Trendspotting - Finding Opportunity in Career Uncertainty

Date August 3, 2008

The Writing On The Wall

See that blue line on the graph? That represents jobs data for the TV news industry according to Simply Hired. For those of you who don’t know me, I’m a network news cameraman by trade, still clinging on to rapidly diminishing fortunes. The more appealing green line represents job data results for “Social Network”. So as that downward job trend continues across legacy media, I still believe there is tremendous opportunity in social media.

The New Television

About a year ago, I came across an interview with August Capital’s David Hornik. In this interview, Hornik refers to the sum of all of this social media as “the new television” and that “we will see increasingly specific social networks”. Both of these notions really struck me, and in my own post then, I hinted at a venture that incorporated those ideas.

The State of Social Networking Today

Since then there has been a lot of hype about social networking. From that hype has sprouted numerous white-label social networking platforms prompting this article in TechCrunch and this follow-up.
In the second post, Tech Crunch writer Mark Hendrickson looks ahead:

It will be interesting to see over the next few years whether this demand further intensifies as potential customers realize the value of niche social networks, or whether it slackens as people get over the hype surrounding this aspect of Web 2.0.

Many of these companies are targeting large, well-established organizations with deep pockets. Scan the chart and you will see big-name media companies, educational institutions, and corporations
-Mark Hendrickson, TechCrunch

Well a year later the results are in, and it doesn’t look good for corporate social networks. A recent Deloitte study, featured in the Wall Street Journal showed that the vast majority of them had failed to attract people.

One of the hot investments for businesses these days is online communities that help customers feel connected to a brand. But most of these efforts produce fancy Web sites that few people ever visit. The problem: Businesses are focusing on the value an online community can provide to themselves, not the community.
-Ben Worthen, Wall Street Journal

The article goes on to cite some staggeringly bad statistics and is pretty gloomy, but appears to put the blame sqaurely on the corporations, who just don’t get the community spirit thing. Marhsall Kirpatrick has his typically droll take on all of this, pointing to a social network built around a cat litter brand, that is emblematic of these failures.

Social networks where a brand name product is what everyone rallies around are a dumb idea. They are stupid. No one should submit themselves to the indignity of creating a user profile and friend connections based on cola or cat litter.
-Marshall Kirkpatrick, Read Write Web

Hehe.. I like Marshall. :) Kirkpatrick also appears to be bullish on niche market social networks.

Building A Community Around Passionate Fans

craftypeek

As some of you know, I’ve been working on something along these lines for some time with a business partner. We are perilously close to unleashing it upon the social web. We feel we have built the foundation for a strong web community that celebrates the passions of a creative constituency. But simply because we aren’t a corporate site, doesn’t mean that we won’t face our own EPIC FAIL. It’s all in the execution. We have partnered with white-label social network developer, Pringo, to design and develop this space and are currently in PRE-LAUNCH beta. (leave a comment here if you’re interested in taking a look)

What we’re discovering in this pre-launch phase is that the community won’t adapt to the platform, the platform has to be right for the community. As we move forward, we must be able to adapt to the needs of our community or we will share the same fate of many of these corporate social networks. Similarly, those white label social network platforms listed in the Tech Crunch post must have the flexibility and agility to keep up with how people are using the social web, or as I’ve come to call it…”the new television”.

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Category Posted in Crafty Nation, Uncategorized, old media, social media, social networking Comments 35 Comments »

Twitter: Show Me Added Value if You Want Me to Pay

Date May 27, 2008

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Albert Einstein

Let’s operate under the premise that Einstein was right about this. Why then, do I, and nearly everyone else on Twitter continue to keep coming back to this infuriatingly unstable platform to connect with our communities? It’s likely because, for now, that’s where the people are, and while most users are getting frustrated with nearly daily outages, no one is taking that first step toward migration. That seems to be the million dollar question - why do we keep coming back? To be more precise, it could soon become the $250 a year question if Jason Calacanis holds sway with the folks at Twitter. Recently there has been a chorus of people from Om Malik to Pat Phelan calling for some type of metered/pay service.

Om Malik’s post is essentially an indictment of the users, “extreme users” specifically. Let me get this straight… it’s the users “fault” that Twitter keeps going down?? This is how you want to introduce a pay/metered system on Twitter?? I have a difficult time reconciling Twitter’s desire to scale with imposing a fee structure on those who help drive growth in order to solve underlying technology issues that they didn’t anticipate. This smacks of hubris to me, the kind of hubris attendant in a brand that thinks they’re the only game in town (think cable company only with hipsters at the helm). This has already driven to a contest to build a better mousetrap and in the interem, I wonder if folks will simply migrate to an equally useful existing platform like Jaiku or Pownce. If Twitter offered added value and created REAL pro accounts, offering tools to organize friends, send messages to groups etc, then I’d consider paying.

