Category Archives: Social Networking

Lookout MySpace, here comes Facebook

2007/11/15 Carlos Granier 2 Comments

This is the first article of a series I’ll call GoogleTrending, where I use Google Trends to compare search terms and come to usually preposterous conclusions based on the trend charts. I hope you enjoy it. Share your favorite trend comparisons -or suggest ideas for new posts- using the comments form below.

MySpace seems to be losing steam as Facebook skyrockets. Facebook should surpass MySpace as a search destination by the end of the year.

Click on the image to open the actual search on Google Trends.

Digital Media Strategy, Featured Articles, Social Networking

5 Observations on the State of Digital Media

2007/11/09 Carlos Granier 4 Comments

I wrote this as the introduction to a report I presented a year ago, after attending the Forbes MEET conference, and was surprised at how relevant it still was… so I decided to share it with my blog readers.

1. Universal access to media distribution.

The traditional media outlets were used to managing an industry of scarce resources, which they owned. Acting like toll booths, they decided what got published and what didn’t. The Internet put an end to this system, giving everyone an effective distribution channel. The bottlenecks have disappeared. Anyone can post their opinion to a blog, a video on YouTube, and even distribute their band’s songs. MediaSnackers are an example of the way users are adapting to this new way of creating and consuming content.

2. Time-Shifting: The future of media consumption is when you want it, how you want it, where you want it.

Although traditional television will continue being relevant for a while, an ever growing number of users will opt for the freedom of deciding how, when and where to consume media. The need for watching live television will still exist, given people’s need to socialize around shows (the so called water cooler effect), but users will increasingly satisfy this need with their online friends (via Twitter, for instance).

3. A need for more -and better- editors.

In a world of easily accessible, unlimited content, the role of editors is ever more important. We need trustworthy recommendations in order to find quality, relevant content. As the value of our time increases, so does the need for editors or editorial systems we trust. This applies for all kinds of content: news, software, music, games, videos, etc. Services like Digg, even with all their faults and growing pains, are a possible solution.

4. Go Local: news will be closer to home than ever.

When agencies like Reuters can distribute their content to every news show in the world, the value of those news falls (as they’re no longer exclusive to any one show). Newscasts and newspapers need to take advantage of their local presence and knowledge to cover events of real relevance to local consumers. The tendency is towards hyperlocal: the neighborhood, the county, the municipality. The Internet is the ideal medium to distribute this localized content. Likewise, users have begun to engage in Citizen Journalism, using blogs, videos, podcasts and any other distribution technology to give their opinions, make their complaints public and comment on the latest events.

5. The Internet will compete with television on the television.

In the next couple of years the Internet will be connected to the rest of our homes. Already, content that’s available on the Internet competes with television shows, and soon watching an Internet-available show on our television sets will be a simple matter of pushing a button on our remotes. YouTube, CurrentTV, Google Video, to name a few, will have a permanent home in our high-definition televisions. Traditional media networks need to make an effort to distribute their content through the Internet (see Hulu), create Internet content that supports and extends their TV offerings (see Heroes) and, more importantly, begin to compete against themselves in this new arena.

What do you see as the future of digital media?

A Spanish-language version of this article is available at Technosailor.com, where I write a regular column. Disponible en espaÃ±ol en Technosailor.com, donde escribo una columna regularmente.

Digital Media Strategy, Ratings Analysis, Social Networking

NBC Drops YouTube

2007/10/23 Carlos Granier

Last week, NBC pulled the plug on its very successful YouTube channel. The following TubeMogul chart, shows NBC’s views dropped to zero on October 19th. NBC’s YouTube page no longer exists.

The reason? NBC is launching their own video distribution network, Hulu.

Is this a smart move? I understand NBC wanting to control (read: monetize) the distribution of their content, but NBC’s YouTube channel was all about promotion (and I’m sure they could’ve played with video ads there as well). With the move, NBC has left millions of viewers in the dark – just like that. If Hulu was ready to go, I might understand the move (although, how are YouTube viewers supposed to figure out the content is now at Hulu?)… but the fact is that Hulu is still in private beta, closed to the general public.

In any case, NBC should have kept their YouTube channel and used it to publicize their Hulu service, that way maximizing YouTube’s promotional aspect. YouTube is limited to 10-minute long clips, while Hulu will supposedly host full length content as well.

