The Signal – Instrumenting Our Social Lives

From my FM column: Tuesday Signal: Get Ready for a Real Conversation About Privacy, Publicy, and Social Media I've long said that I'm a fan of social networks and media, of course, but I've also pointed out that most of it is artless and ingenuous in comparison with the sophistication…

From my FM column: Tuesday Signal: Get Ready for a Real Conversation About Privacy, Publicy, and Social Media

I’ve long said that I’m a fan of social networks and media, of course, but I’ve also pointed out that most of it is artless and ingenuous in comparison with the sophistication each of us has when it comes to “being social.” So far, our technologies lack the instrumentation each of us employs when interacting in the simplest social situation. We have the benefit of hundreds of thousands of years of social evolution – not to mention millions of years of biological evolution. Yet as social creatures we flock to technologies that allow us to express that fundamental need, even if it fails to truly reflect our nature.
What’s heartening is how our culture has begun to ask interesting questions about what this all means – for our businesses, as marketers, as citizens, and as individuals. As Danah Boyd states in her opening keynote at SXSW: “ChatRoulette may be a fad, but the idea that publicity and privacy will get mashed up in new ways will not be.”
Tens of millions have flocked to ChatRoulette – and while it may well be a fad, the impulse which sent so many to “only connect” is not. Understanding who we are as private and public beings will be a fundamental component of what it means to be literate in a modern society. And marketers who make a practice of understanding this will succeed over those who do not.
I predict a punctuation mark in this conversation over the coming months, in the form of Facebook’s public data firehose. Expected at their F8 developer conference this June, the Facebook firehose will allow developers to create all sorts of unexpected applications and services which leverage Facebook status updates, wall posts, and more. Twitter should get the credit for pushing this open architecture, but Facebook’s implementation of it will be revelatory – and not necessarily in ways that might be positive. I predict one of the first applications created will be a site publishing Really Stupid Pictures You Probably Should Not Have Posted To Facebook, for example. Cue media frenzy and….well you get the picture.

2 Comments on The Signal – Instrumenting Our Social Lives

SIGN UP FOR THE NEWSLETTER

Stay up to date on the latest from BattelleMedia.com

Announcing The Fifth Annual CM Summit: Theme and Initial Lineup

(cross posted from FM blog ) I’m very excited to announce the theme and line-up for our fifth CM Summit, to be held in New York June 7-8 (it's the kickoff conference to New York's annual Internet Week). We’ve got a lot to talk about this year – our theme…

summit-arrow-color-2.png(cross posted from FM blog )

I’m very excited to announce the theme and line-up for our fifth CM Summit, to be held in New York June 7-8 (it’s the kickoff conference to New York’s annual Internet Week).

We’ve got a lot to talk about this year – our theme is “Marketing in Real Time.”

2009 was the year the web went real time. Twitter grew five fold and became a major online player, tens of millions of us learned how to live out loud in public. Facebook responded by changing its approach to user data, making its more than 400 million user profiles publicly searchable. And Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo began integrating Facebook and Twitter’s real time signals into their search offerings, creating an ever-circulating ecosystem of conversation across the web.

2009 was also the year the web went mobile and local. The “broadband of mobile” – 3G – became ubiquitous. As Apple’s iPhone consolidated its grip on the smart phone market, Google and its partners introduced the open-platform Android, Palm introduced its Pre and Pixi, Verizon its map, and AT&T responded in force, kicking off what is sure to be a multi-year, multi-party marketing war. “There’s an app for that” became a cultural catchphrase, and even Intel prepared to become a player in the new app economy, driven by the rise of a new class of devices, including netbooks. By year’s end, Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker had predicted that the mobile web will far exceed the current web in scope and opportunity.

Mobile, local, real time, social – in its second decade, the web has matured and taken a central position in our culture, one that no longer relegates the Internet to role of “other.” The web is now a part of every aspect of our lives, and as marketers, we must integrate this fact into our strategy and our execution. That means rethinking what we’ve grown accustomed to calling “traditional media” and imagining new ways to blend offline and online. It means developing the skills and practices of a publisher, and taking a platform-based approach to connecting with customers. And it means rethinking some of our “best practices” – including measurement, research, and the agency-client relationship.

So what can we learn from the past year as we enter a decade where the real time web will become ubiquitous? What worked, what failed, and why? What platforms have emerged as steady new partners? What startups are lurking in Silicon Valley’s wings, poised to once again change the game and offer new channels of communication with our customers?

At the CM Summit you’ll hear cross-platform case studies from senior marketers at brands like Starbucks, AT&T, Adobe, Paramount, and many more. You’ll meet the leaders of platform companies like Facebook, Twitter, Google, Bing, and Yahoo. And as always, you’ll discover the next wave of disruptors – companies like Foursquare, Boxee, and AdMob.

Here is the initial 2010 speaker lineup – expect more announcements in the coming weeks. Register now (while the early bird price is still in effect!), and I look forward to seeing you in New York!

