Monthly Archives: December 2008

Can Twitter help Apple’s shares rise?

Posted on by
Reply

How’s this for a quick example of the power of Twitter I posted on ICAEW’s IT Counts today as my final day in the role of ION community manager, based on the simple premise of the value of being in the right place at the right time? The price of Apple shares have dipped recently with rumours of Steve Jobs’ health concerns. Yet yesterday notable blogger Robert Scoble posted: “I’m in Palo Alto. Just had yogurt at shop that Steve Jobs eats at frequently. They said he was in a couple of days ago and is in great health.”

In return Ross Mayfield posted on Twitter: ”Amazed at how much play @scobleizer got with his Steve Jobs health insight.Wonder if it will move $AAPL stock tomorrow http://bit.ly/jLpI”

So now I’m watching Apple stocks today to see if there’s a positive effect effect. Whatever the outcome, it’s a great example of how Twitter can quickly and easily spread the word.

Note: the use of the $ sign before Apple’s stock symbol is so the post also gets published on the Twitter-related shares site StockTwits.com with other Apple posts.

Is the Long Tail dead?

Posted on by
Reply

Hmm, seems like I missed the news last month that the so-called Long Tail is dead, which is interesting as I looked at the economics of music sales last month following a meeting with Russell Hart of Entertainment Media Research. Appears their Digital Music Report 2008, based on 1,500-strong survey, may support this trend in so far as it highlighted a drop in illegal downloads too. Or to put it another way I wonder if you included illegal downloads in the of the digital inventory whether the pattern might look somewhat different. Obviously you’re not talking about revenue then, but hey I’m just curious in case that helps find new sources of revenue!

“The most comprehensive empirical study of digital music sales ever conducted has some bad news for Californian technology utopians. Since 2004, WiReD magazine editor Chris Anderson has been hawking his “Long Tail” proposition around the world: blockbusters will matter less, and businesses will “sell less of more”. The graph has become iconic – a kind of ‘Hockey Stick’ for Web 2.0 – with the author applying his message to many different business sectors. Alas, following the WiReD Way of Business as a matter of faith could be catastrophic for your business and investment decisions.

“Examining tens of millions of transactions from a large digital music provider, economist Will Page with Mblox founder Andrew Bud and Page’s colleague Gary Eggleton, looked to see how large and valuable the “Tail” of digital music may be. They produced a spreadsheet with 1.5 million rows – so large, in fact, that it required a special upgrade to their Excel software (and more RAM) – and the three revealed their work at the Telco 2.0 conference this week.

“They discovered that instead of following a Pareto or “power law” curve, as Anderson suggested, digital song sales follow a classic Log Normal distribution. 80 per cent of the digital inventory sold no copies at all – and the ‘head’ was far more concentrated than the economists expected.

“Is the ‘future of business’ really selling more of less?” asks Page. “Absolutely not. If you had Top of the Pops now, you’d feature the Top 14, not Top 40.”

User-centred aggregation for 2009?

Posted on by
Reply

Aggregation, aggregation, aggregation; hmm, I like the sound of that (thanks to confused of calcutta):

“We have had aggregation before. Past paradigm aggregation was about content owners and distribution and channels and audiences. Which allowed for words like authority and traffic. Which begat strange things like advertising.

“Next paradigm aggregation is about the owner of the power to bestow attention, and to do something with that attention. The customer.

“So the customer will not watch a television channel, but instead create her own, an aggregation at viewing guide level. The same with news and reviews, the same with music.

  • First, the ability to aggregate a directory of services selected by the customer rather than the provider.
  • Second, the ability to drill in, to dig deeper into these directories in order to do something with the particular service. Time shifted, place shifted. She will read your blog if she finds something of interest, when she wants to, how she wants to, using the device she chooses.
  • Third, the ability to participate, to feed back, to comment, to rate, all these services.
  • And finally, the ability to reuse all or part of the service so provided in a Creative-Commons-like way in order to produce something else, and to share that something else.”

Happy sociable Xmas

Posted on by
Reply

If you want something that’s free, simple and fun to measure your brand metrics try HowSociable. It provides a search engine focused on web 2.0 spaces from twitter to flickr. I met the guys behind it (from the engineers at http://inuda.com) and they inspired me to try it out.

For India also read Brazil, when it comes to social media growth?

Posted on by
1

OK, here’s a prediction for 2009, with help from Gauravonomics Blog:

“Social media outsourcing will we widely seen as the next big outsourcing opportunity for India. I have earlier written that social media outsourcing is the next big business opportunity for India and may already be leading the third wave of Indian outsourcing. In 2009, the volume of consumer generated media will increase, social media engagement processes and metrics will evolve and budgets will continue to decrese. All these three trends will drive large international brands to seriously evaluate outsourcing parts of the social media valua chain to countries like India. We will also see more Indian firms pursue the opportunity in a structured manner and social media outsourcing will be widely seen as the next big outsourcing opportunity for India.”

Check out Power.com as one nice example of a social media company headquartered in Brazil and India, with markets worldwide which has recently launched in the UK. OK, India has an edge on Brazil for the simple reason everyone speaks English. Though in Brazil there’s the longstanding US-connection, not to mention the relative ease of travel to consider.

