Social Media is Just a Big Game

On February 4, 2010, In New, By Tac Anderson
Standard joystick

Play On

As a proud member of Gen X I have fond memories of my Atari 2600.If you are reading this chances are you had an Atari, Nintendo 64 or Sega Genesis and chances are even greater you have an Xbox, Wii or Sony Play Station in your home right now. In fact to carry this even further, you are also likely to have an iPod or iPhone loaded with several games.

Gaming is a huge industry. But social media can thank much of it’s growth to gaming.

I’m not just talking about all the Farmville, Mafia Wars, sheep throwing, super poking and other plagues that roam Facebook.Social networks are filled with gaming components. The most obvious is Four Square with it’s points, badges and unelected mayors.

LinkedIn was the first time I noticed it with it’s profile status bar. If you remember back to when you first signed up there was a status bar that gave you a percentage of completion and next steps to improve your level of completion.Add a photo, invite friends, fill in job history, etc. The annoying thing was that I knew I was being gamed but I did it anyway.

Games on iPhone

Image by Tac Anderson via Flickr

But there are even less obvious forms of gaming. Why do people care about their Twitter follower count? We don’t really care how many people are following us. It’s nice affirmation and all but really it taps into that deep seeded, primal urge that games satisfies for us.

We watch how many followers we have, we watch haw many RT’s we get and how many replies to questions we ask, just like we watch how many coins we collect or aliens we kill.

Business Need to Play More games

One thing that strikes me as a huge opportunity is to more overtly build gaming qualities into business software.

The biggest problem with CRM software is that sales people don’t enter the needed information in. Taking this thread to the extreme and knowing sales people and their uber competitive nature, what if each lead was a kill and all additional information under that kill determined the value of the kill. You would also need a constant leader board that sales people would check daily (I promise many of them will check it multiple times a day). You could also make a kill list out of your target customers and offer bounties for special targets.

While this is an extreme example that could potentially cause some perception problems, I promise that this would be the most successful CRM system out there.

The Future Will Be One Big Game

With the advent of Augmented Reality we will quickly move from AR games on our phones to AR glasses to everything being one big game.

[Prediction] By 2020 games will be the next social networking. Not games like we think if them today but systems that work off the same gaming theories. There will be gaming communities that dwarf Facebook and challenge Google and Microsoft for time spent, functionality, marketing dollars and developers.

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Facebook Takes on Google Reader: Who Said RSS is Dead?

On February 1, 2010, In New, By Tac Anderson

I’ve been playing around with Facebook. Both how to promote brands on Facebook as well as how users consume content within the walled garden (hint: there’s a direct correlation between the two).

As blogs and media networks extend their reach using Facebook Pages, I noticed something interesting:

Facebook can be used as an RSS reader.

Most people don’t use the groups feature enough but it’s just like using Twitter lists, except you can’t share them. I’ve set up one just for the blogs I follow on Facebook.

Facebook as RSS Reader

It’s like a more graphical version of Google Reader with the shared and comments view shown in the collapsed mode.From here users can like or comment on any post or click through to the expanded “notes” view.

Facebook is a growing source of news for most people. While the geeks among us may still prefer RSS or Twitter your average user will follow a fan page before they subscribe to an RSS feed.  I’ve written about a study showing that Facebook members use the social network as a growing source of tech news.

(BTW, feel free to join the New Comm Biz Facebook Page.)

Over on the Facebook blog, Malorie Lucich, has a post about how she’s seeing the rise of Facebook as a news source Creating Your Personalized News Channel.

When the earthquake hit Haiti, victims in the area, news affiliates and people around the world used Facebook to learn what was happening, connect with loved ones and quickly disseminate information. ABCNews.com and France 24 added Facebook live stream boxes to their sites to enable people to share their feelings on the disaster and relief efforts, and publish it back to their Facebook status. Meanwhile, The New York Times created a special Facebook Page dedicated to Haiti coverage, resources and updates from their reporters on the ground.

Malorie then recommends building a group of just the news sources you follow to clear the clutter. The next step in Facebook’s twitterfication will be to make these lists shareable. Facebook could also further this adoption by mimicking Twitter’s now dead, Suggested User List and have a recommended group that people could follow or even recommended groups by category. Companies would pay millions for that kind of reach.

As this kind of use on Facebook grows your Facebook fan numbers could easily eclipse your RSS subscriber numbers. This also poses an interesting challenge for publishers hiding their content behind pay wall or a unique partnership opportunity, depending on how they approach it.

