The A Case for Social Depth

+Dan Reimold has 44 followers at the time that I write this. He wrote an “article” called “Google+: Social Media Upstart ‘Worse Than a Ghost Town.”

Dan‘s article basically says “Google+ is not good because no one follows me.”

Now, Dan has some “evidence” for this. Of course he does.

Except his evidence consists of Rainbow Rowell’s article on Omaha.com. +Rainbow Rowell has 33 followers on G+ and she has posted a handful of times. Rainbow’s opinionated column basically comes down to this: “My Google+ home page is worse than a ghost town. It doesn’t even feel haunted. Meanwhile, down the road,in a much less desirable neighborhood, Facebook is teeming with life.” So apparently Google+ is dead because Facebook, which is over half a decade older has more users poking each other (I’m not disagreeing necessarily, just paraphrasing).

And her “sequel” is well… “The fact that I think Google+ is useless might be one of the best possible indicators that it’s going to succeed. Get yourself a Google+ account. This thing’s going to be huge.”I’m not sure what it is. Insurance? Change of heart? Sarcasm? Live journal emotional flashback?

But that’s not all. The “best” evidence comes from the one and only Forbes: +Paul Tassi, the person who called the “eulogy” for Google+ and celebrated when others talked about it on G+.

Apparently Google+ has become appealing to Mr. Tassi, who ironically also wrote a follow-up article only hours after the first one. No one remembers that one. Now, when I first saw Tassi’s profile on Aug 15th, he had few followers and aprox 5 public posts. Today he’s a happy Google Pluser with 1200+ followers. He almost raves about it without having to rave about it. Paul has converted and has amassed a following.

But wasn’t G+ dead? Hmmm… I’m confused now. I thought the word “EULOGY” was a strong one but apparently I’ve been reading the wrong dictionary. (more…)

I first spoke with Erik Ober, CEO of Booshaka, in 2010 because his startup, which started as a search engine for Facebook, had caught my interest. I expressed that while it was great to find out about what people were publicly saying about Samsung on Facebook, it would be great to also know specifics about the engagement in our Samsung USA Facebook page. I really wanted to discover who Samsung USA’s “top fans” were.

Today, Booshaka ranks Facebook pages based on engagement and, as I had hoped, Booshaka identifies your “top fans” and ranks them in a nice leaderboard. You can see Samsung USA’s “Top Fans” on a tab on our Facebook page, and find more details on the Booshaka page for Samsung USA.
Read my interview with Erik below to learn more about the startup, how “Top Fans” works, and where his team is headed.

1. Who is behind Booshaka and what does your “Do the Impossible” tagline mean?

Booshaka is backed by a proven leadership and advisory team with 100+ collective years in social applications, data analysis, algorithms and advertising. Our mission is to help brands and businesses drive engagement and advocacy on Facebook.

From the start, we wanted to create big, meaningful company.  ”Do the impossible” is more of a motto than a tagline and its derived from the Urban dictionary meaning of “Booshaka.” Since naming the company, we’ve been told that all the biggest internet domains have two “O”s in them — Facebook, Google, and Yahoo :)

2. While the site initially started as a way to search on Facebook pages, it is now focused on Facebook Leaderboards based on engagement. Tell me more about this evolution.

The first few iterations of the product were experimental and designed to test how the market would respond to innovations built on Facebook’s Graph APIs.  In August 2010, we launched a version of the site which showed what was trending in different topical categories (ie Sports, Movies, Politics, etc) on Facebook.  We received some great organic press for the app and hundreds of developers and companies reached out to see how they might be able to leverage our technology.

After several months of customer development, we learned two things:

a. Marketers were overwhelmed with the amount of social data and interactions on Facebook and didn’t know how to take advantage of it.

b. Everyone was measuring the success of their Facebook Page(s) in terms of total number of fans / likes.

From our perspective, social media is all about how active your community is, how engaged your customers are, and how much they talk about your brand or business. At that point, we set out to develop technology solutions for the next frontier of social marketing — customer engagement and advocacy.

When I was in High School, Napster was the coolest “computer application” on Earth. Sharing and downloading music, for free, had changed the world. From pillow fights with Metallica to the rise and fall of copycats like Limewire, Napster disrupted the web, the music industry, and the tech industry. Today, the Napster logo still represents music, but it doesn’t represent what it used to represent back then: Freedom.

