On narcissism & outgrowing influencers.

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Facebook is a funny company. At first blush today’s update looked as though they were playing catch up in trying to integrate/imitate features of Twitter and G+ (just like they did with Foursquare some months ago). Worse, they seem to dash these updates off, ambushing their customers with seemingly disorienting features that quickly lead to bad buzz among the Mashables, Techcrunches and Twitters of the world.

On the other hand, Facebook is a mature enterprise now. In addition to 750MM users, it has 750MM users’ data. It’s by leaps and bounds the most popular social networking tool on the planet. It has deep pockets and deep resources and let’s face it, there are some smart folks working there. While they’re undoubtedly watching their competitors, I’d be shocked if Facebook felt so threatened by Twitter or G+ – which lag behind in membership by wide, wide margins – to just willy-nilly copy what those two do out of some sense of reactionary fear.

What if instead they were more Machiavellian. What if they were watching their competitors test new ideas and then moving quickly to replicate those that showed promise. This is the second-mover advantage and it has worked before.

Too far fetched? Okay.

What if, instead, Facebook made the changes it made because the opinion of influencers didn’t matter as much? What if Facebook realized its most valuable customers were not influencers?

Facebook today serves two audiences – its membership and its advertisers. (It has certainly erred a few times in helping the latter at the expense of the former.) With 65+% of the Internet using public in America holding accounts and significantly more user participation than other competitor platforms, the importance of social media power users is somewhat diminished in Facebook’s current business model.

To grow, Facebook needs to keep the masses happy, not the influencers (who, realistically, it probably can’t keep happy even if it wants to).

What if Facebook’s latest updates were aimed solely at its most valuable customer – the mass user? In this sense you could say the updates delivered a few benefits:

  • They automatically improve the news stream with algorithmic intelligence without requiring the user to fiddle with settings.
  • They deliver twitter-like friend streams and updates without requiring the user to join Twitter (and hope their friends are there).
  • They deliver circle-like friend handling without requiring the user to join Google+ (though I’m guessing with an average 150-odd friends, most Facebook users don’t have a need for ‘circles’ anyhow).

Forget whether or not we as power users find any of the above to be true. The important question, from Facebook’s perspective, is will the average user? Maybe Facebook’s version of circles and Twitter is good enough for most people. Going to market with ‘good enough’ is a proven tactic for dominating a marketplace.

Admittedly I am hypothesizing here but if the knowledge of what the average Facebook user will find useful exists, you can bet Facebook has it and is putting its top minds to work on making the best use of it.

I sometimes feel we working so closely in and with social media are a little too focused on our own worldview. We say we are advocates for the user, but which user – the average user or the power user? Like Narcissus, we might be talking so much to our conclave of other early adopters and power users that we wind up seeing only the reflection of our own opinions coming back at us. To read Twitter today, you’d have to believe Facebook’s latest update is a massive failure.

Less than 12 hours after the updates hit, my own Facebook newsstream seems pretty quiet. Nary a mention. Instead, people went right back to Facebooking. Were they initially shocked? Some were, yes. Was it truly so disruptive a change that it earned all the ‘hate it’ comments? Not really. Or at least if so, that hate was pretty fleeting.

Who knows, maybe most the masses are happy with the updates, even if we power users are a little outraged. It’s possible.

Social Media Marketers are not normal people.

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I found myself really pouring over the details in the Sysmos ‘Inside Twitter’ report I first discovered during my last post. Given how big a splash Twitter has made culturally – it’s little blue ‘T’ now a ubiquitous bug on everything from advertising to T-shirts – I have followed its growth and found myself curiously conflicted about the mass uptake reported in the media and pushed by social media marketers vs. the seemingly less zealous use by the people I observed around me who were not working in the social media industry.

As it turns out, Sysmos did me the favor of breaking out social media marketers and comparing them to average users (scroll down to the bottom of the report to see this subsection). Here are some revealing highlights:

“65.5% of social media marketers post less than one update a day, compared with 85.3% of the general Twitter population. In addition, 6.3% post two updates a day (vs. 2.8% overall), while 4.3% post at least nine updates a day (vs. 0.17% overall). This suggests social media marketers are far more active than overall users.”

