As digital engagement spreads from the web (Facebook, Twitter, websites) to smart phones and tablets, apps have become a critical factor to gain user attention by providing a function, service or information. It’s more than the icing on these devices that we buy and use. With the smartphone/tablet dimension, apps are embedded into the user experience landscape as serious, useful and fun additions to their device. Often the availability of the apps to improve the function of the devices from phones to tablets and the variety of apps available make the choice of host product purchase a real effort in research prior to purchase.
(Article first published in abbreviated presentation as Tech Talk: Create Your Own App in About 60 Minutes with Appsbar.com – for Free!! on Blogcritics.org)

There are a few key few issues concerning the app marketplace. First is the exclusivity of an app to a particular platform. Often your favorite iPhone app is not available on Android or Windows or tablet platforms. Cost is an issue. While there are a number of apps in the free to three dollar range, there are apps with premium prices ranging from five to twenty dollars. The third issue is that perhaps the app or function you want or need is not currently available or doesn’t function in the way you need. I heard of a woman who wanted a “mirror” app so that she could see what she looked like on the fly– but she couldn’t figure out where to find that app.

Should you be so entrepreneurial as to want to create an app, you have a few choices. If you were smart enough to get into IT when in college or are taking classes for that, you know where you can make extra bucks — creating apps on the side. If you are a “geek freak”, you could dig into this as a DIY project and buy the books to create an app yourself. Or if you are like the rest of us (especially moi), you could hire a programmer and find out what it will cost. The price tag– even on the bargain end can be about $3000. Most of the pro apps cost about $10,000 and can cost up to $100,000 or more depending on the sophistication of the app. The time frame for app development can range from six weeks to three months. Until now, these were the only options you had.

The apps paradigm has shifted courtesy of Appsbar.com, an open-to-all-ages website that offers members the ability to quickly and easily build an app for a specific platform with lots of bells and whistles in about 30-60 minutes– and it’s free! Plus once you create the app, it’s funneled to the Apple, Android or Windows markets for others to download. It’s a win-win proposition. In a little more than 2 weeks since the site launched, eleven thousand apps have been created.

Appsbar.com is a new website that allows anyone of almost any age to build their own app on a variety of platforms including iPhone, Android and Windows and also get them into their respective markets. The “digital engagement” that appsbar.com provides allows you — as the user– to create the app for anything or everything you want– depending on how much time and creativity you bring to the table. Generally speaking, if you are thinking about a relatively simple app to build, it could be done in about 30 minutes. The more complex you want to make it, the longer it will take– 60 minutes is about the baseline. However if you get really creative and want the veritable kitchen sink, it could take longer.

Here’s what the site (and their press release) says you can create on an appsbar app
•Event Notifier – which delivers real-time or scheduled notifications to app users.
•Menu – allows creating of catalog of products or services.
•Form Builder – which can be used for customer service surveys, a restaurant to-go order, or answers to questions asked through the app.
•Social Interaction – adds the ability to share content within an app across social networks such as LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.
•Soundboard – lets users create a unique “app ringtone” by uploading any sound which can play when a user shakes or taps their mobile device.
In addition, appsbar can also handle RSS, photos and videos like other similar services

This isn’t just for play boys and girls. This is serious business masquerading behind a fun game-like wizard that will be blowing away the competition in a very short time. As the community grows, watch what happens as the members connect, communicate and collaborate. It’s bound to create something exponentially better than anything out there. This isn’t just for consumers only– bloggers. brands, companies can create their own apps for micro-consumer engagement. There are a wealth of uses for this application wizard.

I was able to snag an interview with CEO/founder Scott Hirsch to talk about this new site and honestly- to ask a lot of questions because appsbar.com is as big a shift in paradigm in the app world as iPhone was to cell phones. Flat out truth, appsbar is on its’ way to changing the perspective of the marketplace and how apps are created and how much the public wants to be involved in the creation. So far there has been little public involvement until now because the public had no way to get involved in the interface of building an app. Hirsch and company have remedied that situation.

How?
1) it’s free
2) they created a very simple wizard to walk you through the building process so that anyone from 18 to 70+ can create their own app.
3) the collective imagination of the appsbar user community is creating new processes for and ways to create apps and the appsbar team is learning from that collective imagination just how to integrate or improve upon what the users have created or asked for to facilitate the building of the most customized app around at the phenomenal price of free plus your own time.

I had the opportunity to interview CEO Scott Hirsch about Appsbar.com and ask a slew of questions about the site– and app development; questions about funding, advertising and how long the site will remain free. The podcast provides answers to all these questions.

I tried the Appsbar.com wizard to create an Android app for my blog. The app creation wizard is easy to use and it’s a lot more fun than a Zynga game. Pick your platform and get started. Do realize that after you complete the first version of your app, you will want to upgrade it as you figure out all the options that you can add to the app and how to make sure that it integrates with your goal.

The community of members can share information and also ask for additional features (coupons, discounting capacity) and the Appsbar.com team will start working on it. While it’s taken me a little longer than the hour, it’s because I kept changing the visuals, the essential app is easily done in 60 minutes or less and I took longer because as I saw the options come up, I was playing with the integration of those options into the app. In other words, I was throwing the kitchen sink into the app and it was definitely fun. Check out the site www.appsbar.com

Thank you to Scott Hirsch of Appsbar.com and Joe McGurk/ Rubenstein PR for facilitating this interview which literally was done in 3 days.

Thanks to Chris Abraham & MarketingConversation.com too.

Stevie Wilson,
LA-Story.com

Most of think of social media through our marketing lens eyes. As we should. That’s likely its greatest use. But the reality is that social media encompasses so much. Or more importantly, it will soon touch on most internal business operations.

That’s why I wrote that latest post. We seem, in our attempts to define it, to be actually inadvertently limiting it. Much of our call-to-change, if implemented, could result in ineffective disjointed efforts that lead to disappointment and even failure.