Fast forward to today.

Spotify, the mythological creature of music streaming, is allegedly coming to the U.S. tomorrow, and rumor is it will be integrated into Facebook soon after.

Pandora, a public company (let me repeat: a public company) birthed out of the “Music Genome Project,” just recently redesigned its site to allow you to go “back” on your browser and provide a deeper social experience inspired by good ol’ photo social network Instagram, among other changes.

(And in related news, I haven’t bought a CD in three years. If I’ve paid for any songs online, it can’t be more than a dozen or two.)

So what does this mean? Spotify coming to the U.S. after what seemed like decades of waiting and Pandora going public and adding a social layer of its own are clear signs that the days of music ownership, at least in the traditional way, are numbered. Music streaming means you can’t download, but it also means you no longer have to. (more…)

Google+ is off to a good start: A clean interface that works, interesting and useful  features, a great Android app, and a curious community of early adopters. The screenshots at the bottom of this post will give you a taste of what Google+ is but they will also likely show you what it is not, at least not yet.

Google needs to go above and beyond itself to make this worth our time and theirs. Right now Google+ (or Google Plus) feels like Google Buzz +1 but also like Facebook -1. It’s exciting, but not that exciting.

Below are 10 things that Google can do to change their reputation in the “social” space and become a dominant player instead of an awkward one.

1) Don’t Focus on the Technology

Google Wave was the future… and then it died. Google Buzz might as well be. Google must truly learn from those mistakes and focus on use cases that make sense to people outside the Googleplex. Why do people go online (beyond search and YouTube) and why/how/when do people interact with each other?

2) Compete with Facebook

Google needs to stop saying that this is not about Facebook. It is. It’s time to compete and compete well. Twitter might not be trying to create a Facebook but its definitely competing by enhancing its own network and doing things that are either very much in line with what Facebook is doing, or completely different. A competition is a competition regardless of whether you can coexist or not.

3) Google Ads

A Google social network without ads? Really? For how long? Google must be brave and put some ads up there. If it doesn’t, I simply cannot take this seriously. It’s not that I love ads, but without ads Google is pretending to be something it is not.

4) Make Changes and Soon

Google Buzz looks the same today as it did a year ago. That’s embarrasing and quite useless in a web that evolves on an on-going basis. There must be a long-term strategy and that must involve changes, updates, and major enhancements and announcements. It also includes making mistakes and doing a thing or two that people don’t like. Just do something beyond launching and don’t wait too long to do it. If there are no changes in the next month or two, I’m not staying around.

5) Integrate ASAP (more…)

Simon Mainwaring is founder of We First, a social branding consulting firm that helps companies use social media to build communities, profits and positive social impact. Simon is also the author of the book by the same name. Read my interview with Simon below, and make sure to follow him on Twitter @SimonMainwaring and find out more about the book at www.wefirstbook.com.

The book is unique for a couple of reasons. It does an effective job of consolidating a lot of different discussions going on right now, whether they’re about the future of capitalism, philosophical debates about self-interest, globalization, emerging technologies, the future of the developing world, and the impact of social technology. Specifically, the book is unique because it looks at an issue that many people have discussed: the future of capitalism through the lens of social technology. Mass adoption of social media has only occurred in the last three or four years, so what makes the book unique is that it looks at these questions through the lens of this new technology and provides three fundamental new solutions. First is a new partnership between brands and consumers connected by social technology and aligned around shared values that creates a third pillar of social change in addition to government and philanthropy. The second is the concept of contributory consumption, which builds on precursors like ‘1% for the Planet’ but extends to include not only retail, credit card, online, and mobile transactions, but also virtual goods when applying the concept of contributing a small portion of the sale of every good or service to a cause. Thirdly, the book proposes the formation of the Global Brand Initiative, which is a federation of brands that would combine their efforts and expertise to bring the best of the private sector into the social change space. So the book is unique because it lays out these three concepts.

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According to recent eMarketer research, Facebook is the number one seller of display ads in the US. eMarketer expects Facebook to generate $2.19 billion in display advertising revenue this year.

