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The Social Web Economy: Analysts & Journalists

Posted: 25 Aug 2008 09:59 AM CDT

This is a continuation in the series on “The Social Web Economy“

Analysts jobs are relatively straight-forward: they analyze everything that is taking place in the social web economy and produce reports on them. They can work inside or outside of companies. The companies can be any of the primary companies in the social web economy or they can even work at actual analyst companies (like Forrester Research).

Analysts pay attention to detail and they can also double as a journalist sometimes. Unfortunately for journalists, there are too many stories to write to have anytime to do in depth analysis. Occasionally though journalists overlap with analysts and they end up producing substantive reports. Both journalists and analysts cover their space obsessively.

In my own opinion, the primary distinction between the two is that journalists focus much more of their effort on working their sources and writing articles. The analysts spend a lot more time doing research which can include working the same sources as journalists but for other types of information.

In the social web economy, I would say that one of the most substantial differences in comparison to other industries is how bloggers are accepted as journalists. While they may not always hold the same standard for reporting, blogs have a substantial reach in the technology field. As such web attending any conference that pertains to the social web economy you will see as many bloggers as traditional journalists if not more bloggers.

No matter who they write for, analysts, journalists and bloggers all are important because they help quickly spread information regarding the companies and people in the social web economy. The primary tension for this group is with other analysts and journalists as they compete for valuable information. Additionally, there is occasionally tension between analysts and journalists and their sources as the journalist will push to expose information that the source didn't initially wish to reveal.

Next Post: “The Social Web Economy: Communications & PR Professionals”

Can Engagement Really Become the New Standard?

Posted: 25 Aug 2008 08:30 AM CDT

If you’ve gone to any of the industry conferences in the past year, you’ll have heard the same pitch from all the companies: “We’re selling engagement.” We understand that there is inherently value to brands when consumers engage in various activities within a branded environment. How much value is provided through that engagement? Nobody knows. How do you measure engagement? Also an unknown.

New Solutions Emerge

Last week news of Facebook’s new “Engagement Ads” emerged and at first it didn’t click with me but the sound of it is pretty ominous. Today MediaPost posted an interview with Facebook’s VP of Media Sales, Mike Murphy in which he says “Over the last few years, Web advertising has been all about demand fulfillment.”

The article continues, “he believes that Facebook users aren't necessarily seeking to execute tasks or fulfill specific demands, and by nature are less inclined to click on ads that take them away from the site.” What Mike Murphy believes is something that isn’t theory, it’s fact: users on social networks do not click on advertisements and this is why Google continues to reign in the majority of online advertising dollars.

Direct sales is what advertisers want and it’s not surprising. When you can put in money into specific advertisements and you can track that advertisement to a sale, why wouldn’t you purchase more or look for other channels that can do the same thing? That’s what most are doing, but a few brave souls are beginning to explore new territory.

Engagement Advertising as the 4th Type of Web Based Ad

You are a brand manager. You are sitting at your desk trying to process a ton of data and make a decision about the next quarter’s advertising budget. You have a bunch of options including: television, newspaper, radio, mailers and online. Online is broken out into banner advertising, search advertising, email marketing, and more recently “social media” which nobody has figured out how to classify it.

If Facebook agrees with what many others are saying, the new categorization should be “engagement advertising”. Meebo has already been offering these types of solutions (as they will discuss at the upcoming Social Ad Summit) and a number of others are beginning to do the same. Ultimately all engagement advertisements boil down to one thing: the conversation.

In public relations, marketing and advertising firms there have been a number of solutions to track buzz such as Cymfony and Nielsen BuzzMetrics. These new “engagement advertisements” ultimately produce similar results. At the end of the day, Meebo or Facebook will come back to the advertiser and say “X number of people interacted with your advertisement and Y number of people are now talking about your product in comparison to Z people before.”

Still Very Early

Just as brands are cautious to enter this space, social media evangelists should be equally concerned about this hesitancy. While we alway have “attention economics” to rely on, soon enough every social media site is going to be pushing this new type of advertisement. The only problem is that the industry is still learning how to measure all of these things.

Metrics is not a new phenomenon, it’s just that technology has made it easier to measure things. Unfortunately all of us are trying to figure out ways of packaging and measuring this “new type” of advertising while at the same time selling it “as is”. Fortunately for the industry there are brands that are willing to experiment and test the waters but the windfall profits we are seeking from social media may no longer be just over the horizon.

Rather than just measuring the impact of advertising on direct sales we are now entering a phase where we monitor the impact of advertising on conversation. While there are already systems in place to monitor the conversation, it was previously challenging to influence the conversation on a large scale. What social networks are now providing is a way to influence consumers’ conversation en masse.

The real question now is: can influencing the conversation on a large scale result in sales? If it can, how do we measure the correlation between conversation and sales? Is this really the secret key to social networks generating large amounts of revenue?

MySpace Isn’t the Only One Suing Spammers

Posted: 25 Aug 2008 07:00 AM CDT

Last week Law.com published an article highlighting a lawsuit filed by Facebook’s lawyers “against Adam Guerbuez, accusing the Canadian man of hijacking users’ accounts, impersonating them to send more than 4 million messages in March and April that market ‘offensive’ and ‘embarrassing’ products such as marijuana and penis enlargement pills.”

The Social Network Spam Problem

While there is no word on the amount Facebook is suing for, this is a continuing trend in the industry in which MySpace has been leading the charge against spammers. Users of social networks have not only been under attack by outside spammers though. Some social networks have even gone so far as to spam their own users. The most recent of the offenders is Reunion.com but many more have been offenders as well. The only difference is that the social networks have been able to avoid large settlements so far.

Spam is a critical issue on all social networks as it has been known to drive users away from the sites. The top social networks have increasingly dedicated more employees to fighting spam, some of which has actually compromised users’ privacy as I describe below.

Facebook’s Increasing Spam Challenge

The chief spammers that have been blasting out inappropriate content became more prevalent on Facebook in recent months. Facebook has been extremely aggressive in patrolling spammers though and this most recent lawsuit emphasizes how the company isn’t cutting any slack. Fighting spam is one of Facebook’s priorities and it isn’t surprising given the backlash that MySpace users had after receiving countless fake friend requests.

In the past few weeks spam has increased on Facebook and as Adam Rifkin wrote, even Matt Cohler had two spam posts on his wall. What is this new type of spam? Through effectively hijacking user accounts, spammers go and post wall posts that include a link which redirects users to insecure sites that request personal information.

I posted about this problem back in January but apparently the problem isn’t over. If you can’t shut the spammers down through technical methods, you might as well the sue them until they quit!