SocialTimes.com

The Collapse of the Conference Bubble Posted: 30 Sep 2008 08:30 AM CDT Over the past two years I have spent countless hours traveling to conferences around the world to meet some of the most influential people on the internet today. As I traveled from one conference to the next I have found that there appeared to be an excessive number of events covering social media, social technology, and Web 2.0. I’ve participated in some of those conference and many of them were amazing productions but there has definitely been froth in the market. Warning Signs Beginning to Emerge The first warning sign that I saw was the shut down of DigitalLife Expo by Ziff Davis media. While I honestly can’t say that I heard about the event previously, it was a sign that perhaps bad things were to come. Yesterday while walking around a local conference I heard that the Social Media Marketing Summit being held by mthink was having trouble selling tickets. These are only a few of the events that are in the process of disappearing. How many times can people possibly listen to the same speakers talk about the same topic? Ultimately this is a question that can’t be answered but it’s my inclination that there are most definitely some events being put on by individuals that don’t even have expertise within the industries they are promoting. The Integration of Media & Events It’s not over though. The real value is generated by the integration of online media and offline events. The business model for modern media companies is through event promotion. Just like the music industry is generating a large portion (if not the majority) of their cash flow through concerts, new media companies are succeeding by promoting conferences. Last night I saw a post on the Facebook blog about the Future of Web Apps in London and realized just how nice it can be to be in the circle of influencers. For those events that don’t have event directors with the industry leaders on speed dial, it can be much more challenging to build a successful event. That’s why those companies need to rely on building media companies. Unfortunately I see it time and time again that some random individual pulls in a few good speakers which snowballs into a decent lineup for an event and suddenly is able to sell-out to a packed crowd. I was fortunate enough to fill-up the Social Ad Summit a few weeks ago with great speakers and great attendees but I believe it was my reliance on creating content which drove the success of that event. Content is still King and the same holds for the content within conferences. If you have the ability to consistently produce quality content, you are good to go. Unfortunately you can’t always hit the ball out of the park with conferences and that’s why generating other media to back up those events is so important. This Economy Will Eliminate the Froth Honestly, if there is one good thing to come of this downturn in the economy, it’s that the froth will be eliminated. You can’t run successful businesses without delivering high-quality service to your customers the majority of the time. Those that were able to pull revenue thanks to an environment with more excessive spending are going to face tough times ahead. You need to either be a thought leader, have a large reach (through your media), or have the best roledex (or any combination of these) to succeed in this environment. There has been tons of events covering the exact same topics in the same geographic regions which has made for an extremely challenging environment. Do you agree that there has been somewhat of a conference bubble in this space? Despite the collapse of Wall Street and what I previously considered a tech conference bubble, one person that continues to build value is Loic LeMeur. Yesterday he was announced as one of the most influential people on the web.

Clearspring Acquires AddThis Posted: 30 Sep 2008 07:00 AM CDT Despite an economic downturn Clearspring is one company that continues to proceed full steam ahead. Today Clearspring announced that they had acquired AddThis, a bookmarking widget which has built a massive reach since their launch in September 2006. The combined reach of these two companies is now more than 200 million unique visitors with over 20 billion monthly views. What does this mean for Clearspring in the short-term? Probably nothing substantial aside from expanding their reach as the leading widget distribution platform. In the long-run there are some definite implications. The most obvious implication is the ability for Clearspring to increase the companies ability to distribute multiple forms of content which was previously not “widgetized”. The second most significant implication is the ability of the company to build new products on the back of AddThis. With more than 20 billion impressions per month, there is substantial data that AddThis has available to them which is currently not being leveraged. Want to know what the most popular content on the web is? Check out all those sites with the AddThis widget and learn what is being shared most. Not only does AddThis let users share but it also enables users to bookmark making it a competitor to Yahoo’s popular bookmarking service: delicious. This one small button will most definitely have a big impact on the company in the long-term as sharing among content distribution platforms continues to surge across the web. Clearspring previously had approximately 120 million monthly unique visitors which means this has increased the company’s monthly reach by approximately 67 percent. As I mentioned earlier, this widget enables Clearspring to now distribute both widgetized content and non-widgetized content throughout the web. Ted Leonsis said that this will help connect “digital content publishers and consumers via a single set of universally recognizable tools”. It will be interesting to see what sort of long-term impact this acquisition has for Clearpsring.