How much is expected for Yahoo? $1.62 billion.

And what about Google? Only $1.15 billion.

We all know that if we want to place text ads on a website or blog, AdSense is the first place to go for revenue. AdSense is great because it delivers ads based on the website hosting the ad. But AdSense doesn’t seem to really know much, if at all, about the audience viewing the ads.

So what about display ads? And what about targeted, relevant display ads?

Everyone talks about targeted and relevant advertising, but no one has been able to deliver this in the way that Facebook can within Facebook.com.

It must be only a matter of time before Facebook decides to add advertisements to the Open Graph.

We already see “Like” buttons everywhere and companies like Amazon, CNN, Levi’s and Huffington Post have done some interesting personalization-like implementations on their sites.

Anyone can add a Facebook plugin in a matter of minutes.

So why not Facebook ads all over the web? Why not a FacebookSense of sorts that would allow both large and small sites to deliver targeted and relevant ads to Facebook users?

Think about. You’re connected to Facebook and happen to stroll away from Facebook for 5 minutes and end up on a sports blog. And let’s say you’re a young woman who recently got engaged. Facebook knows you’re engaged and you’re a young woman who likes to run so maybe it would show you a wedding dress ad and a Nike Women Sponsored Story. It might not be perfect because Facebook wouldn’t know whether you’ve bought that wedding dress yet but it would be a better experience than seeing an ad about muscle gain next to an ad for a questionable dating site, right?

And what about visitors who are not on Facebook or don’t feel like connecting to Facebook at that time? Well, Facebook could deliver ads based on the content of the site itself just as Google AdSense does.

My guess is that a Facebook AdSense coming and it’s coming before 2012. Why before 2012? Well, because 2012 is the alleged IPO year. Oh, and also because 2012 might be the end of the world. And Facebook doesn’t have time to wait until the end of the world.

The “Social Media Exchange” Empire Avenue has been getting a lot of buzz. While I heard about the site last year, people like Jeremiah Owyang, Peter Kim, Scott Monty, Robert Scoble, Caleb Storkey and David Armano have written very interesting thoughts in the past week or so, and the community seems to be thriving like never before.

I was going to write a few fun Empire Avenue predictions (e.g. A “Buy” button that’s like the Facebook “like” button), but instead I decided to ask CEO Duleepa Wijayawardhana (aka Dups) a few questions about the past, present and future of his company. I think you’ll find his answers, including a hint about Foursquare as the next network to be integrated, very interesting!

Follow @dups and make sure to add some “DUPS” and “ESTEBAN” shares to your social portfolio.

1. What do you think about Seth Priebatsch’s prediction about the next decade being the decade of games and the “Game Layer?”

To be honest, I happen to believe that most of what we do in real life reflects the human mind’s love affair with what we call games. In fact, in most cases a game takes aspects of what we do in life, things we can understand, and place finite scores, missions, obstacles and rewards into it and then allow us to “play” it.

What I will agree with is the notion that this decade will be the decade that the mainstream understands the use of games and gaming layers in more than just building crops and shooting enemies. I do believe we are seeing the start of a generation that has grown up with computer games and can see that games can actually teach us about Real Life and, indeed, ourselves and how we affect our environment. It’struly an exciting time in my opinion.

2. There have been a few applications/sites that simulate investing in people, websites and organizations. What do you think is the one thing that positions Empire Avenue for success?

We studied almost every single one of them :). What we realized almost immediately is that stock market sites are based on current stock market models, which, I hate to say, are complex and almost incomprehensible beasts. With Empire Avenue, we actually went backward in time to a simpler market system. We have a system of “Market Makers,” who are algorithmic”people” who analyse your content and engagement, and create share prices every night. People add to or subtract from that share price by buying and selling. In effect we have created a very simple BUY/SELL/Earnings system which is not at all a real stock market — something that has many more Bids and Asks and so on. We admit, it does take a little while to “get it,” but if you start with Buy and Sell and watch your money grow, the game mechanics should lead you in the right direction. We also have a long way to make the whole thing simpler and easier. The one thing that puts us ahead, in my mind, is our team and our community. The team is dedicated, the community equally so, and they have helped us move the site to what it has become.

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