Marketing Your Brand on Pinterest - Better Than Facebook?

There's a lot of talk about Pinterest lately due to it's crazy-fast growth (faster than Facebook): What is it good for? Why is it growing so quickly? Who's on it?  And, how should brands should use it?  Here’s a little insight into how consumer brands can use Pinterest effectively to drive traffic and sales as an integrated part of their social media marketing mix.

What does “being on” Pinterest really mean?

There are two ways for brands to be on Pinterest.  One is passive, one is active:

1. Get Pinned.  Optimize your website's content so others can easily Pin It, share it, discuss it.
2. Maintain a Pinboard.  Create and update a brand profile on Pinterest.

Get Pinned.  Optimize Your Website's Content

Even if you decide that creating a brand profile on Pinterest isn’t for you, you can and should still leverage Pinterest passively.  How?  Make it easy for Pinterest users to get your content to their Pinboard so they can share it.  All legal and copyright issues aside, when it comes to marketing, the more people talking about your products the better.

Step 1:  Identify the products on your website that people will covet.

The Power of Pinterest
(Click for Full Infographic)

That’s right, covet.  There has to be some sort of “drool factor” to get things Pinned on Pinterest.  If one person finds it desirable, many people will find it desirable and then Re-Pin it.  Re-Pins are the rocket fuel of Pinterest – the more you have, the more mindshare you've built, the more traffic you'll get.

You should treat each and every Pin as an object of desire – from the photo, to the description, to the link back to your site. Here’s where working with your web development team comes in – you need to make sure photos on your site can be Pinned.  Make sure photos are not rendered in Flash (if you’re still using Flash you’re missing out on many other social media promotions and SEO as well). Give each photo a caption (title) that is easy to select and copy (and then paste into Comments).  Make sure photo URLs are static (not on a CDN like Akamai).

Next: you can encourage visitors to create Pins.  There’s a Pinterest PinIt button (see button below the image to the right).  You should put that next to every photo or once on every page that has one or more product photos.  A good place for the PinIt button is right next to your Facebook Share and Tweet This icons in a nice red/blue/light blue grouping.

And, don't forget to include the 'Follow Me on Pinterest' button  next to your Follow on Facebook / Twitter buttons if you've set up a Pinboard.

All these buttons are getting making pages pretty crowded, so you might have to think about redesigning them into an appealing but unobtrusive graphical container.

Lastly: test it!  Make sure you can create Pins quickly and easily yourself.  If you can’t do it, then your customers and potential customers surely won’t.

Create a Pinboard.  Your Brand on Pinterest.

The discussions about whether or not to maintain a brand profile on Pinterest are ongoing.  Large consumer brands that are used to push marketing and brand marketing are having a hard time figuring out what to do.  Pinterest (and social media in general) is so…well, personal.

Does curating Pinterest content enhance a brand? Does it makes sense to do with all the other social media channels you’re maintaining?  If you represent a B2C product company - as long as you're not more than 80% male oriented - the answer is "Yes".

“For brands, Pinterest has the potential to connect inspiration to purchase,” said Matt Wurst, director of digital communities at 360i. “People know which websites to go to if they want to buy a specific product or type of product, but sometimes they need a spark of inspiration to help them make a decision…Retailers can use Pinterest to drive traffic to their e-commerce sites, whereas CPG marketers might use it to curate recipes around their products…”

Here’s a great flowchart infographic on whether or not you and your brand should bother with creating and account and maintaining content.  I can’t speak to the effectiveness of Pinterest for B2B use, but for B2C, Pinterest can be very very powerful.

The Pinterest Audience

Contrary to everything else you might have heard, marketing (and especially social media marketing) is about story telling.  Pinterest is story telling through pictures – and since 60% - 65% of people in the world prefer to take in information visually (read more about NLP) Pinterest is wildly appealing to a large part of the (female*) population.  If you’re targeting females, especially between the ages of 20 and 50, this is a great place to find and grow an new audience and keep connected to an existing one.

[* Why not males?  Like most things that require day to day attention - we can’t be bothered and we don't have anything close to a nesting instinct.  Not scientifically proven, but after talking about Pinterest with many different people, both male and female,  guys just don’t ‘get it’.]

Before you get all excited and move forward, realize that maintaining Pinterest is going to be like maintaining Twitter – you need to have multiple posts and interactions every day.  You need to share, like and comment on other people’s Pins.  It takes time, it takes creativity, and it takes dedication to maintaining the account.  An inactive account might as well be a dead account.  If you can’t put at least 30 minutes a day into it, reserve your name now but wait to use it until you have the time.

Your Pinterest Account

OK, so you’re managing a B2C brand that appeals to women between 20 and 50, and you’ve decided to create a Pinterest account – how should you set it up?  What I’ve seen work the best throughout social media is personal recommendations, rather than brand recommendations.  Even though social media brings people closer to brands, they’re still brands and not real people. Nominate an employee, use an executive, or create a persona to setup your account – each business will be different, but give your profile personality and a person’s headshot along with a logo, not just a big logo. People, especially women, want to feel an emotional connection.  You can’t do that as effectively with a corporate brand presence.

Your Pinterest Content

What should you post?  

Remember, this is story telling through pictures. Start with your company’s history and products – it’s usually the fastest and easiest.  Start pinning your own products from your website to create a visual product catalog.  Create the right topics or categories, and group the things you think people will (or do) covet.  Don't Pin every product, or every color variation.  Only Pin photos that make the item look as desirable as possible, and be selective.

IMPORTANT!  You should NOT Pin all of your products / content all at the same time!   The power of Pins is appearing at the top of your follower's feeds, and the subsequent benefit is social sharing, or Re-Pinning.  Pins show up in feeds for a moment in time – they will only be visible to your followers for an hour, a day, or a few days depending on how many people they are following.  If you Pin all your content at once, you’re throwing away most of it.  And if you don't have any followers, you're throwing away just about all of it!

