nuance intelligence

Here are some interesting stories I saw this week, and why…

• Industry Standard: 10 ‘Net Services that Will Succeed and 10 That Probably Won’t.  A new set of choices for the new new new new new thing, most of which I hadn’t heard about yet, and some harsh knocks on buzz darlings Second Life, Zillow, Twitter and Joost.
• Compete Blog: Analysis of Traffic Patters Among Users of Facebook, MySpace and Twitter.  Good insight into how these brands differ, based on data about the most popular sites visited by account holders in these three meganets.
• NYT: Feature on Boulder in the Travel Section.  For a piece in the Old Gray Lady, it’s not too bad.  What did they miss?  The 300-person-per-month TechMeetup at the core of the biggest tech entrepreneur scene between New York and San Francisco, five new CleanTech venture funds being started, how close excellent backcountry skiing really is and the wide variety of global leaders who make their living somewhere else, but make Boulder their home.
• Worldchanging: Emerging Green Jobs Market.  Joel Makower has a good piece on the gap between the hype and reality around the growth in ‘green jobs’.  Made me think about the solar panel installer I met at “Green Drinks” last week who said, “for the first time in my life, I’ve got job security, and I’m not worried at all about a recession.”

Enjoy your weekend.

Good friend Rebecca Saltman turned me on to this piece in the Journal of Philanthropy (ironically, a paid subscription site). It looks at how Steve Case leveraged both Parade Magazine and Facebook to build a socially-focused initiative that funds smaller non-profits.

The competitions, financed by the foundation created by Steve Case, founder of AOL, and his wife, Jean, promised $50,000 grand prizes to nonprofit groups with the greatest number of donors to their cause, not the largest amount raised. In all, the Case Foundation handed out $750,000 in awards. Continue reading

It has taken me the better part of a decade, but I finally think the Economist might understand a thing or two about the business of digital media. Throughout the 90′s and into this century, it seemed they were late to the table, with obvious observations that hit the newsstands six months after they hit the digital zeitgeist.  Living outside the echo chamber, they provide good triangulation and outsiders’ detachment, as demonstrated by this week’s piece on the business of social networks.

As fits their milieu, they cover the battle of the titans with some accuracy, but miss the nuance of how social networks create value in a more distributed way.

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Today, I went to check an old online workspace at Omidyar.net for Targeted Currencies, a project I co-founded back in 2004. And I found out that the Omidyar network had closed down.

The Omidyar Network (O/Net) was an early phase community collaboration site for progressive global activists, founded when Pierre Omidyar (founder of eBay and leading social venture financier) led the pack and switched his charitable giving from a .org to a .net (and for-profit) to allow the fund to invest in for-profits as well as non-profits, which was a major turning point in the evolution of social entrepreneurism. And I felt at the time that the network had an equally serious role. Continue reading

In case some of you thought the blogosphere was simply a haven for losers in basements worldwide, the INSIGHT blog from EyeTraffic Media highlights a recent study from TNS Media Intelligence/Cymfony that includes some good data:

• 49% of senior marketing executives believe that social media should be monitored at the executive level and be allocated significant resources
• Uses of social media: 37% said to gain consumer insight, 21% said to build brand awareness, 18% said to increase customer loyalty
• 88% of U.S. senior marketing executives (65% global) agreed that reading and analyzing social media to understand unfiltered consumer perceptions would have the most impact on the future of their businesses
• 50% of senior marketing executives said creating a user community of bloggers to provide user feedback is the most effective use of social media
• 47% of senior marketing executives said using social media vehicles to generate a viral campaign would also be very effective in a product launch

What’s the nuance? While this might seem like good news for our burgeoning consultancy, I’m concerned that it will continue to add noise to the already crowded ‘sphere, and the worst kind of noise, at that — corporate marketing speak. Only if they can understand the cluetrain manifesto’s primary point, that markets are conversations, and speak with their real voice will they have a chance of creating some signal (even Microsoft seems to get it). And if the marketers can’t distinguish between viral and organic marketing, they will succeed in further isolating themselves from the market, exactly the opposite of their goals. Evolve or die.

Doesn’t matter if we’re talking about search, marketing, or web 2.0… organic is the new viral. A viral campaign uses its hosts to its own ends usually increasing attention to a particular web site.

An organic campaign nourishes the hosts (or network nodes), and gains the social ‘word-of-mouth’ hyper-growth as the result of its direct benefit to the host.  In fact, organic is not just about a marketing campaign, but should be integral in the design of the product in the first place, reducing the need for flashy or creative marketing.

Take Facebook and LinkedIN as examples. Whether I’m reading the digerati or talking to close colleagues, professionals have become weary of widget spam on Facebook, because the widgets are noise, not signal. But new features from LinkedIN actually provide benefit to professionals, and are therefore quickly adopted.  In this comparison, Facebook is viral, LinkedIN is organic.

Here’s the summary one-liner from Google Search Guru and former Technorati CTO Kevin Marks’ blog Epeus’ epigone:

I spent the last weekend fighting off a flu virus, partly by eating lots of organic fruit. I expect social networks and their users will continue to do the same.

A good friend, John Siewierski, said this to me another way a few weeks ago, “think about what you are doing for your network, not what your network is doing for you.” Pretty organic, John.

“Ask not, what your country can do for you…”

I’m doing a fair bit of research into location intelligence, geo-coding of data, and data visualization for AWhere these days, and found out that Quantcast (competitor of Alexa and comScore) is now including location-based info in their reports.

From their announcement:

We believe geographic and business/organizational data will be a powerful characterization of publishers’ audiences, especially as advertisers begin to evaluate online media opportunities on a more targeted basis.

I thought the localization of advertising started in the ’97 and ’98 not ’07 and ’08, but it’s great to see the trend coming around again through another sales cycle.

The Collective Intelligence Foo Camp (CIFoo) just concluded. Lots of interesting pieces:

1. It’s run on an open WIKI server, demonstrating real trust in the community.
2. It’s got a relatively active social network attached, with good comments and lots of shared knowledge.
3. Slides are posted. I strongly recommend two based on key metrics for social network development (but search around for others):
   1. ROI for social networks. Good walk-through of the creation of a business metric to justify investment and measure return.
   2. Viral marketing performance metrics. Although set in a silly pirate metaphor, the review of a full viral marketing campaign reviews several key performance metrics that define web 2.0 campaigns

What’s the nuance? It’s another great un-sung benefit of all these groovy web 2.0 tools – the outer ring access to conferences and other curricula that provides something on the order of a 50-5 Proposition, which considers that you may get half the value of the conference by spending 5% of the time to carefully read and review the site, slides, presentations and comments. This is not to say that it will replace the conference – so much of those are about who you meet and how you connect – but it’s nice to glean key learnings from a distance.

Although Boulder has an impressive stable of businesses in the green / sustainable / eco milieu, Fort Collins, a perennial David to Boulder’s Goliath, is gaining a strong base with the addition of CEO Casey Verbeck to the GenGreen team (who’s got so much going on that he doesn’t have time to update his LinkedIN profile).

The site is building local guides for cities around the US (to start), and will be merging them with the usual social network tools. They’re just about ready to mix-in commerce, which has the eco market quite excited. Casey told me that there are over 120 green businesses in Boulder without a storefront, and no easy way for people to locate them. He’s committed to organizing that market.

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Interesting to see Microsoft’s open channel to the development community, Channel9. This isn’t your Ballmer’s MSDN (reference too obscure?). I like their manifesto. Continue reading