts selecting where they are going to choose to share their metadata. They are saying they know who the message is for and who will respond best to it.

Fine. But they are reaching the tip of an iceberg. If you allow the receiver to decide for themselves whether your advert is a recommendation, they will take that message with them deep within their peer groups - where iteration after iteration of your message can spawn - where the next generation of receivers are available to decide if the message is an advert or a recommendation for their peers and so on...

In this context broadcast ain't all bad. We all broadcast our metadata all the time in social networks and mediums - advertisers and receivers all.

The advertiser can't assume they can calculate what it is that the receiver will decide to morph into recommendation today, right now, in the social context they are in. Their peers may be better placed - their current adhoc community of purpose.

The sharing of metadata encourages us to form into groups - communities of purpose no matter how adhoc in nature.

And groups with whom I share purpose are in a great position to spread advertising messages that morph into recommendation when I receive them. They share stuff with me they think I'll think is cool.

Targeting tries to calculate this. It rationalises our preponderance to respond in certain ways.
People, however, can feel this. Which is useful; because we're rarely entirely rational when it comes to purchase (or any other) decisions.

As Mark Earls suggests in Herd - we're post-rational creatures. We do stuff and then try to rationalise why we did it, later. If this were not the case you wouldn't smoke and I wouldn't be overweight.

So, given all this. Why spend the time and trouble targeting? Put your metadata out there - as widely as possible - and hope to be pulled to the people who find it useful, who can shape it to be useful to other people they know.

Messages don't do marketing. People do.

Please, help me on the journey with this one...

Using mobile social networks to target advertising... one day

I was due to be in Brussells on Monday to present on the subject of using mobile social networks to target advertising.
For a variety of reasons I can't make it. My good friend Jonathan Macdonald is going to fill in for me. Many thanks for that.

Still, I'd done all the prep work so I'd rather share that than waste it. Right below you'll find the slide deck and then below that my notes to go with them. It's not quite the real thing - but if it gets you thinking and makes you want to take the conversation in various directions, I'd be delighted to read your comments.

In summary:

• First we need ubiquity
• UGC-powered broadcast models and Total Community models require different approaches
• Viral is something we do together
• Be ready to give up control

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• Slide Two

First things first.
The company I work for, Bauer Consumer Media, is one of the few media brand owners to sell its own mobile advertising, at least in the UK.
We can do this because we have long term excellent relationships with key operators. Our brands include FHM, Grazia, Heat, Motorcycle News, Angling Times, Mother & Baby, Your Horse, Zoo, etc.
In mobile our best known brand is Eyevibe – the video mobile social network which operates across 3, 02 and Vodafone in the UK.
Selling our own advertising reveals two significant truths for us:
1. A lot of people still don’t know where to start if they want to place an ad on mobile.
Is it with the operator, the agency, the media property, the handset maker even. So just to be clear: If you want to place an ad on any of our properties come and speak to us!
2. We’ve learned a bit more about the scale of the opportunity than most media owners. And right now, that opportunity is small.

• Slide 3

What that means is that while I’ve been asked to talk about ‘exploiting mobile social networking and user generated content to deliver highly targeted mobile advertising’ the reality at present is that none of us have big enough pies for media buyers to trouble themselves with slicing up.
At the moment we are stuck with selling our services, and the eyeballs gathered by whatever community features we deploy.

• Slide four

Eyevibe has 350K unique users a month generating 28m page impressions each month.
That may sound impressive, and in mobile internet terms, it is. But it’s not enough to start dicing and slicing for the average media buyer.
We know for example that our core age group on eyevibe is 18-25. 18-25 year olds who are heavy users of mobile internet are a pretty focused group right now. That’s focus enough to offer advertisers without going too much further.

• Slide five:

One current example: Doritos is carrying out a mobile advertising trial with Bauer. The five shortlisted entries to its £2.5m 'You make it, we play it' competition are being shown as post-roll ads on not only eyevibe but also on Empire and FHM’s mobile sites. They are targeting 18-24 year olds. Users are asked to vote for their favourite and the ad will be aired on TV during the UEFA European Championships.

• Slide six

Mobile is playing its role in an integrated campaign and one in which the planners have identified mobile as having high penetration among the 18-25 age group.
Targeting broad channels within a mobile social network, rather than tightly targeting individuals within it may be the best fit for today’s media buyer. In fact that’s an approach we are working on with eyevibe – the sponsorship of channels.
In short, it is too early to be deploying highly targeted advertising on mobile..

• Slide seven

Why is this? Because we are not at internet scale yet – or anywhere near it. It’s more like the mid 90s on the internet. And remember, Google adsense didn't emerge until there was already a good deal of advertising volume on the internet. Ubiquity first, targeting second.
We are not yet at that volume and your business plans for the short to medium term must take account of this.
Pains me to say it, but it's important to understand the reality of now before examining how value will be created in the near future.

• Slide eight

Now, all that said, scale is coming. Only a fool will think otherwise. Flat rate data is becoming ubiquitous, 3G footprint is expanding, emerging nations are going to mobile first adding billions to those online, search is improving, walled gardens are coming down.
So no wonder Google’s Eric Schmidt now predicts more ad revenues from mobile internet than fixed line in a few short years.
What I'm going to talk about speaks perhaps to the understanding google has arrived at. Google are focused on services – where ads and content meet. They also see a new slicing and dicing niche emerging from location based services.
When we reach scale then we have the possibility to create more value with real relevance. Ads have the opportunity of moving from interruption to engagement – from lowest common denominator to being focusedm useful content for the user.

• Slide nine

So with that in mind, let’s return to that question ‘Unleashing the power of the user: Exploiting Mobile Social Networking and User Generated Content to Deliver Highly Targeted Mobile Advertising.

Is it right to lump these together? Perhaps not. Here’s why.

• Slide 10:

I think there are two kinds of user generated content models:
broadcast and total communities.
Youtube and wikipedia and our own eyevibe are great examples of UGC-powered broadcast models.
1% of users contribute. 99% consume.
Let me be clear. This is not a bad thing. The 99% now have something they want to consume, created by that busy 1%. It didn't exist before. It's been carved from that cognitive surplus that Clay Shirky introduced us to. New value has been created.
It’s actually a very good thing if you’re an advertiser of the old school. Youtube, for example has some videos which have been viewed by 1m plus. That’s an audience – and it’s one in consumption mode.

• Slide 11

What they are consuming is content. And if your advertising model functions in a content way you have opportunities for success. In simple terms: music video to promote sales of tickets, downloads etc, discount vouchers to promote sales of products, wallpapers to promote fan affinities etc.
Users in these worlds soon spot straight-forward 30 second spots though – and turn on them. Yes they are ready to consume content on youtube, but not to be spun at.

• Slide 12

Simple ad models we are familiar with such as pre-roll etc have a better chance of success if users are receiving something in exchange – your download is free if you watch this ad, for example, seems a reasonable bargain. Just make sure the ad is relevant to the content if you don’t want those eyeballs to simply turn away…
Consuming your ad as a part of their selected experience can work.
There are, for example videos on youtube which reach multi-million audience. eyeballs matter when you have this scale – for branding purposes at least. an ad for a web2.0 conference on a great bit of web2.0 thinking could work well.
The greatest aggregate value will of course be achieved by activating advertising in the long tail in self-formed audiences.
So UGC-powered broadcast models can deliver value and are relatively easy for traditional agencies to understand.

• Slide 13

Then we have Total Communities, the other UGC model. These are communities in which to take part you have to create part.
Think of twitter. If you don’t create a profile you can’t take part. And if you don’t contribute some thoughts through microblogging you’ll get little value.
These are models which aren’t architectured to be accessible to large consuming audiences – they are for small communities to form around shared purposes and interests – facebook, myspace, secondlife… social networks/mediums.
Itsmy is a fine example in the mobile world.
And in these cases I’m going to suggest traditional ad models will prove less effective.

• Slide 14

So it may not be a question of using social networks as a vehicle to deliver highly targeted advertising, more that unless you consider different advertising models advertising will simply not be effective in social networks.
In Total Community models ads as content models are king.
Itsmy allows users to choose if they want to display ads, and if they do, they get to choose which ads to display. It changes the relationship with the brand. Now your choice of relationship with your brand says something about you, it’s now your content.
Even in huge networks like facebook and myspace, we know response rates even to relatively targeted banner ads is poor.
I believe this has much to do with the mode of thought people are in when they are using Total Community sites – they are more creative than consuming.
They are also looking at each other, rather than at you.
Give them an opportunity to join in the creation of an ad message and they are not only more likely to respond, they are also more likely to share.
As Mark Earls, author of Herd, says, “give them something to do together”

• Slide 15

This is at the crux of the idea that viral marketing may be “the key enabler for the success of mobile advertising”.
To be successful viral marketing must follow the rules of a networked world – and they are rules that appeal to people in creative mode, the mode we find people in in total communities:
Speak in an authentic voice (close the gap between creation and marketing)
2. Lose the TV envy (think relevance over quality)
3. Give people tools to make it their own (that which we create, we embrace)
4. Don't bother with urls, links or 'brand messages'. (We don't do spin) If people are interested they will search. Buy the keywords if you want to make it easier for them.

• Slides 16-18

What it takes to succeed in the viral environment:

1. A willingness to relinquish control.
2. Toolkits users can play with.
3. Creative users.

2 and 3 are readily available.
Number 1 is down to you.

• Slide 19

Summary

• First we need ubiquity
• UGC-powered broadcast models and Total Community models require different approaches
• Viral is something we do together
• Be ready to give up control

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OMFG! Even when we're looking (hard), we can't see

I was lucky enough to be in New York's Times Square on Sunday. It is the most message-intense place I know in the physical world.
I was there to vist ToysRus for some daddy's-away-on-business guilt shopping.
I've been to the ToysRus on Times Square before - last year when I visited with my wife.
I'm sure I remembered exactly where it was. But I couldn't find it.
I just couldn't tune out enough of the visual noise of Times Square to find what I was looking (hard) for.
Turned out I was stood right slap bang outside it. (About where that A-board is in the picture below).
The wood is so, so, so hidden in the trees.