(Shocking, I know.)

In addition 35% of those who identify themselves as social media marketers tweet at least daily. That’s more than twice the overall Twitter population (of which 15% do).

In fact, most Twitter users (92.4%) follow fewer than 100 people and 93.6% have fewer than 100 followers. That means on top of there not being as many Twitter users as media headlines might have us believe (see my prior post), the majority of active Twitter users are not ‘power users’ per se. In fact, compare the behavior of social media marketers to average users per below:

% of social media marketers % of all Twitter users in aggregate
Follow more than 500 people 9.23% less than 1%
Follow more than 1000 people 10.7% less than 0.1%
Have more than 500 followers 10% less than 0.5%
Have more than 1000 followers 11.8% less than 0.1%

If you consider that among the regular Twitter users in the column on the right would be included celebrities and such, who make a good business of following and having many followers, the number of rank and file citizens who are power users is really quite small as a proportion of the whole.

The key takeaway here is that we in social media marketing are not the norm and do not represent the way most people use social media. In the case of Twitter we consistently over index by anywhere from 2x to 10x on power user behaviors.

Yet it is a well known aspect of the human condition that we all assume others think, understand and behave in ways similar to how we do. This is a cognitive bias of sorts. We working in social media are eager adopters of technology. Our circles of professional peers are too. We can easily become surrounded by observational evidence that the whole world is tweeting and following and checking in endlessly throughout the day. Yet the server logs often tell a different story.

All of this is not to say that Twitter is not a powerful force today. It is. It has changed much about our culture from how we discover news to how we put our finger to the wind to measure prevailing trends. Twitter’s membership, because it is popular among social media marketers who are themselves very connected, also has a higher concentration of influencers (though they may have the most influence on people who are already like them, a.k.a. social media marketers and power users).

The high concentration of social media power users that makes up a significant chunk of the Twitter community is an important constituency to be sure. Yet, It is equally important that we, as representatives of the interest of the brands we serve and the customer groups we engage with, do no deceive ourselves into believing everyone is as infatuated with Twitter and some of these other new tools to the same degree we are.

We social media marketers are not like normal people which means its critical we look outside our circles to gauge which tools are most appropriate to achieve our goals and engage other constituencies.

The Real Reach: A Context Exercise for Thinking About Twitter

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This article in Business Insider underscores something I’ve long suspected (and blogged about before): That Twitter, despite all the hype and sensationalism, isn’t quite as big as the boastful numbers that splash across headlines. For instance, the article notes that of Twitter’s claimed 175MM registered accounts, 56MM (approaching 1 in 3 users) are following zero other accounts. 90MM accounts (over half the total membership!) have zero followers.

The graph above is a nice counterpoint to what was published as Twitter’s ‘hockey stick growth‘ in 2009. The inverse hockey stick above should give everyone (especially those investors whose due diligence valued Twitter up in the billions of dollars!) a moment’s pause.

This finding synchs with a piece of research I saw a while back from Edison Research which stated that the United States had about 17MM ‘active’ Twitter users in 2010. (‘Active’ was defined as those survey participants answering ‘yes’ to the statement, “Do you currently ever use Twitter?” – which is a pretty generous question in my opinion.) Compound the above with the revelation that 22.5% of Twitter users post 90% of Tweets. Net, net, it seems that a very small niche of Twitter users are responsible for almost all of the activity that might be defined as ‘engagement’ with the service.

Now, If you’re trying to communicate with this niche group – which I suspect is largely comprised of brands, marketers, social media people, self-promoters and celebrities, then Twitter might be a great tool. For reaching any other target group – soccer moms, accountants, car aficionados, sports fans, etc. etc., its efficacy to reach significant numbers of these people is called into question by these findings.

Here are a few other interesting figures that support my belief that Twitter is a micro-niche community with minimal broad audience relevance (or participation). These items come from Sysmos’ Inside Twitter findings.

