Online Marketing Takeaways

How LinkedIn Can Monetize the Social Web

Social Networking Sites (SNS) are growing faster than Alec Baldwin’s midsection or Kanye mentions on twitter.  Facebook alone is so ubiquitous that it has 300 million users and I had to convince my mom not to join so I could have a little space of my own. Point is, human social networks are forming online.

Why not? Free tools that allow us to socialize, stalk ex’s, and share experiences? But Facebook and Twitter have real costs to keep the sites up and provide that functionality. For social networks to keep the momentum, they need to find ways to generate revenue. Could LinkedIn hold the secret to creating these streams, even if they themselves aren’t maximizing it?

Let’s consider a few facts (at least what suffices for facts these days):

• Advertising revenue seems to be the only tried and true model. Facebook is estimated to make $550 million in 2009. A lopsided $475 mil of that is expected to come from advertising revenue.

• Twitter, the darling of social society, is still mulling ideas for revenue models. And they’re clear to not rule out advertising.

• LinkedIn, the Jan of the virtual Brady family, is reportedly in the black via their three-prong revenue approach.

Although ads are part of LinkedIn’s revenue stream, it’s a fairly benign placements that don’t interfere with the user experience. LinkedIn also makes money through enhanced user accounts and recruiting products. But are they missing a golden opportunity?

What asset does LinkedIn have that the other social sites don’t? Robust graphs of connections between people. The value isn’t the profiles it contains, but rather the grid of connections that help you understand how you’re linked to other people. And because it’s a professional site, people are more apt to link into a wider graph of people than say Facebook, where more personal information is stored.

But in my opinion, LinkedIn does not leverage this asset. Their widgets allow for you to show connections keyed on specific companies or to link to the public profile of the individual, however the connection to them is hid behind a login or at least one click away.

What if an API or widget allowed developers to leverage the social graphs stored within LinkedIn to help encourage peer-to-peer recommendations or conversations?

Examples:

• You go to a realtor site where you have normally look at pictures to see who looks like someone you can work with. But with the super-duper LinkedIn integration, you can see how you’re connected to each realtor. Oh, Sally knows my friend Jake? Well maybe I’ll work with Sally.

• Or you want a new dentist and can run a reverse-lookup that brings all your friends dentists (that they self-disclose) back in a search result. Oh man, Joanna has nice teeth, I’m going with her dentist.

• Take it a step further where Facebook Connect could be cross-bred with the LinkedIn API so a user could post a request to know what insurance people use not only to their Facebook friends, but reach two or three degrees beyond.

If LinkedIn loosens up their API access policies (right now they have set widgets with the ability to request new ones) and developers of other sites look at creative ways to integrate the social graph, the could be an additional revenue model for LinkedIn (licensing) and online networks. Huh, Reid? Can it be done?

Week in Review (8-21-09)

Man, stuff always happens when I take day off from work. Last time I took a long weekend, the Yahoo/MSFT deal was announced. Today we have twitter changes, analysts quitting and more. Here's my quick take on the events you should read more about (there's plenty of conversation out there).

• Twitter knows where you are: Twitter announced it will make twitter location-aware. Developers will be the first exposed to use before it rolls out to the web platform. So soon you'll be able to follow tweets of those around you even if you're not following them. Don't worry, the default will be to not disclose your location for those of us who like to go off the grid.

• Twitter for suits: Twitter co-founder Biz also let loose that they will be providing commercial accounts for twitter in the near future. I believe this is a great step (as a brand marketer), but I'm guessing the folks at Co-Tweet weren't as thrilled. Or maybe it'll float all boats.

• Bing licenses Wolfram (Bingram? Sounds vulgar): Not quite a merger, but Wolfram did license some of it's curated data to Bing. I think this does help Bing get closer to the decision engine it wishes to be. Don't take your eyes off Wolfram-Alpha. I think this ice cube is melting slowly into the greater waters of search. And it's flavor will be distinct (okay, I've done that metaphor to death. Sorry Anil).