You are subscribed to email updates from The Social Times To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now.	Email Delivery powered by FeedBurner
Inbox too full? Subscribe to the feed version of The Social Times in a feed reader.
If you prefer to unsubscribe via postal mail, write to: The Social Times, c/o FeedBurner, 20 W Kinzie, 9th Floor, Chicago IL USA 60610

SocialTimes.com

The Social Web Economy: Distribution Companies (Platforms) Posted: 29 Sep 2008 10:00 AM CDT This is a continuation in the series “The Social Web Economy“ On the social web, widget companies and application platforms are the primary distribution companies. Facebook, MySpace, Clearspring and Gigya are all examples. These companies strive to expand their reach either through partnerships or through sheer force. Facebook for instance has enough momentum that they can grow virally. Widget platforms on the other hand are forced to sign agreements with large product organizations and media companies to expand their reach and incentivize developers to build on their platforms. Just as there is tension between product and distribution companies, so too are there tensions between widget platforms and broad social platforms. The reason is that they are all battling for developer attention as well as the attention of large product companies. This is an extremely challenging role because not only do they need the developers and product companies (which are essentially large teams of developers), but they also need to attract the attention of advertisers. The benefit of this position is that attracting advertisers is as easy as calling them. Most brands managers will pick up the phone if somebody from Facebook calls. The problem that many of these companies are running into is that the product companies who are building reach through the platforms are now undercutting their run rates on advertisements. Whoops! This isn’t completely horrible though as a side-effect is that it is in everybody’s best interest to work together to try to increase the overall run rates (cost per thousand impressions (CPM), etc) across the board. Unfortunately there are some substantial hurdles to get past before this happens. One other interesting note about distribution companies/platforms is that these are the companies that attract the largest investment dollars. Investors are looking to put their money in platforms for the most part, not product companies. That’s not to say that product companies don’t get funding, it’s just that they don’t receive as much funding. That’s because platforms will always be larger (at least they should be). Next Post: “The Social Web Economy: Social Web Agencies”

Now is the Time to Start! Posted: 28 Sep 2008 02:29 PM CDT With all the banks going under (or at least getting acquired) and Congress preparing to write a check for $700 billion to bail out the economy there is a lot to be pessimistic about. Honestly though there is always a reason to be pessimistic. I’m Angry & Confused Too It’s hard not to be a little angry (if not very angry) that a bunch of people that participated in making bad decisions are ultimately getting bailed out. It’s also hard to make sense of all the chaos when it’s going down. I spent all day Friday trying to figure out what exactly happened, why we got here and what’s being done (here’s what I’m reading on the issue). I’ve felt the same emotions many times over the past 8 years though (September 11, the war in Iraq and more … go here to get your dose of negativity). The only thing that has ever worked for me is to read about it, be aware of what’s going on, and then get over it and press on. There’s really not much I can do and while it’s important to be educated on the issues, it’s kind of hard when there is little transparency about what’s taking place behind closed doors. Now is the Best Time to Start! I’m a little disappointed in Jason Calacanis who took what is ultimately a leadership position and gave everyone something to cry about. Negative sensationalism works though. Jason at least has a few positive notes, none of which were this: now is the best time to start. Ask any entrepreneur and if you can build a business (which means a company with revenue) now, then you will be able to thrive during the good times. This morning I reached out to a few of investors that I look up to (including Howard Lindzon and Brad Feld) to hear what their thoughts are on the economy and start-ups. So far the response has been positive. One of the investors has already funded eight start-ups in the past two months and four more closing next month. While there may be a recession, there is a massive opportunity to build something now. I don’t remember who said it, but there is a phrase that is along the lines of “The bigger the hole that you dig, the greater the opportunity that you have at building something many times greater.” In essence every seed for failure comes with a greater seed of opportunity. Is the economy looking bad? Build a business! Your business will be much better prepared to thrive during the great times. What Are You Building? So now that we all know now is the best time to start a business, the only thing left is to figure out what you are building. What are you going to build? One important factor when building a business during these times is focusing on revenue generating activities. While investing in long-term and working on building value is important (through re-investing in your business), it’s important that a solid portion of that investment is in sales. Aside from that, there is not much else to say! After spending a few days reading one negative article after the other, I’ve had enough. It’s time to get back to business and build something that’s valuable. There’s nothing else I’d choose to do … You should do the same thing too!