Update: Marshall Kirkpatrick just posted a very similar post on ReadWriteWeb:

Facebook Could Become World’s Leading News Reader (Sorry Google)

Services like MyYahoo and iGoogle saw some traction and many readers here may have a Google Reader account, but dedicated RSS (really simple syndication) feed reading services have never lived up to their potential to become a mainstream phenomenon. These days many people say they just wait until links get shared on Twitter and they never use a feed reader at all. Late last week Facebook threw its hat in the ring and called on users to use its service as a news feed reader. There are a number of reasons why Facebook could be the strongest online subscription option yet.

Join the New Comm Biz Facebook Page or follow the Twitter account.

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The Hive Awards: Celebrating the Unsung Hero

On January 29, 2010, In Comm, By Tac Anderson

I can’t believe I haven’t blogged about this yet. Last year Alan Wolk asked me to be on the board for a new project he was working on, The Hive Awards. I loved the idea immediately and happily jumped on board.

The Hive Awards are designed to reward all the unsung heroes of the internet: the coders, programmers, user experience designers, content strategists, information architects, planners and the like: the people who innovate and create but rarely get the credit.

There is so much great work happening out there by the little dev shops that never get any attention. I’d love to see them get more love.

You can find out more here, see the categories here, read the blog here or see the other members of the board here.

The deadline has been extended to February 15th because a new Crowdsourcing category has been added.

The award ceremony will be held at SXSW on Friday the 12th and is going to be a blast, hope to see you there.

Follow the Hive Awards on Twitter and join the Facebook Page.

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Barack Obama vs Steve Jobs: Battle of the Super Presenters

On January 28, 2010, In Comm, By Tac Anderson

Two big news events happened yesterday: Steve Jobs announced the iPad and Barack Obama presented on the State of the Union.There was a lot of hype leading up to both and I imagine most of the planet was aware of both.

Image representing Steve Jobs as depicted in C...

Image via CrunchBase

Both men are excellent presenters who command attention when they speak, but with two very different styles. There was a lot of global attention on both men and both had some high expectations to live up to.

No matter what you may personally think of either man, I think we can all agree they were both at peak presentation form yesterday.

I’m no where the level of Jobs or Obama. I prefer a more informal conversational tone but I’m always looking to these two for ways to improve.

Steve Jobs is known for his ability to weave a story and build suspense as he prepares to unveil a new product. Despite the let down most everyone felt about the iPad his presence was was no less disappointing.

Barack Obama delivers a speech at the Universi...

Image via Wikipedia

Many have commented that Barack Obama was back to his pre-presidential best yesterday, reminding a nation why he was elected. Obama is no less the story teller that Jobs and I would argue even more so as he often weaves in analogies and diverse, real life stories to make his point. Obama’s only real fault is that he is never without the teleprompter. Which leads to the only criticism that it’s his writers that make him look so good.

Anyone who doesn’t think that Jobs or any CEO doesn’t have a speech writer has never spent anytime in corporate communications. The fact that Obama has writers and a teleprompter doesn’t detract from his ability to deliver the speech with poise and ability.

All waxing eloquent aside how did they do in the court of public opinion?

Wikio has recently released a new Wikio Labs product called Wikio Trends that allows you to compare individual mentions. So I plugged in Barack Obama and Steve Jobs:

Barack Obama vs Steve Jobs

While Obama has more mentions over a three month period (as he probably should) Jobs crushed him yesterday. There’s one big reason for this: Blogs are dominated by tech geeks. But I still expected it to be closer, there are, after all, a lot of political bloggers out there.

I imagine the real reason for this is because the State of the Union address was broadcast on every major station, including YouTube (yes I just called YouTube a major station). The Apple event was not live streamed but live blogged, meaning the mentiones pilled up in real time.

Did you watch both presentations? What did you think?

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Search, Discovery and Curation

On January 28, 2010, In New, By Tac Anderson

While @gearheadgal may never speak to me again my post from earlier this week, 3 Reasons Why Social Media is Killing Search, sparked some healthy debate. (BTW debate is a good thing, it’s healthy, respectful and we should all do it more.)

In my post I pointed to some recently reported trends that social media engagement is nearing search levels and given that many people use social networks to “find” recommendations, this will be very disruptive for search.

Google knows this and is responding: “Google Forming Social Web Team”

But Jeremy Meyers, Joe McCarthy and others helped qualify my claims in context of user behavior.

