Tag: Facebook

  • Trust & Context

    The Tiger Woods saga continues. And though I have had fun (like this) at his and Accenture’s expense, the entire series of events did make me wonder again on endorsements, especially after Accenture dropped Woods. The topic of endorsements is something I have written about earlier too – of how blogging/tweeting ambassadors would react to uncomfortable questions about their brands (Big B – Cadbury’s worms), and the effect of celebrity micro-bloggers even on brands they don’t endorse. But this is on a slightly different note.

    “As perhaps the world’s ultimate symbol of high performance, he serves as a metaphor for our commitment to helping companies become high-performance businesses.”, the Accenture site had said earlier. Like we discussed on Twitter, a lot of the audience are not just fans of a celebrity’s attributes, but even assume that he is equally good or flawless in every other facet of his life/character too. Its perhaps a wrong expectation, not just from the audience, but from brands too. (high performance on the course) Lack of context.

    That brings me to the subject of the connections we make on social sites, most notably Twitter, because (for me) only a small percentage of following/followers are made of people who we knew from before. The connections, while they may evolve into relationships later, are built on trust, developed over time and actions, and in my case have a contextual nature to it too. I rely on specific people for expertise on specific matters. I am guessing many others do too, many Twitter lists are a manifestation of that. The recommendation economy, consumer ambassadors, and micro ambassadors posts I have written earlier are variations of the same premise of trust.

    When I look at entities like newspapers, which were built on a trust model, I wonder how the newly formed trust relationships will shape up. Newspapers and later other platforms owned the power of dissemination..distribution. The net disrupted that. In the age of unlimited content and trust agents, the new networks start playing crucial roles in trust relationships. And that is why, the ‘url shortener’ war that is in its early stages now – Facebook, Google, bit.ly interests me.  Reach, trust and context. Who will you trust all your data with? How much of data mining can be done with the links we share and consume, and how much context can be gleaned from it? Which network gives you the maximum reach? While FB and Google can integrate with their own networks, bit.ly is Twitter’s default shortener, and for now, it is doing things to maintain its lead.

    And its not just this. These days I’m seeing more and more manifestations of power play around me – among people, organisations, communities. When Twitter plans to add ‘contributors’ to business accounts, and allow multiple users to be identified in a single handle, it means that the different people will have different levels of trust from their audience, it would also allow context. But when Marissa Mayer describes Google as “omnivorous” in its quest for indexing data, and when Facebook changes its privacy stance, I wonder whether a trust economy built among individuals and relying on networks for the reach, will get overshadowed by the networks themselves, and the way they use our data.

    Tiger Woods might have been used by advertisers out of context with his permission. With unlimited data on you and fuzzy privacy settings, will you, without your knowledge, become a micro ambassador for something you have no expertise in, and thereby erode your trustworthiness? Silicon India profiles, Facebook Ads stating X friend has used an application, random RTs…..Paranoid? perhaps, but then, we share so much online, that maybe I can justify it. 🙂

    until next time, deprived of privacy

  • Brand Chats – Google & Godin

    Last week, Seth Godin’s company Squidoo launched “Brands in Public” (BIP from now), a  service which creates pages -‘public-facing dashboards’ that aggregate conversations about brands on Twitter, YouTube and blogs, in addition to news, videos, images etc. BIP will create the pages anyway, but for a fee, brands can develop this page. Brands then get control of the left column on the page, and can respond to the content, highlight certain content, run contests etc. (example) In Seth Godin’s own words, brands “can respond, lead and organize.”As Godin himself states, there are many monitoring tools online (found an excellent wiki by Ken Burbary) which can be used to ‘listen’ to the conversation, but this service allows brands to respond publicly.

    I saw a couple of posts which asked an interesting question – whether by creating pages ‘anyway’, Godin was brandjacking. Godin had clarified that if a brand requested him to take a page off, he would do so. And in a later update (to clear the air) he took off the 200 sample pages that had been put up. Bravo! Not that there was anything technically wrong with it – after all, like one of the articles states, Google does something similar- sell ads next to contextually relevant others- generated content (search, ad sense on sites), but the non-paid for brand pages just didn’t sound right.

    But it made me wonder again about the location of brand-consumer conversations. Before we get to that, another interesting news item in context, albeit a bit tangentially. Last week, Google launched Sidewiki, “which allows you to contribute helpful information next to any webpage. Google Sidewiki appears as a browser sidebar, where you can read and write entries along the side of the page.” The entries which are shown, are selected not by recency, but an algorithm that has among other things – the contributor’s previous entries and the feedback on the entry. Moreover the entry will also be used on sites with the same content. Users will have to be logged into Google for leaving comments and rating.