I just read a great report from Aberdeen Research, Customer 2.0: The Business Implications of Social Media. Aberdeen determined from its research that there were three levels of adoption, Best in Class (20%) are those organizations whose practices are significantly superior to the industry standard, resulting in more successful implementation. Industry Average (50%) are exactly that. Average adaptation, average performance. Laggards (30%) suffer from poor performance because of lower than average adaptation of social media. Both Industry Average and Laggards are divided between companies that are looking to improve their standing and those that are apparently satisfied with their status quo or lack the vision to improve.

From the report I’m garnering several trends that are impacting levels of success…

Need for executive buy in should extend to culture change when needed

Usually the need for executive buy in is something we take for granted. If upper management is resistant to something, it’s not likely to happen. In the study, that’s reaffirmed, but I noticed something more.

The buy in must extend to action. Social media adoption can mean wholesale change. It can affect several departments. Executive buy-in in the form of lip service is useless.

Case in point. While almost two thirds of laggards (65%) say that Web 2.0 applications are a top two or of the highest priority, only 37% of them report that they’ve received full support from senior level management, and that only 13% of them have developed internal processes to implement, manage, and analyze the applications. These are the companies that will soon be in the Industry Average category. The other 87% aren’t so lucky.

The 65-37-13 discrepancy is telling. It shows a significant detachment between what could be a stated vision and the will to carry it out. It shows me that a large percentage of the Laggards are going to stay where they are. One of the key factors that Aberdeen found, in the successful implementation of Web 2.0 applications is having established coordinated internal processes. If only 13% of respondents say their organization has some sort of program in place, but yet 65% say that Web 2.0 is a priority, then a lot of the 37% of those leaders who are said to be supportive of Web 2.0 either aren’t, or they simply arent’ doing their jobs.

Social media via Web 2.o applications is too cross-functional to be implemented department by department. Sure, an organization can have a praised social media marketing effort, but will that really change a corporate culture?

Process implementation problems mean Steve Rubel’s prediction won’t come anytime soon. But still take heed.

A couple of months ago, Steve Rubel surmised that the job title/descripiton of Social Media consultant will be going away in a few years. He reasoned that as organizations become more Web 2.0 ready and adopt soicla media throughout the entity, the duties and responsibilities of the consultant will disperse as well…in fact they’ll disperse so much that they’ll dissipate when it comes to the defined role of a social media consultant.

I actually think he’s onto something in that today’s worker will be soon enough equipped with social media skills for fulfilling social media duties and responsibilities that today’s consultant will be quite different from tomorrow’s. Setting up blog, wikis, and podcasts could easily be handled in house.

But if only 87% of Laggards,76% of Industry Average, and 63% of Best in Class at this point DO NOT have a process in place, then we a a long ways away from the death of the social media consultant. But wait…

Social media agencies will have to become more full service. They’ll have to adopt larger corporate practices that go beyond setting up Facebook accounts and reaching out to bloggers. They’ll need to fully understand how a social media marketing effort effects sales and then how customer services must respond, by using social media by this (hopeful) increase in sales. So social media strategist may be less hip, but in the end, more useful.

Dedicated cross-functional teams are needed, meaning the nexus of controlling responsibility must be fluid.

If you’re in one of the company considered by a Laggard, you’ve got company. Aberdeen found that 86% of the Laggards don’t have dedicated personnel to work on social media initiatives. A few people working a few hours here and there. That’s not going to work. Social media will be changing corporate and organizations culture.

In most organizations, social media will be implemented across several department that interact with customers or clients, vendors, investors, the media, and employees. The level of implementation of Web 2.0 applications will vary according to the size of the organization, the industry it is in, the specific needs of each department within the organization and with the organization as a whole. The implementation of social media on a strategic level, with its technological components and human interaction focus means that it can’t be done on a cookie cutter basis. Teams must be created knowing that their success depends on a large scale collaborative effort.

Collaboration means cooperation. Each division will have its own needs, its own level of adoption and adaption. Some of that adoption will be reliant on adoption as a whole.

Here again, is where I part with Jason Falls’ belief that social media come under the control of public relations. Internal leaders must develop and they must see across the entire enterprise. But then again, I already wrote about that.

More importantly, at this stage of the game, management must cultivate internal resources in creating great teams to lead the way into the age of social media.

The current legal battle between Viacom and Google/YouTube is going to have significant ramifications beyond today’s headlines.  It’s getting surprisingly little play amongst much of the social media digerati, but it’s something we all need to be aware of.

The lawsuit and the proceedings around it are truly a sign of the times.  It’s a direct outgrowth of what we’ve been emerging via the internet over the past several years.  Sites such as YouTube have essentially become free communicative vehicles to not only view, but  share and alter video productions of all types.  The concept of “share” is important because most of us use it.  But in reality, it is a nice way of saying “distribute”.  And from distribute comes distribution – a fundamental with tremendous legal ramifications.

Alter is a tough one too.  The “mash-ups” that many in social media and digital marketing talk of enthusiastically can be as problematic.  As, I guess, it should be.  At least in some cases.  An artist creates an original piece of work.  Then distributes it, usually netting some sort of financial gain.  Others take it, and now because of new tools can alter it and redistribute it.  Many times this new process leads to lost potential revenue for the original artist.

Basically what has happened was that YouTube became extremely popular practically overnight.  So now we have tens of thousands of people posting videos – videos that may be copyrighted material (or at least contain copyrighted material).  Interested parties on the original creative/distribution side sort of stood by, trying to figure what to make of it.  That means artist, recording studios and major distributors.  Sometimes it makes sense to let things slide.  Other times it means lost revenue.  Copyright infringement.  But how the major players handle themselves at this juncture will probably set precedents for years to come.

All of this brouhaha is a result of overlapping laws, revenue distribution models, current legal precedents in related industries, and perhaps most importantly, the determination by key players to establish new legal precedents and business processes.

Part of the problem is that there is little established law beyond the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) that establishes a foundation to base anything on.  Consequently, it’s been up to the courts to decide what it legal and what it not.  This puts all parties in a bind because the likely solutions could create a lot of losers.