Joe McCarthy had a great response I thought was worth bringing to the surface of people who missed the comment thread.

I like your elevation of “curation”, and agree that social recommendation is an increasingly important component of discovering interesting and useful things online (very much in line with Jeremy Meyers’ distinction between search and discovery).

However, I hope that in the quest for innovation, search does not become overly influenced by social media usage. danah boyd posted an insightful piece a while back about valuing inefficiency and unreliability, in which she emphasized the value conferred by effort. It seems to me that many Twitter users tweet (or retweet) a link to a long article or story without reading it (completely), or tweet a link to a short summary of a longer essay … possibly drawn in by a catchy headline and/or an engaging first paragraph (and no, I won’t say anything more about headlines, given another thread in these comments :) .

My concern is that Twitter and other social media services are promoting a “snack culture”, and without search algorithms that are not [as heavily] influenced by the memes of the moment, our ability to find original sources – or insights and experiences that may not be currently trendy – may suffer.

As a potential analogy, I’m reminded of a study, Voting With Your Feet: An Investigative Study of the Relationship Between Place Visit Behavior and Preference, where Jon Froehlich and his colleagues found that the restaurants people visit most often do not correlate well with the restaurants they actually like or value the most … they are simply most convenient. There’s a place for convenience – online and offline – but I hope search innovations will not sacrifice breadth and depth for radical immediacy.

[Update] Joe left this comment with a link to additional thoughts on the original post:

…the commoditization of Twitter followers, where it provided a missing piece to tie together a few loose ends at the conclusion

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The Innovation Equation and Social Media Solution

On January 26, 2010, In The Book, By Tac Anderson

I have a theory: The amount of Knowledge and quality of Collaboration a company is able to achieve directly effected by the level of Trust all parties have in the company.This is reflected in the potential value of the Innovation.

Collaboration
Image by yuan2003 via Flickr

(Knowledge x Collaboration) x Trust = Innovation

Knowledge is the raw materials businesses are built on today. All commodities are just that, commodities. Production became a commodity thanks to globalization and distribution became a commodity thanks to the Internet. The only thing that’s left is knowledge.

Knowledge is easy for individuals to gain. Knowledge is itself a commodity – for individuals. Knowledge is a scarcity for companies. The ability to mine the wealth of knowledge inside of the people employed by a company is harder. Add to that the need to mine knowledge from customers and partners and knowledge just became the scarcest mineral on the planet.

Why is knowledge so difficult to gain? Two factors: Retention and Trust.

Retention because we don’t stay at the same job as long as we used to, customers are rarely brand loyal anymore and partnerships are fleeting. None of this is going to change dramatically, which puts an increase on the need for trust.

Employees, Customers and Partners have an inherent lack of trust in corporations. This means they will only give up as much knowledge as they have to in order to gain something of value like a paycheck, a product or a contract.

In my last post I talked about the value of Trust. Let’s assume for a minute that you are actually able to gain enough trust to gather sufficient knowledge, now what? Now that you’ve mined that raw data you need to turn it into something. This is where collaboration comes in.

As companies continue to rely on remote and mobile workforces our ability to collaborate has been hampered and becomes expensive and difficult. This yields lower returns comparable to the level of investment. Which in turns causes companies to kill potential breakthrough innovations much sooner.

Social Media has huge payoffs in all of these areas. Social Media allows companies to open up and place trust in their employees and customers which in turn yields more trust. Social media allows for the gathering, storing and sharing of knowledge as well as facilitating communication and collaboration across multiple regions and stakeholders.

Among other benefits, this social media centric approach lowers the overall costs and increases the output making it easier to invest in, what in the short term seems like, smaller innovations but may actually have larger returns in the end.

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Being Trustworthy Isn’t About Feeling Good, It’s Smart Business

On January 26, 2010, In Comm, By Tac Anderson

For a long time now I (and many many others) have been talking about transparency. I’ve even gone so far as to tell companies that they need to adopt a Transparent Business Strategy.

The goal of a Transparent Strategy is to *have* trust.
To have trust in others and to have the trust of others.

I hate throwing around the much over used word, “strategy” without some context. The best definition of strategy that I’ve heard is: to create fit within all practices of an organization. Each function of a company should support the other business functions to drive profit.

Transparency isn’t just about Marketing. A Transparent Business Strategy should align across the entire organization: Marketing, Employee Communications, Partner Communications, Investor Relations, and Customer Support.