Under the Om Malik plan I would pay around $60 a month. It’s important to note here that none of this discussion has come directly from the Twitter team themselves. But given the uniformity of the this pricing structure amongst the bloggerati, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if this turd in the pool has been floated with at least the implicit aknowledgement of Twitter and/or their investors. Now, $60 may not seem like much to some people. But let’s get real for a minute, as our buying power diminishes daily $60 is not insignificant to me. That’s a weeks worth of gas in my Honda Element. For that $60, all that is being currently discussed is platform stability.

Imagine buying a car, driving it off the lot only to find that the engine routinely dies. Imagine taking the car to get fixed over and over again until the dealer finally tells you he’ll fix it for good for an extra $5000. What chaps my hide a bit here is that the early adopters (I joined in Nov. 2006), helped grow Twitter’s mainstream adoption. Nearly everyone on the service has evangelized the platform by either word of mouth, blog posts, mainstream media mentions, or workplace use. In many respects they wouldn’t be where they are today without the very people that proposed fee plans would penalize. Perhaps if I try to glean as much potential financial/professional benefit from every Twitter post, I’ll soon grow more tiresome than I already am. Then people will drop me in droves leaving Twitter more affordable to me. That should make Twitter AWESOME! It’s the people that make Twitter what it is. It is CLEARLY not the platform in and of itself.

Over the weekend, I engaged in an ideological video tete a tete with Seesmic CEO Loic Lemeur on the topic of paying for Twitter. The videos are short, but it’s clear that I don’t come at this unemotionally.

Drops in ad spending forecasts for social networks are likely drivers in the push for pay-for-use and I wouldn’t be surprised to see more of this in places other than Twitter. Overall, I have no problem with paying for something I find useful, or that simplifies my life. I do take issue with the suggestion that Twitter hold stability for ransom. So to those forced with re-examining revenue models and premium” plans, I would humbly suggest creating an added value transaction, not penalizing the community that has helped build your brand.

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Category Posted in Uncategorized Comments 57 Comments »

Conference to Conference - Putting the “Social” Back in Social Media

Date April 21, 2008

New Communications Forum 2008

sheljim.jpg

gathering the lunch gang with Shel. (photo courtesy of Lunaweb)

On the eve of my trip to the 2008 New Communications Forum in Sonoma, CA, I’m looking back at a couple of inspiring and energizing conferences that I’ve had the opportunity to attend in the past month - South By Southwest Interactive in March, and Podcamp DC this past weekend. Both very different events, by way of scale and influence, but both great forums for sharing ideas and connecting face to face with the trailblazers of emerging, participatory media. Looking ahead to Sonoma, I’ll be sharing a stage with Shel Israel and Tom Foremski as well as a panel with Steve Lubetkin.It’s encouraging to me that there are many people who see value in the story of my journey into disruptive media, from the eyes of this old media footsoldier. Yes, i know.. “disruptive” is just more conference-speak. Look, let me assure you… ALL of these social media are very disruptive, and there are real economic and human consequence of this disruption. And while social media creates kool-aid drinker evangelists, and very vocal, antagonistic, contrarian detractors, the fact of the matter is that social media simply ARE.They are just communications tools that can be adopted by many - those with useful, meaningful things to say, and those with very little value to bring to the enterprise.So it’s worthwhile to me, as an “old media” dinosaur, to examine how and why these disruptions are taking place and to see where there may be areas where these worlds collide. That, I believe is where very extraordinary things can happen, right at that intersection. At the end of the day, I come at this from a guy witnessing upheaval in the industry that pays my mortgage and feeds my family. You better believe I want to get out there and meet these agents of change.

South by Southwest Interactive

NBC News sent me and two colleagues to Austin to attend SXSW interactive back in March and our team really came away energized and inspired. There are some really great platforms out there that are built on participation and community that are very eager to integrate with traditional media companies. From a strategic standpoint, there are some very smart firms like Forrester Research that are advising big media on how to develop their social web strategies. Forrester’s Charlene Li and Jeremiah Owyang are a formidable team in this space and Charlene’s SXSW presentation is well worth examining, and is outlined here.A very fun, kind of “rock star” moment for me was being interviewed live on Qik by Robert Scoble. We talked about the impact of this technology and how audience interaction becomes the real game changer here. Pictured below the video is me, CC Chapman and Rocky Barbanica. Love both of those guys, and Rocky, like me is tasked with keeping the talent like Scoble in check. ;-)The photo was taken by friend and very savvy Canadian marketing pro Adele McAlear.

ccjimroc.jpg

Podcamp DC

Certainly smaller in scale than SXSW, Podcamp DC makes up for it with enthusiasm, knowledge base, and grassroots community. I had an opportunity to speak with NPR’s Andy Carvin about social media tools being used as a “new journalism”. We were able to cite the Midwest earthquake of last week, where people on Twitter were sharing pretty dramatic first-person accounts of the tremors. These messages caught the attention of NBC Nightly News, and were included as an element of our coverage.

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Category Posted in Uncategorized, confernece, social media, tradtional media Comments 13 Comments »