blog.traackr.com

We’re usually not into bragging. Let this be the exception: didn’t Traackr tell you back in January that Barack Obama was on his way to win the democratic primary boosted by his social media strategy? Here, let’s refresh your memory.

Back then, Obama’s popularity and buzz scores on Traackr were already off the chart while the poll numbers still showed Clinton very much ahead.

We later provided a more thorough analysis of Obama, Clinton, and McCain’s social media strategies (or lack thereof) to explain more qualitatively what Obama did differently that made him more successful with social media.

We won’t go as far as saying that we have a crystal ball in Traackr’s score, but interpreted the right way, our scoring system can be a good predictor of future trends.

Stay tuned as we’ll start looking into the McCain-Obama contest next!

I usually enjoy reading most of Techcrunch’s posts from Michael Arrington on Twitter as I find them incisive and informative. Today’s rant against Twitter former Chief Architect just rubbed me the wrong way.

Is it or is it not Blaine Cook’s fault that Twitter seems to be in technical hell? Did Twitter’s early outages correspond to Blaine Cook’s vacations?

As far as I’m concerned, the answer to both questions is “who cares?!??”

Cook is not at Twitter anymore and blaming the guy who was there before has never solved any problem…

Twitter has not been playing the finger pointing game, nor should they. Their full attention is required to fix their performance problem and taking ownership is the best way to go about it. No excuses, just results.

Update: Twitter responds to Techcrunch’s post but is not taking the bait and stays on the high road. Excerpt: “The folks at TechCrunch singled out a former employee of Twitter by name in their questions but Twitter is a team—we share responsibility for our victories as well as our mistakes. (…)”. I’m starting to like the folks at Twitter

While acknowledging that Q2 results for Viacom (VIA) will probably disappoint, Chief Executive Philippe Dauman attributed the relative softness of the advertising market to a slowdown of an “uncertain (economic) environment“, pointing especially in the direction of the automotive sector. He added that there is no sign of a broader weakness in advertising. In other words, as soon as the economy recovers, everything will be a-ok.

Really?

I understand that the role of a CEO is in part to be the most active cheerleader for his or her company with the press and investors. How about a little less cheering more leadership instead?

Let’s not insult the intelligence of savvy reporters and investors. If the economy turns around, it might give a break to advertisers for some time but won’t change the fact that their current business is as good as gone. This is not a dooming prediction but a fact. The very respectable Q1 results for the media giant Viacom were driven by the success of a video game, this should give us a clue…

The issue is really quite simple: mass marketing is finished, kaput, gone, fertig, terminado, fini. We wrote about the death of mass marketing a few weeks ago so I won’t bore you too much on this.

The high cost high revenue model of media giants and advertising agencies is based on mass marketing and handling a transition won’t be easy. Everyone in the field has in some fashion initiated this transition, including Viacom.

We find the lack of acknowledgment of this structural crisis troubling in Philippe Dauman’s announcement. Investors always expect to hear the harsh truth and senior executives should face up to it. Success is not guaranteed but failure is if they don’t.

Hank Williams in his blog, “why does everything suck?“, wrote today about being in Blogger jail, and his desire as a blogger to disassociate the platform from the content (whether articles or comments).

A heated discussion started a couple of weeks ago on social data portability - we wrote a bunch of things at the time following the news - you can find the posts in this blog.

Hank’s plea for a more open environment for bloggers where information could flow is no different from the discussions on social data and their portability. Both advocate for an environment where platforms and data are kept separate.

This is of course a scary idea for most businesses out there trying to create an “unfair competitive advantage” (I hate this idea btw) by raising the threshold of switching services - not so different from your cell phone provider trying to make your life difficult to switch service. I’m not going to go too far down that path as this is a whole other article I’ll probably post on the Ignesis blog.

We wrote a few weeks back a post called “Who owns my data? What really matters is who controls it!” advocating that users should be on the forefront of (re)claiming their data and push for open standards. We are on the right track with so many services starting to emerge using RSS feeds and APIs to aggregate user data to provide stats to the user, like TubeMogul, assess performance, like Traackr, or simply enable central upload of content, like Oosha.

The loop is not fully closed yet but the trend is getting enough momentum to become hard to stop.

I was reading last night about the launch of Microsoft’s live search cashback, described in Sillicon Valley Insider as a “disruptive development”. Intrigued, I signed up this morning to try it. Painless process except that I had to remember my Hotmail password - not easy as I usually only use this account for spam…

After browsing and searching for products for 15mn, I’m still struggling to understand the value proposition. What’s the difference with Google Checkout that will celebrate its 2-year anniversary in 2 weeks?