  • 85.3% of users tweet less than once/day.
  • 92.4% of users follow less than 100 people.
  • 93.6% have less than 100 followers.
Okay, but numbers and stats, as succinct and persuasive as they can be in PowerPoint decks, often make it hard to contextualize a situation. Numbers can be too abstract. In the world of social media – which I maintain still has something of an echo chamber issue to sort out – that abstraction can be problematic, leading to bad recommendations and wasted resources. Something struck me today that helped contextualize the reality of Twitter usage penetration – The United States Unemployement Rate.

With about 14MM unemployed Americas today, there are slightly more ‘active’ Twitter users than there are people out of work. So, if you work in social media as I do – where we and all our friends and peers are part of the 1.5MM people who follow more than 500 people on Twitter – we might want some outside context to balance any industry-insider biases we might have.

I have an exercise for doing just that.

I recommend taking a walk down the street and looking around. Walk into grocery stores, restaurants, parks and coffee shops. Take in the sum of all the people you see. Then ask yourself how many of them you think are unemployed (fully unemployed, not temps, because temps aren’t counted in the U.S. unemployment stat either).

If you’re being honest with yourself you should be overwhelmed by the sense that the vast majority of the people you see on the street probably are employed. The minority that aren’t, those represent the equivalent of your ‘active’ Twitter users. You know, the people you have any real chance of reaching on Twitter. (And that is if you set aside the other issues like Dunbar’s number, attention span and the short life cycle of a tweet.)

Oh… and Twitter 175MM members is a global number, the U.S. unemployment is of course national. So we’re being generous with this exercise.

I found the exercise sobering and useful. Maybe you will too.

Outposting & Irrational Exuberance

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Staking a parcel of land in a new digital space is easy. It can lead to big sexy headlines and snap-judgement misassumptions.

Mashable wasted no time last week noting that Google+ has ‘signed up 13% of the U.S. population‘ and could be larger than LinkedIn or Twitter within a year.

Exciting news to be sure. And in some ways, given Google’s reach with its search service, etc. not surprising. I question the prediction though. Via an admittedly unscientific survey across my own Google+ circles I see a lot of outposting going on.

I define outposting as the rushing out to stake a claim to a new site or service online without intention to actively engage with it immediately. Outposting is done to reserve our account name. To be seen there. And to take a peek to see what all the noise is about. The rewards for outposting are well known. Having your name locked up – especially if its John Smith or similar – has a certain first-mover cache and is good for those concerned with their personal brand. Outposting is also a little like investing a small amount in a stock on the chance it gets big someday. Plus, as with many things online, the actual investment made in outposting is pretty small – about 10 minutes of your time – so why wouldn’t you?

I’d casually estimate that 20-25% of the people in my circles on G+ haven’t posted anything yet beyond the bare minimum profile and maybe a test quip or two. Additionally, the vast majority of people who have posted regularly work in media, marketing or technology or are otherwise of your typical early adopter profile. This is fine, and niching in natural in a fragmented media environment, but it should cast a certain light on stats like “G+ could be larger than LinkedIn by next year”. G+ might give Twitter a run for its money – it’s currently appealing to the same market segment – but when I think of all the kinds of people I know on LinkedIn vs. G+, Google still has some distance to go before it has proven its appeal to the broader LinkedIn segment. (The utility of Google+ competing with LinkedIn is also highly suspect at this point.)

Outposting reminds me of the Oklahoma land run scene from the Tom Cruise film Far And Away
(I found the clip and inserted it below) where they rush out onto the frontier and jam a flag in a piece of land. In the film, it was literally a dash to stick a flag in a parcel of land surrounded by equally open, full-of-potential, land. As anyone who follows history knows, some of that land grew to become towns and eventually cities. Some became farmland. And some never became anything at all. It had something to do with the land itself, but more to do with what was being done on neighboring plots around any specific parcel.

That last part is important because the eventual settling and development of G+ will work in a similar way. What the settlers around us do with their piece will largely define if the piece we staked out will be useful and valuable to us.

