The New York Times had a great story today on the state of mobile social networks. The bad news for the US? Most of the fun is currently happening overseas.

Social Networking Moves to the Cellphone

The prize, as these start-ups see it, is the 3.3 billion cellphone subscribers, a number that far surpasses the total of Internet users. The advantage over computer-based communities, they believe, is the ability to know where a cellphone is, thanks to global positioning satellites and related technologies.

I was chatting with the wicked-smart analyst Christine Perey earlier this week, who wrote a very thorough report on Mobile Social Networks. One of the most interesting things she shared with me was that by her estiamtes there were 100MM unique users of Mobile Social Networks today. Based on her predictive models, we could see grow to 200 to 300 million by 2009.

What is clear from speaking with Christine and from the NYT article:
- We are poised for explosive growth in this space
- The US is way behind Europe and Asia, and the domestic carriers are slow to upgrade, standardize and offer new services
- The US carriers are holding back potentially billions of dollars in unrealized market value by not allowing 3rd party data access, applications (natively) and not upgrading service (speed)

I will be blogging more about Christine's report when I receive the executive summary.

We will be discussing Mobile Social Networks in great detail at the Mobile Communities Unconference 3/20 in Palo Alto. Early bird registration ends today (3/7/08).
http://mcu2008.eventbrite.com/

TechCrunch has news that Facebook and Google have joined the DataPortability Workgroup.

The DataPortability Workgroup is actively working to create the ‘DataPortability Reference Design’ to document the best practices for integrating existing open standards and protocols for maximum interoperability (and here’s the key area) to allow users to access their friends and media across all the applications, social networking sites and widgets that implement the design into their systems.

It is an important step that Facebook has entered the conversation, but until there is an "export" tab in my Facebook profile, I'll remain a bit skeptical.

On the other hand, if the major social network and online media / search sites adopt a common social graph standard, the fun really starts. Porting profile and friends from network to network is a problem with limited scope... frankly, not very exciting. What I find really exciting is the possibility of being able to port and mashup content, reputation and recommendations from multiple sources.

Regardless, this is an important first step to the "majors" at the table.

What do you think? Especially the folks who host communities for their organizations: How does this impact you?

There is a fascinating conversation playing out on TechCrunch about "guerrilla" tactics for launching viral videos into the upper echelon of YouTube and other social media sites.

In his post "The Secret Strategies Behind Many “Viral” Videos", Dan Greenburg offers a glimpse at his PR companies' secret sauce for pushing video viral.

Have you ever watched a video with 100,000 views on YouTube and thought to yourself: “How the hell did that video get so many views?” Chances are pretty good that this didn’t happen naturally, but rather that some company worked hard to make it happen – some company like mine.

The techniques range from general social media best practices for format (length, title convention, etc), to the downright icky (faking conversations, BS personas, ratings manipulation, etc.).

The truth is that Dan is dishing techniques that many agencies have been using for months (if not years).

I would encourage you to read the article, as well as the follow up piece "Follow Up To The Viral Video Post: Dan Wants Another Word" by Michael Arrington.

A lot of the discussion in the comments centers on the ethical issues of brands and agencies engaging in these types of activities to push content and to shape public taste. No one seems to be asking questions about the responsibilities of the host community. Why is YouTube so easy to game? Shouldn't the site be able to monitor and ding patterns of behaviour that are obviously manipulative? If you can't trust ranking and ratings on these sites, why bother having them?

As you may have heard this week, both Facebook and MySpace launched their new ad networks.

MySpace is all about hypertargeting, and Facebook builds on hypertargeting with the addition of letting members "fan" (not friend) brand via their brand pages.

Jeremiah Owyang does an excellent job (as usual) of making sense of all of this:

"Both Facebook and MySpace have launched profile and network targeted advertising and marketing products. As they both use member interests and the communities which they are part of, trust continues to become key in adoption as information is passed along the network. The sheer size of MySpace’s member base, as well as the thriving local business membership will lead to success. Facebook, which brings a unique solution evolves advertisements to endorsements and encourages members to subscribe to a brand in what we are calling “Fan-Sumers” (an evolution of the consumer). As consumers share their affinities, brands can advertise using trusted social relationships."

Read Jeremiah's full post here:
MySpace and Facebook launch new Advertising products, why Hyper Targeting, Social Ads and rise of the “Fan-Sumer” matter to brands

This is sure to be a topic of discussion at the Marketing & Online Communities conference tomorrow.

Google announced OpenSocial this week, which, as my ForumOne colleague Kurt describes is:

a set of web API's that will let developers write applications that plug into any participating social network (launch partners include Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Flixter, Friendster, Orkut, and others).

