My first post ran over at eCo Times.
Philanthropy 2.0 covers the basics of how social media and social purpose have begun to intersect.
What’s the nuance? Let’s hope there’s more of both (eCo Times posts and Philanthropy 2.0).
Note to entrepreneurs, especially those whose plans I’m currently reviewing for the upcoming Colorado Capital Conference: if you still think that you can support any type of social media on ads, think again.
You can’t scan the RSS feed of a latte-fueled digerati without tripping over tales of low low low advertising CPMs for social networks. If you don’t believe this, see what the industry heavyweights at AlwaysOn’s recent Venture Summit East have to say; it’s not pretty.
What’s the nuance? From the perspective of a business whose primary revenue is not from developing online social media, a few things should be clear: Continue reading
With the whole silicon valley echo chamber trying to figure out how to make money from social networks, I had very low expectations about our tiny little blog’s performance on Google search results.
When researching CPM and other detailed info on that very subject, our own blog hit the front page of google, specifically for the search “vertical social network monetization,” not exactly an obscure search given the scale of these business opportunities.
Proof, with apologies to George Jefferson, that we “finally got a piece of the pie”:
OK. Back to work.
Ning, the largest provider of customizable social network software, just raised $60 million, on a pre-money valuation of $500 million, so says Venture Beat. This on top of $44 million on a $170 million valuation back in July, 2007. In a generally depressed venture environment, according to the Industry Standard, this is a pretty important indicator.
This editorial in AlwaysOn runs counter to the skepticism around social networking bubble hype, and points to the very legitimate upside of Ning and social networking in general.
What’s the nuance? Ning’s success rides on the trend of people moving away from massive centralized networks like MySpace and Facebook, and toward smaller, focused, vertical networks that connect people with more affinity and coherence. More and more people are approaching us with queries on how to integrate social networks into a meaningful business model, which is the next major hurdle once you grok the idea of vertical social networks.
But the scariest nuance is the quote from Marc Andressen in his note to VentureBeat:
We raised the money to enable us to keep scaling given our accelerating growth (over 230,000 networks on Ning now, growing at over 1,000 per day) and to make sure we have plenty of firepower to survive the oncoming nuclear winter. At current growth rates, we don’t need it to get to cash flow positive, but having lived through the last crunch, it’s good to be conservative with these things.
I was recently interviewed as part of a survey of Denver’s telecom industry. On the table was the question of the future of telecom in Denver and Colorado. Our discussion brought to mind a premise that has stuck with me for almost a decade now.
In his 2001 book, As The Future Catches You (review), Juan Enriquez advances the premise that intelligence, innovation, wealth and progress will be focused in a tiny set of locations, measured more accurately by zip codes than states or cities. For instance, he points out that innovation happens in Cambridge, not all of Boston. In Enriquez’s view, these tiny hubs of intellectual activity will have an ever-widening gap with the rest of the city / state / country / world. And if you’re not in one of them, you’re nowhere.
What’s the nuance? As we watch the U.S. economy tumbles and inflation takes hold, tenuous infrastructure will start to fall apart. Already gas prices are making suburban living prohibitive, and it’s just the beginning.
Places like Silicon Valley, Boulder, Cambridge, Ann Arbor and others will continue to deliver value through innovation; value that will be recognized globally, regardless of the power of the dollar. Life outside of these hubs will become tougher and tougher, as is already demonstrated by the massive housing price drops in many parts of the country. This leaves major questions about cities and communities on the bubble.
Can the globally strong Caterpillar save Peoria? Will a telecom revival support Denver? Civic and business leaders are going to have to turn to new strategies in order to answer those question in the affirmative, working together like never before.
Bill Gail, a new acquaintance who runs strategy for Microsoft’s Virtual Earth, is also the editor of the Geoscience Remote Sensing Society’s Private Sector Newsletter. He ran a great piece in this month’s issue, which I’ve excerpted here:
** 4. ACCURATE DATA VS USEFUL DATA – why accuracy is not always best
As scientists and engineers, we often assume that more accurate is always better than less accurate. For the end-users of information, this is not always true. Car navigation devices provide perhaps the best illustration of this issue. They show “notional” maps, in which the width of streets and their separation is less important than assisting with rapid visual recognition of where to go and which way to turn. In this, and in many similar situations, portraying something inaccurately can provide the user better knowledge than portraying it accurately. This phenomenon might be described as “objective inaccuracy”. Within the remote sensing industry there are many examples of objective inaccuracy – from the widespread use of ortho-projection imagery (a non-physical projection from a vantage point at infinity) to the well-known distortions of the Mercator map projection. In the end, all are engineered in an “objective” way to provide useful information rather than to preserve less-useful accuracy.
What’s the nuance? Web and software entrepreneurs (along with many other professionals) confront this compromise all the time. And it’s easy to tell who’s running the show by observing the outcome. Too many times in technology, engineers over-build a solution to manage every single case, when providing the simplest functionality is really what the market wants. Apple is an interesting case of the inverse, where useful trumps accurate at every turn.
We are seeing this at the Colorado Capital Conference. As the finalists are picked, the more nuanced differences begin to appear, and over-engineered solutions begin to lose out to useful applications that win the hearts and minds of customers and investors.
Please take a minute to check out eCo Times, a new blog launching today (on Earth Day) that supports a great company eConscious Market. The blog focuses on helping readers learn how to take action in pursuit of a more sustainable life.
I’m one of the blog authors, and my first (weekly) piece runs next week. There are some other great folks blogging there, including co-founders Mathew Gerson (whose piece on the Tao of Jones is a great read) and Pippa Sorley, as well as Anita Burke, a brilliant mind that focuses on sustainability and the future of our society, and many others.
Enjoy.
Back in February, I wrote about how Microsoft had lanched Channel9, an honest and open discussion with their developer community, a strategy the heady authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto introduced over a decade ago.
They are now joined by Starbucks and Dell, so says MSNBC.
What’s the nuance? First off, it’s interesting to note that the service for both companies comes not from Blogger, WordPress or Ning, but from Salesforce, who focuses on customer relationship management.
It’s also noteworthy that both companies undertook this strategy under the duress of losing their connection to customers, as measure by decreased sales.
The question on my mind is when (not whether) this mechanism moves from being a ‘good strategy’ to a ‘standard operating procedure.’ And when, as Locke, Weinberger, Searles and Levine wrote so long ago, will those who ignore this open conversation be removed from the discourse by their former customers?
The problem is exemplified in this post from Kevin Jones, over at Xigi:
The worst news from the Skoll World Forum was from another investor. They were trying to co-invest with a venture philanthropy fund, but found two significant barriers; one that fund does not co-invest, nor release its due diligence reports to even other like-minded institutional funders.
Worse was that this fund had made the social enterprise sign an exclusive deal; they would not take funding from another fund. The reason, it seems, is metrics run amok; they only way to make sure they can measure their impact is to try to restrict other impacts on the enterprises.
What’s the nuance? In this discussions, it’s all nuance. Continue reading
The launch of CERN’s Large Hadron Supercollider (wikipedia, NYT) has a strange bedfellow, which has been in development almost as long. A “new” internet, capable of handling the enormous amount of data that the Supercollider produces, has been on everyone’s background radar for some time.
What’s the nuance? As near as I can tell, it’s going to be a long time before porn, spam and the rest of the .com web appears on ‘i2,’ as this second-generation Interet is sometimes called. We’ll see how it really plays out, but don’t cancel your DSL or smash your cable modem in expectation that the ubergeeks in CERN bless you with access to more connectivity than you can actually comprehend.