Hulu needs to work amazingly well from the start. In addition to good content in the proper formats, it’ll need to offer:

a positive user experience (usability, reliability)
social networking tools
sharing and embedding
no buffering problems
a stable server farm that won’t buckle under the huge user load
bearable ads

What do you think? Was pulling the plug on YouTube a good move? Does Hulu have a chance?

NBC’s escape from YouTube was chronicled around the web:

Online Video: NBC pulls YouTube channel

Could this move be a sign that Hulu, scheduled for “private beta” testing this month, is finally ready?

The Facts About NBC (GE) on YouTube, Hulu, and iTunes* – Silicon Alley Insider

Also, read Silicon Alley Insider’s take on Hulu’s exclusivity deal with NBC.

NBC’s YouTube Channel Goes M.I.A. on Epicenter

…the real question is whether or not viewers will feel comfortable leaving YouTube to view NBC’s shorter clips on the new site. If pulling the plug on its YouTube channel without warning is how NBC is going to roll, then it’s not looking good.

US TV – News – NBC pulls content from YouTube – Digital Spy

An NBC spokeswoman confirmed promotional content would no longer be available on YouTube. She said it was “not antagonistic” but a move designed to support Hulu.

She said NBC still might put promotional content on YouTube “as we see fit”. The network was not “closing the door” on anybody, she added.

NBC Leaves YouTube

Is NBC putting too much stock in their own service? They offered video clips for free on YouTube even when iTunes sold complete versions of the same episodes. I assumed the logic was that you could see a clip for free on YouTube and then decide to purchase the episode over on iTunes. Between the two monster services, NBC was getting wide exposure. Now pulling videos from both for their own service seems like a step in the wrong direction. No exposure, other than stories like this stating why the move has been done.

Big Media vs. YouTube & Google: Smart or Not? Â« GigaOM

It is my belief that these companies are in the business of content, not distribution. Offering their content on their own properties may give them a lift in terms of page views, but at the same time they also run the risk of losing the audience that simply seeks out such content on sites such as YouTube.

NBC Confirms Pulling YouTube Content for Hulu Â« NewTeeVee

Blogged with Flock

Tags: google, nbc, youtube, hulu, ugc, user generated content, online video, social networks, tubemogul, distribution

Social Networking, Software

Tracking conversations with Twitter

2007/10/09 Carlos Granier 36 Comments

Twitter just unveiled a new feature that allows you to track any word when it comes up in a public Twitter conversation. You could, for instance, instruct Twitter to let you know every time your name comes up in a conversation, or your hometown, favorite band, or latest trend you’re tracking.

Currently, tracking only works through Twitter’s web and IM interfaces, which turns out to be a good thing.

This is how I’ve set up tracking:

I use Twitter on my Mac through Twitterrific, which -as you will see- allows me to keep tracking results separate from my day-to-day twittering.
Set up an IM account for Twitter. This will allow you to access the tracking functionality and receive results through your IM software. I use AdiumX and Twitter messages me through my gmail chat account.
On your Twitter friends page, set Notifications OFF for all users (so their messages won’t show up on your IM and get lost amid tracking results). You’ll still get all their messages through Twitterrific.
Using your IM software, send a message to the Twitter IM bot with tracking instructions. If, for example, you want to track any mention of Google’s stock ticker (GOOG), then simply send the message “track GOOG” to Twitter. You’ll immediately begin receiving updates, via IM, of any public Twitter conversation where the term “GOOG” comes up. The great thing about this is that your normal Twitter conversations will remain free of this additional message traffic.
Once you see something interesting come up in your tracking results, you can use “whois username” to find out more about the person behind the post, and “follow username” to begin following this person on Twitter.
If you decide to stop tracking a certain term, simply send “untrack term” to Twitter, via your IM software or the web interface. Send “track” to get a list of search terms currently being tracked.

It just occurred to me, while writing this post, that you could set up a nice stock tracker using this system. Simply enter the ticker symbol of whatever stock you’re interested in and see what the Twittersphere spews out. I’m gonna try it out and see what people are twittering about my favorite stocks.

What about you? How are you using Twitter’s tracker?

Marketing and SEO, Social Networking, Software

Using Twitter as a Marketing Tool

2007/10/08 Carlos Granier 33 Comments

A friend recently asked me about ways his clients could use the power of social networks. As I was explaining to him the nuances of socnets as marketing tools, it occurred to me that Twitter could be used as a powerful marketing weapon. Imagine being able to immediately reach your clients with breaking news at zero cost.

Here are some examples, for different industries:

Retail: inform clients of new promotions, sales, time-limited offers, etc.
Real Estate: post new properties the moment they come on the market.
News: breaking news, behind the scenes info, insights into developing stories.