• Jeremiah's Excellent Adventure: Forrester Analyst and social icon Jeremiah Owyang announced Thursday that he's leaving Forrester. His friends and followers are having fun guessing what he'll do next. My bet is he'll do a 180 and go back to evangelizing sandwich boards and billboard advertising. Bringing it back old skool. Best of luck to him. I hope the timing was coincidental and I had nothing to do with it.

Those are a few tasty items to nosh on. Have a good weekend.

WolframAlpha: Inside the Launch

In today's world of free content one micro-url click away, I feel the strange need to apologize for linking you directly to this article from Technology Review magazine. You see, it's not free. However, I strongly encourage you to pick up a physical copy at your local Barnes&Noble or Borders. First off, the content is great and this article provides a deeper look into the motivation of Stephen Wolfram in creating a new curated search engine, WolframAlpha. Secondly, once in awhile we all need to detach from the digital and embrace an old pleasure of just paging through a magazine.

As digital marketers, we need to understand the evolution of search. And 2009 has been a very interesting year so far.

• Microsoft relaunches Bing to breath life into their search efforts
• GoogleLabs releases GoogleSquared in a rather timely fashion
• Mahalo tacts a different direction with human-powered search and a different monetization model
• And maybe most interestingly, WolframAlpha makes a stab at a fully-curated content with a heavy-dose of egghead included

If you find yourself saying "Who cares? Wolfram can't compete with Google.", you need to open your eyes to the possibilities. Underlying features of WolframAlpha (curation, mathematics, presentation) will influence the direction of the big three (Google, Yahoo, Bing). After all, Google co-founder Sergey Brin interned at Wolfram before cashing in.

So do yourself a favor and read it. I won't summarize it all here partly because you should read it entirely, and partly because it's a nice Saturday afternoon and I'm not sitting at my computer much longer.

Additionally, Firefox has a nice add-on that allows wolframalpha results to appear alongside your Google results. Test drive it.

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Study Summary: An Empirical Analysis of Social Media in Rural Life

Do folks in rural America “poke” or “superpoke” their online friends differently than those in urban centers? Maybe with a pitchfork while listening to a little Shania Twain. Well, that’s not necessarily a fair synopsis of the study the University of Illinois at Urbana – Champaign published last year, however it does get to the heart to the question. Do rural and urban users have different numbers of friends and stronger/weaker bonds?

Technology has often manifested differently in rural versus urban settings. When the telephone was introduced, it was believed the device would reduce rural isolation. However, small towns would often own a single phone and share it in a central location. And don’t think it was price-driven. It simply fit their culture.

Rural settings have inherent differences to urban settings. As the study states, “…rural life is fundamentally a social setting…Furthermore a rural location brings with it a number of other correlated social indicators: income, education level, race, religious affiliation, socioeconomic class, etc.”

The study set out to see how social networks differ in this rural setting.

The Methodology

Rural areas are defined as “a town with less than 2,500 people, or an open area (read:farm)”.  The study focused on MySpace.com, which was still the most widely used social network during the 2007 sample period. They looked at 2000 rural and 2000 urban users by zip code, which was the independent variable. They looked at usage (friends, comments, relationships), gender, privacy and physical distance (avg distance between friends, friendship strength).

The hypotheses going into the study based of literature review of previous technology introductions (telephone and internet) were:

1. Rural users will have far fewer friends and comments than urban users.
2. Females will account for a greater proportion of rural users than urban users.
3. Rural users will set their profiles to private at higher rates than urban users.
4. Rural users’ friends will live closer than urban users’ friends.
5. As compared to urban users, rural users’ distribution of friends will preference strong ties over weak ones.

The Results

·        Basically the hypotheses were correct. Except #5.

1.      Rural users will have far fewer friends and comments than urban users. [Rural users had one third the amount of friends as urban users. However, they have close, active relationships with the same percentage of 4% as their urban counterparts.]

2.      Females will account for a greater proportion of rural users than urban users. [Rural men see the internet as a communication medium most appropriate for women.]

3.      Rural users will set their profiles to private at higher rates than urban users. [Rural users view the internet not as a place to meet new people, but to communicate within existing relationships.]

4.      Rural users’ friends will live closer than urban users’ friends. [Again, if you’re not looking to meet new people, you’re going to take offline friendships online.]