Which is why I like the picture of the OMFG billboard (left) I took. Dunno what it means in the US but it's pretty explicit in the UK.
A very loud signal, you might expect? Yet no one, no one! was looking.

Times Square is quiet compared to the totality of messages we have thrown at us daily. That's why we no longer see them. But, just like those pedestrians walking by, we are looking where we are going.

Which is where I'm headed with some widget strategy work I've been doing: The user is the destination now.

A rare handful of things are so important to us that we are prepared to look really, really hard for them - like ToysRUs in Times Square. What has made them important is an awesome experience. Think how awesome the Times Square ToysRUs has had to be to achieve this. This is a toy shop. A toy shop with a ferris wheel, giant Barbie House and animatronics dinosaurs throughout. Oh, and a brand...

If you can't match that we won't come looking. Because looking is becoming increasingly Times Square-hard. And if you make us look too hard, we'll give up and go elsewhere. Or ask a friend.

For the rest, if you want your message to be part of our walk through the Times Square of life, you are going to have to be something so useful to us that we're prepared to take it with us and place it where we always head back to, or somewhere our friends will take us by the hand and guide us to.

Fred Wilson, Stowe Boyd and Josh Bernoff at Widget Web Expo day 2

The following is simply my notes, made at the time the presentations were being made at day two of WidgetWebExpo in NYC. Lack of wifi made live blogging impossible.

I'll add a little commentary and links later (am at JFK waiting to board for Heathrow at the time of posting). Apologies if it's not polished, but it's the best I could do in the time available!!

Fred Wilson gave the key note

1.Fred Wilson: (Fred blogs at AVC)
Why widgets is the wrong word and why it matters.

"I wrote a blog post this morning and in the process I developed some thoughts. the ppt is available at slideshare.

Fred's powerpoint for WWE:

| View | Upload your own

Fred referred to the widget as defined on wikipedia.

"The words are wrong and the way we are using them is wrong.

"The first i used was in 2005, the flickr badge. Eye opener for me It developed a lot of interaction, people would click through and comment on my flickr page.

"Most interesting widget i have used is the mybloglog widget. It made me realise widgets would do more than just show content, they would introduce new function – that my blog could become a social network.

"My favourite widget is one hacked together by a friend named darren, a frequent reader. we all post music. (widget is on fred's blog) you can fast forward, auto play skip, etc. pulls from tumblr.

"The problems with widgets: what is content and what is ad?
we increasingly are getting trained by google to think of organic results as content and the stuff on the right is ads. that notion of separation of ad is content is something we see a lot of places on the web.

"Widgets get relegated to the sidebars and increasingly viewed in the same way as ads and therefore increasingly ignored.

"Three times I have cleaned out widgets, I posted 'widgets suck' cos most of last year the single most used search term on my blog was 'widgets suck'. I found widgets i liked and then found I needed to clean house and I'd poll people and people said they didn't like the widgets.

"Widgets cause a painful slow down in load times."

Fred demo'd with his own blog taking 25-30s.

"Responsiveness and load time is key to success on the web.

"On my tumblog there are no sidebars. it is delivered inline and a better experience for the user – but these are embeds or feeds.

"I am enamoured with the concept of flow and rivers, we need experiences on the web that are a flow controlled by the user... a river of news or of anything, is more compelling than the more interruptive experience of widgets on my weblog.

"The challenge is how do you get into the flow, with a better end user experience."

Q&A: Stowe asked: "Why don't you come up with a better design for AVC."

"I don't really have any other way to do some of these things – I don't have a way to express my social network any other way, or these flickr photos and put them into the flow.

"Idea that widgets get served like in context ads – gthe only that appear to the user being the ones that suit the content. Less interruptive then.

"Is it just a design issue? I used to have a lastfm badge which showed my most recent songs. I took it out, in my tumblr page there's a post that's autogenerated showing my five most recent songs, in the flow.

(worth noting Fred is delivering a very publisher rather than consumer perspective, by which i mean widgets are not always 'ours'. Fred's are displays of elements of his likes and interests, not ones designed for the user to take and display for themself - to make their own).

"There's a signal to noise ratio issue. the signal on avc is now much stronger about tech and venture capital because much of my 'noise' about other things I'm interested in is now in a different flow (tumblr).

"Generational shift, those born after 1980 are much more fast paced about the way they consume content, they want to get to the answer really quickly so twitter and tumblr are doing well.

"Facebook is taking the apps off the profile and into an apps tab, the fact I've installed an app doesn't mean it should be on my profile page (though it'll be in the river of news...)

"First gen of he widget economy was powerful because it showed we can mash up on a single page. But the user interface needs to change. widgets shouldn't suck."

Chris Saad: “You don't have to consume your friends entire life stream. You post to the world but your friends should be able to filter for themselves.”

Stowe: people are experiencing blogs differently – via rss without any of the widgets.

Fred: "The ultimate power of feeds is to route content to the people who want it where they want it. Widgets can put that content before the right people at the right time.

"People are starting to access the power of rss as plumbing rather than as publishing.

Q what models are making money.
A: widgets aren't, they are marketing system to get to web services.
People say this fb app has been installed 20m times, but then you see the daily active users might be 20K. It's about the engagement of the widgets.

"I want to know how much people use a widget on my blog.

"Web is becoming more intelligent more social and more playful. the most successful widgets on fb are games, social games, with real engagement. 2m a day play one of comps games a day. 12% of worldwide fb reach.

"everything should have some game dynamic to it, it has to have entertainment value even if its just about information.

Stowe Boyd:

Social Meaning In a fragmented world.

"Tower of Babel was destroyed and everyone's languages were confounded and spread out. that's what's going on on the web.
"People are spending more time on the web, less on tv! there's a fragmentation of exp.

"Is widgeting enough to bridge all of this incompatibility, bring together all these social shared meanings?

"Can we have distributed reputation and identity. If I have rep in tech is it worthwhile in politics, can we abstract sociality.

"I am a webthropologist, I am a synthesist, trying to get a big picture view on the impact on all of us, more an art than a science.

social tools and fragmentity:

"social tools have the purpose of creating or shaping culture, not just to make communication more important.

"culture is about a shared experienced, shared context and shared ethics.

"FB and google's actions are being amplified by the herd behaviour. Large population activities can cloud what people actually do with their closest context, down to social scale. There's a whole different set of physics in social groups compared to crowds.

"You can make the wrong interpretations and assumptions, just like we did about subatomic particles.

"Individuals aren't concerned about the fragmentation of their ID. denizens of the web are trying new stuff and setting up accounts all the time. I've recently used brightkite, i used to use plazes, i was just waiting for something new.

"people are curious and looking for new things to do, this playfulness that Fred was getting at.

"They will tolerate and even gravitate towards a fragmented world, it is this willingness to use fragmented identity on the web, they want a porthole here into some other context and they want to show that to someone.

"We can't expect uniformity when there is so much innovation going on. I use change.org, they have devised new ideas which aren't like anything found elsewhere.

"People can propose activities that other people can take on (eg give up your car). I create the activity, it is unique at the moment. You will see this innovation, new ways of sharing in social tools. and we'll see more and more innovation, leading to more fragmentation.

People will do the big things AND all the other little things.

Edge vs Centre:

"The move away from mass to social media is the move from the centre to the edge. here we talk to each other as individuals. not published by a media org. I am an individual having a conversation – and this hollows out the centre and the impact has been enormous.

"The death of newspapers is one impact.

"The difference is that people choose to find their info from people they care about.

"People find it more enjoyable interesting and rewarding to work with real people rather than companies. People can say, I really like Louis Vitton, I really do, not because I'm being paid to, it's a natural social conversation. I express myself through this.

"Ads always come up, what do ads do for us on the web? as individuals? Are they a tax – in order for this to be free...

"Is it possible that they could be supportive of what we do – not just be at best benign.

"Could they support our social tools – I suspect ads will be enmeshed in the social experience – just using them as some kind of ugc is already proving to be more successful.

"Make it easy to share ads, too. I can't reblog ads, I can't share it.
Doing something more with ads, changing the words, making it personal, voting on them, we'll see that in the context of people sharing.

Social = Me First!
"The paradox is that we connect with others, through whom we define ourselves, we have to start by defining ourselves. We present ourselves in one way or another – makes us seem a little self-obsessed but its ok cos we are searching for a reason to be – (psychological self-determination) we are developing our personal identity at the heart of all we do online.

"Sharing widgets, our favourite this or that, it's all part of that. It can be a core way in which we define who we are and what we do.

"Rep and status plays to that (numbers of my followers) etc, I'm defined by my connections. It's about me in the world of other people.

The web is no democracy but it's not a hierarchy.

"It's more like living in a village where your rep and id is not even, some have more than others. We have kin, just not genetic. We have a sense there's a whole world of people we can talk to yet we are broken into language groups. There's 2K languages. English as a second language is accelerating cos of the web. it's killing language diversity.

"David Weinberger said on the web we will all be famous for 15 people.
DW also uses the term continuous partial friendship – deep connections in short periods.

"Long tail changes our concepts of involvement.

"Does the world become a deeper place or do our feelings become shallow. No, I have rivers of information and get to know hundreds of people meaningfully. The long tail isn't just about retail, it's about the spectrum of relationships we can afford.

"Widgets can help this with a low cost of doing so.

The web of flow is huge, but not massive

"We are moving to a web of flow where streams come to you, twitter, friendfeed, new google reader with commentary and sharing, tools which allow us to mediate the web... a stream of sociality.

"It will be a socialised world, not mass media. it has to be filtered by other people – via social relationships. Fred waits to see things come around cos it gets pushed to him. There's a mass impact but not cos its a mass medium.