Instead, create a following first.  As soon as you create your account and Pin a few products (5 - 10), start following people who seem to have the same tastes or interests as you and you’ll get reciprocal follows.  Create a base of followers this way.  Like and comment on other peoples’ Pins.  Also, link to your Pinboards from your other social media channels to get your existing followers / fans to follow you on Pinterest, too.   If you've done a good job there, you'll have a Pinterest following in no time.

Then, you’re ready to start a steady stream of Pinning – one of your products every hour or three.  Trickle the Pins in over time, and you’ll get much more traction, many more Re-Pins, and a lot more followers.

Your Story, Your Lifestyle

While you’re posting all the content that’s fit for Pinning from your website, it’s up to you to tell a story about your brand.  You're representing a lifestyle and trying to really identify with your core consumer.  Your "lifestyle" is really theirs - what else does your consumer do?  Based on your research, what else are they interested in?  Most importantly, what do they aspire to do?  What do they aspire to own?  What do they covet?

Your story is yours alone, and this is where having a personality represent the brand can make it easier (unless your brand is really interesting).  Every person has tastes and interests.  If you’ve chosen your company founder as the personality, for example, they have hobbies.  They have interests.  They have food they like to eat, cars they like to drive, shoes they like to wear.  

Create those categories and give your brand life beyond the products it sells.  Give your followers an emotional, non-sales connection to the lifestyle and tastes of your founder.  Create categories on your Pinboard for other people's content that essentially describe how those Pins reinforce your brand and messaging.

Become a Curator
Become a curator of a certain thing that is a direct benefit of your brand, educates about an area relevant to you, is focused on a charity or cause you support, or is in some way complementary to what you do.   Make it pretty broad to attract general interest.  People might not know about your company or product, but they might find you because of your lifestyle Pins.  This is hard!  Here are some examples:  

• You're an interior designer, create a Pinboard for new ways to use old things as furniture, decor, or art.
• You sell jewelry, educate your audience about gemstones, metals, and where they come from to reinforce the fact that your only use the best quality materials.
• You sell vacations, create boards about travel gadgets, luggage or recipes for cultural foods to reinforce that you're knowledgeable about travel in general.
• You're restauranteur, find all items that are trendy to reinforce your brand as trendy and hip - curate things your customers will covet.

This is storytelling at its finest.  Curating your visual story builds trust in your brand and your people in a subtle and genuine way.  After you build a base of followers organically this way, when you do decide promote that next new product, people are more likely to pay attention/.  They will like, Re-Pin, click through, and buy because they “know” you, trust you, and relate to what you represent.  In the end, you represent them.

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Social media #FAIL #2 - Social Media is Constantly Changing

Why Marketers and Companies Continue to #FAIL at Social Media Execution

Social media can be defined as communication by people using digital tools to have conversations with one or more known or unknown parties - individuals, groups, companies, brands. These conversations take place on social media sites like Facebook, but also on millions of blogs through comments, on microblogs (like Twitter), through smartphones, through mobile apps or Facebook apps, and even through “old school” tools like discussion boards and forums.

Many marketers who have excelled at traditional advertising – online or offline – have a hard time getting their arms around social media and what it means to them and their business.

Not just because it’s a different channel. And not just because it’s a discussion rather than a one-way push of information.

For many marketers, the difficultly exists because the definition of social media and associated tools are morphing and changing and being used differently on a weekly basis. And they're proliferating.

Getting your arms around the world of social media is a challenge that requires constant attention, constant change and constant learning – very unlike any other form of marketing or advertising.

Advertising has become pretty structured. Take TV, print, radio, outdoor, and even online display. There are agencies, buyers, creatives, producers, ad sellers. They all have their place in a tightly integrated world, delivering their piece of the puzzle and taking a cut along the way. Measurement is straightforward - there are standard metrics, measurement tools and services at the ready with comparisons to well-defined baselines.

Search engine marketing was the first push in a very new direction – where the rules of the game are dynamic, in motion, and can change on a dime. Search engine marketing (both PPC and SEO) needs constant attention by experts to get any sort of decent result. Marketing through search engines isn’t just about producing a creative, buying space, and running the creative for a month or two. It requires designing and developing many creatives (ads and landing pages), dynamic bidding, growing a network of links, and optimizing results based on metrics. Incorporating changes every day. It's a marketing campaign with no end date (except when your PPC budget runs out).

If Google changes their ranking algorithm, page rebuilding ensues.
If a competitor bids double what you’re paying for an effective keyword, new thinking and restructuring is a must.

If you thought search engine marketing caused you grief, social media is will be a monster.

How many social sites are there? Facebook, LinkedIn, Live, MySpace (yes, still there), Orkut, sure. But what about the millions of blogs out there, and microblogs like Twitter? What about new group sites like Gravity that gather people with similar interests? Yelp, where you might be interested in only one listing? YouTube, and the Break Media sites that encourage community feedback and conversation? Yahoo and Google Groups? Specific interest sites like OleOle.com focused on a single, but controversial topic, where multi-media contributions are part of the fun?

How are they different? How many are completely unique? What can be carried across them? What is the new one that just cropped up this week? What device(s) are people using to access them?

Your brand might be discussed on any one of these sites or tools. It might be important to you to get into that discussion, or maybe just monitor it. There are so many different places that people can have a digital conversion, and they are new sites every week, new iPhone apps, new IPTV services.

The first step in getting a grip on social media is to go into learning mode. Learn about the sites you need to understand. Learn how advertising works on those sites, what type of voice you need, how friending or ‘fanning’ works. How people exchange information. Each site is somewhat unique. Learn and read every week. Setup profiles. Make "friends". Know what's going on with each tool. And then keep learning.

Then, once you know how a social media site really works, develop a plan for monitoring, setup KPI's, understand that this list will continue to change, and most likely continue to grow.