5.      As compared to urban users, rural users’ distribution of friends will preference strong ties over weak ones. [This was the only hypothesis not confirmed. Turns out country mouse and city mouse both like a few close friends and a majority of superficial connections.]

Takeaways:

• As a marketer, you already tend to segment by demographics such as gender, income, and race. It is important to think about segmenting by rural vs urban geography if your target audience reflects healthy proportions of both. Rural people comprise roughly one-quarter of the U.S. population. Larger than senior citizens (age).

• When addressing rural marketers in a social media context, try building custom experiences that lend to the rural mindset. If they have trust issues going beyond their local network, build in incremental trust. Don’t ask a lot of them immediately. Let the relationship grow.

With deference to Zsa-Zsa, “Dah-ling I love you, but give me Park Avenue”.

References:

Study PDF

Gesundheit! The science behind viral marketing. A Facebook Study.

Conventional wisdom says the tipping point is achieved by reaching a few influential clients or "fans" to help get your viral momentum going and create your deluge of new Facebook fans. But a study conducted by Stanford University last year, suggests this is not the case. And it may influence how you should plan your Facebook fan page launch.

The Methodology

The study used data from Facebook to empirically assess the conditions under which large-scale viral reach occurs within a social networking service. Using existing models around epidemiological contagion and adoption of network-based features (stick with me, I don’t understand it all either), the study compared the patterns of Social Network Systems (SNS) to those existing models. And the results might surprise you.

Most of the existing models are based on the assumption that a small number of influencers (nodes) trigger a large chain-reaction. They’re your Typhoid Mary in this viral equation. This assumption is pervasive in our infancy of social media understanding. See many of the social media gurus/rockstars/ninjas and you’ll see articles about identifying your influencers and focusing on them.

In Facebook context, the assumption is if you have a few key fans, their actions such as “fanning” you brand page or taking an action such as commenting, posting notes, etc. will reach their Facebook feed and passively reach their social graph (one interesting aside is the realization that a key variable is the Facebook algorithm that determines what does/doesn’t appear in someone’s feed). And the power of both the originator (actor) and their vast friend network will create a cascading affect on the friends (followers) and their friends.

The Results

• More big fishes in one big pond: The majority of fans occur in a single cluster. 14-18% of the individuals in the cluster are chain initiators. This is larger than generally assumed in theoretical literature. Just because a few people have gazillions of friends, doesn’t mean they’re that much more important.
  
• More initiators with shorter viral impact: Theoretical literature generally assumes that a global cascade begins with a small number of people that reach a series of levels of “infected” recipients. The study showed a larger number of initiation points that have short chains and eventually merge.
• Facebook holds the key: One surprise is the variable that most impacted the ability to increase viral reach is the ability to appear in the friend’s feed. This is the algorithm that Facebook controls determining what activity you see from your friends.

 Takeaways:

• If your objective is to maximize reach with your Fan Page, you likely need to orchestrate a marketing/communications plan with your launch. This means paid advertising in addition to just letting your clients or email list know you launched. You need a broad level of initiators to get the cluster going.

• Post-launch activities are important to kick-start new clusters. Add new value-propositions to fan you, so that you reach a different mindset of new fans. Maybe your rollout was around having access to free widgets or exclusive offers. Subsequent campaigns could center on the employment value-prop or your charitable initiatives.

Video Presentation

Oath of Digital Service

Let me readily say off the bat that this is a bit smarmy, but please take it a bit tongue-in-cheek. Let's face it, the recent info about 10% of twitterers making 90% of the content, reinforces that many of us are consumed with ricocheting tweets amongst ourselves. We need to step outside the bubble and re-acknowledge that social media is just one more tool in the toolkit. Let's refocus and re-affirm our oath as digital marketers to utilize the digital medium as one part of our strategic mix to reach our objectives.

Thusly, I've created the Oath of Digital Service. Please recite it out loud and purge your soul.

1. I pledge to never refer to myself as a guru, rock star or maven. This simply identifies me as delusional.

2. I pledge to never tweet the food I'm eating (unless I am, in fact, a food critic), that I'm waiting for a flight, or I'm hanging out with another twitterer (namedropping their twitter name). There is no way I'm that interesting.