"Its not one person's decision but 100k peoples considered opinions and thoughts.

CONTEXT

EXPERIENCE: we all watched the same TV and talked to each other about it. Now its fragmented. People are doing other stuff. mass media is failing as a primary experience we share. instead socially scaled tools are emerging. The experience at one places will pop up in another context, like seeds in the flowers you give to someone and the seeds falling in their garden.
We adapt to this unequal and lumpy web with different experiences, where old experiences can be re-embedded in new contexts.
eg mybloglog, people tolerated, people experimented with dozens of different widgets.

People crave these novel experiences and our use of it as a mechanism of self expression.

Q&A

Big brands fear letting go of control!
Stowe: Courage is one of the key skills for people moving from mass to one-to-one. They might have to accept they will get their feelings hurt. At this scale different rules are at work, they have to have same kind of courage, they have to cede control, the control was already lost, the conversations were already happening.
Playfulness is another part of that courage thing.

Get down to social scale.

Stowe: “People departed to the web (from mass media) just as fast as it emerged”


Josh bernoff – biz case for widgets:

You better be thinking about your objectives. In groundswell this is important in any social app.

We had a client called us and said we want to start a community. cos a competitor has.
ok
What do you want to achieve.
There was a long embarrassed silence.
The client had not figured out why they were doing this.

Groundswell:
A social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other rather than from traditional institutions.
Concentrate on the relationships.

P: People, assess your customers social activities (25-35yr olds are widgeting!)
O: Objectives: decide what you want to accomplish
S: Strategy how will this change your relationship with your customers – people officially declare they are an x fan
T: Technology is last.

Don't think of the technology first and then try to find a use for them.

Widget use in us:
12% used desktop (18+)
17% of 18+ 53% used web widgets (12-17yr olds)

Groundsell.forrester.com has a tool to look at how this ladder looks around the world.

Widget users are highly socially active. they are doing a lot of creativity and use of social tools. if you do create a widget then you can count on its users are using lots of other social technologies too. You won't reach everyone. you reach an elite, a highly influential elite.

Objectives:

research – listening
marketing – talking
sales – energizing
support – supporting
development – embracing

my starbucks – tell starbucks how they should improve.
widgets can do all of these.

listening with widgets – you can get insight, see MuseStorm you can measure the interactions and learn from them.

Talking with widgets: usa today isn't that sticky – it doesn't extend the conversation (just broadcasts rss).

Purina has a personal outcome version which allows you to add a pic of your pet.

Q: “people will not post your widget because they love your brand. They will post if they find something useful.”

(not always true, eg fans).

Widgets can embrace customer suggestions and ideas (bit like digg), crowdsound, salesforce ideas,

Summary: To make widgets work start with your clear objective, measure progress toward that objective, choose technology to meet that objective.

Widgets as Adverts
scott rafer, lookery

Are you trying to get people to click thru? Or enjoy themselves.

New formats are hard sell, clearspring and kickapps have some really expensive sales people – i dont have the margin, we don't pitch the agencies we don't pitch the brands.

83% of US display ads (6bn dollars) sold for under $1 cpm in 2007. on a dollar basis on an impression basis its nearer 97%.

myspace average 9c a 1000 across the entire enterprise.

There are 12bn dollars in us above this of txt ads – and most is google.

facebook has left out search from apps deliberately, so we can't get into that.

Below all this you're into remnant advertising.

We run about 3bn ads across social networks the majority on facebook.

We got most of our traffic with a low guarantee. we said we'd pay 12.5c per thousand on which ever fb apps want to play. Shared this on techcrunch. Within 24hrs loads of interest. we did 150m in jan and 3bn more than that in may.

for this to work you need to find impressions by the truck load.

Later this year we'll offer a guarantee 1c a 1000.

what widgets are actually good at massive data collection. that data is a lot more valuable than the impression itself.

Facebook has closed half of its viral routes, most people are shrinking in there, it's getting harder to launch.


Fraser Kelton; adaptive blue; semantic web type company funded by union sq ventures (fred's)

our secondary product is widgets

everything can be explained by pop culture.
Widgets: if you build it they will come... if we have thing with a grab button everyone will grab it and share it.

you need value for the publisher
value for the browser
ease of replication

the major failure usually is we leaves out the fact that there has to be some utility – otherwise we get very skilfull at tuning it out.

How can you find the equilibrium between the three things.

Value for publisher: Why do I want to put this widget on my site/fb page etc.

1.self-expression – I'm a fan, I'm showing something about me.
2.Additional content – if its pulling in rss, lazy man's update.
3.$ the potential to make money
4.playful/fun
5.community building – my bloglog
6.Increased page views – media companies want more page views cos they live on cpm models.
You can have a widget strategy that layers in a bunch of these, provided you keep the other two arms in balance:

Next: Value for the visitor.(browser)
We are good at blocking out items we don't deem the content. sidebar stuff.

Have to get interaction; something to get them to engage with the software, you're halfway to your goal of having widgets to promote widgets.

1.self expression – my bloglog face roll. chance to replace the 'you' picture with the real you.
2.playful/fun
3.call to action (shoot the monkey on banner ads, for example)
4.Ego: tap into people wanting to show themselves off – feedburner gives you a chicklet to show how many have subscribed.

Ease of replication

People have focused on this too much. In order to make it effective:

1.1-click installation – don't have pivot points
2.on-page – people don't want to move from where they are – no pop-ups etc
3.customizable – you must allow people to change it to suit a users own background colours etc. issue for people who want to control brand look and feel. ditch it! it's the basics why you wouldn't have a flexible width for sidebars, too.
4.Simple
5.transaction timing: a really big one. if you instal one widget on fb people get an offer of a second. that works cos of context on fb. on the web its where you see one specific widget, so when you try to do the same thing people see it as a negative thing.

Keep 1.2 and 3 in equilibrium (value for publisher/value for browser/ease of replication

We launched widgets a few months ago.

People hover their mouse over images. Go image heavy rather than text heavy.

Give people buttons for installation – visual. changing to logos and images made a big difference for us.



Future of online branding, content and advertising on the web, Jeff Nolan NewsGagtor.

The way audiences are engaging media is changing. They aren't going to media, they are bringing it to them so media, brands and advertisers have to change.

Newsgator works with over 100 media companies. all of our customers are syndicating their content and monetising their content with advertisers.

the best value for getting traffic is to get the people who already visit your site to promote your site.

A site that gets 200k pi, you get 50 placements = 1m more page views. widgets are traffic multipliers.

USA today works as a simple extention of reach. their audience only needs this.

If you are in music you have to be in myspace. it drives distribution and discovery. But you have to know who to seed with.

Media co's see this as a way to also synidcate content to other media sites.

See National Geographic's Our Shot/Your Shot



Danny from Amnesty demo'd Hypercube which makes widgets render as users want them in whatever networks and in an itunes style.
I like what it does, but wonder why people would visit in the first place? maybe widgets are a point of inspiration thing. you grab it when you see it. you don't go looking for it.

Top 10 widget mistakes:
vp marketing MuseStorm:

1.mismatch with your demographics or demographics of where the app is launched
2.fail to take advantage of social graph
3.spend a lot before you know what works
4.don't limit incentives – push people to your site instead of have them use app (you need them using app for virality
5.Naming may be key if you have a rival.
6.its content that rules, not the brand. utility wins.
7.do a better analysis of your category before you develop your widget. try the other rivals.
8.don't bet the farm on a single social network – consider going where your competition isn't
9.do provide content that is useful
10.do remember whey people post or share – it's the content.


DON'T ALWAYS BUILD YOUR OWN, SPONSOR OR BUY WHAT IS ALREADY WORKING
IF IT'S DEEP APP

11.don't be self-serving and uber ad heavy. facebook demographics hate that.
12.DON'T LET YOUR Widget go stale
13.don't forget to make your widget searchable.

WHERE SHOULD WIDGET STRATEGY SIT IN THE BIZ?
IS IT MARKETING, ADVERTISING, CONTENT DISTRIBUTION – WHO SHOULD OWN IT.

There are five types of widgets:

mobile
desktop
gadgets (igoogle)
Applications
Flash

musestorm wrap them so it can work across all.

marciak@musestorm.com

preso will be on slideshare.net/musestorm


strategy questions to answers:

who is responsible (what dept in our biz)
what is the objective (what do we aim to achieve with a widget)
then tech solutions (see josh bernoff preso)
who will use our widgets and why?

its pull marketing. the majority in facebook are staying in there, not surfing – are they like your demographics.

discover how people are using social media, the people you want to reach.
what kind of widgets are best fit for your peeps.

Media Transformative and other presentations from day 1 at Widget Web Expo

I spoke at WidgetWebExpo in Brooklyn, New York, yesterday. Michael Leis was good enough to be live blogging as I did so.
So here's a link to his writing about my presentation.
The slide deck that went with it is below:

| View | Upload your own

I'm also delighted to have found some very nice tweets from the conference floor as I spoke:

mleis @davidcushman rocked the house with "the media transformative" http://snurl.com/2j92i #wwx

Armano @davidcushman just wrapped up a nice preso. I liked his POV that effective marketing happens in the mind of the individual. No hard sell.

stoweboyd @davidcushman is smart. Among other things, he quoted me! #wwexpo

Gentlemen, very flattering - and many thanks.

Fred Wilson is doing the keynote today (June 17) and I'm very much looking forward to that. Fred sent me a link to a preview which I'm happy to share.

Will be adding more links to this the moment I get a chance!

Here's a summary of some of the many great speakers at yesterday's day one of widget web expo.

Ivan Pope opened the event suggesting widgets are a fundamental change in how we engage with online and noting that June 16 was the 2^nd anniversary of the time he first coined the phrase widgetsphere.

Keynote on day one was clearspring ceo Hooman Radfar.

