Content Matters

SIIA NetGain Conference Starts Monday

Monday kicks off NetGain, the SIIA's annual west coast event. This year's conference will be held at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco.

This event brings together the three divisions of the Software and Information Industry Association - the Content, Software and Education divisions. It's NetGain for the content division, Software Summit for the software division and Ed Tech for education.

This year's schedule has some great sessions. Brewster Kahle, Kara Swisher, Chris Anderson and author Judith Estrin are the keynotes. There are panels  on cloud computing, workflow applications and a panel on social media platforms which will feature Plaxo's Joe Smarr, Clara Shih of Salesforce.com (and author of The Facebook Era), Facebook's Dave Morin and Pavan Mediratta of LexisNexis.

Alacra will be presenting our new Street Pulse application as part of the new Product Previews segment Tuesday morning. Street Pulse has also been nominated for a CODiE Award. The winners will be announced at Tuesday evening's CODiE dinner.

If you're attending NetGain, or if you just want to follow from afar, we'll be using the #netgain hashtag on Twitter.

Hope to see you there.

Help Send Deserving Kids to Camp this Summer

As the economy continues to decline, the nonprofit sector is taking a big hit. State and municipal funds have dried up, foundations are struggling with poor investment returns and many of the big individual donors are worried about keeping their jobs.

Luckily, there are lots of ways that each of us can make a small difference. Social media and micro-donations make the process even easier.

Edelman and a few other organizations in the Chicago area are supporting the Off the Street Club (OTSC), which provides inner city kids with a summer of swimming, horseback riding and cookouts at Camp Mathieu.

So, please take a minute and make a modest donation - even $5 makes a real difference. You can donate using the ChipIn widget below (see, I told you this used social media tools).

Not sure? Visit their Facebook page and watch the brief 2 minute video.

PS - for those who were at the SIIA Twitter panel on Wednesday, this program is part of the Friday $5 Twitter Challenge from Amanda Mooney, the Edelman social media maven I mentioned.

Twitter for Business - SIIA Event recap

Earlier today, I moderated an SIIA panel entitled "Why Twitter Matters".

I was lucky enough to have three great panelists, which made my job really easy:
Philip Pearlman, Director at StockTwits
Jacob Harris, Senior Software Architect, New York Times
Sarah Austin, Real Time Matrix

The event was sold out, but for those who missed it (or who care to re-live it), here's the video

View Full Screen

Supporting materials including my Introduction to Twitter deck are available here.

Developing a Twitter Strategy

While the entertainment market has suddenly found Twitter, a number of technology, information and media businesses have been using Twitter effectively for the past 12-24 months.

This Wednesday, we will be exploring some of those success stories on a panel, sponsored by the Software & Information Industry Association. Below are some initial thoughts on a few themes that we’ll be discussing. What questions would you like us to ask? Post your questions in the comments below or send them to me @graubart.

The Twitter land rush has begun. This differs somewhat from the web land grab, which was all about URLs. On Twitter, it’s not so much your Twitter handle (though there are a bunch of spoofing efforts for brands) but more about staking out a position as a key source to follow in your domain.

Meanwhile, the Twitter ecosystem is starting to emerge. One of the ways to measure the success of a platform is the ecosystem that springs up around it. Google is a great example of this. Beyond the 300,000 advertisers who participate in AdWords and the many publishers who use AdSense to allow Google to run ads on their pages, the Google ecosystem consists of SEO consulting firms, resellers of Google Appliances and the many software consulting and integration firms who focus on the Google platform.

For Twitter, the ecosystem is just beginning to emerge. There are a growing number of third party applications to enable more efficient posting to and searching of Twitter on desktops and mobile devices. Developers have built plugins, like TwitPic, which make it easier for users to share information through Twitter. At the same time, consulting firms, PR firms and ad agencies are beginning to focus on Twitter as a critical medium. And vertical market applications like StockTwits have emerged to aggregate tweets and build communities within the Twitter universe.

Before jumping in, develop a Twitter strategy. There are numerous ways in which companies are using Twitter to help them achieve their business goals. But the first step is in defining your goals. Are you looking to use Twitter to improve customer service (like @comcastcares)? Do you wish to use Twitter as a more user-friendly version of RSS, pushing out your latest content (like @msnbc_business )? Or, are you looking to drive transactions (like @delloutlet)? Before you start tweeting, think about your specific goals, then develop an appropriate Twitter strategy in support of those goals.

These are all issues that we’ll explore in further depth at the panel discussion. If you’ve not already registered, there’s still time to do so at the SIIA website.

