Social Media and Mobile Growth are Exponentially Symbiotic

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

There are a lot of conversations happening around the need for social media in your company.

There are a lot of conversations happening around making your content mobile friendly.

Partial map of the Internet based on the Janua...
Image via Wikipedia

To me there are not enough conversations happening around mobile, social media and the impact they will have on your company. It will be huge. Bigger than either by itself. I honestly don’t think anyone has a full sense for how big it will be. There’s a reason both have been growing at a huge rate right along with each other.

From CNET:

6.8 Billion People on the planet
5 Billion Cell Phone Subscriptions
1 Billion with Internet Access

Cell phone subscriptions to hit 5 billion globally | 3GSM blog – CNET Reviews

“Even during an economic crisis, we have seen no drop in the demand for communications services,” said ITU Secretary-General Dr. Hamadoun Toure at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week, “and I am confident that we will continue to see a rapid uptake in mobile cellular services in particular in 2010, with many more people using their phones to access the Internet.”

h/t Daring Fireball

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Will Apple Finally Have to Embrace Social Media?

On August 4, 2009, In Biz, By Tac Anderson
Image representing Apple as depicted in CrunchBase
Image via CrunchBase

As I was flipping through one of my favorite start pages I couldn’t help but notice something. Let’s see if you notice it to:

Notice a theme here? Do you know what that is? That’s Apple entering the main stream. Now yes, Apple has been main stream for a few years but until now they’ve been able to act like the cool outsider who jeered and derided, well pretty much everybody.

I’ve wondered out loud how it is that Apple could get away with the approach they take to Social Media (aka hatred and disdain). They have had a very clear lack of presence. There was no need for them to get involved. Why would they waste their time, attention and money on social media when all their fan boy’s took care of hyping them, building buzz, monitoring their brand and defending their virtue?

But things are different now. Apple’s is no longer just a threat to Microsoft (and every PC manufacturer). They have become the main threat to every mobile phone company. And they are now a threat to their biggest ally, Goolge. But competition is nothing new to Apple. The current scale and pressure they are facing is something new but something else has changed.

When you compete in the main stream not every customer is willing to put up with your little idiosyncrasies. As you scale not every manufacturing partner plays by your rules. As your platform gets bigger not every developer is willing to put up with your rules.

Consumers don’t trust size. As you get bigger people don’t trust you. This is why so many companies have become more transparent and are engaging in social media. Openness and transparency are not in Apple’s DNA. The sad thing is that they would have to do so little to have a big impact.

Now that the honeymoon is over will people continue to accept Apple’s lack of transparency and lack of presence in social media? I don’t know, we’ll see.

(Microsoft, T-Mobile and HTC are all clients of my employer Waggener Edstrom. Please see my disclosure)

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Training My Own Citizen Journalist

On July 18, 2009, In Comm, By Tac Anderson

I’ve mentiond before that my Emma has a smartphone (a Palm Centro – it was BOGO when we got my wife the same phone). She doesn’t have a data plan but she download pics and vids to her HP Mini.

I never taught her how to use her phone like this. She picked up video all on her own.

Posted via email from /tacanderson

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2.0 Thinking

On September 26, 2008, In Biz, By Tac Anderson

1896 Telephone, hand cranked magneto on right ...

There is a lot of talk out there in the Value of Web 2.0/Social Media companies.  Being an EIR at Highway 12 Ventures I’ve had the opportunity to discuss this in great detail with a lot of VC’s who are questioning how many social networks and ad monitized sites can you have?

Web 2.0 is a functionality.
Web 2.0 is a toolset that allows the person to person communication that we call Social Media.

How Much Value Has the Telephone Created?

When the phone was invented how many phone manufacturers could the market support? What eventually happened was the telephone was adapted into other business models. Other new services sprang up to support these businesses until the point that the phone is ubiquitous. Yet still, more than 150 years later we see constant innovation around the telephone and the basic functionality that it enabled.

  • Telesales
  • Customer Support
  • Conference Calls
  • Mobile Phones

Applying 2.0 Thinking

Web 2.0 will lay out the same way.  Yes at first we become enamored with the functionality. The Media/Advertising model has been the most popular business model applied to Social Media to date. It’s easy: get enough eye-balls sell advertising. That will only extend so far.

The extent to which Web 2.0 can be applied to various business models has barely been tapped.  If it helps you think about it in another way, look at groups within companies. Marketing is obvious.  HR is just starting to get underway. While Legal has typically been prohibitive to corporate adoption even they to will find innovative ways to adopt the tool set.

One of the areas that excites me the most is the financial space.  I personally think all this turmoil, despite the outcome (unless it really is Armageddon) will lead to a lot of opportunities for 2.0 style financial services.  There are already some great options in the financial software arena like Mint and FreshBooks.

The piece that very few Web 2.0 start-ups have been able to capitalize on yet is the mass amounts of data at their fingertips.  Data mining, deep analytics and predictive modeling will be huge.

If the Web flattened business models Web 2.0 will turn them inside out. My best advice is get creative and think beyond advertising.