Some highlights:

Widgets are the building block for the social web: they have become the new web page, but they are intrinsically off domain.

When building you have to consider your experience in someone else's web space.

Advertisers are seeing them as a new kind of rich media. Entertainment industry is seeing them as a mechanism to promote their content with a higher engagement factor.

148mm us widget viewers

95% of facebook users add apps

massive adoption rate

Now they must be a standard part of online strategy.

“I don't know of any media company that doesn't have a widget strategy from the smallest to Disney.”

Widgets are not a fad, they are here to stay.

They catalyze the change of the web into more than a platform.

Kinds of widgets:

Phase one youtube and photobucket found what's missing. Youtube realised myspace didn't have a good video service and they found a way for users to add video - as widgets.

This is widgets attacking – appearing on myspace whether myspace wanted them or not.

Myspace got sniffy and battled with the widget makers. Meanwhile facebook accepted them - and open up the facebook platform.

Developers suddenly became welcomed on social networks and opened the door to the open-everything world.

Facebook let us add apps. They called us back if things broke, they allowed linking out! They opened the social context -

1. developers had access to profile

2. access to the network of people around them

3. access to the activity stream, the newsfeed shared widget apps.

opportunity is to create end to end experience, you can visit me on my site which is synched with other social networks... you the url.

Important elements for social context:

1. you need username and password consistent – open id?

2. profile – helps everyone tailor app to you. but you are a function of the people around you. (the social graph). this is what facebook is aiming to do – be the centre of it.

3. Presence ; what you are doing. everytime you do something on the web you are being tracked, you are generating data – so the value is in leveraging the derived data in the network.

Social context: all services on the web will leverage share of social graph. knowing who you are and that you are connected is powerful.

Layered on top of this are derivative services: video, pictures etc – how do you expose your services?

Widgets are emerging as a huge channel to deliver massive services overnight.

Hints and tips:

Think BIG act small: make widgets fast.

widgets are a building block, not a building. so think cross channel.

Need effective seeding processes; really direct people to your widget to increase your grab rates. think about your entire strategy. treat widgets like a first class citizen.

Data-driven focus on user – measure everything then you'll discover how the widget functions in different environment – measure the experience people are having. set goals and try to maximse against them. eg get people to take a quiz. focus everything around achieving that.

Iterate fast.

Repeat different cross promotion, see if you can find the viral loop, the point at which you get more inbound requests.

Study people who have been really successful, comscore200 etc. You'll see common trends so go with what works. Be rigorous about A/B testing. See if adding an image in a newsfeed makes a difference, for example. these are the things that make the difference. study the data.

cross promotion: Make sure everywhere you can you get cross promotion.

Lift your head up, ask are you really creating value. the data is a guide but human intellect is better at spotting the real value – know your user.

Be ready to fail. don't be afraid, assume you are wrong and ready to try new stuff and try it real fast.

social networks have helped us communicate better – this is just another channel, users haven't changed.

widgets have become a fantastic building block, they catalyze open social context, web is the platform. the web is becoming the centre of everything. Think big act small.

Ivan Pope: toward a long term web strategy.

When facebook launched its open thing overnight people only asked for facebook solutions.

But you don't have to second guess where your audience is and when. Widgets can do the work for you.

Widgets carry the ability to replicate themselves.

Widget strategy should look at what your biz objectives are be built to align with those.

We can use the potential of widgets to push marketing into social networks.

Widgets are mirror image of social networks, a vehicle you can use to enter those spaces, rather than an end in themselves.

Why use widgets at all?

alternatives: buying ad campaigns, building big websites, doing destination deals. widgets route around these solutions – diy solutions to carry your network into social networks.

Widgets work because:

1. organic communication:

2. viral intelligence; LEVERAGES the intelligence of the crowd

3. infinite reach: they can go on forever, mutating, growing and unstoppable!

Long piece of string: you can have a piece of string to each and every widget no matter where it has gone.

Ally widgets to other strategies, don't just 'do widgets' don't build in isolation. experiment within a framework.

METRICS: what tools to use?

INTEGRATED planning: cross market,

SEO: and widgets,a huge win for people who get this right – using google juice!

AFFILIATE MARKETING: not just a crude sell this and you get x. Rather by distributing value through a chain that splits and moves on.

BBC Radio people wanted to give producers a tool kit to make widgets to add to their website BUT they have issues over control and management and re brand control, legal issues about what the bbc can do, image issues. The thought of allowing official widgets to go off where they like is difficult for them.

But we need solutions for control and lack of control to be developed at the same time.

Let them go, but always have some control. What happens when things go wrong and we want to turn widgets off. What happens when the BNP has BBC-branded widget on their website?

We needed political cover for management!

We wrap the building toolkit into a set of feedback tools which gave a lot of control points so we could know who do what with what.

1. legal/brand/admin control given: sign off for adding the content to a widget in first place.

2. Templates to control the branded bit, the image issue. The org can sign off the identity of the widget.

3. Getting data back about widgets, giving people access to crunch that data and to use that to .

In publishing companies, lots of people do their own marketing, widget control can devolve that power throughout an organisation or open that control to external orgs with the neccesary controls.

Marc Canter spoke on How to build the open mesh.

We can all be a web celeb. you can promote yourself. plurk is an example of a swarming effect – couldn't invite friends from facebook en masse.

Brad's thoughts: a whitepaper about the social graph. Unless we have a way to centralise the social graph has to be rebuilt each time a new service emerges.

A new kind of server can assemble the open mesh. an 'our data server' implementation of a shared social graph. we have shared data.

Facebook wants to maintain privacy against/data portability.

I own my data.

everything will be/is a url, every person, event, etc

We need to build our own open mesh, there isn't going to be one standard, or one platform, but we need to control our data.

TOOLS:

1. Liveweb: real-time communicaton, conversation, presence, microblogging, streaming, eg twitter, meebo, im, vid conf

2. Watch: Your friends and content sources – rss, newsfeed etc

3. Express: yourself via txt media links – publish, upload, comment, rate, bookmark, blog podcast etc

4. Media Gallery: your media stored somewhere – upload, share, tag.

You are what's important – user centric id

no one vendor

resusable components

two-way api.

PANEL:

Dave Armano chairs and asks his panel to define widgets:

steph agresta, internetgeekgirl, consults in social media pr and affiliate marketting: widgets are microcontent, interacting with consumers that's not a full site.

Ian Schafer: Deep Focus: focused on distributable sharable experiences. widget is a portable exp that lives on a particular platform. web-based apps?

Steve Rubel: edelman digital. “I study internet trends and advise teams, advise clients and counsel them, alk to industry at large. When i think about widgets I think they are the beginnng of the end of something, end of the website (death of the url) web content isn't going to die, but you now have a giant iceberg that's breaking up into thousands of pieces. You have to be able to go where consumers go.

Matt Dickman, fleishman hillard, pr agency. i came from a digital shop. every type of agency is trying to reinvent itself. widget is a portable brand gateway.

David Malouf, motorola. “I also teach interaction design and rich internet apps. Widget is not accidental, its a metaphor for small components that are interchangeable and portable across various systems.”

David Armano: Critical Mass.

Q”: to david malouf – what are some of the similarities and differences you see.

A: mobile interfaces are about interruption mostly, they are interruption from what you are doing, they are moments of tangent. I design apps that aren't interuptive but are on mobile devices.

Armano: I wonder if widgets are ready for prime time, do devices like the iphone help.

Dave ixd: widgets have been around for a while. i think what is different is a richness. now there is an understanding of the information density too.

Ian Schafer, done a lot of work in myspace – re content distribution. Networks are filled with people who want to be connected, so a lot of what we do plays on that community context.

You can wield influence with your friends, we create things that help people ID themselves as influencers, and then reach them. Clients want response fast. we are trying to change that.

Steve Rubel – what's the role of the brand in the community? web2.0 is made out of people, the brand has got to get the peeps from behind the gates. if the brands are going to create their communities they have to be participate.

Rubel: i study the internet for four hours a night and read and obsess, its an education process. you have a lot of people in their 30s, 40s and 50s who are different from the generation that grew up with the net, they want to do an old way of business and apply it to what is new and different.

armano asks matt dickman in the context of micromedia what is the relevance of an aggregator like friendfeed.

Many people are only just understanding blogs let alone twitter etc. We have to teach them how to listen online. friendfeed allows you to aggregage (looks like my typing made up a new word here, but I kind of like it so I'm going to leave it) all of these things in one place.

Armano, back to companies listening. ff is aggregation and distribution. Can we use portable formats to listen as well.

Rubel: listening and talking is a means to an end. distributed content works where brands and users have a shared outcome. trust in peers is ever rising. ff and services that will follow after allows you to see what your trusted circle is saying. if you can find that it's huge.

Steph: what is the role of people building reputations online

“I'm always impressed by someone like zappos, a company, top down from ceo, they are using it for customer service. a lot of it is about personal brand building. Tony goes to a lot of events, they are fuel for the social media world. this trusted group of friends is built stronger.

I don't just do twitter, I still do facebook and flickr.

Rubel I suffer from shiney object syndrome. it's very easy for the clients to come in with a notion that they want to focus on one site or one tech only.

Get Me One Of Those! We hear a lot of that.

Look at the trends and look where they are in your audience. 6-20% is creating content online. Take a look at mahalo.com social layer on top of search, then you are into big things.

Steph: I do think there are certain personalities that do better in an environment. you have to have a good product.

Matt D: I live in cleveland ohio, 10 years ago what would be the opportunity for us to meet. I've known these people online – that level of brand building is through the content you are creating.

rubel: don't think too much about the tech or tools. secondlife was web2.0's vietnam.

don't think of it as widgets and social networks and aggregation and video, its how they all connect up.

in five years you won't buy from amazon, you'll buy from which ever site you happen to be on and pop open the relevant widget along with recommendations, chat with friends about them and make the purchase.