If you can’t participate but would like to follow along via Twitter, we’ll be using the #SIIA hashtag and you can follow the discussion here.

In advance of the panel, I’ve posted some materials, along with links to related resources.

Social Media: My Place or Yours?

The number of definitions of social media typically equals the number of people in the discussion. During the past couple of years in my role chairing the SIIA's Social Media Action Committee, I've had numerous discussions with peers about "social media". And what I've found is that the lack of clear definitions leads to frustration and confusion.

In an effort to simplify that, whenever I'm now engaged in a broad discussion of social media, I start with the question "my place or yours?" In other words, are you looking to add social media capabilities (communities, user-generated content, etc) to your existing site or are you looking for ways to play on the social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter?

That one question immediately simplifies everything that follows. So, when do you look to add social media tools to your site and when do you go play on the platforms?

Think about your goals to start. Do you have an existing audience of users whom you're looking to engage? Are you trying to increase page views and time spent on your site by your existing readers? Adding social media tools to your site to enable information sharing, commenting or linking by your users can help you achieve that.

Are you looking to reach a new audience, perhaps a different demographic than you currently reach? That's where the external platforms come in. Build a Facebook widget, create a LinkedIn group or share useful information via Twitter. You'll attract new users who may otherwise not be familiar with your brand.

There are dozens of use cases for how you can help achieve your business goals through social media. But the starting point is always in defining those goals and matching them to the right sets of tools.

So, at the next industry conference, when you ask me about social media, don't be offended when I ask you "my place or yours?".

Has friendfeed Hit the Wall?

Friendfeed never got the adoption rate that Twitter has, but the active friendfeed users were devout supporters. For a while, last year, there were nonstop threads on friendfeed, discussing why it was the superior platform to Twitter.

For those who have not used it, friendfeed shares much in common with Twitter. At it's basis, it's a microblogging platform that uses the "follower" approach to share information. But the main difference is while Twitter takes more of a broadcast approach, friendfeed has always been about real-time conversations. One of the main drawbacks to Twitter is that conversations are not threaded. In other words, if you reply to one of my Tweets, it's not easy for users to see which Tweet you responded to. You see snippets but not the full conversation. friendfeed, conversely, is all about the conversation. When you click on any friendfeed comment, you'll see the full threaded conversation. At first blush, this is a powerful advantage, but it also becomes an incredible time-suck.

Twitter is like casual dating. You can check in a few times each day for a few minutes and move on with the other activities in your life. Friendfeed is like dating that super-obsessive, ultra-needy person who doesn't seem to work or have any other full-time responsibilities. While the relationship may be just as superficial, it's completely exhausting. It seems that she is always there and when you pop in for a quick hello, you soon realize you've spent hours.

While Twitter certainly has won the mindshare battle, it seems that it's also winning the underlying war.

Friendfeed remains the communications platform of choice for many of the digerati, but there's evidence that its growth has hit a wall.

One of the early advantages to microblogging client Twhirl (from Loic LeMeur's Seesmic) was its support for both platforms. Twhirl has now been replaced by the new Seesmic desktop, which competes with TweetDeck for Twitter desktop client market share. Yet this new version of Seesmic focuses on Twitter and provides no support for friendfeed. While Seesmic may continue to support its Twhirl client, my guess is they will focus their efforts on the new desktop app, so this is a bad sign for friendfeed users.

Edelman's Steve Rubel, who spent a lot of time on both platforms last year recently indicated he's lost interest in friendfeed and now spends his time largely on Twitter.

And, even Robert Scoble, emperor of the digerati, who clearly spends much of his day on friendfeed, recently acknowledged (on friendfeed, of course) that while he receives many new followers each day on Twitter, his follower growth on friendfeedhas plateaued. According to Scoble:

"One big difference between Twitter and friendfeed is that:
People follow on Twitter. My friendfeed rates have gone way down.
I looked into a few people I've recommended. On Twitter they are getting followed at a MUCH higher rate than their friendfeed accounts are.
That's not a good trend for friendfeed, because it means that there's a much stronger power law in effect there where people like me will have more power to get content noticed than new people who come along"

So, is it the end for Friendfeed? That's hard to say. It's likely that Friendfeed will continue to exist as a niche platform for the most geeky of the social media elite, at least for a while. And, perhaps as Twitter finds itself becoming more mainstream, friendfeed will become the refuge for those who wish to avoid the more commercial aspects that are already cropping up. But at least for now, it's clear that Twitter is where the growth is and where most social media participants (at least those who want to pick one platform) should focus their time.

What do you think?