I am guessing that behind Google+ rapid signup rate, there is a lot of outposting going on. Who wouldn’t take 10 minutes to claim their parcel of this brave new world? The question remains how many of these people will be true frontier settlers willing to pull up stakes and move their stuff from the comfort of Facebook or LinkedIn or wherever to the open frontier of G+.

Then again, maybe it won’t be an either/or but rather like having a summer cottage you visit occasionally. (I realize I am stretching the analogy here.) Many of us already have multiple accounts on multiple sites and visit each for different reasons. This is all well and good, but one place is always our primary residence and as anyone with summer property knows, maintenance of the place you don’t go to frequently can be difficult to keep consistently. And if maintenance drops the face of neighborhood starts to change. Timely updates are the fresh paint and manicuring of Internet land ownership. (Wow, I am beating this analogy to death aren’t I?)

It’s worthing pausing now to consider Twitter as there are some parallels. According to Edison Research, Twitter enjoys 92% awareness among Americans. This is not surprising given that the little blue bird appears on everything from T-shirts to billboards and on the vast majority of websites. However, despite this awareness, which is nearly equal to Facebook’s, regular users of Twitter represent just 11% of the population. A far cry from Facebook’s nearly half of our population.

Twitter’s rocketing growth made headlines just as G+ is today. Publishers spoke of ’100% growth rates’ etc. without detailing the circumstances surrounding those statistics. As it turns out, 22.5% of Twitter users publish 90% of tweets and only 21% of registered users are actually active on the site. (Think about that… 22.5% of 21% represent 90% of all Tweets. That’s the 80-20 rule on steroids.) So while a ’100% growth rate’ is a great stat for headlines, there’s a lot of outposting hidden in there as well as simple old-fashioned account abandonment and user atrophy.

Google+, at this point seems to be echoing Twitter’s general trajectory just as Foursquare did a few years ago. Admittedly, G+ probably has higher odds of pulling in more of the masses if only because more of the masses use Google tools and brand awareness and trust is very high. No one needs to learn what Google is or stands for. We all have our idea.

(Playing devil’s advocate though, even with 92% awareness, Twitter hasn’t demonstrated enough utility to enough people to enjoy higher usage.)

Lest I sound like a buzzkill, it’s worth noting here too that having 11% of the U.S. population active on your site (as Twitter does) is not shabby at all. In my opinion its not quite enough market share to warrant the lofty Wall St. valuations, but then again, Wall St. has had a bad week so I’ll be nice to them for now. Instead, 11% marketshare is sort of the equivalent of being one of the ‘big four’ networks of our time – though with Twitter that network is more akin to the Syfy channel and E! combining audience than a general household demographic. (Also, its worth stating here that the dynamics of social networking tools are so different from TV networks that the comparison and utility of being the equivalent of a ‘big four network’ basically ends with the simple quantitative similarity).

I guess my big point here is that I think we working in media, marketing and communications need to check ourselves against irrational exuberance associated with outposting. Outposting is a well-established phenomenon that drives great headline writing and creates really impressive growth charts in meetings. It is not, though, a guarantee of future returns.

Funny, that last sentence sounded like the disclaimer that shows up on financial statements. And finance, as witnessed by this week’s remarkable stock market plunge, is another category full of hyperbole and ‘surprising’ disappointments.

Interesting.

Water cooler 2.0: Why, one day, content will crush channel.

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I read recently the analogy that social media had brought back the proverbial water cooler. The original water cooler (v1.0) was defined by mass media. With limited channels we all saw shades of the same programming thereby having something in common to talk about at the office water cooler the next day. Then came the media fragmentation. While the number of hours we spent watching TV programs didn’t decrease (it continues to increase actually) we were all watching different channels (and more recently, different screens). On Monday morning, fewer and fewer people saw the same program and those water cooler chats were among smaller and smaller groups. It’s been a slippery slope ever since.