Currently, web properties that entail copyrighted digital content are required to get two licenses from interested parties.  One is a reproduction license from the record company as the record company often has sole rights for reproduction.  The second is a public performance license from the performers and/or their agent representatives.

But the problem is that its not that YouTube is getting those licenses them selves and then showing the videos – videos that can’t be downloaded and distributed.  The problem is that anyone can take a copyrighted video and uploaded it up to YouTube.  Now the video can be distributed as others can now download it.

Representatives of the music and entertainment industries are thus saying that YouTube would thus need a distribution license as well.  And these arguments have been paying off in court.  YouTube is acting as an enabler, intended or not.

It’s not as if Google and YouTube have been sitting still in all this, letting everything stupidly happen.  They’ve already reached agreements on  reproduction with major music labels and artist representatives.  But that, of course, doesn’t address distribution models.

YouTube is making some efforts – but it’s the nature of their business model that’s hurting them on this.  And the popularity of the service.

For one, they limit the time allowed for videos to 10 minutes.  This way, whole programs can’t be recorded and posted.  YouTube has also set up a “content identification system” that allows a content owner to set up a “reference file” on copyrighted work which enables YouTube to locate exact matches between a piece of copyrighted work and something that is posted.  The problem there is that anything can be altered, and alterations (those pesky “mashups” can throw the system off.  Once YouTube identifies a piece of copyrighted material, they then contact the artists and productions studios to inquire as to whether or not it should be removed.

Those that continually upload copyrighted material will be asked to stop, and if they fail to do so, can have their YouTube account suspended.

All in all, YouTube seems to be doing all it can to stop all of this.  But the current technological capabilities, coupled with the site’s enormous popularity have made it impossible to really have an effective system in place.  At least in the mindset of companies like Viacom.

In my last post, I talked of the coming disruption of the three way relationship between marketer, agency, and media property. Essentially it centers on the idea that marketers (who are often behind themselves) are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the lack of digital savvy of their agencies and are now turning to media properties for strategic ideas and creative capabiliites. And these media properties are making themselves all the more ready, willing, and able to carry out the needs and wishes of the marketers.

I believe that that’s happening. But there’s still a big problem with that model. Consistent brand messaging

On a micro-level, this new way of doing things makes perfect sense. Crafting an marketing campaign tailored to the offerings of an online property could maximize the effectiveness of the campaign itself. For that media property.

But last I looked, most advertisers don’t use all their spend on one property. They’ll pick many properties in many channels. They’ll test here and there. They’ll sometimes concentrate on branding, sometimes concentrate on direct , sometimes (and the web makes this more possible, concentrate on both.

If the marketer – the company that is the end client – has to tailor each of its marketing messages to that of the publisher, chaos could result.

Publishers will need to realize this and further expand their services, sort of becoming almost full service for their advertisers. But still, this still could run into brand confusion as each publisher will owe it to their paying client to create the most effective campaign for their specific property or properties, leaving potentially different and confusing brand messages across several media properties.

Wise agencies should see this as the window of opportunity and work with publishers before they even get clients to formulate the framework for effective marketing campaigns that can perform very effectively over a cross section of properties and platforms.

Me too.

You want to get back to the show, the game, the newscast. See the bad guy get his ass nailed, the final two minutes of the tight game, or news on the latest scoop on the election cycle. The last thing you want to see is a series of presentations about pills that can make you pee better, a car that supposedly makes you cool, and a law firm that chases ambulances.

Me too.

But every once and a while, you’ll watch something that will catch your eye. It will make you laugh. Chuckle inside. You’ll be able to relate to it. Or you’ll be impressed because it’s impressive, not because the commercial is trying to pretend that it’s impressive with itself. Or you’ll think, shit, how did they do that?

Me too.

If that’s what happens, then that’s a commercial that will likely end up on Firebrand.

Firebrand is a client of ours. We’re proud to have them. They’re a new media outlet – literally. We’re proud to have them. They’re a new media outlet – literally. They’re on the web at ‘re on the web at http://www.firebrand.com and on the ION network on cable in 95 million homes. They seek out and get the world’s best commercials and play them, MTV style. From the States, Britain, Malaysia, Canada, Australia, India.

Now, let’s talk football. Let’s talk the Super Bowl. I could go off on a tangent and first talk about the great commercials, but I’m a lifelong fanatical New England Patriots fan so to me, this Sunday means football. I had to get that in.Allright, so lets’s talk about those about great commercials that the Super Bowl is known for. They get plenty of press beforehand. People do stop and watch them and they then talk about them the next day. They remember them. And they wish that all TV ads were that good.

We’ll, this week Firebrand will be celebrating ads of Super Bowls past all week long. Then on Monday, February 4th, they’ll be hosting “Firebrand Monday”, showing all the ads from the previous day’s Big Game. Viewers will be treated to the likes of Terry Tate, Office Linebacker and Carmen Electra

Here’s the lineup for the week.

Monday January 28th: “BIG TIME ATHLETES” in classic Big Game commercials

Tuesday January 29th: “BIG BUDGET PRODUCTIONS” for classic Big Game commercials

Wed January 30th: “CHICKS IN CHARGE” in classic Big Game commercials

Thursday January 31st: “BIG TIME CELEBRITIES” in classic Big Game commercials

Friday February 1st: “BIG TIME BRANDS” in classic Big Game commercials

Monday February 4th: IT’S FIREBRAND MONDAY, THE DAY AFTER THE BIG GAME – CELEBRATE THE HOLIEST DAY IN ADVERTISING WITH THE OFFICE LINEBACKER, CARMEN ELEKTRA AND CLASSIC BIG GAME COMMERCIALS!

I recently got to thinking about the article Chip Griffin wrote last month in MediaBistro. It was called “Throwing Out the Social Media Rulebook” and it created quite a stir. Some even got a little hostile.