Associated Press to Internet: Drop Dead

The Associated Press's plan to more aggressively police use of its content on the Internet seems less about saving the newspaper industry and more about justifying their own existence.

Do the AP's owner-partner newspapers really want their content removed from the Google index? How much might that reduce their traffic? Depending upon the news outlet, I'd guess Google accounts for between 25-50% of the traffic. How will those rapidly falling CPMs look when they lose half their traffic?

I realize the A.P. is in a tough spot. Newspapers rely upon its syndicated content, especially as they cut their own editorial resources. At the same time, the newspapers have pressured the A.P. to cut its fees. But the A.P.'s approach here doesn't do anything to address the long-term problem.

The problem remains that the basic business model for newspapers - that of being a near-monopoly for local advertising - is gone. The classified business has moved to Craig's List and elsewhere and it's not coming back. And the basic concept that a local auto dealer or department store should fund the cost of an editorial news operation no longer makes sense.

So, should the AP be allowed to go after those who steal its content? There are spam and splog sites out there which duplicate the content in its entirety and provide no links back to the source pages. So, yes, AP should go after those sites and partner with sites like Google to ensure those spam sites are not included in the Google index. But if they go after search engines and aggregators who follow the "fair use" doctrine, I think the cure may be worse than the disease. We'll see AP content removed from the search engine indexes and see new competitors spring up to fill the void. Meanwhile, AP newspaper partners will see a drop in page views, further eroding advertising revenues.

The solution should lie in partnering with the search engines and aggregators to ensure that AP-syndicated content is shown in the best light and drives the most traffic to its partner sites. The AP should be providing widgets for its partners' use on social media platforms and mobile devices, all designed to help them grow their share of news content consumption. They could also work with aggregators to develop ways to generate shared revenues. Instead, they seem focused on a plan to make themselves irrelevant on the dominant platform for news - the Internet. Sure, they may generate some short-term licensing revenues, but in the long-term, they're destined for irrelevance.

Associated Press - be careful what you wish for.

Mary Meeker on the Economy and Internet Trends 2009

Love her or hate her, it's hard to ignore Morgan Stanley's Mary Meeker.
This week, she posted a massive, 147 slide deck entitled "Economy + Internet Trends".

Despite the massive size of the deck, it's worth taking 30 minutes or so to walk through. She looks at the impact of the current economic environment on Content and Internet companies. Whether you agree with her analysis, there's plenty of data there for you to chew on.

The first 20 or so slides provide some interesting views into how the economy got here; nothing new but some useful charts and perspectives on what's similar and what's different from past recessions. The economy has pushed ecommerce growth to negative (starting Q3, 2008) after consistent 20% annual growth rates from 2001-2007. The technology sector's five flat or down sequential quarters matches 2001, but the outlook this time is worse.

Key spending sectors of the S&P500 have taken a huge hit - financial services, industrials, consumer discretionary, materials, information technology, telecom and energy. Even utilities, health care and consumer staples stocks are down 30-40% from their pre-recession peak.

Then she digs into the slides that are of greatest interest to those of us in the content and technology space. The trends she highlights include:

Online advertising: ad spend is closely tied to GDP growth. On top of that, right now we're in a very difficult period as the disruption caused by social media, video and VOIP is not yet translating into significant revenues Online CPMs are a fraction of offline CPMs. Meanwhile, doing a regression analysis, she shows how a flat GDP in 2009 could lead to a 4% drop in ad spend.

One bright note is that in difficult times, consumers spend more time, rather than less, on the Internet. It's "a cheap/efficient/transparent thrill!" as she describes it. The Internet is becoming a necessity. Broadband Internet was the last thing to be cut in consumer survey (even after personal care, toiletries & cosmetics).

At the same time, undermonetized social media, video and VOIP creates an opportunity for marketers to capitalize on low CPMs.

Looking ahead five years, Meeker projects the online consumption mix will be what she describes as consumer-enhanced professional content: anchored with first class professional content; augmented with first class user-generated content that's ranked/reviewed/'edited', supplemented by all-comers user-generated content that's ranked/reviewed, all presented in a holistic/widgeted way.

Or, as she describes it, a "clean combo of WSJ.com+bbc.co.uk + digg + techmeme + youtube + nytimes.com + allthingsd.com + facebook + twitter"

Meeker drills in to online advertising, noting that Google's share has increased from less than 50% in Q4 2005 to 67% in Q4 of 2008. Search advertising continues to show growth and is taking budget from other forms of advertising, most notably print magazines, direct mail and newspapers.

