Anderson's "FREE" & Social Media

Chris Anderson is right. Again. The Long Tail author is publishing another seminal tome on the theory that costs are dramatically reduced given the efficiencies of the websphere, promulgating a whole new economy of "free". From Wired in February:

Once a marketing gimmick, free has emerged as a full-fledged economy. Offering free music proved successful for Radiohead, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, and a swarm of other bands on MySpace that grasped the audience-building merits of zero. The fastest-growing parts of the gaming industry are ad-supported casual games online and free-to-try massively multiplayer online games. Virtually everything Google does is free to consumers, from Gmail to Picasa to GOOG-411.

Another example: Social Media integration. A year ago this month, Facebook launched its API platform, allowing third-party developers to create applications that can easily be integrated into existing tools and features of the Facebook community. This opportunity has spawned over 26 thousand applications, generating over 1 billion downloads by Facebook users. It is free to use. However, the API is a "walled garden", providing no interoperability with other social media networks, creating a cost to the developer (e.g. their time).

This idea of providing an API to enable interoperability between your website / web service and others is taking off. Even the New York Times is jumping on the band wagon - they are working on an API to allow developers to import NYT content into new and yet-to-be-thought-of applications for disseminating content.

Earlier this year Google launched its Open Social product, with MySpace, LinkedIn and most others (except Facebook) on board. Their intent is to provide the infrastructure to allow developers to code their applications once, and then provide the tools and resources necessary to support the interoperability among the various social networks, websites, etc., current and future.

Facebook had attempted to license (i.e. charge) other social networks to take advantage of their platform. Bebo bit, licensing the platform last December. However, given Google's move, Facebook has been forced to go a step further, "open sourcing" their platform for anyone to use. Thus, like Google's Open Social, use of Facebook's API platform is now free for other social networks to integrate. The only cost is their time.

Facebook's obvious expectation is that other social networks will take the time to integrate, therefore offering Facebook's growing developer community more value for time spent developing within the their API platform.

The efficiencies of the internet continue to shrink even non-monetary costs (in this case, a developer's time). Interesting times...

Beyond Blogs

In an effort to keep up on what is going on in the social media space, I read. Lots sometimes, less others. There are a couple articles I found interesting recently.

First, this one by Heather Green and Stephen Baker. The key point I take from it is that social media has crossed over to the mainstream. Though only a quarter of the US online population reads blogs once a month or more, the continued proliferation of tools and services to connect are dominating attention and dramatically evolving online behavior.

While only a small slice of the population wants to blog, a far larger swath of humanity is eager to make friends and contacts, to exchange pictures and music, to share activities and ideas.

And this shift in online behavior is overflowing into the off-line. I am a neophyte within this space, as compared to my younger colleagues, and yet even I do not walk in to a meeting without first looking attendees up on LinkedIn and/or Facebook. It is a rare event where the guest list isn't published online beforehand. I have been in a bank a handful of times, only to cash the random check that was not direct deposited. And, I have not bough a newspaper in years.

This article by Jackie Peters, further summarizes the impact of these behavior changes on marketing and communications:

Our job now is two-fold: make sure the fakers who claim they get it, but really don’t, don’t screw things up, and educate clients, potential clients and our peers so they are able to make intelligent decisions in selecting an agency and implementing a social media strategy.

The fundamentals of this space are crystallizing, separating the effective from the ineffective. More is certainly to come. So now what?

August 29, 1936

In another installment of how control is lost in American politics, we have this gem:



I am curious has to how the McCain camp will defend against a birthday. John McCain turns 72 on August 29th - less than 10 weeks before election day.

Facebook is Dead? Long Live Facebook! (in Politics)

I commented on Colin Delaney's post about the failure of Facebook to deliver on its value to political organizations & campaigns, but I wanted to elaborate.

As I wrote, no one has yet really invested in a well-thought-out strategy. The features of Facebook are limited. By features, I am referring to Groups, Pages, Events and even Profiles. Active communication tools such as email messaging are hamstrung on each of these, to suppress spam. Interactive features do not go beyond basic discussion boards and comment threads. These tools become no more than glorified blogs. Thus, maintenance of these has been left to lower-level staffers and often interns within the campaign's internet team.