What is Transparency? Transparency means communicating honestly, it doesn’t mean communicating everything. It also means trusting others.

Companies need to be trust worthy. If companies want to have the trust of others they need to first trust in others. We don’t trust people who don’t trust us.

I believe that transparency drives trust which drives greater profits.

  • When your employees trust you they will work, not just harder, but better.
  • When your customers trust you they are more loyal.
  • When your stakeholders trust you they are more likely to invest in you.
  • When your strategic partners trust you they will more likely share valuable information.

I don’t know a single company (I’m sure they exist somewhere) that doesn’t want to have the trust of their customers, or the trust of their employees. Far fewer companies are willing to first trust their customers or employees. Most say they do, but how many actually do?

On a tactical level, last year Shel Holtz and John Haven even went so far as to release a great book called Tactical Transparency. If you’re interested in driving transparency through your organization I recommend giving it a read.

If a company trusted their employees, why would it be so scary to let them blog or use Twitter? If a company trusted that their customers why wouldn’t they have a dedicated evangelist program?

Of course an even more poignant question is: if a company has trust in themselves why should social media scare them? Ironically, I think they are afraid of the truth.

This is an updated version of an older post which can be found here.

Photo credit by nick.garrod

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This is Why Advertising on Twitter is Wrong…for Twitter

On January 20, 2010, In Comm, By Tac Anderson
The Twitter fail whale error message.
Image via Wikipedia

This month has seen a flurry of activity regarding Twitter’s growth rate. Does it really matter what Twitter’s growth rate is? Does it matter if Twitter ever gets close to the size of Facebook?

Only if they plan to monitize with advertising which they swore for years they wouldn’t do.

That is until November of last year:

Twitter COO: We’ll Have An Advertising Business Soon. And You’re Going To Love It.

Costolo was vague on the details, but he did make some promises: “It will be fascinating. Non-traditional. And people will love it… It’s going to be really cool.”

It’s going to have to be super fascinating and really, really cool for people to like it. Twitter users (the ones that are there for the community not the hype and buzz) hate advertising. Are even violently opposed to it. But we’ll see.

HubSpot recently reported that growth to Twitter has slowed. What this really means is that traffic to Twitter.com has slowed. The only people who use the Twitter.com interface to post tweets are usually new users. There are other administrative things the rest of us use Twitter.com for but once your account is set up you could never have to go back again.

Twitter’s Growth Slows Dramatically: ReadWriteWeb

Now, however, according to the latest data from HubSpot, Twitter’s growth is slowing dramatically. In October 2009, Twitter’s growth rate had fallen to 3.5%. On a positive note, though, the average active user on Twitter today is more engaged than six months ago.

Twitter growth slows while usage expands globally, report says | Social Business | ZDNet.com

On the flipside, the report states that Twitter users are more engaged than ever before.

In the seven months since we last examined the State of the Twittersphere, the average Twitter
account holder has become less of a newbie. The average user is following more people,
followed by more people and has posted more updates.

So while new Twitter users are slowing, engagement and usage on the site is going up. Are you using Twitter more? I know my usage has leveled off but I’ve been using it for years. Presumably in an effort to let the people know that Twitter is still *growing* rapidly (just not in new users) @ev posted that they had a record usage day.

Yesterday Was Twitter’s Highest Usage Day Ever. Today Will Be Bigger: TechCrunch

For several months now, all we’ve heard is how Twitter’s growth, once rapid, is flatlining. And all indications are from the various third-party measuring sources is that this is true. But Twitter co-founder Evan Williams just tweeted a little surprise for everyone today: Apparently, yesterday was Twitter’s highest-usage day ever. And today will be even bigger, he continues.

Why is all of this relevant/important? Because no matter how hard some companies try advertisers live and die by the CPM (Cost Per Thousand – M is the Roman numeral for thousand). Facebook advertising works because of the sheer number of people. It also helps they Facebook is continually trying to make advertising more relevant to you based on your network. This makes it less annoying but it’s still advertising.

Fred Wilson at A VC (an early investor in Twitter) posts about the growth of Twitter’s ecosystem (going as far as to call Facebook part of Twitter’s ecosystem) versus the growth of their site traffic.

Twitter.com vs The Twitter Ecosystem: A VC

So the links I put out into Twitter in the past 30 days generated almost 39,000 clicks. Nice. But only 10,000 of those clicks happened on Twitter.com. The rest happened elsewhere in the Twitter ecosystem, including Facebook which is part of the Twitter ecosystem when they showcase a post that is generated on Twitter, as all of mine are.