This announcement effectively does for the web what FaceBook's API platform did for their single social network, allowing developers to tap into:
Profile Information (user data)
Friends Information (social graph)
* Activities (things that happen, News Feed type stuff)

This is going to shake things up a bit, I imagine. Facebook has been getting a lot o attention lately, and should be given kudos for creating the best social experience to date (within their walled garden), and a rich API (that works within their walled garden), but to me, Facebook has always felt like I was looking at the Internet through a keyhole. OpenSocial acknowledges that there is a much larger space to play in, and many playgrounds.

Anil Dash sums facebook up this way:

...Facebook is part of the web. Think of the web, of the Internet itself, as water. Proprietary platforms based on the web are ice cubes. They can, for a time, suspend themselves above the web at large. But over time, they only ever melt into the water. And maybe they make it better when they do.

Marc Andresen has done a lot of writing over the last few days about the implications of OpenSocial, and how this will affect social networking experiences and apps longer term. This is highly recommended reading:

Open Social: a new universe of social applications all over the web
Report from the front: Tonight's launch of Open Social

I haven't got my head around exactly what this all means... but it's big. Big, as in, I'm up at 4am on a Saturday morning, and I can't sleep because I keep thinking about the promise of a future Social Network made up of the smaller, disconnected pieces we have today.

There is a great article in the NYTs (required registration) about the decline of traditional media and currently "non-traditional" marketing practices that are emerging. The article focuses on Nike's shifting advertising spend and new marketing tactics.

Last year, Nike spent just 33 percent of its $678 million United States advertising budget on ads with television networks and other traditional media companies. That’s down from 55 percent 10 years ago, according to the trade publication Advertising Age.

“We’re not in the business of keeping the media companies alive,” Mr. Edwards says he tells many media executives. “We’re in the business of connecting with consumers.”

Mr. Edwards may be more blunt than most. But many large marketers are taking huge chunks of money out of their budgets for traditional media and using the funds to develop new, more direct interactions with consumers — not only on the Internet, but also through in-person events.

I think we will be hearing a lot of conversations along these lines at the upcoming Marketing & Online Communities conference.

The latest issue of Wired has a an article that takes a not so flattering view of Second Life, and of several large brands that have tried to open up shop in the virtual world. The title says it all: "How Madison Avenue Is Wasting Millions on a Deserted Second Life"

One of the things you never see in Second Life is a genuine crowd — largely because the technology makes it impossible. ... Created by an underfunded startup using a physics engine that's now years out of date, Second Life is made up of thousands of disconnected "regions" (read: processors), most of which remain invisible unless you explicitly search for them by name. ... And even the popular islands are never crowded, because each processor on Linden Lab's servers can handle a maximum of only 70 avatars at a time; more than that and the service slows to a crawl, some avatars disappear, or the island simply vanishes.

The article goes on to cite several examples of failed or failing storefronts, including coke, H&R block and Toyota. The author chalks the willingness by marketers to experiment with second life to the fact that traditional marketing techniques are essentially failing.

"A terror has gripped corporate America," says Joseph Plummer, chief research officer at the Advertising Research Foundation, an industry think tank. Plummer has been around Madison Avenue since the early '60s, when modern advertising techniques materialized. "The simple model they all grew up with" — the 30-second spot, delivered through the mass reach of television — "is no longer working. And there are two types of people out there: a small group that's experimenting thoughtfully, and a large group that's trying the next thing to come through the door."

It's pretty easy to come up with examples of silly ideas (at least in hindsight) or poor execution. What about presences in second life that actually work? Before I left Autodesk, I was shown what I still consider the best application of the technology that I've seen to date. Warning: It's a pretty modest and practical application.

Crescendo Design, an architectural firm in Wisconsin, is using SL to model their home designs, experiment with renewable energy, and walk clients through potential designs. The demo I got about a year ago just blew me away. You can screenshots of their work in SL here.

The interesting thing about Second Life residents is that they REALLY love it. I'm not sure that it's possible for real world brands to come inworld have a meaningful interaction with the residents without changing somethign about their real world product or marketing formula (ex: coke machines in second life?!?).

What do you think? Have you seen examples of companies large or small using having success doing business in a virtual world?

In the latest issue of THE HUB magazine, Bradley Kay has an interesting article called "Micro-Communities" (.pdf here).

The article is written from the perspective of a marketer, and for a marketing audience. In the article, Kay suggests that the giants of social networking could learn a few things from master hotelier Ian Schrager.

Using Schrager's hotel Delano in West Palm Beach, Kay says:

If the Delano has taught us anything over the last 10 years, it’s that less is more and to maintain exclusivity you must first create demand through desire and intrigue.

He says that the large social networking players (MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) should stop serving anyone tha wanders in the door and should

be considering new ways to close or limit access and create specialized content for “micro-communities.”