Panel ends

Michael Leis:
Emerge Digital

For agencies, frequency's the thing.

widgets are all about little ways to make your life easier.

Clients get back insight, the metrics show you who people are and what their lives are like.

Associating the brand with the moments that make a difference – lots of little pings to audience.

What do agencies get? Ownership of an entire channel! at the heart of where the brand and users connect in real time. essentially its own network.

We think of it as the brand as a platform, todays most popular sites are all platforms, the website sits on that, blogs, widgets and mobile all feed off the same base.

The risk is the possibilities are endless -loads of great ideas which require loads and loads of budget and then they run screaming.

So keep it simple and start with a one-way comms model.

give core users promotional tools , they are early adopters and give them a way to share your brand. it empowers them, the people who really like your content can do something with it.

service

utility

fun

means to branch out

who are the people we want to reach?

what content can we use to reach out with them?

you learn when core users are online, what channels they are using, and how often they use computers...

GoGo, bringing wifi to aeroplanes:
we thought our audience for the game to promote this would be in facebook but our biggest engagement was in hi5 and friendster. You find out the metrics after launch. the goal is to get the metrics.

University of Illinois (Chicago) 8000uu and 22mins/users a month and all sponsored.

In version 2 we then try to take those points that have pain and stop insisting they visit our site. widgets are new ways to reach out to them. conversion, registration, sweepstakes, online tools.

artefacts of personality traits:

widgets can show what you are. virtual gifts, mini-apps on social networks. apply new coding and new places...

eg Miller; platform for bartender education: videos and quizzes with prizes. we rewarded them with a facebook trophy that can live on their profile. this pivots the social graph that already exists. Viral without having to constantly refresh content.

Darkhunter facebook app – a quiz, how much do you know about dark hunter. in 6hrs we had 4000 users. In 2 hrs the amazon book rank for pre-sales rocketed. we gave a context and they came together and set up their own groups, too.

Level 3:

utility: how can you make it work for your audience in the context of your brand; integrate with existing apps; browser communicaton, outlook and appointments, PDAs (good on the enterprise side).

service: with this tech you can bring audiences new experiences they wouldn't otherwise get.

fill the need that isn't being met for my audience – how can I program for it; itunes. itunes took a simple thing to catelogue and play mp3s. ecommerce version looks just like it.

eg Nike ID system; they looked at what their users do: they run with ipods, graphs your run.

Widgets can then inform your other channels, you now know more about the exact preferences and behaviours of your audience. you can zero in on where your people are really at. creatives get their scripts written by the audience – by the audience' behaviour.

Hope to see you at WidgetWebExpo

I'm in NYC (aching a bit from walking from Brooklyn to Midtown and back, to be honest) ready for Widget Web Expo which opens tomorrow in Brooklyn.
I'm speaking at 11.15am.
If you're coming, I hope we have the chance to meet. See you there?

The great disruption of social networks reaches its tipping point

I feel like I've been warning that global warming was about to reach its tipping point - and suddenly images of the arctic glaciers collapsing, crashing into the sea at an alarming rate, are being broadcast around the world, providing hard evidence for all to see.

The great disruption of social networks has reached its tipping point. The theory of the impact of the networked world has become real. The evidence is now with us.

A short time ago I wrote that the disruption caused by social networks had only just begun. I thought we'd been guilty of over-estimating the change that the internet heralded - and of underestimating the significance of the rapid charge toward ubiquity of social connectedness - via the easy-to-use tools of 2.0 - social networks in their various guises.

But it looked to me like a two-speed 'social' world had emerged:
1. UGC-powered broadcast models (where 99% of the 'audience' consumed what 1% created)
2. Total Communities: where to take part you have to create part (eg twitter, secondlife, facebook (reversing the 99/1)

But now, Via JP Rangaswami's Confused of Calcutta, comes evidence of the inconvenient truth of the speed with which the networked world is emerging - a shock for those of us who perhaps thought the UGC-powered broadcast model was something more persistant than a hangover of the broadcast world.

It's evidence of the speeding up from broadcast to networked, from centre to edge.

It concerns youtube - one of the models I placed firmly on the UGC-powered broadcast side of the equation.

In the past our assumptions were that it followed the 1% create, 99% audience model.

That may be changing - and very rapidly indeed.

JP Rangaswami tells us that Dr Michael Wesch, (of The Machine is Us/ing Us and A Vision of Students Today) is speaking on the Anthropology of YouTube at the Library of Congress in Washington DC.

And this, according to the Library of Congress news release is what he will be talking about:
"More video material has been uploaded to YouTube in the past six months than has ever been aired on all major networks combined, according to cultural anthropologist Michael Wesch. About 88 percent is new and original content, most of which has been created by people formerly known as “the audience.” "Wesch will discuss the three-year-old video-sharing Web site in a lecture titled “The Anthropology of YouTube” at 4 p.m. on Monday, June 23, in the Montpelier Room on the sixth floor of the Library of Congress’ James Madison Building, 101 Independence Ave. S.E., Washington, D.C."

Update: www.twitter.com/mwesch: " finishing highly experimental presentation for Lib. of Congress ... 50 minute video made of over 300+ YouTube vids that I will narrate live"

I think this part is worth repeating:
"In the last six months...About 88 percent is new and original content, most of which has been created by people formerly known as “the audience.”

The numbers were so impressive that I thought I ought to check with Dr Wesch. I am extremely grateful for how rapidly he has responded:

"The numbers are as fuzzy as the distinction between professional and amateur. We are very confident that at least 80.3% of all content is UGC ... and as much as 95% (depending on how it is defined).
"The difficulty comes because many "users" are now creating near-professional-level content and are often getting paid for it - even if they did not expect to get paid for it when they started creating videos. I would consider myself one of these people in this fuzzy category (see my youtube account "mwesch")
"And one more clarification: the 88% figure refers only to what is new and original (and may be ugc or pro) - the other 12% are repeats, reloads, or stuff that was copied from TV, etc.. I think 80.3% is the safest figure for what we call "unambiguously user-generated content"

The notion that we are all publishers now (and that also means we are all advertisers now) has taken a giant leap from theoretically possible to actually happening.

The networked world is becoming reality before our eyes.

The end is in sight for the silent majority
When all is said and done Youtube may yet remain a UGC-powered broadcast model, attracting large audiences to consume that which is created by ever-larger numbers of user-creators. But as surely as participation rises towards the norm, so those who would passively consume will fall into a silent minority.

They'll get as much as they ever got from the broadcast world, which is to say, rather less than those of us enjoying the fruits of the networked world.


I'll be speaking about some of the implications of this in New York next week. Find me at WidgetWebExpo I'll be in NYC from Saturday evening.

F**K the algorithm! It's time for the human touch

Since the rise of the search engines we've surrendered the nuancing of our experience of culture to the algorithm. In other words, the machine has been in charge of editing our choice.

Google's bots, maths, hard science has shaped what we all get to know about. Increasingly so. Google accounted for 87% of searches in the UK in May, 2008.

When humans get involved, then we start to discover things we didn't know we needed to know.

Blogrolls write this large; very human recommendation lists which extend and share our networks of trust. Trust me from the metadata I express on this blog? You're likely to consider my blogroll less advert and more recommendation.

The likes of Mahalo, Powersets, StumbleUpon and Ditto (disclosure, one of our own) take advantage of this, too. The human element of discovery. Tools for us to use rather than tools that use us?

The robots have played the role of editors of choice. Page 1 or die! In many fields they are very good at it.
But now it's time for the humans to take back a little control - particularly and effectively where things have a human, emotional dimension.

Traditional maths-led search is a little like someone who thinks they are quite well-enough socially connected, thank you, if they have the phone numbers of the people they know.
My question, aimed at tempting them to dip a toe in social media is: "How do you discover new people to call?"
Human-powered search recommends relevant alternative people to call.

We're playing with a ditto.net list at the moment - aiming to rank the Rock Stars of Web2.0.

We could just google appropriate terms and see who comes out on top.
But somehow, asking you what you think seems more fun - and more appropriate. How do YOU define what makes someone important in this context. Maybe humans are better at doing this than machines?

I'd rather know how human beings are ranked by other human beings - we're complex, more-than-the-sum beasts.

In that context I don't want to be a slave to the algorithm.

See you at Telecoms Multi-Platform Content and Delivery Forum?

Apologies for the flurry of posts. Been having a bit of a late spring clean of the blog's left-hand column. Now the 'resources' section isn't listed in full down the left, it's available from the link under the 'resources' title. I've done similar with the 'ones to watch'.
Guess I'm finally waking up to the fact that the internet isn't made of paper...

I'm speaking at Telecoms Multi-Platform Content and Delivery Forum in London tomorrow (June 12, 2008). Snappy title huh? If you happen to be there, please do say hi.

This weekend, New York.

Here are the slides for TMPC&DF (phew...)

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Resources

• SOCIAL MEDIA STATS: UM Wave 4
  
• BLOGS: Top 100 that'll keep you up to date
• Design: Googley UX defined
  
• Disruption Group tools
• Disruption: SloaneReview MIT.pdf
• Engagement: Social Media Case Studies uberlist.
  