How is the “cashback” of any interest to buyers? I know that the font is red and all to emphasize it’s important (see screenshot below), but really, who is going to look at anything else than the bottom line price of what they buy??? Ask airlines, they have been struggling with this for some time now…

Online shopping aggregators have made tremendous strives towards price transparency that has become the norm for online buying, so what’s the point of cashback? People will always look at the bottom line (price + tax if applicable - discounts/cashback + delivery) when they make decisions on a purchase.

If the idea is to be able to show exclusive deals for Live Search with cashback in the form of a discount, it only works as long as competing online retailers don’t align their prices, which they will undoubtedly do.

The only disruption I have found so far with Live Search Cashback is in the logic. What am I missing?

For the record, if there is a site out there set up by your customers that is called “is [name of your business] down?”, it’s good and bad news.

It’s great news they care enough to actually do this.

It’s really bad news that you can’t get your act together to fix it.

This is what has happened to Twitter. Check out http://istwitterdown.com/ that pings Twitter to tell users when the site is not working.

If Twitter doesn’t address its downtime problems very soon, it may go down in Web 2.0 history as one of the most unexplainable failures of its time.

One more problem: Twitter is actually down right now and istwitterdown is not reflecting it… Argh! Can someone set up istwitterdowndown.com?

So many people claim expertise in social marketing while so few actually have any that it’s not always easy to figure out who to trust to help you navigate what is still for most an unchartered territory.

Here are a few tips to marketers looking for a helping hand to start experimenting with social media. These are simple things inspired by personal experience and a good dose of common sense, always my best weapon…

1. If someone tells you they are an expert in social marketing, they are probably not… The field of social media is still very new and changing at light speed. There have been a few social marketing success stories but not enough to draw definite patterns in such a fast evolving environment. People who tell you they know exactly what you need to do are either taking you for a ride, or worse, haven’t grasped the complexity of what they are supposed to be experts of.
2. Check out your ‘expert’ for yourself. The least you can expect for someone operating in social media is for them to use the right tools for themselves and build their own brand image. Where do they blog? Can you find them on Facebook, YouTube, Linkedin, Flickr, Twitter, etc.? Do they show up in a simple Google search? Get a sense of who they are and how they use social media tools. In the process, you’ll get more knowledgeable yourself!
3. Has your ‘expert’ already added value to your business? I love this rule because it really addresses 2 important things at once. The first is whether or not that person is truly knowledgeable in this field. Very few businesses are on the cutting edge of social media and chances are that someone with deep knowledge in the field can contribute even before they meet with you. The second is whether or not that person really gets it. What do I mean by that? Unlike traditional marketing, social marketing, and social media in general, require reciprocity and transparency. You need to show your cards first before others decide to trust you. Have they?
4. Dog and pony show allergy. Maybe I should have started there as it’s probably the easiest way to screen out phonies: no company fancy 50-slide Powerpoint presentation with effects and no special website set up for this meeting with the Web2.0 bells and whistles. To give you an example, I attended a discussion last week on social media and the keynote speaker had prepared a total of 6 ugly slides to drive the conversation: he spent all their time thinking about the content of what to say and write, none about formatting. Great way to gain street cred and a great meeting.
5. How many zeros to the proposal? Budget is another way to tell who you have in front of you. I dare anyone to convince me any company should spend a 6 figure budget to start a social marketing project. Over the course of a whole campaign, you might end up spending that and more, but by small increments and by learning along the way what works and what doesn’t. If you are still recovering from a budget discussion on social marketing, you are probably talking to a good ol’ ad agency boy hiding behind buzz terms (see rule 7) and a fancy website.
6. Free! Before you spend big money on social marketing – let me rephrase, before you spend any money on social marketing, have you considered the following: is your company on Twitter yet? How about Facebook? Maybe a group on LinkedIn? Do you answer questions in Yahoo Answers? Shall I continue? If none of these things sound appealing to your ‘expert’, it’s because there isn’t enough money to be made for him there, not necessarily because you shouldn’t do them…
7. Language please! Here is another easy way to tell who you have in front of you. Do you hear “viral marketing”, “UGC”, “building brand equity”? All not good signs… See American Shelf Life for more. Also, if anyone talks to you about “banner ads”, have them escorted out of the building.
8. Fake doesn’t cut it. Another way to tell the people who really don’t get it is to see if their first approach is to try to rig the system and offer to trigger a “viral buzz” (argh! see above) by faking ratings, fans, etc. This is the old school trick of buying the first million copies of a new album to get it at the top of the charts… Let me address this specifically to the geniuses at EMI and Universal (if they still work there) who had interns add friends to MySpace band pages: it doesn’t work!
9. How old is your ‘expert’? I resent discrimination in any way shape or form but I figured that as I stand on the wrong side of this one, maybe people would forgive me. Without elaborating too much, there is a huge generation gap that people who didn’t grow up with MySpace, IM, and Warcraft have much trouble filling when it comes to truly understanding social media. I encourage you to read Mark Prensky’s research on this who introduced the concepts of digital natives and digital immigrants.
10. Speed trumps quality. This field is changing so fast that the only way to stay in the game is to do something. Too many planning sessions, brainstorm exercises, concept reviews and discussions slow you down. Prefer working with someone who is responsive, fast thinking, and not afraid of risks. Running short experiments we can learn from is Ignesis’ bread and butter and I could ramble for some time on this but I won’t… In short, you’re better off receiving a one line email with typos from his or her Blackberry within the hour after you meet instead of a detailed summary of your meeting the next day, articulating next steps, and scheduling the next brainstorming session…

I hope these help you pick the right person for you. Try to hide your smirk if you come across one of the stereotypes I describe. These people do exist!