3. I pledge to not wait to be the first to retweet the mashable or Jeremiah tweet without reading it and determining if it is interesting.

4. I pledge to review my followers and, in good conscious, block careerists looking for re-follows and spammers. No matter how it affects my follower count.

5. I pledge to mention the source of information and not ignore the retweet to suggest I was the first to hear of something.

God bless all of us. Each and every sad, obsessed, twitter-glued one of us.

Case Summary: Rudder.com Emails Client Data

Let me first admit to getting this one wrong. When the news started circulating twitter earlier today, (read details at that link) I tweeted...

and I linked to a flaptor chart showing a trending conversation around it (albeit early). Well, the digital flood of tweets never happened. Which is good, because I hate to see any marketer piled upon and us avid twitters tend to latch onto any example. But there are some lessons to be learned here.

The lessons I point out are more about the PR element in this social media age after the event began. What led up to the error, is best left in the CEO's explanation.

Lesson 1: Listen & Act. I admit it's hard to say when it's the appropriate time to engage with your community. But, brands need to be aware that the timeline has shrunk for when your community expects information. I caught wind of this around noon Central Time, but as I write this (7pm), their site has no information regarding the incident. Neither the home page or "trust and security" tab. The CEO just commented on the Mashable article a few minutes ago telling their side of the story. It was a nicely written comment (below) and I admittedly don't know what they communicated to their clients through other mediums. But probably makes sense to post information where their audience is looking; website, twitter, somewhere.

This Nikhil Roy the Founder & CEO of Rudder.com

We at Rudder sincerely apologize for accidentally sending the financial updates of up to 732 of our users to one another this morning. We have identified the problem, assessed the full scope of the issue and have implemented measures to ensure that it will never happen again.

Although nothing in the email would enable recipients to access bank accounts, withdraw funds or transfer money, our users’ peace of mind is of utmost importance to us. Therefore, we will provide affected users with a subscription to an Identity Theft Monitoring service, paid for by us.

In addition, we promise to work tirelessly, from here on out, to restore user confidence.

We have set up a hotline for concerned users to call – (877) 730-4914 extension 0.

Here’s a summary of what happened:
On May 18th, 2009 we made a change to our utility that generates custom email updates for each individual user. On the morning of May 19th, 2009, the first time the emails were sent out after the change, instead of sending out emails to each individual user, a bug in the utility caused it to append several email addresses together. The issue was detected early and subsequently all email communications were stopped. However, incorrect emails were sent to users whose email addresses started with either a number or the letters “a” or “b”. In total, emails were sent out for 732 users (less than 2% of Rudder’s user base). We’d like to reiterate that Rudder has “read only” access to your account balances and transactions. We do not store account credentials like user names, passwords, or your personal information like name, address or social security number.

To be clear this incident was not the result of a security breach, nor was any third-party hacker involved.

We greatly appreciate the generosity that the Rudder user community has shown us thus far, and for those of you who choose to continue managing your finances with us, we will go above and beyond the call of duty in every aspect of our business in order to regain your confidence.

Anyone who wishes to cancel their account and delete all associated data may do so here https://www.rudder.com/settings/.

The online banking industry itself (including companies large and small) has been grappling very publicly with issues of security and privacy for many years.

More than anything, we hope that users do not let this incident discourage them from pursuing the benefits of managing their finances online, regardless of which provider they may use. Improving Americans’ financial health has been our mission since day one, and we continue to believe that this new generation of personal finance management applications, including Rudder, have the potential to change the world for the better.

Lesson #2: Know your audience. Online financial management, especially where you have to have some saavvy as to the understanding of aggregating your accounts, assumes some technical profecciency. I was suprised there was no active twitter presence. If nothing else to acknowledge that they are aware of an issue and working on it.

Here's their (I assume) twitter account...

And their facebook page...

Okay, well at least they have a blog (that I had to sift through tweets to find)...