I agree with all he wrote in that some in this open environment are creating certain rules suddenly come about that many say we must adhere to. Often by the most strident voices. But some of those same voices, while strident, make sense.

One of Chip’s points caught my eye. Actually they all did, but this one in particular:

2. It Isn’t a Blog Without Comments. Hogwash. Do comments often make blog posts better? Absolutely. Can you learn things from reading them that you might not have learned from the original post? Sure. Do comments help build a relationship between reader and author? Of course. But you can have a great blog without comments. Marc Andreesen of Netscape fame pens a fantastic example, but the zealots would dismiss it as inauthentic. And note how this idea clashes with the previous rule the zealots profess about RSS – when you read a blog via RSS you don’t even see the comments.

Now I agree with his basic point. A person can have a blog and not allow comments. Consider that word: allow. The word allow signifies a choice. It means, in a sense, “permission”. He mentioned Mark Andreesen. Others pointed out Seth Godin. Who are we to say what HAS to be when it comes to someone else’s choices or ‘property’? It’s their blog, it’s their creation.

But then I got to thinkin’…

People like Andreesen and Godin are gurus. Their words carry weight. Often, the fact that a ‘guru’ says something gives what he or she says instant credibility. Even if it what they say is crap. Rockstars have devoted groupies will often automatically agree with a rockstar. Yet, I’ve also seen plenty of points raised by non-gurus that are quite brilliant…but go nowhere because they ain’t a rockstar.

But here’s the problem. When a guru has a mega blog and is pontificating on subjects and writes books or heads up conferences or is a ‘go-to’ guy or gal for the media, they are, in essence, creating the foundations of much of the subsequent conversations that we all then have. They act as ambassadors to the outside business communities…you know, the ones that we hope to get as clients.

If one of the primary ways they pontificate (besides book writing and speaking at conferences, etc.) is their blog, and their blog writing could be greatly affecting the direction of the foundations and methodologies of the strategies the we all will use, and the flows of conversations that we all will have, then I’d say that by not allowing comments, they making an active choice to not allow us to contribute to that conversation on the same level. They are not making any attempt to learn from us, to, well, engage us in a conversation - one of the fundamentals of social media. It sorta smacks of arrogance.

That’s because we can’t challenge them. We can’t call them out when we disagree. We can ‘t point out flaws in their thinking. What they say or write may carry significant weight, but it may be all wrong and we can’t point that out. By being able to point out flaws in the blogger gurus reasoning, the guru might have to defend themselves.

What they are blogging about may be self-serving and we don’t know it, so we can’t engage them (and others). In other words, they may say that a trend is coming and that may or may not be the case, but they have a product/service/company that would benefit from this trend. So they talk it up, create a buzz…and presto! They’ve may have laid the groundwork for a new trend and they further established their status as a guru. Yet we can’t challenge them.

Is it that they are above being challenged?

Now I don’t know Marc Andreeson or Seth Godin. So I’m not willing to apply the term arrogant to either one. But real gurus should allow us the challenge them. To engage us in conversation. They should give us permission to do so. Otherwise they don’t have great blogs. They’ve got great online newsletters.

The culture of participatory social media is having some surprisingly significant effects on both the way satisfied customers play a role in contributing to the marketing message development of products and services. And it is also playing an increasingly important role in defining the key touchpoints that customers use in the deciding factors one what to purchase. What makes this all the more noteworthy is that much of this is rooted in offline purchases. I’m putting this together from two recent studies…

As we all know, a satisfied customer can often be your most effective marketing vehicle. This has become all the more apparent as Bazaarevoice found in a survey they completed for Keller Fay, the word of mouth marketing agency based out of Atlanta. They found that 79% of reviewers write reviews to reward a company for the quality of the product or service they bought, with 87% of the reviews being positive in tone. Positive experiences mean greater customer involvement.

This means that satisfied customers see the idea of writing online reviews as an important part of their product/service experience. That’s backed up by the fact that in the same survey, 90% of the respondents write the reviews to help others make better buying decisions. Social media allows them to ‘share the love’ so to speak. The survey also points out that 70% see contributing to online reviews as a means to help a company improve what they offer. If this is the case, then we’ve got the initial stages of what many are calling a ‘community’.

The significance of that point shouldn’t be underestimated. Social media marketers are constantly talking about community. Sometimes I think they overdo it. That’s because I think they believe exists in the first place. It doesn’t. But customer reviews are one way in which they begin.

That becomes more important when you realize that comScore and the Kelsey Group found that reviews written by fellow consumers had a greater impact on the buying decisions of potential buyers than that of professional reviewers. And this no small point: 97% of review readers fine the reviews they read to be accurate. So, the quality of the reviews by fellow users is not compromised by a lack of ‘expertise’ in writing reviews. With more than three-quarters of review readers saying that their reading of someone else’s opinion on a product or service effected their decision to make a purchase, online review are now completely mainstream They are part of customer relations, message development, and community formulation. In short, an ecommerce strategy must include happy customers.

And just how can this affect the touchpoints as to the reasoning behind a purchase. comScore helps us out again by pointing out that people were willing to pay 20% ore for an Excellent, or 5-star rating, than they were a Very Good or Good 4-star rating. The survey doesn’t stipulate the percentage of people that feel this way however. But it does show that for (likely) price is not necessarily a huge factor when it comes to top quality. I say that because a 4-star rating is still very positive.

It should also be pointed out that offline purchases are really pushing this. Bazarrevoice found that of their respondents, 65% of them had, after purchasing offline, had gone back online to write a review. So it is not necessarily technology insiders. It’s broader than that.

I keep on trying to legitimize the reasons that Facebook is using to justify their new marketing program, “Facebook Beacon”. But it’s just not happening. It keeps on coming back to user relationships, user privacy, and user benefit. You know, the USER.

