I’ve been thinking about better ways of connecting offline communities online. Like what Webkinz have done with their animals and then bringing the people back to their site. I think it’s quite interesting how invested people become in collecting and participating in the community. I was trying to think of an example of where this had been successful with adults. Today, I made a Hub on Coffee K-Cups, which got me thinking about the social nature of coffee drinking. There are certainly passionate coffee drinkers that actively participate in forums, but is there a way of bridging the social behavior of meeting a friend for coffee to a casual online group that meets for a cup of coffee like old friends? And, can the offline behavior of coffee drinking be connected socially online?
Archive for July, 2008
I’ve been talking about user generated content and value for a while, so I was excited to read this post that links to a white paper on user generated context.
If you’ve heard me talk before about the value of user generated content, I’ve said, the valuable content is commercial in nature. Reviews of products, financial information, and travel plans are easily contextually matched to advertisers like Google does with Adsense. UGC that is less valuable is where it’s hard to get context like a photo, or a game, or personal rants with little commercial context. There are few advertisers that want to be matched to this type of content.
I think the Havas Media Lab has one piece right in that UGC that provides context is the valuable piece. Where it goes wrong is that context is created collectively, and what it means to investors and advertisers.
The reality is the number of content creators (me blogging) to consumers is so low that context is easily created by one person. The 300 or so people that read this post will be influenced one way or another. Some will come here and get this content, some in their RSS feed and some via a search engine. This one post, loosely connected to a graph will be enough to provide context to readers, and unfortunately, it won’t add much commercial context so the value is really very little. I’d be better off reviewing entrepreneur drugs like Provigil. Mike’s post on this is providing a ton of context where advertisers for the drug would love to be placed. Heck, if he had an affiliate link in that post, I bet he would have moved some serious inventory today making some decent money.
As for investors and advertisers, I think there is value in connecting context across a social graph. Some company will make a lot of money by doing this. But, for advertisers, it’s much more complicated. To replace traditional advertising to participate in the context created by thousands of users is impossible. But, advertisers can listen and be accountable. I think that’s their best move with UGC.
Companies like Omniture are creating powerful analytics for marketers, but it’s not clear that the traditional marketer has the skills to analyze the detailed data. If you take a look at job listings for marketers, there are less creative jobs and more quantitative.
Social media is also at the center of the marketing shift. Even as the economy softens, I keep hearing how difficult is to find marketers that understand how to tap social media. SEM, blogging, community management,vlogs, widgets, and even forums are all tools for marketers. Few know how to use them effectively, while the demand for these skills are increasing.
I’m a big believer in improving the ad experience. A user experience that delivers a quality bar that attracts brand advertisers and perhaps separates the ad from the content of a web page. Google is creating professional content with ads distributed across its ad network. Equally as interesting is what VideoEgg has been doing with the ad/user experience. I think it’s going in the right direction.
Jeremy Liew has a post on the four types of ad targeting. One thing targeting ignores is the impact of an ad’s creative on performance. As marketers accountability grows, the ad’s creative is the last mile.
I setup friendfeed after reading about friendfeed vs twitter. I’ve been looking at a few companies for targeting technology to integrate into YieldBuild. None of the targeting companies are consumer facing, but I think they should be. They grab data from all the social networks. The most interesting ones build a profile of a user that connects feeds from all types of services like YouTube, your blog, Facebook, MySpace, Flicker etc.
Essentially, they have an automated way of setting up a friendfeed like service. The technology automatically finds correlations and ties the services together around a user. To me, this is what social search should be. The ability for my mother to search my images and look at flickr, facebook, picasa or any other place I put images. And, I shouldn’t have to setup all of my feeds in one central place to do it.
As for using Friendfeed or Twitter for short messaging. I think that these systems should be federated so you can use any messaging app you want to participate.
I had dinner last night with a doctor that said he was concerned that bed-side nurses are using WikiPedia to research treatments. His point was that there is often one source for recent research. Most likely the person that is doing the research is publishing journals, not contributing to WikiPedia. So, if WikiPedia has the information, it’s most likely paraphrased or another persons interpretation of the original source. And. The fear is valuable information is lost in the translation. In short, he was fine with WikiPedia for a number of things, just not as an information source where you have liability. I’m curious, has anyone been sued for using incorrect information from WikiPedia?
Yesterday, the Chronicle had an article in the business section about Yelp deleting some accounts and posts by users that appear to be swaping reviews with other local businesses. I scratch your back. You scratch mine type thing. It got me thinking at what point do services like Yelp become so influential that there value deteroriates since others are insented to provide skewed information. Also. What can Yelp do to ensure it remains a collection of unbiased reviews? Is deleting accounts and posts the answer? I think there must be a better way. Perhaps a warning on a review or a link to potentially biased reviews. Obvious spam is the only thing that should be deleted.
The best way to lower bounce rates is to engage and delight visitors. But to say that reach doesn’t matter is a mistake. Reach matters to advertisers. More uniques equals higher CPMs.
The best of both worlds is to do both. Big reach and low bounce rates, which really means getting users to view multiple pages. The best way I’ve seen to do that. Hands down. Photo galleries.