Omar Hamoui – Founder & CEO AdMob

Ann Lewnes – SVP of Corporate Marketing and Communications Adobe

Chris Schembri – VP Media Services AT&T

Henry Blodget – EIC The Business Insider

Avner Ronen – CEO boxee

Ken Wirt – VP, Consumer Marketing Cisco

Deanna Brown – President and COO Federated Media

Dennis Crowley – Co-founder foursquare

Rob Norman – CEO Group M North America

Bradley Horowitz – VP, Product Marketing Google

Susan Wojcicki – VP, Product Management Google

Dennis Woodside – VP, Americas Operations Google

Arianna Huffington – Co-founder & Editor-in-chief Huffington Post

Joel Lunenfeld – CEO Moxie Interactive

Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. – Chairman The New York Times Company

Amy Powell – SVP, Interactive Marketing Paramount Pictures

Bob Lord – CEO Razorfish

Chris Bruzzo – VP- Brand, Content& Online Starbucks Coffee Company

Dick Costolo – COO Twitter

Hilary Schneider – Executive Vice President Yahoo

The CM Summit thanks its sponsors:

Read More
2 Comments on Announcing The Fifth Annual CM Summit: Theme and Initial Lineup

Weds. Signal: Get Me a Mobile Strategy or You’re Fired!

(Cross Posted to the FM Blog, where Signal will have a permanent home soon) Mobile. It's on everyone's lips, but no one knows what the hell to do about it. At least, that's what I hear from every single marketer I talk to, and I've made it a point to…

201003091750.jpg(Cross Posted to the FM Blog, where Signal will have a permanent home soon)

Mobile. It’s on everyone’s lips, but no one knows what the hell to do about it. At least, that’s what I hear from every single marketer I talk to, and I’ve made it a point to talk to a lot of you in the past few months.

It’s a source of significant frustration: Everyone’s saying mobile is the next thing, but no one has a solution for how to market in the space in a way that delivers the four pillars of brand marketing: Scale, Safety, Quality, and Engagement.

Read More
2 Comments on Weds. Signal: Get Me a Mobile Strategy or You’re Fired!

Database of Intentions Chart – Version 2, Updated for Commerce

There are many, many signals in the Database of Intentions, as my readers have pointed out, but the one I feel compelled to add to the chart I created Friday is the Commerce signal. This signal emerged before search, really, and has remained a constant, though honestly it has yet…

There are many, many signals in the Database of Intentions, as my readers have pointed out, but the one I feel compelled to add to the chart I created Friday is the Commerce signal. This signal emerged before search, really, and has remained a constant, though honestly it has yet to become a signal that others can truly leverage into an open ecosystem (unlike the signal of search, or status update, or the social graph). I expect that to change, and shortly. So here you go, an updated version of the chart, for the record. I expect this chart may well evolve into a pretty complicated ecosystem in its own right, over time….

  DBoI v 2 3.07.10.png

15 Comments on Database of Intentions Chart – Version 2, Updated for Commerce

The Database of Intentions Is Far Larger Than I Thought

Way back in November of 2003, when I was a much younger man and the world had yet to fall head over heels in love with Google, I wrote a post called The Database of Intentions. It was an attempt to explain a one-off reference in an earlier post -…

Screen shot 2010-03-05 at 9.01.41 AM.pngWay back in November of 2003, when I was a much younger man and the world had yet to fall head over heels in love with Google, I wrote a post called The Database of Intentions. It was an attempt to explain a one-off reference in an earlier post – but not much earlier, as the “DBoI” post, as I call it, was just the sixty-third post of my then-early blogging career. (This is the 5,142nd, by comparison…)

I had, in fact, been ruminating on this concept for over a year, driven by an Holy Sh*t moment in late 2001 when Google introduced its first ever Zeitgeist round up of trending search terms. Scanning the lists of rising and declining terms, I realized that Google – not to mention every other search engine, ISP, and most likely every government – had in their grasp a datastream that, were they to just pay attention, could quite possibly be the most potent signal of human intentions in the history of the world.

Zeitgeist, it struck me, was proof that Google was indeed paying attention. I went on to write The Search, and Google went on to become, well, Google. My study of Google also led me to start Web 2, with Tim O’Reilly, and Federated Media, which I positioned as a media company that leveraged the impact of The Database of Intentions.

Read More
36 Comments on The Database of Intentions Is Far Larger Than I Thought

Thursday Signal: Google’s AdSense Cookie – The Untold Story

Today in Signal we take a walk down memory lane, of sorts, because sometimes such a journey helps us prepare for what lies in the path ahead.   Early last week I ran into Susan Wojcicki, VP of Product Management for Google. Now, Susan is more than just another Google VP,…

susan.jpgToday in Signal we take a walk down memory lane, of sorts, because sometimes such a journey helps us prepare for what lies in the path ahead.  

Early last week I ran into Susan Wojcicki, VP of Product Management for Google. Now, Susan is more than just another Google VP, she’s also on Google’s operating committee. Oh, and the person in whose garage Google was founded, not to mention Sergey’s sister in law. If Google were a family, Susan would be something of a matriarch.