If you’re not sure what Beacon is, it’s basically this. Facebook is setting up agreements with online retailers that aren’t part of Facebook to have the retailer directly send information of what people buy on the retailer site to their “friends” on Facebook. The user is first supposed to see a notice on the retail site for which they need to give the thumbs down if they object. So the system is supposed to be opt out. But there’s been some circumstances where the information is just automatically sent without approval or even notification of the buyer. That means the next time you buy a book from Amazon or an item from Overstock.com, the retailer could end up letting your friends know what you bought unless you explicitly stop it.

Facebook is positioning this as the way of advertising because it essentially involves word of mouth as a strengthening agent to traditional display. I see it as an overreaching policy designed to push the envelope that much further to see how they can monetize user experience.

This whole thing rubs me the wrong way. It is part of the continual losing of control of our privacy, done with a smile, assuring us of the neat new opportunities it will bring. Not all agree with me here. I’m reading plenty of comments of people saying that they don’t mind the idea of letting their friends know what they buy. But when I hear that, I say, fine. Then keep it opt in. Not opt out. I’m thinking those that have no objections to this sort of thing are thinking strictly of their own personal preferences in buying and the relationships that they have with their Facebook friends. And they might be of the mindset that what they do off Facebook is free game. Since I read marketing blogs, I’m also reading the comments of marketing types…not necessarily someone outside of the industry. My hunch is that most that feel that Beacon is no big deal are relatively young. As people age, they often get more private. And the demographics of Facebook is getting older as it grows.

Matthew Ingram feels as if the opposition to this is being overblown. I can’t agree. Take the case of Charlene Li. Charlene is none other than an internet analyst with Forrester. Not exactly a newbie. She recently recounted an experience she had when she bought a coffee table from Overstock.com. She hopped online, went to the site, and ordered the table, using her personal email as opposed to her one from Forrester. It should be pointed out that she has two profiles on Facebook. One for professional reasons that’s tied to her Forrester email and one a personal profile that’s tied into her personal email. The next time she logged into Facebook, she did so onto her Facebook profile. Maybe because it was the first she logged onto, she received this:

She points out that Overstock.com never let her opt out of this. Or that she didn’t see anything that would allow her to opt out. Either way, Overstock sent it without her permission. The second part is that they sent it to her professional profile, not her personal one. Even thought she had used her personal email. That’s because Beacon is cookie/browser based.

This brings us to my first objection of user relationships. While I’m buying a particular item on a particular online retail site, I do so because of my desire for that product and for my trust of or relationship with that store. I’m not thinking of my friends and colleagues on Facebook when I press the buy button. But now Facebook and the retailer have decided that Facebook is now going to play a role.

When I’m on Facebook, I know I’m within a somewhat closed off setting…a social network. My relationship is with Facebook and with what is within Facebook. That’s fine. That’s cool. But when I head to, say, Amazon, my relationship there is with Amazon. Not Facebook. But apparently, Facebook and Amazon have decided together that I now have a relationship with Facebook when I buy that book that I want.When I buy a product from a local retailer (an actual store, you know, a physical one), I’m a customer of that retailer and not the local newspaper. I don’t expect the store to then send a press release to the local newspaper about what I just bought and then get a phone call from a reporter asking me to approve of them putting the news in the paper. Screw that.

Beacon potentially violates the relationships that we form online. Ones that we in social media marketer so often say are built on trust and respect. Oddly, this happens with the retailer’s involvement. Facebook could easily come off as intruding into that relationship. This shouldn’t be underestimated. In a time that we’re talking about “listening” we’re talking respect.

Justin Smith of Inside Facebook sees this as a rehash of an earlier bump in the road that Facebook had to deal with. That particular bump involved the debut of Facebook’s news feed, which informs our friends what we do on within Facebook. Justin also points out that opposition to that was 10 times larger in sheer numbers.

Justin, if you read this, I’d answer you on those two points the following way. First, I’d say that that initial opposition, while maybe justified was probably mollified by the understanding many would have that they’re receiving many benefits within the site and that the news feed application is a legitimate price to pay…because the feed is about what’s happenig within the site and not outside. And your point on numbers it correct and may be legit, but I’d say part of the reason could be that most people probably found out about within a couple of weeks of in being installed. All they had to do was log onto Facebook and they’d see a newsfeed. The quick, collective discovery of this probably fueled the flame.

But what we have here will be much more drawn out. People will be finding out over time. Perhaps thousands each day. Enough to build steam but not enough to have every one know about it over a couple of weeks. But then again, the holiday season is upon us…

This brings me my second point, which is probably the underlying one of all. User privacy. It’s not anyone’s business as to whether or not Charlene bought a coffee table, regardless of how we know her. That’s, of course, unless Charlene want us to know. This new system shouldn’t force her to take an extra step to make sure that her buying habits are private. She didn’t invite Facebook to be that part of her personal or professional life.

Think about it. Say a closeted gay man who lives in a relatively conservative area goes to Amazon and buys a couple of books on coming out of the closet. Amazon doesn’t notify him that they’re sending this info to his Facebook friends because of the same glitch that happened to Charlene. Now, KABOOM!, he’s out of the closet. Everyone know. Probably before he has any clue as to what happens. Now his life sucks. Screw that.

Or you may have a woman who recently found she has a sexually transmitted disease. She’s horrified, terrified. Doesn’t want anyone to know. She buys a book about it on Amazon. She’s so scared, she doesn’t see the notice on Amazon that this info is being sent to Facebook. After all, the notice was never there before. Now her ‘friends’ know…from her actual friends to her business colleagues. Screw that.

Follow up:  I had read on TechCrunch that Amazon is part of Beacon.  Alas, it isn’t.  Wanted to strike the above two paragraphs as a result.  My bad.

Maybe you got a buy who happily just ordered an engagement ring for his wonderful girlfriend. Kinda nervous when he does. Doesn’t notice that small notice on the retail site. Now he’s planning a big surprise for her. This is a once in a lifetime event. Being a romantic at heart, he’s gonna make it special. He’s going to take her to the best restaurnat in town. And while he’s there, he’s going to take her out on the balcony overlooking the sun setting over the river and OOPS! The whole world now knows, including his sweetheart. Great way for a girl to find out he’s popping the question. Screw that.