Image via Wikipedia

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Using SMS to power the smart homes of the future

On September 1, 2008, In Biz, By Tac Anderson

Most common mobile keypad alphabet layout.Image via Wikipedia I had an epiphany on the way home from running errands. (I’m sure I’m not the only one to think of this but I haven’t heard of any application that works this way.) We picked up a take-n-bake pizza and Jen wished we could warm up the oven remotely.

One of the prohibiting cost, as I understand it, is that you have to build one box to manager all of your home devicices, and then an app to remotely manage that box. A lot of companies are working on how to crack the whole Smart Home thing. Once it’s solved it wouldn’t be hard to imagine a time where I could sink my mobile phone to my house and start my oven with an app on my phone.

Then the thought struck me that it would be easier and more widely adopted to SMS eneble your appliances. Let your phone act as that box and SMS to act as the network.

I could just send an SMS to my oven that recognizes my phone number and a simple command like: “450″. If I get delayed and am not going to make it when I planned a simple, “off” would turn it off or “pause 20m” would pause the oven for 20 minutes.

You could really apply this to any appliance/function in your house.

“DVR ch7 7-8″ would record channel 7 from the next 7:00 to 8:00 am or pm.
“Lights on” would turn on a predetermined set of lights like the main downstairs and outside lights.

I could go on but an open standards like this would do more to drive Smart Home adoption than any proprietary platform and would enable a wider economic base of people access to it.

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The rise of crappy pics and vids

On June 9, 2008, In Biz, By Tac Anderson

Now that I have a 3G camera phone I feel this overwhelming urge to do more with pictures and video. As I’ve stated before I personally still prefer text over video for business applications. But there is no denying that video can really enhance certain types of content.

Pictures are an obvious fit in online content. They provide color, context and good visual elements that enhance a readers experience. That is, if it’s shot by someone with any talent at all. That’s not me.

Here’s a photo I took at the opening of the downtown Boise incubator I helped launch. That’s my wife Jen in the bottom left, she’ll be so happy I used this pic ;)

But my phone and I don’t stop at ruining good photo ops, we also take on video.


This is a group of us waiting for last weeks Boise Twitter lunch. (We would have Twittered from the event, but Twitter was down.)

This is the very first video I successfully shot and loaded up to YouTube with my camera phone. It’s absolutely horrible. I’m actually impressed the audio came out as well as it did. Being a test video and my first one, I can only get better (I hope).

I am not alone in my new visual capabilities. There are hundreds, if not thousands of people a day gaining this new capability via shinny new cell phones. I wonder what will happen as the Web is flooded with this content?

I imagine we’ll see very similar trends that we saw when blogging took online publishing mainstream. Millions of people will upload content daily. The popular stuff will rise to the top, the niche content will find it’s place and the rest will be relegated to being enjoyed by a handful of friends and family members.

If you’re interested my Flickr Stream can be found here and my brand new YouTube channel can be found here.

What do you see happening with the rise of online pictures and videos?

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Twitter Craze Feels Like MySpace Back in the Day

On March 19, 2007, In New, By Tac Anderson

So back in 2003 I heard about this brand new site; MySpace. At the time I owned a skate shop in Las Vegas and all the lurkers we’re obsessing over this MySpace.com. As they explained how it was soooo much better than Friendster, I decided to give it a try.

One of the things that struck me right away was this sense of belonging to something. There was this basic carnal need to be on the “inside” when everyone else was on the outside. The best part was watching people who swore they would never join MySpace get hooked and start acting like junkies. It was an obsession to see who had left you a message, who added you as a friend or if anyone had commented on your pictures.

Things feel remarkably similar to the ongoing Twitter craze. There is this sense of belonging, of connecting to people that you don’t know. Communicating instantaneously with hundreds of people is amazing. According to compete.com, Twitter has grown almost 108% in one month to 35k people. And according to Blogpulse Twitter went from being mentioned in 1% of blogs back in mid February to 10% of blogs by mid March.

It is impossible to compare the growth of MySpace or YouTube to Twitter; two are platforms and one’s a channel. Here lies the real power of Twitter: Who has more power: a site that millions of people visit each day and stay on average of 20-30 minutes? Or a utility that is always with you via web, SMS and IM?

You have the capability to use Twitter like a hybrid IM/blog right from your Twitter page. I rarely use this page. I run Twitter from my Google Talk, which is run through on my Blackberry. This allows me to have Twitter on my phone without having to give out my cell phone # or have to pay for all the additional text message charges.

The challenges that are ahead for Twitter are that of scale. Can they continue to handle the load? MySpace crashed a lot back in the day, but something about the service kept people coming back.

Twitter has been having similar problems; so far people are sticking with it.

Twitter already has bands jumping on board. Can Twitter ad features like MySpace has? We have yet to see anything new from Twitter (I bet they’re just trying to hang on right now), but the users are taking care of that; there are plugins for WordPress, there are Twitter specific search engines plus Twitter mashups are popping up all over the place. Some bloggers have abondoned their blogs in favor of Twittering.

Many people are already predicting the demise of Twitter. I think they’ll pull through just fine. Twitterers seem pretty willing to live with the glitches caused by the sudden increase in users. I think Twitter is one of the newest ways to stay connected and will change the face of social networking. You think MySpace is looking at a way to copy Twitter? I do. And if they don’t someone else will.

Recomended blogs on this topic:
Micro Persuasion
Tac’s Twitter Page

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