You are subscribed to email updates from The Social Times To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now.	Email Delivery powered by FeedBurner
Inbox too full? Subscribe to the feed version of The Social Times in a feed reader.
If you prefer to unsubscribe via postal mail, write to: The Social Times, c/o FeedBurner, 20 W Kinzie, 9th Floor, Chicago IL USA 60610

SocialTimes.com

Politics Gets Social In Time for Debates Posted: 26 Sep 2008 10:34 AM CDT Today, a number of companies have announced new services that will help users track the political discussion taking place around the web related to the Presedential debates and the election. Earlier this week I wrote about the new MySpace MyDebates site as well as how the candidates are leveraging social networks for their campaigns. Today, Twitter, C-SPAN, and Facebook have all made announcements regarding new political offerings. Twitter has launched a new election site which enables users to track all of the discussion taking place surrounding the debates and the candidates. If you check out Twitter’s Election 2008 site, you will immediately notice that the coverage streams in real-time. The service appears to have a similar feel to Politweets except that it is streaming. I was able to find what I would already consider “classic” Sarah Palin videos by watching the stream of tweets. I highly recommend checking out the Election 2008 site to watch the discussion take place in real-time. C-SPAN has also announced the launch of their Debatehub site (in conjunction with JESS3) which will track the debates as they are happening. It’s a blogger-friendly site which gives users instant access to blog posts happening around the web, a timeline of the debate and video clips that can be embedded on any site. There is also a keyword diagram which lets users easily see what topics are being discussed most frequently. The tools available are extremely valuable for anybody covering the debates. One of the most useful tools is the video player in which you can create clips with specified in points and out points. Finally, last night Facebook announced the release of a new voter registration tool. According to Facebook thousands of new voters have already been registered since launching the new tool. With so much influence, this is an unprecedented effort to register new voters. No other social network has made such strides to promote voter registration. One thing that Facebook also theoretically has power to do is target voter registration based on various demographic characteristics. While Facebook hasn’t stated what determines whether you see promotions for voting, it’s clear that they will try to drive as many new registrations as possible. If you haven’t registered to vote, go register now. Overall, it’s impressive to see the increasing integration between politics and social media. Twitter, C-SPAN, Facebook, and MySpace are just a few of the companies stepping up their political activity.

You are subscribed to email updates from The Social Times To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now.	Email Delivery powered by FeedBurner
Inbox too full? Subscribe to the feed version of The Social Times in a feed reader.
If you prefer to unsubscribe via postal mail, write to: The Social Times, c/o FeedBurner, 20 W Kinzie, 9th Floor, Chicago IL USA 60610

SocialTimes.com

Social Ad Summit: Social Ad Network Solutions Posted: 25 Sep 2008 03:04 PM CDT One of the most interesting panels during the day at Social Ad Summit was the Social Ad Networks Solutions panel. The best part was the disagreement among some of the panelists. It was a panel of multiple ad networks (SocialMedia, Lookery, Social Cash, appssavvy, and Offerpal Media) and moderated by Allen Stern of Centernetworks. This made for a pretty insightful panel. Check it out below!

The Low Down on MySpace Music Posted: 25 Sep 2008 11:53 AM CDT Last night MySpace Music went live and I’ve spent the morning playing around with the new service. The most important thing about this new service is that it is built on top of MySpace’s existing music service. There are a number of competing services when it comes to MySpace music and the most obvious are iLike and imeem. MySpace Music aims to be the top social music service. In exchange for granting the music labels ownership in the new venture, MySpace is paying a discounted amount on each song that’s streamed. It’s not a bad model but such a system has never been tested before. Just like all the other leaders in digital music, MySpace is trying to figure out how to successfully navigate the space. With MySpace music comes two new key features: personal playlists and song purchases. Personal Playlists One of the key new features is personal playlists. For the first time, users will be able to create personalized playlists from all the songs in the MySpace Music directory and listen to those playlists on demand. They will play full songs with no limits. This is a huge step forward from what already exists and it’s a large step in what many consider to be the shift toward free on-demand music available everywhere. Whether or not personal playlists accomplish that has yet to be seen. What also has yet to be seen is whether or not the number of songs sold will cover the total cost of playing all the songs for free. Part of the cost is being subsidized by advertisements which are displayed next to the music players but the model remains unproven. Personal Playlist Player Song Downloads Songs will now be available for purchase. While not all songs are currently available (such as the ones included in the screenshot below), many will be immediately accessible via Amazon’s MP3 service. Not only will artists be able to sell their music but they will also be able to sell tickets and merchandise to fans. Amit Kapur was quoted in the Wall Street Journal as saying “We’re not only going to be their home on the Web, we’re going to be the place they make a living.” Updated Music Player Conclusion It’s unclear as to whether or not this is really going to solve the problems facing the music industry. For the most part it appears that this new service simply highlights the massive problems facing the industry as a whole. For now we will have to wait and see if it works. Thankfully, while we’re waiting we can go listen to as much free music as our hearts desire.