The possibilities are endless. And they’re waiting to happen.

But Facebook and the retailer are now benefiting from this. They’re making money from this new ad system. But what about us? What is the user benefit?

I don’t see any. I really don’t. We will become marketing agents for retailers and products without sharing a piece of the pie. We won’t be getting a commission. We won’t be getting discounts from the retailer. We won’t be having a more robust experience on Facebook because of this. No, we’re being monetized at the loss of our privacy and convenience. Our newfeeds will be filled up with nonsensical news that people bought coffee tables or bird cages or books on how to leave an abusive husband. No user benefit in that.

This brings me to a fourth objection. What happens to the data? What happens to the info that Facebook receives? Retailers house the info from the data to strengthen the relationships they have with their customers. Now Facebook has it. They are looking to monetize its users. Will the data be shared with fourth parties? Remember, Facebook is the third party here. Will the gay guy suddenly start getting ads that appeal to the gay community? Will this happen when he’s at work? Will someone else get the same ads if he quickly checks his profile on a shared computer and someone else logs on to Facebook ten minutes later?

In other words, will the results of all of this info end up being public? Screw that.

This morning I read two important posts written by Greg Sterling on his blog Screenwerk. One is Nielsen – WebVisible Data on Local Search. The other is New Findings on SMBs and User Reviews. It left me more and more convinced how local businesses must view the internet as a marketing and business development source, and as a customer relations and reputation management tool.

Now I’m combining the results of two surveys both taken on line, so bear with me but Greg teamed with Opus Research and AllBusiness.com to put forward a survey that netted them 1200 respondents. AllBusiness.com’s users and members are SMBs (small & medium businesses). Of those 1200, 55% said that they had a website. That figure is smaller that I would expect – which is a good sign. That’s because it means that it probably wasn’t heavily populated by web savvy or tech oriented companies.

Now the Nielsen-WebVisible survey found that 86% said that they had used the Internet to find a local business to actually shop at. And as far as usage, 78% responded that they use the internet more today to find a local business than they had done two years previously and that an additional 20% use it the same amount. Combined, that’s 98%. Wow.

What we’re seeing is that a significantly large (and getting larger) percentage of people – people who are looking to conduct some sort of business- use the internet to locate businesses within the category of the product and/or service of what they need…on a local basis.

This obviously underscores the tremendous need today for SMBs to have websites. Not having one is ludicrous. But it also points to the fact that, in today’s arena, it PAYS to develop an online marketing plan for one’s SMB. It should include SEO and SEM for most. Banners at times. Email marketing to current customers. Each business will have different needs and all of these methods may not apply, but we also find out from the Nielsen-WebVisible survey that 52% use telephone directories less now than they did two years ago. Disclosure: I still use mine and have no plans to use it less.

Now there’s going to be a gap here. And the gap is that many smaller businesses mistakenly view advertising as an expense. And they’ll go for the tried and true. Yellow pages and flyers. Or they’ll rely on something that is very effective, but may not be enough: word of mouth.

To be sure, in Greg’s survey, 60% of the repondents said that more than 50% of their business comes from referrals. And 30% said that more than 75% come from that same source. You won’t find me dissing WOM…

…so I’ll say this. I think a lot of business owners put too much stock in their product and/or service and rely on word-of-mouth…which while being very effective can be very slow. Which is why I think they’ll need to invest in some online strategies.

But going back to WOM, we see the internet is increasingly playing a major role. Greg also found out that 64% or respondents knew of online review sites and that 30% regularly check these reviews. About one-quarter of them said that these reviews led to new business.

So people are searching for and finding local business via the internet. They are then reading (or writing) online reviews. More evidence that developing an online strategy is becoming ever more important.

Close to 60% of respondents felt that customer reviews are “a good thing and help us improve our business”. Improve means that a business sort of has a free focus group online. And then it adds their favorite marketing tool…word-of-mouth.

Now a lot of Greg’s respondents not only recognize the importance of these reviews, they apparently understand that it’s important to address – no, wait, I’ll say that word – ENGAGE – their customers/reviewers because over 50% had contacted unhappy customers to address complaints. That’s a very smart thing to do.

This brings me to a final point. Online reputation management. Still today, with 45% of the respondents here without website, it shows that many SMBs are very much behind the eight ball. Because a company doesn’t have a website, or they have one that one of the officer’s nephews built four years ago, doens’t mean that they’re not being talked about online. And, if you are a business owner, you want to be the most prominent, the most central web presence out there.

I see a tremendous opportunity for not only local search, but local marketing, bizdev, and customer/business relation management that’s going on RIGHT NOW.

Yet another digital concept has gone from being brand new and cool to become a substantial business concept that’s actually worth something. Google, continuing on its path of empire-like growth has snapped up Jaiku, one of today’s microblogging platforms that are compatible with both internet and mobile technologies.

To some, the concept of microblogging may seem silly. And it can be – people messaging one another that they just saw, say, a chicken cross the road. But, in actuality, it is and it will be so much more than that.

It seems to me that there are two types of people who use services such as Jaiku, Twitter, and Pownce. People from late teens to mid-twenties – future trend setters. And techno-savvy business oriented types – current trend setters. The young will use Jaiku to let their friends know what they’re up to or what they’re doing or what they’ve just discovered. And today’s tapped-into influencers will do the same, only at a higher level. It is a new way of personal one-to-many communication…in real time.

Google didn’t just buy the technology or current user base. They bought and entered into this new culture. I liken this to Google’s purchase of Blogger.com a few years back. A blogging platform for personal expression. Now, they’ve built up an affinity of potentially millions of users. And I bet most of them have gmail addresses. Addresses that can now be monetized.

What’s more, is that Jaiku is essentially made for mobile phones. In case you haven’t noticed, cell phones are now part of people’s daily wardrobe. And remember, Google is looking to get into the phone business somehow. This only enhances their move.