    As Jason Falls notes in his post about Sidewiki, this adds another layer for brands to keep in touch with, because users may not even have to search for information about the website (or the product/service sold there). If they have the toolbar downloaded, they can see the information as they browse the site. He also rightly remarks (IMO) that we should expect ads (even that of competitors) in the wiki soon. Meanwhile, like any good social product, there is no control that a brand can exert on this content, as it exists on Google’s servers. Jeremiah Owyang  also has a post on the same subject, which offers several great insights and advice. Apparently, the comments a user leaves will also be displayed on his Google profile. The web as one giant social network, he’s right, that’s what Google’s after. There is also the option of sharing it on Facebook/Twitter. It’d be interesting to see a Facebook version of this whenever it happens – a play with Facebook Connect, the website, and perhaps, Facebook fan pages. The Facebook newsfeed means that it can bring the conversation back to Facebook. That’s something Google can’t do..yet.

    Now, back to the location. Attempts are being made to aggregate these conversations, and in BIP’s case make it a conversation involving the brand itself. My problem was not with brandjacking, the conversations are happening anyway, and brands are free to create their own ways of aggregation and response, I was more concerned with two other things. One, the creation of a destination point , a ‘middle man’ whose only context connecting its users was the brand itself. Like a subject popping up while chatting over coffee vs a focus group – they both have their uses, but for me, the former is more social media, simply because of the difference in intent. To be fair, I’ve always thought aggregation was inevitable, but Chris Brogan wrote recently about ‘Feeling the Community‘, where he talks about how “we don’t join communities because we  happen to like a product or service. We gather around people who feel what we feel, and we share passion for things that bring us some sense of pleasure or joy, or even healing.” I can completely relate to that, it is the reason I’m not a fan of many things on FB, and was/am not an active member of the groups I’d joined. Now, I talk about all these things (whose group/fan page I am part of) on Twitter. I follow blogs and use these as conversation points there, on Twitter and offline, whenever I feel there is a context, and whenever I can identify with what’s being said on the subject.  What I’m trying to say is that the objects (brands) or even the platforms are not the important context, the people are. Even though the brand has an identity and a personality, different people associate to the same brand differently, and my conversations happen with people who I feel can relate to what I’m saying. Also, the aggregation may not really show the context in which a comment was made. (esp. Twitter). For that, the brand has to be present on Twitter. I’m not sure whether an aggregation point would have the same effect. Woods, trees, and mistakes.

    The second issue I have is whether such destination points would tend to become band-aid fixes for a larger problem. Would brands approach the issues with a short term tactical mindset – highlight the issues that they’re able to solve, gloss over the ones they can’t? In essence, see this a point where they can control the conversations? Shouldn’t the greater priority for organisations be changing their internal processes and structures to adapt to social media, than having a dashboard responding to comments? I’m just not very sure it can work in parallel.

    So, conversations on the brand website, on its side, and on some other site..actually everywhere. At some point, all data would have to become portable, and depending on context (and perhaps other parameters) I would choose the platform/service/location for interaction. For now, world wild web indeed. 🙂

    until next time, a website with a sidekick 😉

  • Flipping news models

    Google’s Fast Flip has been receiving quite a lot of attention these days. Based on the Google News model of aggregation and categorisation, Google has partnered with quite  few sources including BBC, BusinessWeek, Washington Post, New York time, to name a few, which shows previews of their pages on Fast Flip, but looks exactly like they would on the source site, almost. We’ll come to that in a bit. The stories can be accessed basis sources, sections and the other parameters we are used to – recent, most viewed, recommended etc. Oh, yes, much of it is the user interface, that lets you ‘flip’ through the content, ‘like’ stories, and you can click through to the source site, if you want to read the full story. It has its rough edges, and is far from being any sort of killer to anyone, but its a damn good start, much better than any interface that any publication has brought out so far. On the revenue front, there are contextual ads on Fast Flip itself, and Google will be sharing revenue with newspapers. It is interesting to note that the previews of the source sites do not include ads. So if I am able to read a story completely in the preview, (which in many cases I am), I wouldn’t go to the source site, nor would I see/click the ads there. This is potentially an area of conflict, since the (shared) revenue from the one ad that’s displayed on Fast Flip cannot compare with the revenue from the source site. Meanwhile, I’m looking forward to a time when perhaps, Google Reader will have a similar interface. 😉

