The Constant Rebellion Towards Channels

YouTube became successful in large part because people wanted an alternative to boring old tv broadcast stations that dictated what you could watch and when. Internet radio was largely the same reason and blogging etc., because people could tell their own stories, create and share their own ideas. Throughout history, whenever someone creates a media channel to broadcast, someone looks for a way around it because they have another view or find too many restriction imposed by the gatekeeper of that channel.

This is always happening. With Facebook effectively now a “channel” it was no surprise over their leak of Project Spartan with the intent to deliver apps within the Facebook channel. Some media channels are looking at developing apps in HTML 5 to be delivered in the Safari browser in iPad and the iPhone and other smart-phones, bypassing iTunes and the Apple gatekeeper. Sure they’re a tad slower, but they work. More importantly, they avoid Apple’s control.

As we indicated in an earlier article, it’s the Hippies who created the Bulletin Boards and the The Well back in the 70′s and into the early 80′s. Steve Jobs was one of them, he knows the aversion to enterprise systemic control – and yet is creating an Apple-centirc channel today. We’re always, as humans, looking for an alternative…technology always disrupts, just as the printing press eliminated scribes and the car the horse and buggy.

We see the issues of Apple, Google, Microsoft and Facebook as basic economic cycles. They are disrupting and in some cases creating, entirely new forms (i.e. app stores), of channels. People will certainly use them, but at some point, people will find a way around them when they want a different form of content and new channels will evolve. Google+ threatens Twitter more than Facebook, yet now Google and Facebook are trying to outdo each other by adding new features to encourage people to stay within their channels.

At its inception, Facebook was intended for a narrow audience with a channel that did not exist in the form desired. YouTube, DailyMotion, Break.com have succeeded because people wanted other forms of video content than what broadcast television was providing. Social media channels are simply alternatives or new forms based on either a want or need of the market. Therefore, disruption will be the norm and people will always look for ways to communicate that fill a new perceived desire, decrease friction and cost.

The Challenge of Search in Social Media Channels

Facebook is a channel, not a website. It has vast amounts of data and a user may spend their entire time online in Facebook without ever leaving. And anyone who’s tried searching inside Facebook will likely agree – their search capability is wretched at best. There’s been much debate amongst the pundits of Facebook rivaling Google for search. Bing is the search engine Facebook has integrated for Web-based content outside their channel; Microsoft invested in Facebook after all.

The search engine component of our mediasphere360 tool connects to Facebook’s API to pull data for our research work. Even that data is worse than what we pull from other sources and requires extensive clean-up. And it’s not getting any better. Google has incorporated “live search” for social media, or user driven real-time content if you will. It’s not bad, but needs improvement. Here are some of the challenges inside Facebook and other social media channels for search that we see and have found;

Link Spam in Facebook: Just as we’ve seen the heavy use of free blogging platforms as link-spam vehicles we’ve seen about a 75% rise in link-spam in Facebook over the past 6 months. The issue presents some serious challenges. Manual review of these has become critical when validating content in Facebook. Twitter has suffered a similar fate but has been more responsive to dealing with it.

Connected Content Conundrum: Yes, that’s a mouthful and cheeky on our part. The problem here is that in  many cases, you can only find content (fan pages, company pages etc.) that is within your “network”. This means you must live within a city or region and someone in your social network must be connected to that content for it to show up in your search results. We call it a conundrum because we see it as an odd failing of Facebook taking “being networked” too far and limiting the value of finding content in Facebook.

Tagging: There isn’t really any in Facebook, Bebo, NetLog or other social networks for that matter. This makes search services harder.

Privacy Walls: We’re not complaining. At least Facebook and other services offer degrees of privacy settings and we think that’s a good thing. But sometimes it makes it harder to share ones content and can limit the effectiveness of a message and can be a challenge for any service connecting to Facebook’s API. It’s a nightmare in Bebo and NetLog.

There are other challenges that get more technical but the biggest problem we see facing Facebook, BigAdda, NetLog and other social networks is the increase in spam, malware and re-directs. This will create significant problems for monitoring tools like radian6, Sysomos, Trackur etc. For us as a research firm, we can develop better filters and spend time refining our tools with the value of human analysts and our tagging and quality control methods for machine learning. For the average consumer, this is just going to make their experience in those channels more annoying. For businesses using social media monitoring tools it is going to skew their metrics.

Get Out Of Your Urban Cocoon With Social Media

Griping about problems in your city or community? Traffic fixes like roundabouts? Oversized city council or political budgets and spending…the list goes on. So you write a blog post, fire off a “tweet” and maybe start a Facebook group to rally folks…and you wonder why your community has all these issues. You’re not alone.

In our research, we cover a lot of communities in Canada, the U.S. and UK. Sometimes at a bigger city level, sometimes within smaller urban centres. What we’ve come to find is…these problems we think are in just our community, aren’t. In fact, they’re often common, systemic issues. Issues all areas are coming to grips with as they grow, populations change and generational gaps ensue.

Next time you’re about to post a rant on why just your town, city or region is facing issue “A” or “X” take a moment and do some research on similar sized communities within your region or on the other side of the country. I suspect you’ll quickly find you’re not alone. Citizens and governments are looking at solutions to problems everywhere, everyday.

Social Media tools can be an excellent way to connect similar communities to engage in dialog. If a similar town to yours finds a solution, that may help your community. These solutions or forums for discussion, can be shared in Social Media. Imagine, two towns on opposite sides of the country working together on a similar problem…twice the brain power finding a solution.

(Author: G. Crouch)

How Much Truth Do We Want To Hear?

I really enjoyed the blog post today by Joe Pulizzi; he has some great insights. As I read through his 30 things I was pleased as a marketer of 20 years that as a profession, we need to be more honest and respectful of the customer. It’s just time.

But it made me also wonder: just how much truth do we want to hear? Certainly we want honesty in pricing and stop the ridiculous promises of instant weightloss.

Don’t we want a little fantasy though? Seeing that Audi wind through the twisty Apline mountains…well, it’s just inspiring. Sometimes we want Calgon to take us away; even for just a few minutes of quiet in the tub (look how long that fantasy tag line has survived – but soap doesn’t really take you anywhere.)

Perhaps it’s that “line” that can get crossed. I agree, good content is better and honesty/integrity is the best. But can we integrate that with a little fantasy time? Where is the right mix? I don’t know but I’d love to hear Seth Godin‘s take or Tim O’Reilly.

How much truth do you want to hear in advertising? When is it a white lie bad? At what point do we reject too much honesty?

What do you thunk?

(Author: G. Crouch, Managing Director)

What Age Groups Consume the Most Media?

It’s a question we get almost every day from current and prospective clients. Usually it focuses on Social Media, but of late Social Media is getting lumped into “media consumption” as a whole. Let’s put this into perspective. Generationally speaking.We think the question is more appropriately posited as “What media is most popular by age group?” Different age groups consume media in different ways. Understanding this is vital to developing effective communications strategies, advertising or marketing. Continue reading »