Kelly Mooney has a great piece in AdAge, For Relevance, Think Three Way, in which she talks about the concept of ‘triangulation’ involving the brand, the customer, and the community and that all three need to embrace one another. She also blogs at MooneyThinks.

She’s quite right in that, for many of us, we’ve moved much of our media gathering experience online. Websites, blogs, social networks, forums are the areas that we discuss brands or experiences with brands or our impressions of brands.

Kelly calls on companies to shift from “B to C” over to “B to We”. An excellent example she gives is the “Pink” campaign from Victoria’s Secret that targeted young women. She writes

The recent star-studded PJ Party, promoted through Facebook, street teams and in-store, included flash-mob experiences via SMS announcements about free merchandise and a mobile photo application that enabled partygoers to see themselves on the stage’s LED screen, and it culminated in a free Fergie concert. The destination site featured a real-time mobile photo blog from the party and a dance-video-upload contest set to Fergie’s latest hit, where Pink fans voted on who should win a shopping spree and have her video featured on VSPink.com. Through triangulated communications, the brand is extended from offline to online, viral and mobile, and to an increasingly “qualified” audience.

I can’t disagree with this concept but, I’m often left wondering…how many brands can actually engage their customers? How many brands are able to cause that much passion? How many brands can develop or, for that matter, find an actual online community?

That’s a question that most of us haven’t asked yet.

McKinsey posted a report on the results of a survey they recently took of marketing executives. It’s called How Companies are Marketing Online. The report may not have earth shattering findings, but it does offer some key insights into the future if you read between the lines.Three things stood out in my opinion.

One is that current levels of spending and implementation are quite low as compared to how marketers and other decision makers perceive the overall effectiveness of online marketing.  This will mean that future investment in online marketing is bright as the level of investment will catch up with this perception.

The second was the lack of understanding of various facets of online marketing and how these facets should be integrated, implemented, and measured.

Many marketers also felt that, while they themselves and their internal folks weren’t up to speed quite yet when it came to online marketing, the marketing agencies that they used weren’t as well.

And this was a contributing factor in the delay of implementing strategies.The third was that the majority of respondents felt that online marketing was more efficient than traditional marketing. This underscores the expectation of the growth in online spend.

And fortifying this was that marketing online was roughly equally as good for brand building and direct response.Early in the report, it mentions that respondents expect that the majority of their customers will discover new products or services while they are online. A full one third of them will purchase them there.

Also, 10 percent of sales will come from online channels, an increase of 100% of what it is today. These expectations are going to be the impetus behind the increased spending that we’ll see.I can’t help but see this as a continued strategy of seeking to get immediate ROI, a factor that may have limited growth at this point.

And I’ve always viewed that as a mistake. The reason I see it as a mistake is that companies need to invest in knowledge and experience to develop and implement the right strategies as opposed to wait a while and finally invest money in what they may view as only tactics. Indeed, the report mentions that 42% of the respondents felt a greater investment in the overall capabilities would have made their initial investments more effective.

That’s because the online arena is not going to be a place where you toss out a conglomeration of tactics and hope they stick. Together they formulate a strategy and a very important one at that.Significantly, many of the companies that advertise online see it as both a brand building and direct response vehicle.

And that includes search advertising. I see this making sense for several reasons. People, as a whole, whether they are acting as a consumer or a business purchaser, have taken in the internet deeper into their lives. It is no longer relatively new.

It is a necessary part of one’s life. With this, online experiences become richer. So people go online to learn and to get information. Ergo, effective online advertising helps build brands and increases direct sales.Finally, companies that have been making significant online investments are including collaborative tools for customer retention and brand building.

This is important because we in the so-called echo chamber have been saying that companies must ‘engage’ their customers online. Get in conversations. You know, a Marketing Conversation.

With the issue of reputation management in the news, I’ve been thinking a lot about the recent discovery that many of the Mattel toys made in China were painted with lead-based paints. This had followed several other unrelated incidents that had previously caused embarrassment to either Mattel or to China.

A company such as Mattel needs to have a proactive online strategy that could meet the negativity head on, to help suppress those damaging rumors that could hurt the company both immediately and permanently. A company needs to understand what is being said about them in online forums, on blogs, and, if necessary, it needs to help blunt and diminish the negativity headed their way.

For Mattel, it was the recall of millions of other toys that contained small magnets that could fall out of the toy and could be swallowed by young children. And for China, it was the massive recall of pet food earlier this year.

Oddly enough, a controversy erupted when Mattel apologized to U.S. consumers. The company had done the ‘right thing’ – or what is now considered standard practice – as they trotted out CEO Bob Eckert and put him on video with him stressing that Mattel will immediately look into the matter and make changes. And he wanted us to know that he, as a Dad himself, was concerned. Relational empathy works.

But the problem was that as Mattel was apologizing to US citizens, they were subtlety making it seem the problem was ‘with China’…which, if not exonerating the toy company, muddled up their role in the fiasco. In the meantime, the Chinese government was not thrilled as most of the recalled toys had problems with their very design as created by Mattel as opposed to lax Chinese standards or poor Chinese workmanship. As a result , Mattel made an apology to China, even though lax standards DID cause some of the problems.

So, as it often happens, we don’t know really who is to blame here. Or if any blame is damning enough to have either the company or the country or both scorned. Now that may be good enough and the issue may go away. But today, with the blogosphere in full swing, with online forums abuzz, with citizen journalism being heralded as a wave of the future, my bet is that problems like this will last more than a bit longer.

So, to me, companies such as Mattel (or governments, or associations, or any type of organization) and their PR agencies are going to have to either learn about or invest in the services of a digital consultancy that can help them manage, repair, or defend their reputation.

Disclosure: Abraham Harrison offers those services. But hear me out.

Businesses are going to make mistakes. Some honest ones, some callous ones. There will always be forces out that the will – very legitimately – call them on these mistakes. But mistakes can lead to rumors to that can spread very fast, to activist groups looking for the killer punch, to media outlets looking for that big story…when there may be no story to speak of.

