Tag Archives: Facebook

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.

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.

G+ – great for users, bad for business?

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So G+ is pretty much where Twitter was in 2008. Everyone on it is talking about it and the blogosphere is lit up with speculation and inquiry. Hordes of people are convinced its an evolution of social networking and that Facebook’s days of dominance are numbered. Among the early adopters on there, it seems people are digging the interface, cleanliness and ‘circles’ friend bucketing. This is all great for users, but it poses a couple problems for businesses who might be interested in exploiting Web 2.0′s latest shiney object.

Circles, self-promoters and the Dunbar’s number.
Eventually the day will come when your G+ stream view can be set to default to one of your circles. That will sound the death toll for ‘number of friends’ or ‘number of likes’ as an indicator of influence. To anyone thinking about it, number of friends, followers or likes is already a moot point as most of us can’t really keep track of more that 150 people anyhow (the above referenced Dunbar’s number). Now, with circles, we can easily block out people we’ve followed and excommunicate them to a lower level in our social graph’s caste system. This will make it all the harder for self promoters to be heard (though no doubt they will continue to broadcast under the assumption they are) and will call into question whatever value is attributed to having 100,000 friends or followers. In fact, because of the current privacy settings, it will be hard for self-promoters to tell how many of their 100K followers are actually paying attention because you never know what circle you were tucked into. If you have 100K followers but only get a dozen comments to your postings, that should recalibrate your thinking a little. G+ endeavors to be a bit the anti-broadcasting tool to the megaphone Twitter has become. That’s part of G+’s appeal. It’s also going to apply some Darwinan pressure on self-promoters who will now have to work very hard not to be tucked into a circle that is rarely, if ever, peered into.

On the topic of Dunbar’s number I still question how important circles will be to the average, casual social media user. Sure, the early adopters find it great because we’re early adopters, therefore we sign up for everything and burden ourselves with accounts, friends, followers etc. But most Facebook users have a friend list nearer to that magical 150 number. That means their friends are not nearly as hard to manage as an early adopter’s are. Circles may be a killer app for early adopters but it may not be to the masses. Time will tell. Either way, for commercial/promotional interests, getting in front of people is harder on G+.

No ads, no games, no brands.
Friends aside, the other criticism levelled at the Facebook experience from power users is the clutter and noise. All those Zyngaesque games, brand sites, everyone ‘liking’ everything and getting spammed in their newsfeed. Some time ago I set up and entirely separate Facebook account to handle all my marketing-side stuff so that I wouldn’t have to clutter my personal account with the avalanche of unwanted racket all those ‘likes’ inevitably deliver. For those who sold out their personal FB accounts, G+ may be that alternative. To be on G+ now, I’m guessing, is to see what Facebook must have felt like to college kids back in its infancy before all of us professionals and soccer moms got on there. If people want this cleanliness as much as the tech-centric assume and mass adoption follows, how long will that honeymoon last?

The cleanliness of G+ is great in that is washes away a lot of the objectionable noise. And Google, with revenue a’plenty, doesn’t need to get advertisers into G+ with the urgency Facebook did in order to sustain its growth, so it may not sell out as fast as FB has. Then again, Google has always been about openness so is API-access and brand intrusion inevitable?

Regardless, that noise that power users detest also represents a lot revenue, business models and employment and blocking it out is, well, bad for business. If a major selling point of G+ is the clutter free environment, then Google will feel pressure by its userbase to not be heavy handed with advertising and e-chotchkies. This dynamic played out before when Google’s pristine search engine instantly made Yahoo! and its heavy interface feel old hat. Users abandoned Yahoo! in droves because they wanted to search for something, not to sift through a bunch of links and display ads. Utility reigned, as it often does online. Revenue declines followed and advertisers were forced to think about search advertising in a whole new way. That’s when Google pioneered its now-dominant model of online advertising. G+ could be equally disruptive to social networks. The assumption that brands are invited into a place extensibly set up for people to connect with one another is again being called into question. To some corporations accustomed to the lovey-dovey lexicon of social media it may be a splash of cold water that brands are not as liked as all those ‘like’ buttons would indicate. If the masses move to G+, they’ll be sending exactly that message.

Then again, going back to the casual user, I’m not as sure they are as upset by the noise and commercialization. Zynga games are very popular. Tens of thousands of people will ‘like’ a brand’s site to get a simple 50¢ coupon. Sweepstakes always draw entries and businesses like Groupon clearly indicate that people are willing to intermingle their personal and commercial-facing lives if there’s something in it for them. If you’re not on Facebook every hour of every day like power users, and you’re only managing 150 or so friends, the experience may not be all that bad. It may even be good.

Will G+ go mass or play niche?
That’s the one question I have about G+. Sure I find its feature set remarkably useful but then again, I find myself having the problems G+ was designed to solve. My wife does not have these problems. Nor do her friends. Nor do a number of my own friends who live their lives with social media playing a side role. So what about the rest of the population? Do they share the same frustrations? Its very easy for people working in social media and technology to assume so, but one of the greatest mistakes we humans make consistently is to assume everyone else is just like us.