hi5 Launches Answer to Facebook’s Translation App Posted: 25 Sep 2008 09:12 AM CDT Last night hi5 announced the release of a new translations application which is compatible with the OpenSocial standard. The new service is being promoted as the first major translation tool using the OpenSocial standard. I’m not quite sure why the release was phrased this way to be honest. The reality is that this is simply a translations application for hi5. Given hi5’s international reach, it makes it much more easier to find users willing to translate applications abroad. Two companies that are immediately taking advantage of this new service is RockYou and iLike. While it makes all OpenSocial applications more easily translated, it requires the applications to be accessible on hi5 in order to have them translated. This application is currently not available on other platforms. hi5 continues to make announcements regarding them being the first to release specific features related to OpenSocial (including the first to implement version 0.8 of the OpenSocial standard) but developers have been complaining. While features are being released, they aren’t always usable and hi5 has been somewhat delayed in rolling out fixes to any issues on the platform. hi5 continues to roll out new features though and it’s clear that they are taking the platform seriously. If you have an OpenSocial application and are looking to have it translated, you may want to test out hi5’s new translation service.

Social Web Hype Hits a Maxim With Digg’s Latest Round of Funding Posted: 24 Sep 2008 11:39 PM CDT Yesterday afternoon Digg announced that they had secured yet another round of funding. This new round is for $28.7 million. Two things come to everybody’s mind: what are they going to do with all that money and did Kevin and Jay take some cash as part of this round? Is the company prepared to release the latest cure for cancer? Probably not. I’m giving Digg a hard time. I mean Facebook was able to raise almost half a billion after all their rounds of funding right? While the site attracts over 20 million monthly users domestically and even more worldwide, the site isn’t exactly at the early stage of their growth. Are they? The site is preparing to launch support for the Facebook Connect service and they’re hoping that this helps transform the service and attract a broader audience. Perhaps the site will become the social voting site for absolutely everything, not just news. After four years of operations, a lack of profit, and many unsuccessful exit attempts it appears that the next best option was to go for funding. I have to give it to the Digg team, they have some serious cohones! While I love using the site to find the latest tech news, I’m just not sure that the service is transforming the world the way that $40 million in total funding should. Perhaps this is all part of the Web 2.0 mindset though. Give a lot of money to people that are building services that help us organize the nearly infinite information on the web. Do you think this round is justifiable? What do you think they could possibly be using all this money for?

How to Use Social Networks in Custody Battles Posted: 24 Sep 2008 11:16 PM CDT This video is classic. Want to learn more about how to spy on your child’s mother in fighting a custody battle? The lawyer below is giving great advice on how to spy on your loved ones (or ex-loved one) in order to gain an edge in your custody battle. The best part is the beginning of the video. The lawyer starts off with the following statement: “In this video I’m going to talk about what’s called social networking websites.” The way he elongates the “social networking websites” phrase is pretty entertaining. Check out the video below for more entertainment.

Comcast Starts Promoting Plaxo Services Posted: 24 Sep 2008 11:05 PM CDT This evening while watching the television I noticed an interesting advertisement show up: Comcast’s ad for their new “universal address book”. Immediately I thought that this must be part of the recent Plaxo acquisition. Sure enough after looking around I found the new Universal Address Book service site and it does indeed leverage Plaxo. The goal is straight-forward: let everyone access their contacts and calendars from a central location. This is something that data portability is supposed to help accomplish. The one place where they can’t access all my contact information is from Facebook. I wrote about this issue earlier today. Facebook needs to open up their contact lists for this to work. As I’ve been saying for a while now, the real battle for social networks is the race to our contact list. Unfortunately nobody has been able to accomplish this yet but Comcast is going to leverage Plaxo’s services, with the help of Joseph Smarr of course, to try to offer this service. Unfortunately Comcast couldn’t get the service to work for me. Apparently I was one of the users being affected by some sort of email outage that I was unaware of. In the middle of my chat with a Comcast support person, the chat application crashed and my conversation was ended. Thankfully I was able to at least figure out a way to embed the following promotion presentation that was included on their site. We’ll see how long this stays live! Once Comcast can resolve my email issues I will hopefully be able to try out a more thorough demo. It’s interesting to see how quickly Comcast has integrated Plaxo’s services into their own. I wonder how soon we can see these services directly integrated into our televisions rather than having to use the net to take advantage of this.

You are subscribed to email updates from The Social Times To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now.	Email Delivery powered by FeedBurner
Inbox too full? Subscribe to the feed version of The Social Times in a feed reader.
If you prefer to unsubscribe via postal mail, write to: The Social Times, c/o FeedBurner, 20 W Kinzie, 9th Floor, Chicago IL USA 60610