• Engagement: Alan Moore's keynote at Nokia World
• Engagement: AlanMooreEngagementMktingPodcast1
• Engagement: AlanMooreEngagmentMktingPodcast2
• Engagement: Project VRM
• Engagement: SMLXL little book of engagement marketing.pdf
• Engagement: The End of Advertising as we know it (IBM)
• Futurology: Rheingold on where tech is taking us and how people are changing (videos)
• Lectures: MIT World (Media) videos
• Mobile ad survey UK 11-20yo.pdf
• Mobile Data Association (uk)
• Mobile internet UK usage figures
• Mobile Life Survey - mobile is the new village green!
• Mobile: Admob's mobile metrics
• Mobile: Betavine: Mobile developers playground
• Mobile: Check how mobile ready your site is
• Mobile: DotMobi developer guide
• Mobile: Oxford Forum (3G pros forum)
• Mobile: Qualitative research young adults and MoSo networks
• Mobile: Videos from Mobinar 2007
• Networks: User Generated Context (Havas Media Lab)
• Networks: Cluetrain as a powerpoint
• Networks: ClueTrain Manifesto. Read it online
• Networks: Concept of community in theory and practice
• Networks: Designing interaction into MoSo networks.ppt
• Networks: Don't just witness the network (download)
• Networks: Economics of Digital Business Models: Analyzing Economics of Platforms
• Networks: Economics of Peer-to-Peer business models
• Networks: Essential Guide to Social Media download
• Networks: Exploring emergence (MiT)
• Networks: Group Forming Network theory resource
• Networks: How Fuzzy R U?
• Networks: Internal comms: Euan Semple video
• Networks: Journal of Computer Mediated Communication
• Networks: Overload Shmoverload. Stowe Boyd on giving yourself up to the network
• Networks: Reed's Law, multiple identities and a longer tail (download)
• Networks: Niche social networks listed and reviewed
  
• Networks: Social Networking for Businesses.pdf
• Networks: Social Networking Intro for Businesses (pdf)
• Networks: Social Origins of Good Ideas
• Networks: The Intention Economy - Doc Searls
• Networks: Watts and Strogatz model
• Networks: White Paper download: Why Media is the New Business Ecology
• Networks: Wiki Vision of a Networked World
• Networks: Wiki: Why Media is the new business ecology
• Networks: Wikinomics - Chapter 1 download.pdf
• Reputation: Using Reputation to Augment Explicit Authorization.pdf
• Thought leadership for business
• Thought Leadership: Thought Leadership cribsheet
• Tools: Brainstorming software
• Tools: JS Kit - Web2.0 apps for the lazy!
• Tools: SEO Book keyword tool
• Tools: SEO: Opera Keyword check
• Tools: Applications listed and reviewed
  
• Video Industry Index

Got any to share? Please add as a comment, complete with url.

Ones to watch

• Admob
• Adjustables: Targeted Ad serving on video
• Big Think
• BoxedUp - Del.icio.us for products
• Brickfish - engagement via User Gen ads
• Cambrian House (crowd-sourcing ideas into money)
• Current TV
• Cyworld (US version of Korean Myspace killer)
• EI42: affiliate your friends
• Elastic Lab crowd-sourced video projects.
• Fanista; friend-recommended purchasing
• Flixya: Social media - shares all revenue with co-creator
• Flektor - digital creation made easy
• Google's socialstream project
• The Gorb
• Habbo Hotel (now a global phenomenon)
• JotSpot (now google owned)
• Kyte: mobsoc with mobtv broadcast
• Lilgrams: Twitter for toddlers parents...
• Live News Cameras (fox project)
  
• Mechanical Turk (crowd-sourcing HiT tasks)
• Meshopolis - free long-tail e-commerce
• Mippin (mobilizes content)
• Nokia Ad Service & Gateway
• Ohmynews (English)
• Open ID
• Orkut - Social Networking site with 32m members
• Orb Networks
• Predictify (uses crowds to predict outcomes)
  
• Qode
• ScanScout (incontext ads for video)
• Suggestion Box
• Viddler - rich video community
• Seedcamp - start-ups galore
• Seesmic
• Shoppero - Long-tail reaching prosumer site
• Spigit: The Game of start-ups
• Swarm Teams
• Tipped.co.uk
• Trutap
• Twine
• Twitter
• Twhirl
• Wink.com (people search)
• Wunderloop: Behaviour targeting
• Wishood.com; ultimate wishlists
• Xtract
• Yahoo mobile ads service
• Zenzui - personalised mobile navigation

Your suggestions welcome - as is your assistance in weeding out ones that are no longer worth watching... please post in comments below.

Free Download: Essential Guide to Social Media

Brian Solis has just made his 'Essential Guide to Social Media' available as a free download. Bet he sells more books as result... I'm adding a link from the 'resources' section of this blog (see bottom of left column), too.

Subject to change: my advert to you?

I'm reading the book this presentation is an intro to right now, and enjoying it. Whether you therefore consider this an advert or a recommendation is now entirely up to you! It's subject to change...

From: AdaptivePath, 3 weeks ago

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As an introduction to Adaptive Path's new book, Subject to Change, this presentation covers key points from the book on creating great products and services for an uncertain world.
SlideShare Link

Recommendation: it's all in the mind - theirs not yours

When I started out in the world of work, as a journalist, we had high principles about the distinction between advertising and editorial.

Where those lines blurred we had a blurred word to describe it: advertorial. An advert dressed up as editorial. A subjective advertising message posing as editorial recommendation.

We thought editorial should entertain and inform, be useful to you. In consumer media it was important to us that our recommendation should not be tainted by commercial concerns (beyond trying to sell newspapers, magazines etc of course!).

Advertising was clearly and explicitly about selling something, nothing more.

The advertorial aimed to do a little of both. And this adulteration made it something of a dirty word to editorial people. Written through gritted teeth, we felt as if we were perpetrating some kind of con trick.

And we held steadfastly to the control of the metadata so we could raise alarm bells for our readers. Warning: You are being sold to. We are being paid to write this. Warning! Suspend your trust in us!

This metadata was expressed through a label 'Advertisement Feature', for example, and the use of clearly different design cues to distinguish it from the pure editorial content. We wanted to be clear this wasn't really our recommendation.

That carries through in most advertising mediums. There is consistent metadata which makes it easy for my 3-year-old daughter to distinguish the difference between a TV advert and a TV programme within seconds. Ads online comply too. We feel guilty if we make google adsense indistinct from the editorial it sits within.

Roll forward. The digital disruption has changed who gets to publish content (recommendations) and who gets to distribute that content - through peer-to-peer networks of trust. We've moved from a centralised broadcast model to an edge-in networked one.

The need for a distinction between advertising and editorial content is an outcome of mass broadcast models. Where control of production and distribution of the message was in the hands of the few, to get your message to the eyeballs meant you either had to own the means of production/distribution or pay for placement.

If you were paying for placement we should be warned that the message was likely to be biased.
So we created a set of rules, both implicit (metadata) and explicit (legislation) to regulate those placements and warn us of the risk of bias.

But it's no longer the case that you need to either own the means of production or distribution in order to get your content OR advert published and distributed.

In the networked world we are all creators of what would once have been called editorial messages AND advertising messages.

And where the payment distinction dissolves, perhaps so does the need for distinction between advertising and recommendation.

Where they meet we find services. What advertising message would you forward (recommend) to a friend? One you think they will find useful. How did you decide to turn that advert into a recommendation?

Well, that's entirely up to you. First it has to be something you personally found useful (a service to you). Being able to change it to better suit your needs (a widget with a personal outcome, for example) makes that more likely. Moulding it to the needs of your own network of trust makes it more likely you will decide it's worthy of your recommendation. Where the content becomes a service, the ad becomes more likely to morph into a recommendation. But there's no certainty.

As JP Rangaswami was suggesting here, recommendation doesn't happen in the mind of the forwarding party, or the person who would distribute. It happens in the mind of the receiver. It's pull. The forwarder, the wannabe distributor, is pushing - is advertising.

I guess that means that one man's advertising is another man's recommendation.

The fact is, peer-to-peer distribution models are likely to make a better fist of selecting the right 'adverts' to forward to the people most likely to regard that service as a 'recommendation'.

So;

• Your service must be adaptable (so the user can make it a better fit for those he would advertise it to).
• Your service must be peer-to-peer distributed (it's the best fit with the networked world and the only way it can morph from advert to recommendation).

Remember, this model is not likely to fit the broadcast world. And not everything digital is a pure networked model.

Models where audiences consume content (eg everything from straightforward broadcast models to youtube - where 1% of creators forge a ugc-powered broadcast model for 99% of consumers) more traditional ad models continue to create value.

But in Total Communities - where 99% are creating and distributing (eg myspace, twitter, facebook, social networks in general) where to take part you have to create part, making it ever easier to turn advert into recommendation is the new alchemy.



I'm going to be talking more about this at WidgetWebExpo in New York next week. In the meantime, please join in the journey by commenting below.

UK brand tags. Share and shape!

Noah Brier's fabulous Brand Tags project has been recreated in a UK version. Now you can bitch about Bernard Matthews.
Brand Tags shows you brand logos then asks you to type in the first word or phrase that springs to mind. The resulting tag cloud reveals the crowd-sourced version of what the brand means to the people who are meant to be consuming it (in theory, at least).
Wonder if I can get a few of our own included?

http://uk.brandtags.net

Recommending the thoughts of JP Rangaswami...

JP Rangaswami (one of my personal recommendations in the Rock Stars of Web2.0 list) has been considering the idea of twitter 'tweets' as recommendations.
I've had my own musings about marketing in this medium. Among others.
JP's take is to define what makes a recommendation different from an advert.
He says:

1. The tweet must be unbiased, it must be about an entity that is in no way connected financially with the tweeter
2. The tweet must be clear in signalling something sufficiently positive about the entity
3. The tweet must be actionable, it must link to somewhere that the tweetee can do something about the recommendation
4. Most importantly, a tweet becomes a recommendation when the tweetee decides it is one

He says his fourth point is the most important. I'd argue it could stand alone. It stands out and alone because it is the one that is all about how much you trust the recommendor. Trust is what transforms what might otherwise be seen as an advert into a valued recommendation.

We build that trust on a whole super-structure of metadata. The ability of one factor to bring that house of cards tumbling down will vary from instance to instance (and it is a precariously constructed structure, one which requires we don't lean too heavily on its walls, or over load it by piling card after card on top).

Yes it helps if there is no financial connection between you and the product or service you recommend if you want me to trust your recommendation, but not as much as it matters that I trust (or don't trust) your opinion in the first place.