In this context, it’s no different than an RSS feed to which your readers subscribe – except that Twitter is somehow more immediate, and more personal than an RSS feed. Twitter, you see, is a two-way communications medium, whereas RSS is one way.

I searched the internet for more examples of people using Twitter in this context. One company using this is Woot.com, a website where you can buy items at ridiculous prices during a short amount of time (and very small inventories). I subscribed to Woot’s Twitter feed to check it out: Woot broadcasts the latest deals via Twitter. If you’re into the whole Woot thing, you’ll want to be informed as quickly as possible about new deals, as they usually go quite fast. Receiving a short tweet (that’s what a Twitter message is called) on your cellphone or Twitter app is preferable to constantly checking the Woot home page. After all, some of us have work to do.

Woot’s Twitter solution is as simple as it gets. You subscribe, you receive a tweet every time a new product comes up for sale (or when a product sells out). It’s one way (you don’t get to talk back), but who wants to talk to an automated script anyway?

Guy Kawasaki also uses Twitter as a marketing tool, this time to advertise new posts that appear on his Truemors website. But he sends too many tweets throughout the day and he won’t automatically add you to his list, which means you can’t talk back to him.

Robert Scoble, of Scobelizer fame does get it. He doesn’t send too many tweets, and he will automatically add you to his Twitter list if you add him to yours. Seems to me like the right thing to do. I certainly don’t want to be listening to someone’s tweets if I can’t reach back to him when I want to follow up on something he said.

NBC’s Jim Long uses his Twitter account to share behind-the-scenes looks while he’s off on secret media tours to Iraq or following President Bush to Australia. Though he won’t automatically add you to his list (so that you can tweet him), I get the feeling he would if you ask nice enough (and I suppose Guy Kawasaki would too. The problem with this it that you need to be able to contact them through some other means, as it’s not possible through the Twitter interface). Jim does, however, post a little too much as he tries to keep the conversation on a very personal level. [UPDATE: Jim’s mentioned on the comments that he does automatically follow people on Twitter.]

Here’s a short list of Dos and Don’ts if you plan on using Twitter as a marketing tool:

Do use Twitter to sell your products, ideas, offers, insights, etc.
Do advertise your Twitter account on your website, business card and marketing literature. Here’s mine.
Do create a conversation. Add your users to your Twitter account. Let those who listen to you, talk to you.
Don’t spam. Really. You don’t have to post everything to Twitter… your important messages will get lost amid the junk. If yours is a high-volume Twitter channel, let users know before hand.
Don’t rely on Twitter 100%. Twitter’s service has been down a lot lately. Use Twitter as one more tool in your social media toolbox.

What about you? How do you use Twitter?

Social Networking

Facebook to Allow Contact Grouping. Is LinkedIn history?

2007/10/01 Carlos Granier 4 Comments

Facebook has announced that it’ll let users organize their friends into groups with different privacy settings for each group. This is one feature I’ve been waiting for since joining Facebook and that would allow me to add even more friends and acquaintances.

Currently, I keep most of my professional friends/acquaintances on LinkedIn and my personal friends on Facebook. I’d like to add more people to Facebook, since I find it much more useful and easy to use than LinkedIn, but Facebook lacks the necessary privacy levels to make this viable. Right now you can choose two types of friends, those who can see your full profile and those who can see only your limited profile… which works to a certain extent. Ideally, you should be able to group your contacts into say, Family, Work, Friends and assign different levels of access to each group. I’d also like to be able to select to which group something gets posted (so that I can spare my friends from enduring my technogeeky posts).

LinkedIn is much less interactive than Facebook. It’s sort of like fishing… you throw your resume into LinkedIn’s pond, sprinkle some connections and questions & answers to chum the waters, and wait for the fish to bite. Facebook, on the other hand, is like your cool younger brother. It lets you show off your cool videos, your awesome collection of links or even those photos from twenty years ago you found at the bottom of a drawer. You can also, if you so choose, sit back, relax and enjoy the view – popping in whenever you feel like it. It certainly offers a much more relaxed atmosphere than LinkedIn.

But can Facebook make the transition to a more professional network without destroying it’s relaxed, youthful qualities? Will you stop using LinkedIn (or Facebook)?