“There aren’t many sites with 5 million users that we haven’t heard of, but Power.com is just that, and it’s a name you might be hearing a lot more of after it launches in the US today [Mashable, 30 November].

“Previously available in Brazil and India, the site bills itself as a “Meebo for social networking” of sorts, allowing you to simultaneously login to accounts on both social networking services like Facebook and MySpace and instant messaging networks like MSN.

“From there, you can view new activities from friends on those services, see who’s online across all of them via a buddy list, and use the “Power Communicator” to simultaneously send a message to your friends on any site you have synced with Power.com. In other words, if your friends are spread across many social networks, you can see an aggregate view of their activities and message them on their native network, all from inside the Power.com interface.”

The value of visuals

Posted on by
Reply

A physical model of the S & P 500, Dow Jones, and NASDAQ price trend from January to November 2008, demonstrating the value of visuals along the way. Seeing is believing!

S & P 500, Dow Jones, and NASDAQ 2008 prices

The sharp decline in prices has an animal-like feel to it

Building for the community by listening to the community

Posted on by
Reply

A short history of the community which is Stocktwits; many of its community members participated in the recent VC funding round, which also echoes the theme of a recent post in IT Counts on member funding of online ventures, Is web 2.0 enabling a new kind of financing?. Here’s what Roger Ehrenberg, founder and Managing Partner of IA Ventures, said:

“Since we started with a blank slate we were able to be intensely customer-focused from Day 1, and it is a culture that runs through everyone that is formally or informally affiliated with Stocktwits. I draw this distinction because there are lots of bloggers and community participants that have been incredibly helpful as we’ve built the platform, and while they are neither investors nor employees have had a profound impact on the product and our roadmap. Building for the community by listening to the community: makes sense, but I’ve seen it done other ways, usually to that company’s detriment. At Stocktwits, Soren, Phil (@ppearlman) and the team are doing it right.

“Stocktwits massively leverages the power of the long tail, but the reason followers are able to rapidly identify value is because of reputation. THE STOCKTWITS COMMUNITY IS A MERITOCRACY. Those that hem and haw and say little don’t get followed. Those who are insightful, sharp and decisive command large readership. And this is the way it should be. We’ve only just seen the tip of the iceberg of what the Stocktwits community can and will become.  But the power of the platform is clear.”

Crowdsource the world baby!

Posted on by
2

Funny how I was just thinking about using the likes of Twitter to use the jargon ‘crowdsource’ answers to issues and needs. I recall no less a Twitterati than Laura Fitton saying how a request posted on Twitter quickly received a bunch of useful timely replies. And today Dennis Howlett has blogged on the same theme, with an example which provide ‘Proof that crowdsourcing works’.

But I’m left with one question that sounds pretty trivial I admit but surely this network effect works so well for these two notables because they are well known ‘names’? If I were to put out a similar ‘crowdsourcing’ request it simply would not work. The context then of being known is key.

As a larger point it does make me smile sometimes when web 2.0 thought leaders acclaim certain products, without this contextual awareness. In fact you could say you get a better idea of the pros and cons of web 2.0 tools for ordinary users when you’re not a ‘name’ as the bias of noterity does not apply. Hey, I’ll keep on keeping a low profile and see what that brings/does not bring as both results are useful — to compare my observations against the reported results from web 2.0 leaders.

That said after I posted this issue to the UK community manager group e-mint I had a useful response from Mecca Ibrahim underlining the value of Twitter for crowdsourcing, including the following great point on why people often use Twitter rather than Google for finding what they want: “In fact a number of friends say they use Twitter rather than Google sometimes as they know they’ll get an answer from people they “know” rather than an SEO’d response.”

PS: Please don’t comment or highlight this post in any significant way or I’ll lose my hard-earned lack of profile in the world of social media!

Social Media Predictions 2009

Posted on by
1

My two cents worth? To beat the competition it helps to be in the right time, at the right place. Social media can help you do this. Or to put it another way, with a quote taken from a nice post on the subject of social networking & profit: “Relevancy is not enough in advertising. It’s about relevancy and timing.”

Social Media 2009

Talking about relevancy and timing here’s a great example from Laura Fitton of how to alienate people with the way Facebook Ads suck up data from users, unless you remember to opt-out of Social Ads:

“Wow! Leaving the group efactor on Facebook! DO NOT WANT the fact that I joined their FB group to be a part of their Ads. WTH? Repeat: this was NOT efactor’s doing. this is a Facebook-wide issue. it affects you too. Social ads are opt OUT. Privacy>News Feed>Social Ads.”

Facebook Social Ads Permissions

Facebook Social Ads Permissions

 

I second that e-Motion

Posted on by
Reply

Hmm, sounds interesting..

Six Apart has launched a preview of a new product called “Motion” that brings together a number of the year’s hottest trends – microblogging, aggregation, and portable identities – into one software package that is installed server side for users of Movable Type.

As you can see in the sample below, Motion features a simple blog editor for quickly posting text, images, or video. The blog itself contains not just updates you post, but also updates from third-party services like Flickr, YouTube, and Twitter. Beyond that, Motion comes off-the-shelf with support for Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect, and OpenID, meaning that in Movable Type’s words, “there are half a billion web users who can comment or vote on your content without hitting a registration barrier.”