I'll take the chef's recommendation in his restaurant, for example. I'm particularly likely to take it if he knows my taste. And I'll take a friend's recommendation on the right mobile phone package for me - even if he works for one of the operators. I trust him to do the right thing for me more than for the organisation he has a financial interest in.

I'm not that fussed about number 2, the clarity issue. In the conversational mode of twitter you can always ask for clarification. A recommendation would typically require this.

Even number 3 is of low importance to me. Adding links is a kind of nice-to-have, make-life-easy function. But we have google. And we like to control our own user experience. Direct links are fine if helpful - but lead me to your checkout page on amazon and I might gag.

No, for me, point 4 is king: "a tweet becomes a recommendation when the tweetee decides it is one".

The tweetee makes that decision based on whether or not they trust the tweetor, and whether or not the tweetor is talking about something they are interested in today.

In fact, the most effective manifestation of this is when the tweetee is the tweetor (sorry!) ie the person wanting a recommendation is seeking a recommendation. I ask my network of trust which small wifi-enabled decent-sized keyboard device to buy, they tell me the asus eeepc.

And it is this that led me to the idea of Conversations of Intent

It's very much inline with Doc's VRM (I believe) and also with JP's conclusion:
"It is the “follower” who imbues the “tweeter” with the “recommender” tag about a particular class of social object."

So here I am sharing the thoughts of JP Rangaswami, Doc Searls, Hugh MacLeod and Mark Earls. You can choose to treat this as recommendation. But only if you trust me.

Marketing is not something you do to people.

Marc Canter previews his WidgetWebExpo speech

Marc Canter (Broadband Mechanics) on the open mesh and the joy of bringing social to widgets. It's a preview of his speech at next week's WidgetWebExpo.
Marc's already listed on our nominees for the Rock Stars of Web2.0.

3G IPhone day today

I'll update with news of the new I-phone (due to be announced today) when I get a moment. Rumours I've heard, it'll be 3G, better camera, video camera added and... price (in the UK) at least will be surprisingly low.
In the meantime Go here for the latest I-phone google news.
UPDATE: Turns out no video (but that's already available as a hacked app). Go here for the full grift (in the UK and Ireland).

Which side of the fence do you sit?

If you happen to be attending this, come by and say hello. I'm speaking on Thursday, about open gardens versus walled ones. Can you guess which side of that fence I sit?
A little further ahead. I'll be in NYC from this coming Saturday until and including Tuesday 17th.
I'm speaking at WidgetWebExpo. Hope I'll see you there.

Nominate the Rock Stars of Web2.0

I'm trying to compile a list of the most influential/interesting people of the world of web2.0. Define 'the Rock Stars of web2.0' how you like, I'm sure you'll have some thoughts.

I've been batting around a few suggestions to start the list with my buddy badgergravling.
But we are only scratching the surface now it's over to you.

The list will be featured on the new ditto.net*- where the community will get to vote on your suggestions, creating a ranking from 1-50 (ish?).

Don't go looking for the list there yet, it won't be live. There's plenty of other lists you might like though, and you're welcome to go browse and do that early adopter thang to your hearts content! You will find a blog post about it.

So below you'll find the Rock Stars of Web2.0 list we're starting with. If we've missed one of your personal 2.0 rock stars, now is the time to add them (as a comment, and include links if possible).

I'll keep updating the proto-list as we go.

And if there's someone on there you really think shouldn't be, say so!

Rock Stars of Web2.0...in alphabetical order - until you intervene!

• Chris Anderson (The Long Tail)
• Tom Anderson (Myspace)
• David Armano (Logic + Emotion)
• Mike Arrington (techcrunch)
• Rick Astley
• David Bausola (Zero Influence)
  
• Veronica Bellmont (tekzilla host)
• Josh Bernoff (Groundswell)
• Danah Boyd
• Stowe Boyd (message)
• Sergey Brin (google)
• Jason Calacanis (Mahalo)
• Marc Canter (Broadband Mechanics)
• Steve Chen (youtube)
• Amanda Congdon
• Corvida (SheGeeks)
• Cory Doctorow (Author and BoingBoing)
• Bill Gates (Microsoft)
• Seth Godin
• Louis Gray (early adopter blog)
• Ariana Huffington
• Chad Hurley (youtube)
• Shel Israel (global neighbourhoods)
• Joseph Jaffe (jaffejuice)
• Jeff Jarvis (buzzmachine)
• Steve Jobs (apple)
• Scott Karp (publising2.0)
• Guy Kawasaki
• Marshall Kirkpatrick (readwriteweb, consultant)
• Leo Laporte
• Loic LeMeur (Seesmic, Twhirl)
• Lolcats
• Adriana Lukas
  
• Heather Luttrell (indieclick)
  
• Alan Moore (Communities Dominate Brands)
• Jonathan Macdonald
• Hugh Macleod (Gaping Void)
• Dave McClure
• Matthew Mullenweg (wordpress)
• Barack Obama (he's everywhere 2.0 is)
• Tim O'Reilly
• Jeremiah Owyang (Forrester analyst)
• Ivan Pope (Mr Widget)
  
• Larry Page (google)
• Sarah Perez (readwriteweb)
• JP Rangaswami (Confused of Calcutta)
• Howard Rheingold (Smartmobs)
• Trent Reznor (NiN)
• Darren Rowse (ProBlogger)
• Steve Rubel (micropersuasion)
• Robert Scoble (tech geek blogger)
• Doc Searls (Cluetrain Manifesto, Project VRM)
• Euan Semple (The Obvious, ex-Beeb Social computing consultant)
• Clay Shirkey (Here Comes Everybody)
• Kathy Sierra
• Shiv Singh Razor Fish
  
• Brian Solis (PR2.0)
• Biz Stone (twitter/blogger etc)
• Don Tapscott (Wikinomics)
• Alana Taylor (mashable)
• Ev Williams (twitter)
• Jimmy Wales (wikipedia)
• Adrian Watkins (Fox Interactive)
  
• David Weinberger (Cluetrain, Everything is Miscellaneous)
• Fred Wilson (a VC)
• Dave Winer
• Jerry Yang (yahoo)
• Tony @zappos
• Mark Zuckerberg (facebook)

*Disclosure: Ditto.net is a Bauer Consumer Media project and I work for Bauer Consumer Media.

Be your own TV news editor

I've been tracking developments at Fox Chicago's www.livenewscameras.com. It's a project aimed at filtering on the way out, rather than the way in. You choose the live feeds you want to watch - you select your own TV news - unedited.

Andrew Finlayson (the man behind the plan) and I have been exchanging emails. The latest asks for a little help in stress testing. So here's your chance to early-adopt and see if you can't make it fall over!

Ideally, give it a try on Friday, June 7. And please spread the word. Thanks.

Andrew said: "We have rolled out the latest version of www.livenewscameras.com. This is the project created at Fox Chicago but is something we hope could become a separate effort.

"We want to stress test it in the real world. We coded the new website in house (except for the Mogulus player and chat box)… learned a great deal but now is the time to see if it works with the public.

"Would you be willing to look at it and ask your friends to take a peek?

"We need help in pounding away at the page on Friday to see if our new set up will handle all the traffic.

We welcome any feedback regarding this website that gathers together live feeds from around the world on to one easy to use website."

Former Editor's Letter

Colin Kennedy is one of the big brains behind the very excellent ditto.net (disclosure, ditto is a Bauer Consumer Media project and one I'm glad to help out from time to time).

Ditto puts the role of the editor in the hands of the crowd.

Colin was once the editor of one of BCM's great magazines. Interesting then to understand his journey.

Here's the letter he's written to the Ditto community. You can find it on the ditto blog, too - where you can read it with all the links intact!

"In another life, I used to be a professional entertainment critic. At one point, I was Editor-In-Chief of Empire, the British movie magazine, and its website Empireonline.com.

"I also spent some time developing a new entertainment magazine, but before it even had a chance to fail something called web 2.0 happened – the crowd got wise, the long tail wagged, the world went flat etc. etc.

"In short, it became clear to even old hacks like me that the entertainment guide of the future would require a very different solution.

"For the last eighteen months or so, I’ve been working on how to create what we’re now calling a ’social entertainment guide’. A best of both worlds solution - an entertaining entertainment guide read by the masses, created and edited by thousands of experts (this means you).

"There are more revolutionary solutions to entertainment recommendations of course: toolbar widgets that can capture your taste or gadgets that can scan your desktop – some are great, some are Skynet scary. But I feel strongly that there is a still a role for the relatively old fashioned way: the best staff in the world, working on the best entertainment guide.

"This isn’t simple nostalgia. There are things that an algorithm simply can’t compute - like who was the greatest Bond villain. And there are things that a hard sell online shop has no interest in ranking, like what was the best album title EVER.

"These are the kinds of lists that give all the best magazines 'soul’ and we proudly carry on that tradition here because I believe accidental discovery to be the most thrilling of all. And because it’s fun.

"Ditto definitely has to be fun because (beyond eternal glory) there are few rewards awaiting those who contribute. I could wax lyrical about the ‘personalised recommendations’ we can make once we have profiled your taste and how hard our developers have worked to make contribution effortless, but honestly, the best reasons to vote on our lists is a) it’s fun and b) it really matters - on Ditto every vote counts.

"We may be a very small democracy at the moment but we are built to scale - our existing entertainment catalogues are huge and they are only the beginning. (Organising YouTube comes next.)

"So basically, we’ve got big dreams and little to offer early adopters, but at least we’re not the first: when Jimmy Wales asked his friends to write the first contributions to Wikipedia, I believe he asked. “Humour me”. That’s about right.

"I don’t know if it’s even possible to create a Wikipedia of personal opinion - miracles seldom happen twice - but if you ‘humour me’ for the moment I will personally promise to do everything I can to make your choices really count.

"Besides, the way I see it - sooner or later, someone will create a new type of entertainment guide that covers the best of absolutely everything - might as well be us.