But the application platform is much less inhibited. You are able to do whatever your creative mind can think of within the canvas page. And then you are able to connect your application to the existing features of Facebook and, more importantly, adapt your application to the behaviors of the existing Facebook community. Is Facebook's discussion board infrastructure too limiting? Build your own. Is your application constrained by Facebook's strict emailing policies? Figure out a way to motivate users of your app to provide you their email address. The opportunity to connect with the 25+ million US Facebook users is limited only by creativity.

And yet, Obama and Clinton have made minimal investments of time and energy in their applications, and McCain's is nowhere to be found. Non-presidential apps have been few and far between.

To consider the value of political activism via Facebook a dead end at this point is premature. Many people (and development firms) have tried to take advantage of the application platform. But the folks that "know" politics, know what works and what does not in the offline world, have yet to commit investment dollars to the space. The people that get the opportunity (and get politics) are most often on the internet team, buried within communications. Those that control the purse strings don't yet understand the opportunity of Facebook and the greater social media space, and therefore are reluctant to invest when tactical opportunities are presented...

Full disclosure: I helped produce Clinton's Hillary Gifts - what I expect(ed?) to be the beginning of a longer-term investment...

Obama, Abercrombie and the Social Web

My how even the smallest blunders get noticed. Obama's advance team missed a small little nuance this evening, but the social web was watching. The three most visible people directly behind Obama were all wearing Abercrombie & Fitch t-shirts. A&F couldn't have paid for better placement.

During the latter part of the Clinton administration, I traveled the country doing advance, essentially event management. The primary focus of advance (other than a happy president) is a good picture (tertiary was a happy press corps). Much of the effort and discussion leading up to an event surrounds the image that cameras will capture.

During Obama's speech this evening, a traditional "crowd" backdrop was used - fill the area behind the speaker with enthusiastic supporters. Great care is often taken in selecting those folks. You have to be sure the right mix of folks is represented. You have to make sure no one is sleepy or yawning. And you even have to pay attention to their clothes, to make sure the colors work. Obama's advance team missed the A&F logos...

Prior to this election cycle, such a gaffe would barely have been noticed. A few political pundits may make a remark or two, but barring any other direction to the story, such an error would be a non-issue. Not this cycle...

As this search of Tweetscan shows, many folks are talking about it. This guy took a screenshot and posted it on Facebook. Patrick Ruffini sent out a tweet. I Twittered about it as well. Even though I mispelled Abercrombie, I was part of the cacophony. Rather than sulking away, this gaffe reverberated throughout the social web, going far beyond the few picky folks like me that notice such things.

What does this mean? In this instance, probably not much, other than a nice brand hit for A&F and further visual support to reiterate the idea that Obama = young college supporters. But it is yet another example of how the communications dynamic is changing...

Fred is Dead

Fred Thompson's presidential site is dead. Nothing there. Given the negligible cost of a redirect, why not push the occasional user somewhere, the RNC perhaps? JohnMcCain.com? I know there isn't much traffic, but isn't it worth a little effort to direct the user to something more useful than an error page?

This makes me wonder what is going to happen to the hundreds of thousands of connected supporters that exist among the various groups for each of the major candidates? Campaigns are known for leaving nothing behind - everything is spent by election day. However, these communities will still exist. What should be done with these assets?

Voter data (aka, the voter file) is another similar asset that at one time never lived beyond election day. Then, first by the Republicans and now slowly by the Democrats, the data each election cycle is being collected and stored for use next cycle. This data has become a powerful tool, as it has grown far beyond a simple list of those registered to vote. The data set now supports everything from ad buying to fundraising, and more innovations are on the horizon.

Given that most of these networked communities are locked within their respective social network, this data cannot be appended to the voter file. How can additional value be extracted after the balloons fall?

Traffic may not be enough to invest resources or thought, but Obama's 780,000 Facebook supporters, or McCain's 49,000 MySpace friends warrants at least some thought... What are your ideas?

Freak Show Update

I just caught this in yesterday's Politico:

...(I)t has only been in this campaign cycle that we have seen the liberal echo chamber — from websites like The Huffington Post and cable commentators like Keith Olbermann — be able consistently to drive a campaign story line. In the past, it was only the conservative echo chamber — Matt Drudge, Rush Limbaugh — who regularly drove stories in new media and old media alike. This is a huge shift.

In my initial post about the Freak Show, I referenced another article by Vanderhei and Harris. It appears as though they are coming to the same conclusion as I have: social media is an opportunity for progressives to (finally) contest the conservative supremacy of talk radio...

Agree or disagree?