Social media’s “unstructured-ness” is why people like it so much. The new sites are the new cool, and the trendsetters are always looking for that “cool” factor they can introduce to their circle of friends. Some sites will catch on, some won’t, but there will always be a new offering out there as entrepreneurs and VC’s look to find the next thing to entice those people looking for the new cool.

Working with social media requires a child’s curiosity to continually explore, learn, challenge, and adapt quickly to the results. Keep reading, keep learning.

PART 2 in a series.

Part 1: Social Media is NOT A Marketing Channel Unto Itself

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Social Media: Why Marketers and Companies Continue to #fail at Social Media Execution

One of the things I’m seeing now as the buzz on social media marketing and measurement is increasing in volume (not quite a vuvuzula levels but close) is that people (marketers in particular) are treating social media as a new distinct marketing channel. Of course we’ve seen some companies run single-channel social media campaigns, but the medium wasn’t “designed” that way, and only a few hip B2C brands can actually pull that off.

I see five primary reasons why social media is so disruptive to marketing departments, and difficult to get a grip on for so many companies - both large and small:

1. Social media is not a distinct marketing channel unto itself (below)
   
2. Social media is constantly changing
3. The marketing department is no longer in charge of messaging
4. Social media requires entire businesses to become more transparent and truly authentic
5. It is both less and more measurable than any broadcast advertising
   

There are plenty of articles out there on the tactics of social media, social media suicide, and the top things that marketers need to not do when trying to leverage social media, but these are symptomatic of these big picture problems.

I’ll cover each of these big picture items in subsequent posts, starting here with #1:

Social Media is NOT A Marketing Channel Unto Itself
It’s an Extension of All Channels and Departments

Social media is a direct conversation with the public. It is an extension of the entire business and it complements every other channel and every other department. This is a huge distinction from traditional media, email, outdoor, print, etc. It’s all about two way communication, not defined one-way messaging.

I just read this MediaPost article recapping a survey that found that most companies that are ‘doing’ social media don’t have a social media strategy. Having a strategy where social media efforts compliment other integrated marketing efforts through direct conversation is just as much of a plan as running a distinct social media campaign. In fact, that is probably better for most companies. But, I’m not that nuance was captured in this survey.

Social media should alert people to things the company is doing, from promotions, to product, to customer support, to partnerships. It’s the voice of the company, and it doesn’t require a ton of money to use effectively. Even worse - it requires internal coordination and communication! It’s much harder for companies to agree on a single voice than it is for them to spend gobs of money to overcome public perception or competitive pressures.

The first thing that marketers should do is educate their company that using social media means that whoever’s in charge of the social media team needs to know what’s going on – company-wide. In that way, it’s very much like PR, but the information has to flow at both the macro (company to customer) and micro level (customer service rep to customer).

Getting this information to the social media group in a timely manner is critical so discussion that compliment print, coupon, banner ad promotions can be timed effectively. Customer service information can be incorporated intelligently into conversations. So that special social media-only promotions can be run in conjunction with campaigns of any sort. So customer raves can be posted. And so that any backlash, criticism or crisis control can be effectively discussed, without backlash or additional controversy.

To set an example for the company on communicating effectively, marketers should plan a social media component into every campaign (no matter how small the campaign or component) until it becomes second nature. The CMO should also ensure that someone in each channel has a direct line of communication to a centralized social media team, again providing a clear example of how he's like this function to work with other departments.

Social Media is changing the landscape of the company, and it starts with the marketing team. More to come...

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The Future of Media

The future of media isn’t about technology or channels, it’s about delivering an experience.

As I was sitting eating a couple of slices of authentically good mushroom pizza in New York, and reflecting on the panel discussion I heard earlier that morning at Ad Week on the “The Future of Media” (thanks for the invite Jon @Mediapost) I realized that content and technology are the wrong things to pay attention to – the future of media isn't technology or advertising, it's bringing exceptional experiences closer to normal people.

It wasn’t just the endorphins released by the pizza, but the things going on at the same time. In my quest for good Italian pizza, I just happened to wander past Grand Central to 3rd Avenue where there was a throng of cops, FBI agents and other protectors of the commonwealth ensuring stability, as the UN and Obama met to hash out the same old things. I wandering into a throng of Iranian demonstrators on the side sidewalk chanting “Hey, Ho, Ahmadinejad has to go!” and a small collection of Tibetans holding polite signs telling China to leave their country. They were eating pizza, too.

But it was actually seeing a picture of Neda, the woman who was shot and killed while peacefully protesting in Tehran, on one of their signs that jolted me – the media, including new technologies and crowd reporting, brought these people around a central topic of interest and made them closer to it - almost part of it. And when I say media, its TV, radio, print, Twitter, YouTube and every other technology and distribution channel.

The disruption that’s happening to ‘big media’ isn’t on content, it’s on speed of delivery. It’s not about print v. video, it's about personal experiences. It's not about any one technology, it's about how technology is becoming immersive and personal and connects people directly. It's still broadcast, but it's not mass market. Monetizing a special experience will continue to drive media, just as it's driven entertainment.

On the prestigious panel were Mark Cuban, Martha Stewart, Reid Hoffman and Judy McGrath the CEO of MTV. McGrath explained how they leveraged technology the MTV video music awards this year to actually increase their audience size as the program went on, due to the now famous Kanye incident. She saw people in the audience like Pink start Tweeting as soon as it happened. Videos were posted to YouTube immediately. New technologies have enabled the speed of the message (experiences happen in real time), and provided the appearance one-to-one personalization (individuals are now empowered to be their own broadcasters every media - text, video and audio).

Separately, Mark Cuban spoke about how the Internet and social media are mature from a platform perspective and there is nothing new going on. While that’s true technically, the adoption of technology across the mass market is different. He's kind of right, the Internet and social media were here a long time ago, but it's not connecting to the masses yet. But what he actually focused on is how cool the new Dallas Cowboys stadium's massive video screen is, and how that is the next platform that media companies should be looking at to deliver their content. That's super for the 10 $40M screens in the next 10 years, but isn't the near future. What he didn’t say explicitly, but described nonetheless, is that the immersive experience that the display creates / provides is a huge differentiator.