Kay goes on to suggest that Micro-Communities offer marketers:

the ability to drive sales through targeted offers; conduct inexpensive R&D by allowing users access to online prototypes of products, packaging or marketing materials; and provide invaluable information about the nuances of specific audiences and how to communicate with them most effectively.

I thought Kay's article was thought provoking, but it left me with a feeling a little uncomfortable. If marketers are allowed to "exploit these platforms", as Kay puts it, will the community experience suffer to the point of losing all value?

What do you think? Can marketers participate in a niche community in a meaningful way?

Seth Godin calls "Online Community Organizer" a "job of the future" in his latest post.

It would help if that person understood technology, at least well enough to know what it could do. They would need to be able to write. But they also have to be able to seduce stragglers into joining the group in the first place, so they have to be able to understand a marketplace, do outbound selling and non-electronic communications. They have to be able to balance huge amounts of inbound correspondence without making people feel left out, and they have to be able to walk the fine line between rejecting trolls and alienating the good guys.

Since there's no rule book, it would help to be willing to try new things, to be self-starting and obsessed with measurement as well.

I've been contacted by both job seekers and those looking to fill the type of position Seth describes steadily for the past 4 months.

We even have some of those positions posted here

The fact that main stream marketers like Seth are starting to talk about the value of online community and social media is nothing but good news for the industry (such as it is)

Nielsen/NetRatings is dropping page views as a key site ranking metric, PaidContent.com and the AP report:

Now, news that Nielsen/NetRatings is planning a major shift in web metrics, moving, according to the AP, from page views as the key metric to time spent on a site.

This new approach will likely shake up current rankings, for instance:

...under the current system, AOL ranked sixth in total page views for May but first in total minutes: 25 billion. Using total time, Google drops to fifth from third in page views. (The reason given is Google’s mission to send people off quickly for answers; that’s probably true but ignores Google’s other mission now, which is to keep people engaged on its own sites.)

In our Online Community Metrics 2007 study (to be released in August), we found that page views were far and away the most collected and reported metric. If general confidence in this metric starts to erode, what will take its place? Is "Time spent on site" the most meaningful metrics for communities?

The other big issue is with online advertising. Most sites are using page views to correlate "impressions", similar to traditional marketing campaigns. If page views become meaningless, who do marketers communicate value back to clients?

File this under "huh?"

JupiterResearch released a report this week (press release here) that essentially says online communities (including social networks) have little effect on influencing online sales.

It seems unlikely that this would be the case. A more likely scenario is that the study was unable to specifically attribute influence back to communities, which does not necessarily mean that there is actually "little influence".

From the press release promoting the report:

The effectiveness of social and community sites, like MySpace, in driving retail sales is still emerging. Because 53 percent of online shoppers go directly to the retailer website while they are shopping, in contrast to the only three percent utilizing blogs, it’s clear online shoppers continue to seek out direct access to locations where they can purchase a product or the source of that product when researching and purchasing both online and off-line.

Sure, it makes sense that you would actually buy a product from a web site that is actually selling it. Most bloggers I know aren't a consumer goods storefronts. I'm not sure what the point is about "only 3% using blogs". Also, I think one component of influence that may have been missed here is the role of communities on consumer good awareness.

“From a branding and advertising perspective, social and community sites are garnering a great deal of influence online,” explained Patti Freeman Evans, Senior Analyst with JupiterResearch. “But when researching a product online, shoppers are looking for fundamental information, not entertainment or social interaction. In the end, the consumer is still interested in convenience and efficiency and social and community sites are just not that efficient.”

I'm puzzled by this statement. I would hazard a guess that the majority of product reviews online are from a "community" source, whether it be member reviews at Amazon or more informal reviews from enthusiast communities, like automotive message boards. Most people I know start with online reviews when researching a purchase.

I was really interested to see the results of this study, but the content offered as a teaser in the press release is not inspiring me to rush right out and read the full report.

Danah Boyd has written a thought-provoking essay on what seems to be an emerging class division between the My Space and Facebook communities. The essay is based on Danah's personal observations in the field over the last 6-9 months.

She states:

Hegemonic American teens (i.e. middle/upper class, college bound teens from upwards mobile or well off families) are all on or switching to Facebook. Marginalized teens, teens from poorer or less educated backgrounds, subculturally-identified teens, and other non-hegemonic teens continue to be drawn to MySpace. A class division has emerged and it is playing out in the aesthetics, the kinds of advertising, and the policy decisions being made.

You can find the full essay here:
Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace

This essay is especially interesting to me, as we have been engaged in an internal debate at Forum One about the use of Facebook vs. Linked In as a professional networking tool. I use both, but I devote much more time and energy to