Please share your own tips on this with the rest of us. We’ll all get smarter.

Last week, we announced the battle for standards for social data among Google, Yahoo! and Facebook (btw, let’s shed a tear for Microsoft, absent from this short list. They’ll probably come up with their own standards in 6 months, stay tuned).

Yesterday, the first shots were fired in this battle with Facebook announcing they will block Google’s Friend Connect, in the name of protecting their users privacy against Friend Connect substandard privacy policy.

In their words, ” At Facebook, we always look out for the privacy of our users”. Really? Charles, I have one word for you: beacon.

Anyways, no reason to elaborate on this as this move by Facebook lacked all subtlety and there is barely a need to read between the lines to understand why they did what they did. Little scared of Google, aren’t we?

Just like in any battles for standards, we can expect more fighting before things settle down. The good news for all of us is that once this is all in motion, the momentum is very hard to stop and standards will undoubtedly start converging.

Last night I had a nightmare. I sat at my computer, and my Vista morphed into a Web app called Woogle, which included a productivity suite, a default search page, alerts, news, a Web analytics page, and all my social networking stuff in one place (and much, much more, all for fwee). I turned around and saw Bill Gates gagged and tied to a nice Aeron chair. Sergei Brin was looking over my shoulder, wearing a photovoltaic-cell powered propeller cap and holding a Subway Veggie Patty footlong.

Seriously, if I had this kind of nightmare, I’d need to get my head checked; but it’s a nice way to start a rant about OpenSocial. On the surface it looks good: Facebook and LinkedIn are the bad guys, because they won’t do open social standards. Google gets a bunch of cool Web 2.0 players on the Friend Connect band wagon, liberates us from social networking tyranny, et voila.

Except it feels like world domination and Microsoft all over again (Woogle = World Google). This way, we’re going to end up with the Internet Explorer of social platforms.

And to quote Dave Winer, one of the hyperbright bulbs behind RSS and SOAP: “Standards devised by one tech company whose main purpose is to undermine another tech company, usually don’t work. In this case it’s Google trying to undermine Facebook. And I don’t think it’s going to work.” This was said a few months ago. OpenAlliance now has 26 members, so at least from a popularity standpoint, it’s working; but I agree with the sentiment, and the long-term lack of viability.

I’m not having conniptions over Woogle. Who cares in the end about who owns the mall, as long as you can shop there. But this increasingly feels like the mall’s security guards are keeping my wallet and hand it over to me every time I go shopping.

The only way to make sure you and I own our data is to have real open standards backed by companies, gov agencies, and the public - not the oxymoron that brings together the words “Open” and “Google”.

by Lau-RANT

I get why Charlie Odonnell is terminally cranky about the data portability issue. (I was going to write, “I grok”, but my wife tells me only people who were frying on acid reading Stranger in a Strange Land say that, so…).

To give some context: there’s an industry effort under way to create open standards and allow your and my data to move from one site or application to the next.

Charlie says: who cares? If a site or app is useful, I’ll use it, and don’t care if my data ports or not. Why would you want to move your scintillating pictures of Bob mooning the frat house from Facebook to Flickr anyway?

Sorry Charlie: because lots of people would. They’d love to move their contact list or page content to the happening new site. Why wouldn’t they? It’s a way for the other site to attract people. And the originating site should get on the band wagon because it will be a competitive advantage to offer portability based on OpenID or whatever the heck else. That’s the part I don’t care about.

And also because of exactly the reasons you mention, Charlie: laziness. Having to create an account every time something else pops up? Give me a break. Use my Yahoo or Gmail login furcrhissakes.
I’m not as concerned about privacy. Vauhini Vara’s article in the WSJ about using the Web to spy on your friends doesn’t send shivers down my spine, good people of the blogosphere. The Web is a vast exercise in exhibitionism and voyeurism. If that boggles your mind, or you feel inclined to huff and puff at the inanity of it all, just read Sapolsky’s “A Primate’s Memoir”, and get a refresher course on your own behavior. And on what makes social networking ventures successful.

Also, if you don’t like it, don’t play.

So: data portability standards are not boring. They’re good. They’re useful. And I don’t really care what they are as long as they’re there.