People want to be a part of experiences that don’t directly involve or even pertain to them. In another great presentation I saw at the IAB / MIXX conference by MeVIO, its founder Adam Curry, former MTV vee-jay, described the growth and success of MTV as bringing people closer to icons and rock stars (and brands). Commentary and interviews and simply video of stars performing, rather than just audio, was a new experience that fundamentally changed music. This is a diferent spin on the same thing - immersion and connection through media. You could even argue that the Beatles and Elvis on Ed Sullivan was the start of this connection, but MTV brought it to the masses 24 hour as day.

Not to say that the paparazzi and glamorization of celebrities is a ubiquitous goal, but sharing an experience in a way that enables us to have a deeper understanding and deeper comprehension of what it's like to be there is the key. Entertainment understands this, the challenge is for non-entertainment media to provide deep connections while being neutral, and monetizing their unique, special experience.

The more senses we immerse, the more we feel like we know it. It’s escapism just as much as it’s realism. We can’t be everywhere, we can’t be part of everything, but media will continue to get us closer and closer. If media can embrace this and deliver it better than individuals, people will pay for it. Bring them into a conflict, be part of a demonstration, eat lunch with a movie star. And that, delivered in an easy-to-consume format, is worth paying for, regardless of the technology or platform.

The Future of Media?
Maybe the world timeline of media looks like this, where media is both the creation / editing / delivery of content, entertainment, rumors, and news. Taking a look at the world, you can see different groups aspiring to move from one level to the next, and the historic events that shaped each step like the 1st amendment and the fall of the Berlin Wall.

1. No information
2. Word of mouth information
3. Single source “official” information
4. Multiple source “official” information
5. Approved information
6. Multi source, multi-channel information
7. Too much information!
8. Information I want to see only
9. Recommended information
   
10. Becoming part of the events that drive the information

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Good Feedback is a Product Managers Best Friend - UserVoice

I ran across a company called UserVoice today and it looks like they've got their act together. I don't know how long they've been in testing / beta but have done a great job with making their website clear and their customer validations prominent. Apart from website envy, the concept of the company is great and I hope they're able to monetize it and stay in business.

UserVoice makes it easy for companies to collect user feedback in an organized, social way. How many times have you received the same feature request over weeks or months, only to lose it in the feature prioritization shuffle?


UserVoice lets users discuss features and bugs but submit their own, and rate (vote for) features that others have suggested. It's leveraging the power of the crowd to do feature prioritization for the product. Of course, this is still customer feedback and needs to be evaluated alongside product portfolio and market strategy, but its certainly much better than anything else I've seen.

UserVoice started off selling its service to start-ups but has expanded to big clients such as Intuit Inc., the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Facebook Inc., Nokia Corp., Nielsen Co., Genetech Inc., Blackbaud Inc. and University of Wisconsin. - WSJ Online

Generally the "developer tools" market isn't sexy or that profitable unless you're catering to large companies, but this seems targeted to organized marketing and products groups rather than small startup software development groups where the technology is the innovation. This is funded by the ubiquitous Dave McClure and the Founders Fund, who see this problem all the time from the boardroom - what do customers really want and how can we really be sure? Credible, first hand data would certainly help VC's call BS on those CEOs hiding behind the curtain of personal bias.

I'll use UserVoice on my next web project and see how we get on.

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Social Media is Based on the Real World - MySpace is Starting to Get It

The Future of Social Advertising? MySpace and Citysearch jointly announce "MySpace Local"

Social media, especially social networing sites like MySpace, started as an deluxe online forum or bulletin board and just took those concepts to the next level. They are based on the concept that people went online with aliases and met and interacted with other people online. It was all about the cyber-world, not about the real world.

While MySpace has been trying to become the social entertainment capital of the net, Facebook (and now Twitter) has seen lightening growth based on a different model - the real world. People of an older generation, more practical people, and teens (it seems like just about everyone who's not a geek) have embraced the concept of using their real name and their real connections to real friends, real networks, real businesses, real schools and are voting with their mice and signing up in droves. It's the online version of you, rather than an online avatar or what you wish you were.

MySpace, because you don't have to be you, is anchored in a previous era (6 years is an era?) and just wasn't built on that real-world network of connections...of course you can add friends, of course you can indicate your hobbies, of course you can use your real name, but you can also be friends with pretenders, rockers, and movie stars and parts of cyberspace groups. The premise of Facebook is you are somehow validated as really being who you say you are. It's not a virtual world or bazaar, it's a representation of a person's real life, something that I daresay more people are comfortable with.

Where am I going? I think MySpace has made a move in the right direction - to the real world. They just announced a partnership and integration with CitySearch to enable the combination of social commentary on the real world listings and information of a very comprehensive contained in the CitySearch yellow pages. And your interaction with these listings will show up in your activity feed - letting others know immediately what you like, what you don't, what you recommend. It's a pre-cataloged slice of Twitter - talking about your preferences when it comes to activities, restaurants, hotels - without the inundating stream of consciousness of Twitter. A practical application - and what could be a model for social advertising. This isn't what page I joined or whom I'm a fan of, this is me and my experience recorded around a real thing, a real place, a real preference.

I really like the concept - I hope it's one of many steps in this direction that MySpace takes to become relevant again.

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What Kills Site Conversion? Focus on Content, Usability and Empathy

I wrote a few thoughts on what kills website conversion for Patrick Neeman on his great blog Usability Counts. Patrick used LinkedIn to solicit answers from his network, which I thought was a great idea to come up with blog material.

You can read my thoughts here.

http://www.usabilitycounts.com/2009/01/29/the-linkedin-edition-what-kills-site-conversion-2/

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Social Network Advertising: Social Media is not Media

There's a lot of discussion recently about social networks and advertising, advertising models and poor performance. What everyone is finally starting to realize is that traditional advertising pushed onto social media /social networks isn't working. This Wired blog post outlines the backlash from advertisers who are frustrated that their spend on social networks isn't effective. But why would marketers expect to effectively apply an old model to a new channel in the first place? Because MySpace and Facebook are internet sites with a lot of visitors? The use cases for users on these sites disagree, and any marketer that understands how to apply a use case will get this immediately.