Lesson 3 is contained in that blog post. Be transparent and open. The problem was already public news. Take control of the story and be genuine. I think they did a nice job of this. However, you still need to post the information where people will look (site, facebook, twitter, etc).

Good luck Rudder. I hope you can overcome this.

More reading:

Mashable

TechCrunch

Open Letter To Twitter: What business wants

Okay, I twittered this earlier, but was thinking about it more. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone foreshadowed there plan to evolve twitter into a monetized business platform. So I sez to myself, I sez "self, time to get your wish list in". Because Lord knows one of my 10 blog followers is Biz, right? (BTW Biz, I plan to return your monogram, gold-plated, collectors edition of The Golden Girls: Season 3)

So anyway, here's my request for features. Let me reinforce that although I have a paying day job at a national brand, these are solely the views of my night job of drinking Bordeaux and blogging.

Caveats aside, here you go...

1. Authenticate: Much like the email industry went through a few years ago, I want to know that a twitter profile has gone through some scrutiny. Seriously, I'd have a lot more followers if I didn't have scruples and block the MLM crowd and the porn spammer. You know Aleesha with 25 followers and following 3,987 people and 5 updates. Create a more difficult threshold to prove you are legit. Maybe use OpenID to tie your Twitter account to (ending in prepositional phrase).
2. Integrate:Give me enterprise license that let's me coordinate across multiple profiles (a la cotweet) and unlimited access to my stream downloads. I want that API data whenever I want it, for as long as I want it, and combined with any system I want it (salesforce.com, Omniture, whatevs). I know there are parts of this, but I want a single source provider. Please don't make me go through multipe procurement processes.
3. DEEP Analytics: I want the social graph. Yep, that's key. I don't want to just know who tweets and who reads that feed, but I want their significance. I want to define what significance means, but I want the dials in place to set the scoring algorithm and your system to calculate it. Please make it simple too. I'm not learn'ED. I'm good with a knife though and have a strong back.
4. Prep it for bartering: Yep, if I know who's got clout amongst their peers, and Jeremiah's social web suggests consumers are going to barter with self-disclosure in banded groups, I want to be able to wheel and deal directly. That means somewhat private DM functionality with sub-groups.

Okay, that's not much to ask for. And if you provide some combination of this, us marketers will likely buy.

And now off to finish Season 3. That Estelle Getty, she's such sassy one.

(flickr.com: oh you)

Case Study: Land Rover & Twitter

Recently, Land Rover began a national ad campaign featuring the use of Twitter. Here's the breakdown and my perspective. Apologies in advance to the advertiser/agencies involved as I'm gleaning my info about objectives and tactics from the blogs/trades. Please comment if you can give more information.

Basics:

• As part of the 2010 Land Rover release, LR provide key influencers early reveals of the 2010 features.
• They then encouraged the influencers to hashtag their comments/reviews with #lrny (now switched to #landrover post-autoshow)
• The hashtag was then promoted in traditional offline advertising (billboards, taxi signs, etc) in NY (during the auto show)
• Now the interesting part...the agency (Y&R/Wunderman) used TwittAd, an agency in Iowa, to pay it's network of twitterers to use the Land Rover branded background for their twitter page AND to tweet about the land rover and use the hashtag (someone correct me if I'm wrong, as I'm trying my best to pull from other sources)

My Take:
Look, I love the use of the hashtag to extend the conversation about the campaign. Very smart for the auto-show, and also good for any legacy exposure. As a matter of fact, I think I blogged about it a weeks ago. Integrating this into the other campaign elements (billboard, etc) is smart. You use your traditional adverstising to create awareness, and the social element (hashtag) to hand the conversation over to the consumers. Kudos!

However, I'm split on the twittad campaign. I think the display type adverstising using the twitterer's background is inevitable and fine. It doesn't really interrupt the user's experience. I do however challenge the pay-for-tweet aspect (again, keep me honest Land Rover/Y&R/Twittad as I may be misreading the blogosphere with it's disdain for editorial or fact checking. Hey, I"m guilty too). The value of tweets is the honest and transparant POV of the twitterers. Those that participate will likely loose followers in the long run.

I do applaud the pro-active integration of all involved in the campaign. Please, provide your two cents.