So that’s a 4x ratio. That’s a good double check. Whether its 3x (John’s post), 4x (my links), or 5x (incoming traffic to AVC), it is clear that there’s a big difference between the two.

My point is this. You can talk about Twitter.com and then you can talk about the Twitter ecosystem. One is a web site. The other is a fundamental part of the Internet infrastructure. And the latter is 3-5x bigger than the former and that delta is likely to grow even larger.

Twitter has proven the ability to drive traffic, there’s no doubt about that. In large part because users feel confident knowing that when they click on a link they won’t be subjected to advertising. Already we’re seeing people try to cash in on their follower count but they’re easy enough to unfollow but if Twitter allows advertisers directly into the platform, you can’t unfollow that. Of course I imagine a smart application builder will find a way to strip out the ads, which of course would lead to a violation of Twitters TOC…anyway.

I remain skeptical that Twitter’s best approach is advertising. They currently have the richest data set out there, especially if they’re ever able to drive geolocation data. I hope they don’t cheapen it with advertising.

Good Morning America had a segment on making money from home, which included a piece on Twitter. This is wrong on so many levels but also unavoidable. (A small piece of my soul died when I wrote that last sentence.)

Make Money When You Work From Home – ABC News

For You, Tweets Can Mean Cash

For anyone who’s active on Twitter, you can turn those tweets into cash. You probably won’t make tens of thousands of dollars like reality star celebrities, but you might as well give it a shot.

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Hiding in Plain Sight. Fighting Privacy with Noise.

On January 17, 2010, In Comm, By Tac Anderson

Not everyone is comfortable living in public. Some of us are pretty comfortable with it, but everyone is a little nervous about it. If you’re not you should be. There’s a simple solution. Not perfect but somehow poetic.

ninja
Image by R’eyes via Flickr

Here’s the fact: There is information about every single one of you online. Unless you’re ex CIA or something there’s something about you out there. And with just a little bit of information you can dig up an awful lot. This is largely due to the fact that there is only certain information about you. Things like your address and other public information.

But what if there was a lot of information. I mean dozens of updates a week on things like what you were thinking about at work, what kind of music you liked, what you had for lunch or better yet a lot of information about something or a couple things you were an expert on. How easy would it be now to find the things you didn’t want discovered?

It would be considerably harder. Even with a name like mine, which is too easy to discover, you now have to wade through dozens of pages of content.My advice to everyone nervous about privacy is to fight it with noise. Publish mountains of content with your name all over it. Bury your private data in safe data. Pandora’s box has been opened. We can never go back but you can safeguard yourself.

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Could the arts survive digitally?

On January 15, 2010, In Biz, By Tac Anderson
SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA - OCTOBER 23: Two members o...
Image by Getty Images via Daylife

The arts are suffering. As our live become more and more digital people have been attending museums and other art venues less and less. I also don’t think that the steady decline of art being studied in schools help. Then to add insult to injury the recession has also taken its toll. With earthquakes in Haiti and other humanitarian aid and research groups trying to cure things like cancer there is not much left for big buildings holding pretty pictures.

Feeling the Recession in the Art World – TIME

The Great Recession has struck museums and performing-arts groups with a vengeance. No one expects the Federal Government to bail them out.

Like and musician, artists can benefit from the Web’s scale to gain awareness and exposure to new fans. From there people can be brought out to shows and museums. YouTube, one of the biggest supporters of curation,  even recently held a contest to support the arts.

There is a trend on the Web that I think can help the arts: Curation. Sites like Flickr and YouTube have power users who comb the sites collecting the best content. These people are very similar to the wikipedians who manage many pages on Wikipedia. They’re the digital version of museum curators.

YouTube Blog: Wanted: Creative Content to Support the Arts on YouTube

At the same time, organizations that support the arts — from museums to orchestras, ballet companies to musical education programs — are sorely in need of funding and promotion. That’s where you can help. YouTube Video Volunteers and guest curator Dr. Phil want you to create a video that shines the spotlight on an organization that advances the arts in your community or on the national stage.

Museums need to get social. They should be holding art tweetups and leveraging other social media. Don’t get me wrong, some are doing this but very few are and they are just scratching the surface.

What ways do you think the arts could use social media? Do you have any examples? Please share in the comments.

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