Along comes social media. Today our social graphs in many ways curate our programming. We see things our friends recommend to us – the breadth of our serendipitous discovery is very directly connected to the variety of people our social graph (which is why it can be limiting to surround ourselves with people who are like us). We can also share information both ways now. We can recommend content to each other, increasingly view that content on demand, and then talk with each other about it in the moment. This is water cooler 2.0. Like everything Internet it has no geographic boundaries. Instead its organized around the topics that connect us to our friends. That could be a sense of humor, an appreciation for sci-fi, or a mutual hobby like pastry making.

You’re probably nodding your head here – what I’m saying is nothing new, right? There is, however, a profound (to me, anyhow) realization that came with this water cooler analogy. Water cooler 1.0 was an asset to advertisers. It made the distribution channels valuable. It’s what ensured superbowl spots would sell for insane amounts of money. The advertiser wanted their ad to be talked about at the water cooler, so they hitched their message to the distribution system – the TV channel with the rights to air the Superbowl. The Superbowl itself was what drew the audience, true, but because of an essential monopoly on the distribution of that program – you couldn’t watch it live any other way – the channel commanded the high prices.

That’s all disappearing now. Now the content  – be it news, an MP3, or the next Subserviant Chicken – increasingly travels across media jumping from a blog post to a Facebook wall to a Twitter link to a Tosh.O clip (back on TV) to the Nightly News. While the content ricochets through these channels it also replicates, cloning itself along the way so that it can exist in multiple media at the same time.

The point is this: The distribution channel matters less and less because the information lives in multiple media simultaneously and our seeing it is more a function of our social graph than our tuning into any particular distribution channel. In fact, most of us are probably used to getting the same piece of content multiple times due to overlap in our media usage and social graphs.

What am I getting at?

If I were an advertiser looking to be talked about at water cooler 2.0 – absent real-world practicality for a moment – I would be less interested in sponsoring a particular channel or network. Instead I’d want to sponsor a piece of content itself. I’d want my message to travel with that content. On a basic level that’s what viral videos try to do, but they’re usually either shallow product shills or they leverage so much borrowed interest to be entertaining as to be forgettable (or irrelevant) as advertising.

What if instead of AMC selling the advertising space during Breaking Bad, the producers of Breaking Bad sold those rights and they traveled with the show and its video clips – on TV, across the internet, onto Facebook, through Twitter, etc.? It’s a little like the 360 contracts labels are offering their artists in the music business.

(And yes, I know, what I just stated would turn the entire entertainment industry upside down. That’s sort of happening anyway right? What I’m articulating may be wholly distasteful today but Spotify also would’ve been despised ten years ago too. Now the music industry is hailing it as a savior. Desperation has that effect.)

Dream with me now because I’m going into La La Land… What if a company could sponsor a piece of news or information? What if every time someone broadcast, tweeted, posted or shared a piece of information (e.g. “Emergency Session Held to Rescue Greece” – the top news item on CNN as I type this) a brand’s message rode along (e.g. “Having financial troubles, talk to Chuck!”). By hitching the message to the news, you’d get the highest possible exposure to the aggregate audience during that piece of information’s lifetime across all the media channels people carried it through. And because that piece of information is curated by social graphs, the advertiser would have an incentive to ensure their message was relevant to that news item and the people who would be tuned into it (otherwise they’d reduce the likelihood of it being further shared).

In a way, it’s almost like watermarking a piece of content metaphysically.

I understand that this is entirely impossible right now. But at one point a lot of science fiction and pie-in-the-sky thinking was dismissed as impossible and later became possible by wholly unforeseen technologies. Who knows what opportunities will be afforded down the line?

My point is this  – content is becoming more valuable because ultimately it is what is shared. The channel is less valuable because increasingly people have access to multiple channels which have redundancy of content built in due to their social graph curation and inevitable overlap.