"And if we don’t quite get there… well, we can always try again after ‘Web 3.0’ - the inevitably disappointing threequel."

Colin

What's next in media? The Dead Fish bounce...

Neil Perkin, who writes the very excellent Only Dead Fish and also does something at IPC, has been kind enough to credit this blog as one of the sources of inspiration for the presentation you can share below. Frankly to be placed alongside the likes of Seth Godin, Clay Shirky, Joseph Jaffe, Jeff Jarvis, Mark Earls, Don Tapscott et al is the highest flattery I can think of. Consider me duly flattered... and not a little humbled.
Neil says: "...the story here is broader than just media and a lot of what I talk about applies to marketing and advertising as well. Unsurprising I suppose. After all, advertising is but a form of content, no? I hope you enjoy it."
Absolutely Neil: Ad as content, content as ad. And where they converge, you get a service.
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You owe this to yourself

And we owe it to (via) Euan Semple.

If you've found this we're interested in you

Here's an SEO challenge. We're searching for a Search Strategy Manager. Kind of hoping that person has some pretty good rss feeds and search strategies of their own set up - so you've already found this.

But if you know someone who needs a nudge... well that's the power of the network so we'll live with that...

So assuming you are a Search demigod you're probably still reading. Good, because this might be right up your street...
(here's the official job ad bit...)

THE DEADLINE FOR APPLICATIONS IS JUNE 12, 2008

Bauer Consumer Media's Digital Marketing team are looking to recruit a Search Strategy Manager who will report directly into the Digital Marketing Director.

The key purpose of the role is to manage natural and paid-for search strategies for Bauer Consumer Media and provide leadership in associated digital marketing activity (linking, affiliate marketing strategy.) Key responsibilities of the role include the following;

Agency co-ordination and Management

• Management of digital marketing agencies to support our activity.
• Challenge and direct these agencies to deliver against a set of agreed KPI’s
• First point of contact with Account Management.
  
• Establish and cascade best practice and thought leadership into the business.

Management of Natural Search strategy

• Develop with agency a NSO plan, and project manage the implementation across technical, marketing and editorial functions.

• Manage business analyst responsible for technical implementation and ensure that technical changes are supported at a senior management level.
• Work with digital marketing and editorial teams to ensure that pages and content are optimised.
• Ensure accurate measurement of campaigns.
• Focus on optimising campaign performance
• Working with Digital Directors to ensure cultural changes are implemented.
• Ensure that learning’s from agency relationship are captured and put back into the business.

Management of Paid for Campaign

• Oversee total PPC campaign budget and work with digital marketing managers to ensure campaigns are delivered to agreed KPI’s and ROI
• Troubleshoot and manage key PPC campaigns
• Work with Digital Directors and Advertising to deliver PPC campaigns to deliver specific advertising/commerce inventory and objectives.

Thought leadership in search strategy

• Coordinate training and best practice seminars.
• Ensure that video, image, location optimisation are built into our marketing plans.
• Build a strategy to focus on building up rankings in specialist directories, niche search sites etc.

Manage associated digital marketing strategy (affiliate marketing/linking)

• Develop an affiliate marketing strategy for the group and manage the implementation.
• Build a linking strategy for the group and manage the implementatio

Leadership

• To play an active role as part of the senor digital exec

• To influence and educate peers and Digital Directors to ensure appropriate investment and resource is applied to this area.

The ideal candidate will be able to demonstrate the following;

• Highly self-sufficient, collaborative and passionate about what they do;
• Excellent organisation and time management skills.
• Able to demonstrate sufficient experience implementing best practice NSO strategies.
• In depth knowledge of NSO methodology, including link community development, content and website accessibility.

• Search agency experience.
• Management of a £1m plus paid search campaign.
• Strong project management skills
• Passionate about sharing and communicating information
• The ability to communicate to groups of people at all levels of the organisation
• Pragmatic, flexible and creative approach;
• Commercially astute but consumer focused.
• Strong analytical skills in analysing and influencing ROI
• Strong interest and experience in media/digital marketing and future trends.
• Technically savvy.
• Hands on role in search
• Experience of online marketing

If you are interested in applying for this role, please send your CV and covering letter to chrisDOTlawsonATbauerconsumer.co.uk

Do hope this has been written with the engines in mind...

WidgetWebExpo: Meet up and pitch me!

WidgetWebExpo (NYC, June 16-17) organiser Ivan Pope is calling together speakers, conference goers and anyone else interested in the widgety world for either a widgety breakfast and/or evening get together on Sunday June 15 in New York.

I'll be adding a link for updates (locations, timings etc) to this asap. In the meantime tell Ivan Pope you'd like to join in. If you're particularly interested in hooking up with me; gmail me: davidpcushman AT gmail DOT com.

I'm speaking at WidgetWebExpo (I' ve sneaked in alongside a stellar line-up including Stephanie Agresta, David Armano, Josh Bernoff, Stowe Boyd, Marc Canter, Chris Cunningham Kris Loux, David Malouf, Ivan himself, Hooman Radfar, Steve Rubel, Ian Schafer, Fred Wilson... frankly too many to name here (so go here for the full list)

While I'm in NYC for the conference, I'm also particularly interested in meeting you if you've got widgets/application proposals or pitches you think might work with the brands I work with.

My particular focus is on our specialist media brands, but if you have a stunner for any other parts of the business I want to hear from you, too.

And if you just want to say hi, that's fine too.

I'm arriving Saturday (June 14) late afternoon and leaving right after the conference closes on the Tuesday June 17.

In between I'll be staying at the conference venue - so come get me!
Contact stuff is on this blog.

Journalists: A tool to change the way you work

Livescribe, which you'll see in the video below, has, according the journalist demo'ing it here, "changed the way I work".
It's a notepad and pen, Jim, but not as we know them.
Robert Scoble (who shot the video) reckons it's the coolest new bit of kit he's seen in an age.

Enjoy.

The top UK marketing blogs

The top UK marketing blogs as compiled by Adage and sorted for the UK by SpinningAround.

Look, there we are at No.26!

Not bad for collection of thoughts and conversations about the future of publishing...

Community defined? You can't take part without creating part of it

My buddy Badgergravling got me thinking with a question on twitter this morning.

I don't know the 'why' of what he wants to know at the moment ( "Still researching content creators vs audience figures/ratio...anyone got examples/figures etc?") but the question itself made me think about our definitions, and valuation, of community.

Wikipedia and YouTube provide great examples of products made entirely from user generatated content. The question often thrown at them is "yeah but, how many people create content compared to those who simply consume it?"

The answer is thought to be a consistently low number (1%?) who contribute while 99% consume. I'll gladly update this with more accurate stats if you happen to have them.

Let me be clear. This is not necessarily a bad thing. The 99% now have something they want to consume, created by that busy 1%. It didn't exist before. It's been carved from that cognitive surplus that Clay Shirky introduced us to. New value has been created.

Of course, it could achieve twice the scale and value should another 1% of the consumers become creators. But then, the theory goes, each time you double the number of creators, you'll scale up the number of consumers, too. That means the ratio of creators to consumers will remain static. Let's call it 1:100 for the sake of argument.

So, the more people who join the community by creating, the more 'audience' you'll grow. Clearly worth getting the tools of creation right then? If nothing else the audience gets to connect with the community through repeated exposure... and that drip-drip effect may inspire some to cross the theshold from audience to community.

All good, of course.

What made me pause for further thought was the fact that I was having this discussion on twitter.

Without creators there is no twitter. Same with YouTube or Wikipedia of course.

But twitter is made with communities of creators as its primary concern, not for consuming viewers. It is built for communities of purpose to form in a networked conversation-driven way, not for an audience to consume what they are creating. It's about small numbers sharing their conversations.

SecondLife follows that formula, too.

In both cases you can't take part without creating part of it.

I'm not about to claim there's no value in products which mix creation with consumption - YouTube and Wikipedia stand as testimony to the folly of that line of argument.

But I do think this raises questions about how uniformly we can apply laws of creator/consumer ratios. The purpose of the tools has a huge influence on this.

I imagine there are some twitter users who only 'follow' (ie only read the content others have created). But I'll make a wild guess: That number is way closer to 1% than the number of people who create content on twitter is.

In really community-focused models (from the architecture up) the creator/consumer ratio is likely to get turned on its head.

And that clearly hasn't done any harm to the likes of SecondLife and Twitter.

So being part of a community is to take part in creating it. All the rest is broadcast - sharing the community's metadata with a world of self-selecting potential members.

It means of course that twitter must come up with a monetising solution which fits the networked world. Can't wait to see which way they jump.

What to blame if response rates take a tumble

Just went to grab myself a bottle of diet coke from my regular vending machine. Put money in - it goes right through and out the other end. It doesn't work.
It hasn't worked for several days now.
When the agency that supplies the machine turns up to refill it they are going to discover it isn't working.
I suspect they won't ask themselves: "hmmm, weather hasn't been so good, has there been some bad publicity for diet coke, maybe no one has any money, are people making their own drinks? etc etc".

They'll spot the machine is broken and do their best to fix it. That will be their first thought.

What is our first reaction when response rates fall?

Is it to consider that maybe, just maybe, the model is broken?

Google is asking.

Models that aren't broken.

Faster Future - and your part in its success

Just wanted to take a moment to thank everyone who has visited, contributed to, linked to or shared this blog and its ideas and conversations in any way. We've done a lot together, and particularly in the last month.
Visitor numbers were up over 150% year-on-year (not the greatest measure, I know) and Technorati has just ranked us at 77,358 among blogs globally - the first time I've spotted fasterfuture in the top 100K!.
So congrats to us all, the community of purpose that is fasterfuture. Blogs may start from one place but they are taken to many, and the thoughts are shaped by many, the value is shared among many.
If fasterfuture is seeing some positive growth - then it is yours to revel in.