Happy Birthday to all as we celebrate the birthday of our Nation. I am not sure who said it, but it is a great quotation, “The greatest lesson we can learn from the past. . . is that freedom is at the core of every successful nation in the world.” Freedom of speech is a key element from among the many freedoms that millions of people–unfortunately, not all people–enjoy. The Internet has added multiple channels of communication since the early days of Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), the Internet standard for electronic mail (e-mail). The first synchronous communication channel was Internet Relay Chat (IRC), and it was followed by instant messaging, various Web chat services, and Short Message Service (SMS), the text communication service component of mobile communication systems (cell phones). Enter social networks, or social media, and we have a whole new layer of channels. I think of this evolution as starting with the basic communications layer, the Internet. On top of the Internet we have a great application called the World Wide Web, and it gives us multi-media content sharing, e-commerce, e-learning, e-health, and many other applications. I think of social networking as a layer on top of the Web that gives us a way to blog, collaborate, share, hangout, chit, chat, chit chat, tweet, hire, be hired, network, find investors, make deals, find a date, get married, and much more.
Will Facebook dominate the new world of social media? Who knows? Perhaps. Perhaps not. At one point it looked like Myspace would dominate. It was the most popular social networking site in the United States in June 2006, but two years later it was overtaken by Facebook. Then the company was purchased by News Corporation for $580 million, and then on June 29, 2011, Myspace was sold to Specific Media for $35 million. The unstoppable got stopped. It could happen to Facebook too. The Internet has proven many times that no one company is too big to fail. Enter the Google Plus Project. I explained it this morning around the holiday breakfast table at the Lake. Some family members are tech savvy, some not. They all were shaking their heads in the affirmative as soon as I described Google Plus Circles. You can have a family circle, a boating circle, a friends circle, an acquaintance circle, a new mothers circle, a hospital board circle, etc. When you post something to the family circle, you know exactly who is going to be able to read it. This is the issue with Facebook–when you post something, you are likely not sure who is going to be able to read it. There are privacy controls but nobody seems to quite understand them. Let me cite LinkedIn to make the point. I have 304 “Connections” at LinkedIn. These are people I actually know. The 304 connections link me to 7,487,410 other people, not counting the 76,856 new people that were added to my network since June 27. If you are looking for a job, having friends of your friends’ friends know about you may be a good thing. When you are writing a personal reflection about something to share with your friends, do you really want the network effect? Perhaps not. With Google Plus, when you post something to your friends circle, you know exactly who is going to be able to read what you had to say. The war over social network market share is underway. Based on what I see so far, I would not rule out Google. If key influencers begin to shift allegiance, the momentum for Facebook could change very quickly.
The bottom line is that we should be thankful that we can communicate or not whenever we want. It is one of our greatest freedoms. Let us be mindful of the many millions of people who have no freedom to communicate. Stay tuned and have a nice 4th.
Epilogue: This story appears in the blog, Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus.
Tags: facebook, google, google plus, myspace, news corp, news corporation, social, social media, social networking, specific media, twitter
Posted by John Patrick on Jun 9, 2010 in
Conferences,
e-Business,
Media,
People 
Attending conferences is the best way I know of to stay on the edge of what is happening in the world. Reading content on the Web and exchanging emails is vital but there is no substitute for attending a few conferences per year where you can talk to people at meals and breaks plus interact with sponsors and speakers. This was my first year to attend the CM Summit, a conference run by John Battelle. John has a long history in journalism and the media industry and is now founder, chairman, and CEO of Federated Media, an Internet advertising company which appears to be prospering. John brought together a good set of sponsors and 30 excellent speakers. It promises to be a chance to hear from the leaders of digital marketing for two days of thought provoking case studies, insights, and conversations with major brand advertisers, agencies, and digital media companies.
The conference started bright and early Monday morning at the Millennium Broadway Hotel in Manhattan. John kicked off the conference with an excellent overview of where he sees the future. The theme was “Marketing In Real Time” and the basis of the theme is, of course, the rise of mobile platforms. A “rise” may be an understatement when you consider that the iPhone has gone from zero to fifty million in three years, Android from zero to sixty thousand per day in two years, the iPad from zero to two million in sixty days, and the impending launch of thirty or more new tablets. Built on this base is the rise of local platforms. Yelp has seen 10X growth in three years. Foursquare from zero to two million in two years. Google has integrated local, maps, and business directories into “Places” and Facebook and Twittr have built location into their models.
On top of that base we see the emergence of real time platforms that constantly stream signals across the Internet. Twitter users are now generating 65 million tweets per day and Facebook 60 million status updates per day. Google just purchased Invite Media to create real time marketing of advertising slots. All this is enabled by the social platforms — Facebook has grown from 30 million to more than 400 million users in less than four years and Twitter from one million to 125 million in the same time-frame. All this means a lot of data that did not previously exist and it offers an enormous opportunity for the advertisers of the world to reach people in unprecedented ways. John Battelle calls talks about “The Database of Intentions”. It falls into five categories.
The purchase – What I Buy (Amazon, eBay, Walmart)
The Query – What I Want (Google, Yahoo, Bing)
The Social Graph – Who I Am, Who I know (Facebook, myspace, Google)
The Status Update – What I’m Doing (twitter, facebook, Google)
The Check-in – Where I am (foursquare, yelp, Gowalla)
Along with the rise in all of the above, there is obviously a huge rise in real time issues. John touched on a few of them.
Privacy vs publicy — Who owns all this data?
Open vs closed — Who gets to play and on what terms”
Publishers vs. Marketers vs. Platforms — can they all get along?
Will regulators sleep through all this?
One thing is for sure. The transformation of the media industry is happening rapidly. I would say we are about 5% of the way into it but there is no heading back. There are going to be winners and losers. The CM Summit was full of energy. The stakes are high. Traditional media companies are guarding their flanks. Traditional advertisers are looking for ways to capitalize on the new technologies. The technology companies are investing to gain market share. The advertising companies are experimenting with new ways to please their clients. Consumers seem to be enjoying the attention. Everybody is tweeting. Some are not sure why. Stay tuned for Part 2.
Tags: advertising, amazon, bing, brand, conference, database of intentions, digital media, ebay, facebook, foursquare, google, gowalla, IBM, marketing, myspace, social networks, twitter, walmart.com, yahoo, yelp