Social networks are places to connect with friends, family, and colleagues - they're places to have discussions, conversations, to find out what's going on in other people's lives. "Traditional" online advertising (its been around only 12 or so years) has seen success in two different contexts - search and editorial. Search ads, as we know, have built Google's wealth and power, and editorial ads (mostly banners but also some new media) mimic traditional media print ads in newspapers, magazines and the like. Let's think about the user experience and use cases and why these ads work well today.

When I'm using Google to search for something, I'm actively looking to do research, to buy, or to find out more about a specific topic. I'm highly motivated by relevant information, and if an ad looks like its relevant, I'll click it. I'm in search and explore mode, and if something is helpful to me, it makes sense to follow a link to find out more.

When I'm reading an online magazine like Wired, a blog post, or checking sports news the site knows what I'm interested in, my general demographic, and specifically what I'm reading. If I've set up a site profile, I even have history and more specific demo information, and if I've used on site search, the site knows exactly what I'm looking for. If I can be presented with an ad that makes sense in context to that learning and knowledge intake, something that can be valuable to me as an information consumer then I'll click it. The key here is the ad adds value to my experience and what I'm trying to accomplish.

So, both advertising contexts take into account what I'm looking for - the content I'm searching for or have found - and both add additional value in that context. On a social network, the content is people and peoples' actions, and that's where the trouble comes. You can't look at Facebook's pageviews and calculate clickthroughs on ads. You can't display demographically targeted ads in the middle of a conversation on MySpace. It's out of context, it's intrusive, and completely irrelevant (in that moment) to the user. John Battelle does a nice job of summing this up.

A good real life example of what happens on a social network can be found when examining a pub or bar - you're having conversations with people, new and old, getting acquainted, pulling photos of kids from your wallet. Maybe you're playing pool or watching a game on TV for more entertainment, but the discussion continues - about the pool game, or about the sporting event. Maybe you want to order a drink, or order some food. That's when you ask your friend what type of beer he's drinking, or look at the bar or taps to see what's on offer, or look at the neon signs behind the bar to see what the bar makes money on. It's not until that moment when you're looking to do something outside of a conversation that a brand really matters. And perhaps you chose the beer because you like it and have had a good previous experience with it, or its on special, or the bartender recommends it, or because you just saw an ad for it on TV while watching the game. All those factors contribute to your buying decision. But none were at all relevant while looking at your friend's newborn baby pictures, or discussing your day at work.

I think marketers and social media players have a semantic problem with the word 'media'.

From Advertising Age: "I think when we call it 'consumer-generated media,' we're being predatory." "Who said this is media? Media is something you can buy and sell. Media contains inventory. Media contains blank spaces." - Ted McConnell, general manager-interactive marketing and innovation at Procter & Gamble Co.

Apart from the fact that this guy's title is ridiculous, he's bringing up the crux of the problem. Media to an advertiser means print, radio, TV, outdoor and internet. Social media, or user-generated content is not media the same sense - it's more akin to "multi-media" in the computer world, meaning not just text, but photos, videos, audio, etc. So, if a marketer is expecting social media / consumer-generated media to have the same "blank spaces" to insert ads as other advertising media, they will continue to be sadly disappointed.

But the big question then is, are social networks worth advertising on if traditional media doesn't fit? The two-part answer is: a) no, they are not worth advertising on using either of the two proven online methods, but b) because users are there and they're engaged, there are many opportunities to talk about products and services at the right time, in the right context. The opportunities are endless, and can actually impact a buying decision much more than a traditional "read me" advertisement. I can see Facebook working towards this outside of the display ad context, but they still don't have it quite right.

But, social media advertising won't look like advertising as we know it today, and we'll be faced with standardizing new vehicles and new methods - all things marketers and agencies are just finally getting used to. This new social advertising will take on the form of a conversation, recommendation, sponsorship and/and the product validation. The same things we see in bars today - word of mouth, vendor credibility, and maybe even (in all seriousness) the Bud Light girls. All methods of adding immediate value for the user in the context of what they are trying to accomplish.

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Mini-Applications Are the Future of the Social and Mobile Internet

The age of min-apps is here, creating a new set of problems and opportunities for the entire internet supply chain - from developers to VC's. With the announcement of the Facebook Verified App program, we've clearly entered a new level of social ecosystem. The amazing number of 48,000(!) applications available for the Facebook will continue to force the platform to adjust and change in ways they could never predict. As a corollary, the mounting number of applications available for smart phones / mobile platforms like the iPhone and the new Blackberry Storm are pushing new boundaries in application availability. With the Storm setting a MySpace record for application downloads, and MySpace's focus on all mobile platforms, the age of applications (min-apps) built for multiple platforms is apparent. If the social leaders on driving mobile use, the mini-apps will surely thrive there, too.

What does this mean? Well, a little something for everyone.

Platforms
Facebook is leading the charge here, but even after the '5,000 apps and counting' announcement a year ago, it was clear that for a normal user to find and sort through that many available apps was going to be a challenge - even at that time. With boundaries to app development getting lower and the ability to monetize getting easier, the challenge of creating a user-friendly experience for finding apps has only grown. Facebook's Verified App program is a great step here, giving credibility to hopefully some outstanding apps, and verification is something I've been discussing for a year now. But, that's not going to be enough. The FB app directory needs a huge overhaul (OpenSocial directories need this too). Every provider, from Apple to Bebo to MySpace will need to provide more detail to users about each app as they search and browse, so installing the app isn't required to figure out what the thing really does.
Hmm...where else are there tens of thousands of products?
Let's take a look at software download sites like CNET's download.com, eBay and Amazon for some examples of 100k+ items for sale. App listings will need to be filtered and results sorted / refined by multiple factors, including verification, popularity, user-ratings, and maybe a few new factors like a 'usefulness' rating, 'virality' (do people recommend it to their friends on purpose?), and a SPAM rating, and maybe some categories (productivity tool, utility, personals, game, group management, time-waster, etc.). User comments are there today, but a way to quantify these would be more helpful for the fast-reading user. Maybe the app canvas page needs more screenshots, a video demo, and some good usage data (installs v. un-installs is an interesting metric). The more ways to differentiate the app, the better for both the developer and the user.
Better directories mean more users will look for and find apps that are useful to them, driving up time on the site and ad clickthroughs.