There is still a huge advertising opportunity - today, online advertising spend is $288 per home vs. $818 per home for newspapers. While CPM's and CPC's may be under near-term price pressure, if targeting/ROI continues to improve (as she believes they should), there should be long-term upside.

Meeker remains bullish on the ecommerce space. While some items, such as computer equipment, event tickets, books, music and videos have seen huge adoption rates on the Web, overall US online ecommerce penetration remains only around 4-6%, though it continues to rise.

Amazon should continue to show growth as it has become the web's most effective commerce search engine and continues to provide new technologies for its users, such as the Kindle and mobile apps for research and purchasing.

Another strong trend for Meeker is the positive growth in mobile. New mobile products, from iPhones to the Kindle to Netbooks are driving incredible growth. The enablers for this growth are:
1. broadband and wireless infrastructure; the cloud
2. Hardware: small, fast and cheap storage, touch screens, GPS and more
3. Software - browser-based tools, widgets
4. Communications tools - messaging, social media, cameras, VOIP
5. Digital content - music, video, news, search, shopping, weather, maps and more

She notes that Google Voice provides Unified Communication for consumers - one phone # + VOIP + Voicemail Transcription + SMS. That's a pretty big game changer.

We are undergoing the greatest media transformation in history and Meeker asks "Where is the great creative" to drive it?

In closing, she reiterates her believe that companies with cogent business models that provide consumer value (Amazon, iTunes, etc) should survive and even thrive in this economy, noting "consumers need value more than they've needed it in a long time".

The full presentation is posted at http://www.docstoc.com/docs/5045631/Meeker-Tech-09.

Thanks, Paul Kedrosky, for the heads up on this.

Random Twitter Users as the New Experts?

One reason we launched Alacra Street Pulse is that the influence of the sell-side analyst is clearly waning. But this article I found via Research Recap took me by surprise:

Twitter Users as Expert Sources on IBM-Sun Deal

The post describes an Information Week article entitled IBM to acquire Sun? Twitter users not convinced. The article first quotes Forrester analyst John Rymer, who provides his insights on the deal. So far, so good.

Next, it goes on to cite three unidentified Twitter users' comments:

• Anonymous user 1: The buyout would bolster IBM's heft on the internet.
• Anonymous user 2: Will IBM keep both DB2 and MySQL?
• Anonymous user 3: Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Dell and Cisco will have to rethink their strategies

Now, this is the high-tech equivalent of randomly asking three people on the subway what they think of the deal.

The article concludes with comments by Dana Gardner, who serves as president and principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions and authors the BriefingsDirect blog. Dana has covered enterprise software and  infrastructure for more than 17 years, as an editor and an IT industry analyst, so I'm pretty comfortable with where he's coming from.

But three random tweets?
And, even if you want to assign "expert" labels to these three unidentified tweeters, how does that support the premise of the article? The article is entitled "IBM to acquire Sun? Twitter users not convinced". Were the users not convinced that IBM will acquire Sun? Actually, sounds like they think it's a done deal. Were they not convinced that it will be a good deal? The comments are either neutral or positive.

That's not to say that Twitter can't be used for market research or analysis. Clearly it can and sites like StockTwits show how you can quickly see response to a potential deal. But random quotes from unnamed sources didn't fly in traditional media and shouldn't be acceptable here either.

As for me, when I'm looking for analysis on the IBM-SUN deal, I'll look at this page on our own Street Pulse. It includes the Rymer and Gardner comments and adds those from analysts at BMO, Citi, UBS, Yankee Group, BarCap, IDC, Goldman Sachs, Illuminata and a dozen other industry leaders, along with blogs like Tech Trader Daily, Dealbook and GigaOm. Random tweets are fun for finding pictures of cute puppies or the latest exploding Mentos video, but for analysis, I'll stick with credible sources.

Seeking Social Media Marketing Intern

Alacra is currently recruiting for a social media marketing intern for this summer.

Candidates should have hands-on experience with social media applications – blogging, Twitter, social bookmarking and related areas. The Social Media Marketing Intern will provide marketing support for a series of products launched on the Alacra Pulse platform and related products. Specific tasks may include authoring blog posts, posting tweets and engaging users via Twitter, researching and identifying potential PR opportunities and exploring ways in which we might engage our user community both within our existing sites and on external social media platforms.

Candidates should have a practical knowledge of and experience with social media applications (Twitter, Digg, Facebook, etc), solid business writing skills and a strong intellectual curiosity.

For more information @ me @graubart or send your CV to barry-dot-graubart-at-alacra-dot-com.

Please feel free to forward this to others who might be interested.