That’s the opposite of the way the media industry views its value and organizes its revenue models right now. Even today, every social network start-up seeks members first as a way to legitimize itself as a business. With so many social media systems in play and with the content so easily transmittable between them, the channels themselves become less important with every new competitive network. The boundaries between media channels is porous and the distribution of content absolutely fluid. Exclusivity, the basic selling proposition of all media, is more or less unsustainable today with very few exceptions. The content, meanwhile, is much more valuable because it is ultimately what most people will seek out through whatever channel is most convenient at that moment.

What we do with that realization I’m unsure. We’re a long way from being able to act on it for technical, political and business reasons. But it feels like its going to be important to grapple with somewhere down the line.

The Influence of Apps on Business Models

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Apps are curious things. Had you described them to someone a decade ago, folks working in technology would’ve wondered what you were talking about. Ten years ago operating systems were continuing to swell with features and hard drives were being increased to carry the increasing load. Apps turned all that on its head.These small, simple, focused little pieces of software have not only become big business, they’ve influenced the very nature of business models themselves.

As with so many things in the world, business models too seem to be losing their middle ground. On the one end are the familiar conglomerates like GE or mega firms like Samsung which have many businesses impacting numerous industries. On the other end, there seems to be a crop of small, focused business ideas that look a lot like apps conceptually. The middle ground seems to be in decline even as the very large companies get very larger and small businesses multiply like replicating cells.

In old-school marketing jargon, the small app-like businesses which this post concerns itself with would’ve been characterized as simply having focus. The benefits of focus in business have been stated before, and some time ago. Al Ries wrote a great book, aptly titled Focus, which made a case for, well, focusing your business. His book was aimed at the larger companies that often get tangled up in line extensions and diversification only to watch their leadership positions erode.

Today’s app-like businesses are a bit different. The ones that have struck me have had simple premises. Interestingly, their websites tend to be equally simple, taking on that blog-like feel that is so popular now. When these businesses are online, their interfaces are small and elegant in a way reminiscent of Google’s search engine. When they’re offline the concepts of these businesses are equally simple. Here are two I recently encountered.

MOJO Motors

This web-based business starts with a simple premise – find the lowest used car prices online. To do it, you use a Google-like simple interface. A few entry points later and you’re looking at local dealers with low prices. It’s remarkably simple in premise and practice. Compare MOJO Motors to the 10,000 lb. gorilla in the space, AutoTrader. If
MOJO is Google, AutoTrader is a bit more like Yahoo!. Lots of options and bits and buttons and hard to know where to start.

Jugglebox

Now this is a nice idea. If you live in a city, chances are you change residence multiple times at shorter intervals of time. Jugglebox lets you rent environmentally-friendly moving boxes temporarily. They deliver the boxes, you pack ‘em and move ‘em, then they pick them up. They’ve even organized their offering around the size of your apartment (by bedrooms). The interface of the site is literally 1-2-3 simple. The benefits are also clear – environmental responsibility, simplicity, no boxes to store or destroy after your move, and its cheaper than buying all those moving supplies.

Today I think we’re all getting more and more used to having 20, 50 or even more little apps that each meet a discreet set of needs from travel planning to calorie counting. More and more we’re moving away from large software suites. Businesses that can do the same have the benefit of being approachable and a little familiar right out of the gate. Sure, the app-business-model won’t work in call categories but its interesting to see the effect apps, the software, are having on the way we think about other things like business models.

Apps seem to embody a simplicity that our ever more complex world seems to make us yearn for. How might this sense of elegant simplicity be applied to complex businesses today?

If you know of other app-like businesses out there, let me know. I’d love to keep an eye on them.

Does she ‘like’ me like me?

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Saw this on G+ today. Originally I wrote about 500 words to go with it. Then I read it again and decided it really speaks for itself.

It’s meant as humor, but its implications are profound.

The lexicon of social media, with its friends, followers and likes, has always been misleading. G+ just gave us each a way to make it official (without really knowing where we ourselves stand among our own online relationships).

I believe this is something worth being mindful of as businesses, brands, and people make assumptions based on the cheap, low-effort, low-risk, one-click connections that we’ve decorated with words that hint at a level of engagement much higher than I’m guessing the actual engagements often are.