Developers
You could see this coming like a train wreck - it's too hard for 'useful' applications to stand out from the crowd on Facebook and other platforms, and just developing a good app isn't good enough. (When I say 'useful' I mean the apps do something other than make you invite your friends to join - a pretty low bar, I know.) Developer emphasis on app virality has been capped in FB and other networks, and is not the way to propagate an app on any mobile platform. What's a developer to do?
I'm predicting that over the next 2 years, we'll see more 'app factories' that roll developers and their apps together under a single company name, much like the organic way that Slide and RockYou developed, but with freelance developers instead of employees.
These 'App Studios' will be able to market the apps on behalf of the developers and split revenues. They will have much more success due to the volumes they can manage and the brand association / credibility they'll be able to create. We'll see an app built for one platform, then under this movie studio model be adapted to multiple platforms and marketed and cross-sold as an incremental addition to a brand portfolio across networks. You'll be able to install an app on your iPhone and Facebook profile, and maintain your single data profile between the two interfaces. This concept really makes sense from a user, developer and investment perspective, it just needs a bit of juice.

Users
Platform users have benefited so far, and will continue to benefit as the platforms and developers make it easier to determine what's good, what works and what doesn't - and what fits the specific needs of each individual. With future programs like 'Recommended Apps' based on demographics, usage and preference selection, platforms will be able to deliver a lot more value through their developer network directly to the user, because, of course, they have the data. They can offer a product they don't own to their users, with a direct benefit to them - a very unique concept and a true ecosystem at work. Maybe by recommending apps instead of ads, then advertising in the apps, they'll see a more effective model for monetization. You get a specific usage scenario, a more specific set of profiles, and a user who's doing something, not just socializing. Users would feel more catered to and have a better experience wherever they are. (Platforms: leverage these apps to gain the hearts and clicks of your users.)

Investors
The venture capital community is already transforming to respond to the new world of mini-apps . It's faster and much much cheaper to develop an app when you don't need to develop the platform, the user database, or do the same amount of marketing to find users. VC's continue to raise large funds, and it seems they need to seek later-stage investments to put the 'right' amount of money to work. Small apps aren't home runs, and they aren't going to use enough capital with a $100 - $350k launch range. Just enough to keep a developer or three happy for a year. Again, the 'App Studio' concept with an aggregation of apps, "ownership" of the user, and marketing of a product portfolio makes a lot of sense - the scale of such an operation fits more inline with a $2-5M 'A' investment. There will be 3 trends: a) existing VC's will continue to only invest in game-changing platforms b) mini-funds will form, with much lower investment parameters c) VC's will see the App Studio concept as a viable option.
An App Studio acts like a proxy for the VC to diversify and invest in multiple apps. It makes betting on any one app a risk, but with the main focus being operational expertise and distribution, the risk is much less. We'll probably see a few VC leaders start (if you've seen any, please comment!) and the rest will follow soon after like sheep and saturate the market...

Applications that reside within networks (social or mobile or both) are the new Chinese menu model of the internet - use what you want, where you want it, wherever you are. This is the intention of Facebook and the concept of the social utility - it's actually becoming a platform and a new operating system. Mini-apps are going to be here for a while - this is just the beginning.

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New Media, Social Publishing or just Social Media?

I get asked quite frequently what makes OleOle different from a 'social network'. The concept of tracking your online or offline network of friends, family and colleagues was never the driver for the OleOle site design, even though 'networking' features are available. It was the ability for amateur or professional writers to instantly find an instant audience of people interested in the topic they were writing about. Publishing and immediate delivery of relevant content, from multiple sources, personalized for each individual, delivered in the way they want it.

Publishing through social media, or Social Publishing, is really that ever elusive "New Media". Everything a newspaper does offline leveraging everything possible online in a true crowd-driven, automated fashion. New Media still in relative infancy and continues to undergo transformation as technology and understanding of crowd behaviour and the social network matures. The idea that blogging is dead - don't beleive the hype- is related. We're seeing a change, and blogging as we know it is evolving as rapidly as it's appeared. We're seeing far fewer independent blogs and more commercialized blogs and blog networks. Not only that, but the standard web-based blog post is changing shape - into iPhone app snippets, Twitter tweets and - get this - ListServes. There are still millions upon millions of blogs, but there are fewer independent blogs making it out of obscurity. Not because it's any harder to setup and write a blog - that's getting easier every day. Rather, it's much more difficult to get an individual blog (like this one) read. Bloggers are now finding that the laws of big numbers work, and blog networks are able to pass along Pagerank, a captive audience, and 'recommended reading' to visitors in a way that a stand-alone blog cannot. Not to mention the ex-old media writers, left to wither on the street in the past two years, are bringing their organizational maturity and editorial skillsets to the web.

So we're seeing a professionalization (not sure that's a word but we'll go with it) of blogging; networks are better able to monetize their readers in aggregate, and able to pay the blogger a bit of that. Blogs and 'collectives' are still working at generating any significant ad revenues, but lumped together with an audience around a single theme, it gets a lot better. Writers are banding together, and we're seeing publications that are challenging 'old media' sites as they grown in prominence, reliability and even scope - even without that offline "doorstep" delivery.