Chime in below with your thoughts…

Digital Media Strategy, Rest and Relaxation, Social Networking, Software

33 Fun Things to Do With Your Photos Online

2007/09/25 Carlos Granier 27 Comments

Now that you’ve got yourself a digital camera, what can you do with all those wonderful photos? Here’s a list to get you started:

Organize and share them:

These services allow you to upload your photos, share them with friends and family, tag them, make slideshows and send them out for printing:

Flickr – Owned by Yahoo!, Flickr offers both free and premium services. You can tag your photos, add comments to any part of an image, create sets, collections, slideshows, print out photobooks, postcards, snapshots, etc.

Zoomr – Think Flickr, but map centric. Zooomr offers nice photo storage functions, closely integrated with geotagging (placing your photos on a world map) and e-commerce (selling your photos) functions.

SmugMug – SmugMug is a wonderful website for storing your images. It’s fast, well supported, and offers plenty of sharing options, including making photos private and password-protecting them. There’s even a special offer for Yahoo Photos customers who are looking for a place to store their now orphaned images.

Photobucket – Photobucket also offers tons of features including easy options to share your images online (particularly useful for bloggers and photographers sharing their photos in online discussions)

Shutterfly – Primarily a photo-printing business, Shutterfly also lets you store your photos, create photobooks, postcards, share your photos, etc.

Fix them:

These services will let you upload your photos and edit them online. Useful if you don’t have an image editor on your computer, or when you need to quickly edit a photo while at a cybercafe.

Picnik – I was impressed by this one. Picnik will even let you play with their software without creating an account (Scrapblog will too), a clever way to let you try Picnik without forking over your personal information. Slick looking, fast and powerful. Worth trying, even if just for fun.

LookWow – Java-based online photo editor. Will let you apply effects to an image, undo, compare and save.

Snipshot – Another really good looking online photo editor. Not as powerful as Picnik, but worth trying.

Phixr – Has a nice set of tools, but took forever to load.

Create:

MyPictr – Quickly create image thumbnails for online social networks. Upload your photo, crop the area you want to keep (usually your face), choose the network you need your photo for and MyPictr will spit out your image in the proper size and format.

Quick Thumbnail – Great when you need to quickly resize an image. A useful feature will resize your image to several sizes at once (i.e., 25%, 50%, 75%)

ePassportPhoto – The Internet equivalent to a passport photo booth, it will format your picture so that it can be printed and cut into six passport-ready photos. No more paying $8 for 19 cents worth of prints. Make sure your photo is passport-worthy before uploading.

BigHugeLabs – Do almost anything with your Flickr images. Calendars, frames, print-out projects… too many to list.

Fun:

Scrapblog – Online scrap books. A wonderful service by my Miami friends. You can give Scrapblog a try without creating an account (you can create an account later and recover your trial project). Connects directly to your Flickr account, so using your existing images is very easy. Amazing flash-based interface will leave you wondering what else is possible on the Internet. Let your inner Martha Stewart run wild.

Spell with flickr – A fun service that will turn any word into its Flickr image letters.

Photagious – Online Slideshows, themes, editing, text, unlimited uploads. Should probably be listed under “Organize and share them” but their slideshow functions are in a league of their own.

Riya – Although it’s been transformed into a “visual search engine,” you can still access their original image storage and sharing service. Riya’s technology will let you search for items containing similar items to a reference image. It will also let you identify a person in an image and find additional images where that person appears.

PikiStrips – Turn any image or images into comic strips, with text balloons and special effects. Look through the earlier examples uploaded into the system for the better quality stuff. It seems the latest ones are mostly people making gang signs.

Map Them:

You don’t need a GPS to map your images online, though one certainly helps. These services will let you identify the geographical place where each image was taken and show them on a map.

PanoramaBuilder Build panoramic images by stitching together your photos. Now you can pan around a place as if you were (almost) there.

Virtual Panorama Tours on Google Maps – A list of panoramic images overlaid on Google Maps. Mostly used for real estate.

Panoramio – Map centric photo storage and sharing. Geotag your photos, correct photos others have wrongly placed. Panoramio photos are regularly uploaded to Google Earth so that other Google Earth viewers can see them by activating the Panoramio layer.

Make real stuff:

Your digital images don’t need to stay trapped inside your computer (or the Internets’ tubes). Make books, posters, postcards… almost anything you want with these links:

Mpix – Photobooks, Cards, Magazine covers, greeting cards, calendars, bookwrap, tickets, puzzles and statuettes (these last ones you HAVE to see… worth every cringe-inducing penny!)