    In the last few weeks, this is the second instance of Google engaging with publications and ‘helping’ them create a revenue stream. The first instance was Google sending a proposal for micropayments, in response to a request for paid content proposals from the Newspaper Association of America. As per an NYTimes blog, this would be an extension of Google Checkout. Google is only one of the companies that have sent a proposal, and the list includes Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft. The system is of course in its early planning stages, and the business model has a 30-70 split (Google-publisher). Though Google still doesn’t believe that paying for content will be the remedy for newspapers’ woes, it  still has a vision of a premium content ecosystem, which includes five key features that combine the Google’s e-commerce, search, and advertising platforms.

    While Google is described by many as the single largest threat to newspapers, its definitely not the only one. From new hyperlocal community sites (eg. Patch) to remnants of old giants (AOL’s Digital City, Yahoo Local) and from new age media entities like Huffington Post to new and varied kinds of aggregators (Guzzle.it, OurSignal, MeeHive, Thoora) different services are catering to the different needs that newspapers used to satisfy. The important aspect is that the new entities are well versed in leveraging the latest tools and collaborating with those who can add to their utility value. A good example would be the tie up between Huffington Post and Facebook for HuffPost Social News. Social sharing, real time are changing the way news is being consumed. I recently read about The Twitter Times, which creates a customised ‘newspaper’ by checking the links from people you follow, and the popularity of those links. Even while massive changes are happening online, and affecting the lifestyle of individuals and society at large, newspapers are still grappling with how to evolve new business models. (a good, albeit dated read on battle plans)

    There was a short but interesting discussion on Twitter a few days back, where Surekha brought up the example of PressDisplay’s business model (aggregation of various newspapers and consumers pay for access) to ask whether a DTH kind of model would work for newspapers. I didn’t think it would. The only other distribution network for television content is the local cable guy (ignoring the web for now). But ‘news’ and even the ‘features’ content can find its way to the consumer through multiple sources and media – TV, web, mobile, and multiple sources within that.  The entry barriers have fallen drastically. Scarcity model vs Abundance model. Keeping in mind the cost that newspapers incur in creating the content and the incremental value that they give the consumer, how much would a consumer pay a newspaper aggregator, and how much would the newspapers get out of that. Yes, Press Display will make money, but ask newspapers to survive only on that revenue or even that plus web advertising, and it would be a tough task. This is why newspapers are finding it hard to negotiate this transition stage (discussed earlier) because its not one answer and its definitely not a common answer. Again, as I’ve discussed here earlier, there are inherent differences between news gathering processes in the print and online space – batch processing vs real time processing. It calls for a (albeit cliched) leaner meaner structure, not just for operations’ sake, but also perhaps from a profitability perspective.

    The more I think about it, the more I realise that its not just processes, there is a cultural angle to this. As Terry Heaton points out in “The Web’s widening stream“, the knack of creating and facing disruptive innovations. We’ve discussed David and Goliath before, David becomes version 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 faster and faster, each version better than the other (because he fixes the bugs in 1.1, 2.5 etc) while Goliath reels because it can’t even figure out the answer to 1.0.  His strength has become his weakness – scale, and he doesn’t have a culture that encourages moving fast, learning from mistakes, being open to changes amongst other things. In fact, newspapers have been lazy and guilty of doing the exact thing that Seth Godin warns about in “Flipping abundance and scarcity” – putting free on top of a business model, and now rapidly trying to change it.

    I don’t think India is impervious to these changes, the time frame will vary because of several factors – technology adoption delays, vernacular content to name a couple, but as I keep repeating, its no time to be complacent. From Rediff and Instablogs which have evolved their own news collection systems to hyperlocal players of different kinds – governance based like Praja, Citizen Matters, local businesses review based like Burrp, and several other niches, the different domains of newspapers are being challenged. More importantly we’re increasingly getting used to ‘streams’ – FB, Twitter etc. The principal revenue model of newspapers has been advertising (as opposed to circulation), they have been the medium to reach audiences, with the most basic of audience filtering. The radical change (as Heaton points out) is that advertisers can be part of the stream themselves, with such filtration techniques that they can target an individual if necessary. So, for newspapers, if the advertiser won’t pay, the reader has to. The reader , meanwhile has figured out that on the web, he has an abundance of choices.

    until next time, stop press?