OleOle takes the social media concept to this new level of Social Publishing. Where it's possible to have enough content on a site about dogs or cats or maybe even cars created by a team of 5-20 bloggers, it is impossible to have enough content about a topic as big as soccer / football with a paid writing staff. Covering 6,000 professional soccer teams - around the world - would be far too cost prohibitive. Big media companies haven't done it, and will never do it - TV, radio, newspaper, magazines - nobody. But, find one (or more) passionate fans per team who are basically literate, and you've got a global publication that covers the entire sport. Fans are out there, otherwise the teams wouldn't exist - it's a matter of time before they stop relying on the AP for their news.

But how do you organize posts from 6,000++ independent blogs? Throw in millions of photos, videos and other user-generated content - how do you find it all? Its not reasonable to be 'friends' with all 16 mllion fans who follow Manchester United. Social networks aren't geared for this for sure.

Social publishing takes the concept that everyone in social network (MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, etc) can publish things to their profile and pushes that to the public arena. Social network blogs are only available at the profile level - so you've got to know the person or have access to their profile to read the content. With organized blog publishing (TechCrunch, Huffington Post) everything is public but there's a high standard of editorial - someone manually arranges content, features it on the right page, and even commissions it in the first place. Again, impossible to do at reasonable cost for 6,000+ bloggers speaking 20 languages in 200 countries. Social publishing enables individual bloggers to self-organize their user-generated content for public consumption leveraging an underlying publishing framework. Social publishing relies on the concept of "Topic Centers" that visitors can easily find and access, and individual contributors can push their content to. Topic centers can be built around any topic the site anticipates - in the case of football it's players, competitions, teams, leagues, WAGS, etc. Finding a topic center must be easy for the user (accessible directly from their homepage) and it must be easy to navigate to, and find new ones. This requires something big - a reversion to what web 2.o brought to the world - the sidelining of those uber-cool things called 'tags'.

Tags, by their very nature, are personal. They are used on blogs to group and classify content around a specific keyword, and that keyword is completely variable based on the author's preferences. A topic center requires centralization and sharing of keywords, so that every author has equal access to publish to where their best audience is visiting. A Topic system is at the heart of the OleOle publishing platform - providing a way for authors to publish and visitors to find the right content - outside of profiles, outside of user idiosyncrasies. The topic system also drives site navigation, page generation, menus and SEO - it's the fabric of the platform matching publisher and visitor together invisibly. However, just because topics are site-wide doesn't mean they need to be static, although in the case of football they are hierarchical to some degree due to the complexity of the sport. So, you're not really giving up the personalization of tags (which can still be employed to filter submissions made by a single user) - but tags are now "personalized" for the collective editorial team, and evolve as needed.

Social publishing is the organization of social media. It's the next step in Web 3.0, social aggregation and smart filtering. Social publishing means leveraging the power of the crowd and the individual writers to publish. The organization is automated, not human, and visitors and volunteers stand in for a managing editor to both rate content and correct things published to the wrong topic centers. Where social networking is useful for keeping tabs on people you know, social publishing is the maturation of social media and user-generated content enbling groups rather than individuals.

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Social Network Commotidization

We'll look back at Facebook and think it's cute.

Charlene Li from Forrester is really on top of things. She's watching the convergence and commoditization of social networks happen in the very near future. All the talk of Facebook and MySpace and how they're huge and growing and which one is going to "win" is irrelevant. Like cars, there will be many different companies and types, allowing you to do different things - each will have its own unique aspect. And like cars, where you can move your cellphone / PDA / address book from one to the other, your profile on social networks will be portable.

Her blog point to the fact that social networks are starting to be commoditized. It doesn't matter which you pick, they'll all allow sharing of contacts. Its just not that hard now to create a network to keep track of friends. OleOle's position as a social media platform elevates us from that discussion - people are coming to OleOle to share a passion - to discuss a Social Object. Making friends is nice, but it’s the commitment and passion and interest in the sport that brings them together - the same way it does in the real world at stadiums, pubs and in front of the TV. OleOle is a publishing platform - publishing the views and opinions of football fans in the way that they see fit. We've got the environment and infrastructure to do that in an organized way - and enable discussion instead of just pushing information one way.

What's OleOle's position on OpenSocial / Data Availability / OpenID / Data Portability? YES, we will build for these protocols (maybe when they're standardized a BIT more) so users don't need to create a separate profile on our site - they can login with the profiles they've created other places. The purpose of our site is great content, not being the sole location for personal information.

That's something the big social networks like MySpace are starting to grapple with - what unique social objects can they add to differentiate themselves? And what social objects will get people clicking on ads? It's tough because of the complete heterogeneity of the user base - there is no commonality other than people have friends.

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"You Can Never Underestimate The Passion of the Fans"

Ever!

That's what Philadelphia found out recently as the city was chosen to support the next MLS franchise in 2010.

These "Sons of Ben" were apparently a deciding factor in choosing the city for a Major League Soccer (MLS) franchise. The Sons of Ben is a supporters' group with more than 1,600 members.

"You can never underestimate the passion of the fans," said Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell. "You can't measure it. The Sons of Ben have been waiting for soccer in this area for so long. Now they have it and they're going to be loud and give this team a true homefield advantage. Believe me, this group's excitement and desire had a lot to do with why we're here announcing this franchise."

Thinking forward a few months to the UEFA Euro 2008. OleOle wants to make this competition the pinnacle of online interaction from fans at the matches, and those that can't make it to the matches.

How can OleOle capture this passion, this fervor? How is football - even in the USA (the least football-oriented country in the entire world) - how is it that this sport incites such passion?

Can it be bottled? Canned? How can we capture even a a piece of that passion online for the Euro? That's the magic that OleOle needs - we don't have it today, we might have it tomorrow as we overhaul the site for the Euro, but what are we missing? What is key to the overhaul? What kind of things can we pull from our readers, fans and from the competition itself? Its more UEFA Euro news, than facts and scores...its the drive to get fans to contribute, to interact, to talk to each other.