QOOP – Photobooks, postcards, mugs, stickers, canvas prints, mini photobooks, shirts, hoodies, mousepads, calendars, greeting cards, etc., directly from your photo storage account. Works with most popular photo storage sites.

Flatenme – Create customized children’s books with your little rascal’s image in place of the book’s hero or heroine.

The Rasterbator – An application which creates rasterized versions of images. The rasterized images can be printed and assembled into enormous (or smaller, if you prefer) posters. See website for details.

Improve your technique:

Microsoft Research Group Shot – MSR Group Shot helps you create a perfect group photo out of a series of group photos. With Group Shot you can select your favorite parts in each shot of the series and Group Shot will automatically build a composite image. Erase someone in the background, fix faces with eyes closed, etc.

Fascinating! Content Aware Image Resizing – An amazing image resizing algorithm. Watch the video and rest easily knowing that the scientist behind is already working with Adobe on the next Photoshop.

Improve your photography with classical art – An interesting technique that uses traditional classical paintings to correct the light and color of your photographs.

Automator Actions: Photoshop Automator Actions v3.5 – If you’ve got a Mac and Photoshop, these scripts might make your photo-editing life a bit easier.

Manage your digital images on your computer:

These programs will help you manage your entire photo library on your PC or Mac. Most will allow you to do minor editing, cropping, resizing, color correcting and printing. Easily upload your images to your favorite online photo storage service.

Picasa – PC/Linux photo management, also includes online photo sharing for anyone with a Gmail account.

iPhoto – Mac photo management. If you’ve got a recent Mac, then you have iPhoto installed already.

Apple Aperture – Professional photo management for Mac.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom – Professional photo management for Mac and PC.

Updates:

2007/10/01: Make that 34 Fun Things to Do With Your Photos Online. Abhiram Sarat of flauntR sent me an email highlighting their quite promising online photo apps:

flauntR one-click effects – Online photo editing and effects. Includes uploading from your computer or flickr account and is nice enough to include sample images to play with. You can try out the apps (currently PhotostylR and PhotoeditR, soon PhotoprintR) without registering.

Featured Articles, Ratings Analysis, Social Networking

Content-centric Communities

2007/09/18 Carlos Granier 12 Comments

Bernard Lunn, at Read/WriteWeb wrote an interesting article about the failure of Eons.

Eons is a social networking website aimed at the over-fifty crowd, headed by the founder of job-site Monster.com. After raising $32M, Eons is now cutting it’s workforce in half – not exactly a measure of success.

In his article, Lunn touches a point I’ve been making for a long time: people gather around content, not around demographic variables (see “The Advertiser’s Dilemma”, “Rethinking Ratings” and “Why Google Should Buy YouTube” for my previous articles on content-centric ratings analysis).

Lunn think the problem lies in Eons’ strategy to connect people around age, a traditional demographic variable, and not around content or common interests. He’s hit the nail squarely on the head:

“…people want to connect around content, not around age. Connecting around content is what Blogs do. You connect on something that interests you. (…) As you get older, you get a more varied set of interests and human relationships across all ages.”

Age/Sex/Location is not a social network

Demographic variables allow advertisers and their clients to easily target their products to artificial segments of the population that probably have very little else in common, other than age/sex/location. In a small-town-world these variables may have been good enough to create desirable advertising targets, but we now live in a connected world where people of all ages and genders interact and share common interests on a scale seldom seen before.

And while you can still use demographic variables to target your product, you’d be missing a much more interesting target, one capable of creating die-hard fans and viral awareness of your product, by ignoring content-centric connections.

As for social networks, look at the successful ones and the “glue” that keeps them together:

facebook: college students (now everyone)
imdb: movies
dogster/catster: pets
flickr: photos
digg: tech news
youtube: videos

Building a social network around content will not magically make it successful, just like putting wings on a box won’t make it fly; but those wings sure help once you put the rest of the airplane together.

The Content-centric Connectivity Chart

The following chart is an example of how people of different ages, genders and cultural backgrounds gather around common interests (caveat: networks are not drawn to scale, connections do not attempt to imply actual traffic for these sites, and age/gender/race were limited by the avatar icons I could find on the net).

The Content-centric Connectivity chart highlights two key ideas:

Successful networks are built around content, not around demographics.
There’s a huge opportunity for anyone who learns how to target their products around content-centric communities.

Conclusion

There will always be products that need to be targeted around demographic variables (e.g., feminine products, some toys, acne-medication, denture products), but the opportunities and tools for expanding your product’s appeal have never been this good.