Susan had just gotten off stage at the annual IAB conference, and I caught up with her as we were both leaving. We got to talking about all things AdSense, and I mentioned a story I had heard recently – without divulging my source, the story went that some at Google believed AdSense had been rolled out too early, before it was ready for primetime.

Read More
5 Comments on Thursday Signal: Google’s AdSense Cookie – The Untold Story

It’s Twitter!!!!!!!! (Yahoo + Twitter)

Just got word of this deal, news of it around the blogosphere: Yahoo is announcing a partnership with Twitter on Wednesday that will bring the services of both companies closer together. Under the partnership, Yahoo users will be able to read their personal Twitter feeds on several Yahoo sites, including…

Just got word of this deal, news of it around the blogosphere:

Yahoo is announcing a partnership with Twitter on Wednesday that will bring the services of both companies closer together. Under the partnership, Yahoo users will be able to read their personal Twitter feeds on several Yahoo sites, including the company’s home page, Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Sports. Yahoo users will also be able to directly update their Twitter status from Yahoo and easily share content that they see there with their Twitter followers. Yahoo will also begin including real-time Twitter content on a variety of its sites.

So, Yahoo’s answer to Buzz? (Irony alert).

3 Comments on It’s Twitter!!!!!!!! (Yahoo + Twitter)

Twitter Stats: This Is (The Start) Of What We Wanted

Twitter just posted a shot across the bow of those who claim the service is not growing anymore. Measuring tweets per day, the post gives us a glimpse into the growth of the service. Er….up and to the right. From the post: "Tweet deliveries are a much higher number…

201002221415.jpg

Twitter just posted a shot across the bow of those who claim the service is not growing anymore. Measuring tweets per day, the post gives us a glimpse into the growth of the service.

Er….up and to the right. From the post: “Tweet deliveries are a much higher number because once created, tweets must be delivered to multiple followers. Then there’s search and so many other ways to measure and understand growth across this information network. Tweets per day is just one number to think about. We’ll make time to share more information so please stay tuned..”

Read More
4 Comments on Twitter Stats: This Is (The Start) Of What We Wanted

Friday Signal: What Marketers Want from Twitter Metrics

Among other things, we discussed how Twitter might crack the code around explaining its user base, how its users use the service, and how it's growing (or the recently very hot – and to my mind misunderstood – topic of *if* it's growing, which he assured me it is). While I don't have any news to report on Twitter's stats, Dick shook his head emphatically when I asked him if the recent Royal Pingdom post about growth in overall tweets was directionally correct.

Screen shot 2010-02-12 at 1.03.15 PM.pngYesterday I stopped by Twitter HQ to see Dick Costolo. Dick recently moved to Marin (my home turf) and took Twitter’s COO job. I’d say that taking such a job means Dick’s hair is constantly on fire, but if you know Dick, you know that’s really not an issue. (He’s level headed, he’s a pro, and, well….let’s just say he doesn’t wear his hair long).  

Among other things (FM has partnered with Twitter in the past, and will continue to do so), we discussed how Twitter might crack the code around explaining its user base, how those users engage with the service, and how the service is growing – especially given the recently hot (and to my mind not well understood) topic of *if* it’s growing. Dick assured me it is – echoing a recent tweet from founder Evan Williams.

Much has been written around the topic of Twitter’s growth, but the shorthand is this: You can’t rely on Comscore or web-based measurement services like Compete or Quantcast, because they do not measure the entire Twitter ecosystem, which is distributed in nature. For example, these services do not measure use of Twitter’s API, which accounts for more than half of the service’s traffic (through apps like TweetDeck, Twitteriffic, Exectweets or Stocktwits, for example). They also don’t measure mobile usage, and some don’t measure international traffic, which Costolo said in some countries is growing “straight up” – quite like it did in the US early last year.

Read More
7 Comments on Friday Signal: What Marketers Want from Twitter Metrics

Google Buys Human-driven Search Engine Aardvark: Will It Make It to the Main SERPS?

The news broke today that Google will be buying Aardvark, a human (and algorithm) powered social search engine that I have written about quite a bit (early last year, most recently, all). I've also featured the service's founders at both Web2 and the CM Summit.) I've confirmed the news in…

Screen shot 2010-02-11 at 11.44.03 AM.pngThe news broke today that Google will be buying Aardvark, a human (and algorithm) powered social search engine that I have written about quite a bit (early last year, most recently, all). I’ve also featured the service’s founders at both Web2 and the CM Summit.)

I’ve confirmed the news in an email with CEO Max Ventilla.

I can’t say I’m surprised by this news. Aardvark’s founders and advisers have strong ties with Google (Ventilla worked there, and a key adviser was at Kaltix, which was purchased by Google).

Read More
6 Comments on Google Buys Human-driven Search Engine Aardvark: Will It Make It to the Main SERPS?