If G+ does become a mass tool to challenge Facebook, it will at the least have a fragmentation effect. The social network pie was once just Friendster – it was the sole player (though in an admittedly smaller market at the time). Then it was split between Friendster and MySpace and then again between those two and Facebook. Now it might possibly again split between the original three and Google+. No one thinks much about it, but Friendster and MySpace still have audiences, albeit much smaller than before. Facebook would be the same way, undoubtedly retaining some of its population as other migrate on. People will continue to be fragmented across social networks (and often, maintaining more than one – as if there was extra time in life to do this).  This dynamic is a little like network TV getting pummeled by cable. Audiences scatter. Reaching them en masse becomes harder. Again, this is bad for business – at least from the marketing side – because now, like people managing multiple accounts, advertisers will have to address yet another social network using the same budget they’re already dividing into many, many pieces. That means less impact in any one place.

Conversely, if G+ goes the other way and remains a community of largely social media power users, then it will be ironic to me that the one cohort of people that seem easiest to reach online today – we clustering early adopters so willing to sign up for everything – will in supporting this technology, make ourselves a little bit harder to reach.

People with low Klout are highly important.

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I recently joined Klout (I’m usually a few paces behind the real early adopters… intentionally) to see what it was all about. I entered my Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and this blog. I came back as a ‘specialist’ with a supposedly strong core network. That’s all well and good. The more interesting thing happened when I looked at my Facebook friends’ Klout scores. Overwhelmingly they are in the single digits. Klout gives these folks feel-good titles like ‘Explorer’ but the real title is ‘marginal participant’.

By way of context for why this is important, I go to some lengths to keep my Facebook network focused on real-life friends while LinkedIn and Twitter are more professionally bent. This is both in terms of the content I share through these channels and the friends/followers/connections I seek out. In this sense, my Facebook friend set crosses all walks of life and does not index heavy for tech/social/net types (unlike my Twitter account which is stuffed with them because of the nature of Twitter and the type of people attracted to it – you know who you are you self-promoters you!).

So while this exercise is a far cry from a scientific sampling, when my Facebook friends consistently come back with very low Klout scores, it does make me wonder if the divide between the tech/social/net types who build these various applications and tools and the average users they think might adopt them, isn’t more significant than sometimes assumed. To look at Klout’s site, online influence is something really important to measure. Influencers are certainly desirable to advertisers. Most people, though, probably don’t care about Klout or clout or being or knowing an influencer.

(I also question the very methodology used for measuring influence online, but that’s a whole other post.)

I’ve observed a similar gap with the pervasiveness of the iPad. Taking a commuter train into NYC, it seems about one in ten people now have iPads. However, when I was in Washington D.C. a few weeks ago, I saw only a handful as is often the case when I’m traveling elsewhere. I don’t question that people are buying them – the sales figures are what they are – but I think opinions of market growth based on observing people in the metro NYC area are somewhat skewed by that rather unique and novelty-obsessed niche.

In my opinion the one recent social media rising star that has most successfully made the leap out of the echo chamber  of the tech/social/net set and become a tool for everyone is Groupon. It’s worth noting here now that Groupon isn’t really about ‘connecting’ the way Klout, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Posterous, et. al. all circle around that word either enabling it or measuring it.

Groupon instead offers something useful that people want – savings. That’s interesting. It might be that the next wave of successful business influenced by social-technology won’t see the technology as the ends itself, but rather the means to offer something lots of people find useful. Like coupons.

Meanwhile the tech sector keeps cranking out new ways for us to connect online. My big question is, how dissatisfied are most people with what they already have? I know early adopters need a constant novelty fix, but I don’t get the sense my low-Klout Facebook friends have too many gripes with what they have. Sure, people will be curious and sign-up – there’s a low barrier to entry for these things – but will they stick around and use it? That’s the big question.

And now of course there’s the hullabaloo around Google+ to look into. Yup, yet another account. Right now, given that Google has said upfront that the invites went out to people with ‘strong social graphs’ I’m not surprised to find it full of my usual industry peers (nice to see you again at yet another URL folks!). The big question is, will those low-Klout friends of mine find it worth either moving camp from Facebook to Google+ or be willing to manage both sites? Either avenue is a lot of work. The big draw of Google+ is the ability to create overlapping friend sets for sharing. That may well be a useful app, but if it turns out to be valuable to average folks, can’t Facebook just replicate it? Technological advantage is very, very short lived these days. If I’ve already set up shop on Facebook, I can’t see pulling up stakes for that feature set alone. What, and wait for all my friends to join? And port over all those pictures and notes? And what about my Farmville (which while technies may despise it, is popular among many people)?

For me, the real test Google+ and others is whether my friends with the lousy Klout scores bother to not just sign up but to regularly participate – like they do on Facebook. Attracting social media fanboys is easy. We’re early adopters who are willing to tolerate having all these accounts and constantly switching from one technology to another.

The people with no Klout (and who, frankly, don’t care about having clout online) are the other 99%+ of the population that Facebook and Groupon continue to grab and largely satisfy as far as I can see. It’s these folks, characterized by low numbers of friends, low numbers of comments, low numbers of posts and low Klout scores, that set the high bar for being the next game-changing player in the space.

Groupon seems to get this. I’m not so sure some of the other ventures popping up do.