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New York Times - taking small steps in Social Media

My last post pointed at all trditional media and publishers. Apparently, The New York Times is becoming a leader in the industry and taking at least a few steps to increase traffic.

There's a lot of promise in this - the content is there, and if it can be structured for SEO it will kill other papers.

Search Engine Land

This goes for other media sites, too - optimization is key regardless of how the content gets to the site. OleOle's concentration on linking, sharing and optimization is a huge advantage for our content contributors and bloggers. More people will read their thoughts here than anywhere else on the web - because they care about football.

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Newspapers Can't Find the Right Business Model

New Media means changing old media. Really.

Newspapers and traditional media seem to just "not get it". This article by David Lazarus of the Los Angeles Times clearly identifies the problem - newspapers are treating online like it’s the same publishing medium as a hardcopy paper.

I visited the LA times site to view David’s article online and see what was going on. Having the print copy delivered to me every day and not reading the paper online, I'm very old school and like to touch the paper and wrestle it to the ground when it doesn't fold.

I know where he’s coming from – I’d be worried about my job and my future if I saw newspaper revenues continue their decline. And, of course nobody is going to pay for the same article online that's in the paper – its just not the model people are used to. I’m positive, however, that advertising can support a newspaper – even one as big as the LA times. Rupert Murdoch is betting on it by intending to what I think is the world's most successful (most profitable?) online subscription content – the Wall Street Journal – available for free. He surely gets it – why can’t everyone? I bet at $60M a year in subscriptions, and with 980k current subscribers, revenue at $10CPM is around $20M/year. That's not the same, of course, but open it up and make it interactive, the audience could grow to 2M+ and the # of pageviews would also increase, driving up ad rates. In 2.5 years, the WSJ could be making $100M+ online just through CPM ads.

For the LA Times specifically, it’s a great paper (top 5 in the US) but there's no just value in the online edition. Reading David’s this article online contains nothing Web 2.0 at all - it’s merely a paper reprint. This is death-by-smothering from a traditional media company, and I certainly see the cause for concern.T

Traditional Media Death 2.0: On the LA times article in question, there's no ability for readers to comment on the article or have a discussion, submit viewpoints or even link to the article. There’s no social bookmarking or sharing the article (except via email), no hyperlinks in the article to sources or related stories, and no simple way to get RSS feeds for that column / author. No submitting to Digg or any other site that would lead more readers back to the article. For interaction, there's just a link to the author's email address, which will result in the poor guy to get included in every spam list in the Ukraine and Romania. The article was clearly written for print – not for the web, and that’s just not what the web generation expects from anything online – there’s no personalization or interaction. And that's exactly how to stop online readership from expanding.

The old model of write & publish is over. If the LA Times was serious about online, they'd stop treating it as a bastard stepchild of print. Yes, there would be a difficult transition period as it would be impossible to support 900+ staffers with online revenues at this stage. But assuming a transition could be worked out and an upfront investment in the future was made, the end result would be an interactive site that fuels itself - an accredited reporter posts an article (doesn't have to wait for press time - it can go up at the right time) and that article, if deemed valuable, will be passed to others by the international community. It’s not just about servicing Los Angeles, it’s getting the news of Los Angeles and the world out to everyone who's interested – faster than any other pub.

But, it takes discipline to see an article get trashed, mocked, or relegated to the heap of articles if not valuable. Comments, ratings, and user feedback will do that – it’s a consumer-driven economy now and the good (greater distribution) comes with the bad.

However, exclusivity is really key here - articles that come from the AP are now a commodity – there’s zero value in reposting something that everyone else posts as well. News that everyone else is covering – without having a specific angle or a unique feature, source or contributor – are a dime a dozen, and only weigh down the cost structure of a paper. Cut the ‘me too’ stuff – use a feed to pull in AP articles with minimum cost and overhead – and focus only on the stuff nobody else has (or can have).

Leverage those news desks around the world - break some news - see it spread and see the credit get linked back directly to the reporter. This will drive pageviews and unique users from outside the normal geographic market, which will in turn drive advertising appeal and ad rates.

And, alongside of that, change the ad model - the advertising team must be stand-alone and not have every deal linked to the print side. The current ads on the site seem like freebies thrown in by the print ad department. Create sponsorships for sections, use non-standard ad sizes, and adios the low-revenue text Google ads and replace them with higher rev direct ads - the Google stuff is crap and it makes the site look cheap, too.

One thing David's article mentions is the Little Guy – small newspapers won’t be able to support online because they’re entirely the wrong structure. Small papers would need a new low cost back office structure to survive. Most just can’t or won’t make this transition – it would require laying off too many people – or they just wouldn’t recognize the skills sets that they need to find or keep. Good reporters, however, can and will survive – even as bloggers. The world will continue to need journalists with integrity and the ability to find news – those are not skills any technology can replace. As long as there is exclusive news, people will pay for it in one way or another.

Today’s publishers are right to say that the internet side of their business can’t support the business. But, that doesn't mean it can't forever. Publishers must make the commitment, investment and effort to build the right online experience for readers – not dangle it as a loose thread from their flagship. Until then, I expect we’ll hear thousands more stories, tragedies and complaints from traditional media who, as many entrenched industries have done in the past, can’t make the transition to the future because they're too entrenched in the past. It won’t be easy, but there is a clear path forward, and it is possible.

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New in Social Media

So, here's my first blog entry, a narrative of all things social media (and football).

The trend in social media isn't going to stop - people are starting to understand that they can be involved and will start to demand it in the next few years. Users, fans and supporters are going to continue to push the traditional media to be included, to be a part of the story. Supporters want a deeper connection to teams and players - something meaningful and as 1to1 as possible, and old media just can't do that. OleOle is leading the charge here. In the next few months we're going to be blowing the doors off old media and soccer supporters worldwide will be able to connect with their favorite teams, players and other like-minded fans.

Social media will become pervasive - a part of everything, not a special thing. Just a matter of time.

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