Traditional PR practices still make perfect sense. Put the CEO on video, develop an new (and more effective) set of guidelines, work with the media. But today that may be enough.

A company such as Mattel needs to have a proactive online strategy that could meet the negativity head on, to help suppress those damaging rumors that could hurt the company both immediately and permanently. A company needs to understand what is being said about them in online forums, on blogs, and, if necessary, it needs to help blunt and diminish the negativity headed their way.

It’s a whole new ball game.

ZenithOptimedia is predicting that the percentage share of online advertising to advertising on a whole will increase from 7.5% in 2007 to 9.5% in 2009. I’m betting it’s going to be higher. And in part for the similar reasons they do.

Online video is improving and it’s becoming more and more common as a marketing communications vehicle. Broadband expansion is slowing down, but expansion, while important, isn’t the only factor. It’s also how we use and will use video that will cause a continued increase. Broadcast and cable will increase their understanding as to how to make online video more profitable with hopefully, little sacrifice in popularity.

Zenith also says that local search will fuel this increase. Once again, I agree. But I’d expand this. As more and more mid-size and larger companies realize the important of search – and search optimization – they’ll invest more in better sites, further increasing the importance of search. And, yes, those local companies will realize that their customer base is going online for local info. They can’t rely on tradtional methods they once did.

But I’d also add that the growth of social network sites such as MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube will fuel even greater online ad share growth. Right now, they’re in the process of figuring it all out. Once they do, more dollars will be transfered online.

To me, the increase will come from the greater use of improving online applications. My guess is that it will push it up closer to 12%.

	2005	2006	2007	2008	2009
Newspapers	29.7	29.0	27.8	26.9	26.2
Magazines	13.2	12.8	12.5	12.2	12.1
Television	37.8	37.9	37.9	38.2	38.1
Radio	8.6	8.3	8.1	7.9	7.8
Cinema	0.4	0.4	0.4	0.4	0.5
Outdoor	5.5	5.6	5.7	5.8	5.9
Internet	4.8	6.1	7.5	8.7	9.5

Source: ZenithOptimedia

This past Thursday featured what looks to be the first of several “Presidential Candidate Dialogues” jointly hosted by MySpace and MTV. The event, held at the University of New Hampshre, featured former U.S. Sen. John Edwards talking to and taking questions from and audience of up to 300 attenedees, primarily made up of Univesity of New Hampshire Students, MTV viewers, and MySpace users.But that wasn’t all. It allowed for an online audience to submit questions via instant messager and also express opinions on Edwards’ performance. These opinions could be gathered collectively to create a consensus and then this consensus could be reported back in real time to the candidate. The whole lasted for about an hour and had a definite energetic feel to it.

Washington Post political blogger moderated the event along with MTV correspondents Gideon Yago and SuChin Park. I’ve always like Cilizza. He seems to have a pretty deep insight yet maintain a down to earth approach about him. And two veteran pollsters were brought in, John McLaughlin, a Republican, and Geoffrey Garin, a Democrat to handle the polling and online audience response feedback.

But here’s what I liked abut the event itself:

1) The continued dispersement of news and informational media delivery
While we’re beyond the period in which the vast majority of people (or at least those that are not directly involved in politics) get the vast majority of their news from traditional news sources – TV broadcast networks and their nightly newspapers and more recently, news oragnizational websites, we still haven’t quite reached a phase were the fragmentation of media outlets and delivery systems makes non-traditional outlets players. The CNN/YouTube debates held for the Democrats made YouTube a player, but the presence of CNN made it all the more legit.

What’s great abut this effort is that it involves two entities that are neither traditional media nor “news-centric”. Granted, MTV has a news bureau and has gotten involved in the political arena. But that isn’t it’s central mission. And MySpace was barely a blip on the nation’s consciousness at this point in the last election cycle.

Here we have two non-traditional players work together to host a forum in which is both both broadcast and webcast to potentially millions. Traditional media has a slight presence (Chris Cilizza of the Post), but it is MySpace and MTV that not only make it possible, but make it sizzle. And I bet this change is permanent.

2) Interactive audience feedback

While I wasn’t necessarily impressed with how it came out – it was mostly generic positive feedback – I like the idea that feedback can be made possible in real time. As this evolves, it should get more complex and may be used in future presidential debates between the two nominees. Can you imagine a candidate who gets too nasty or one who is constantly avoiding answering a question getting feedback live that he or she is looking idiotic or poor? It will probably happen. A major improvement over the tightly controlled events that we’ve had for the past few decades.

3) Candidate interaction to a targeted demographic in an interactive setting.

This might seem to be a combination of the first two and in a way it is. But this format can now be transferred to other non-traditonal media partners who can reach out to their targeted demographics. This means candidates will have to forego stump speeches from time to time.

In response to Saul’s recent post, “Conversational Marketing and Language Barriers” and the subsequent discussion on internet culture, one of our readers, Mark Foreman, of aconnector.com asked if we here at Abraham Harrison LLC, are “typical Americans that expect the whole world to speak English”, the kind that “repeat the words much louder when the locals don’t understand you”. As I thought about how best to answer Mr. Foreman, it coalesced in my mind how amazingly international, cosmopolitan, and multi-lingual Abraham Harrison is, and thus, why it is so natural for us to communicate sensitively and effectively regardless of what internet subculture we find ourselves in conversation with.

We are a company of 15 people stretching across 14 time zones, and living in five countries on four continents. We are of four nationalities and six ethnicities.

Among us we speak not only English, but Spanish, Afrikaans, German, French, Hindi, Swahili, and Arabic. I don’t know all the countries that our people have lived in, but they do include the US, UK, Canada, Mexico, Guatemala, Liberia, South Africa, Tanzania, Tunisia, Germany, Spain, and Egypt. I don’t really know all the many countries our people have visited, but off the top of my head, I count 56.

In this highly international, intercultural, interlingual company that is Abraham Harrison LLC, we meet on the internet and operate primarily in English – and we live our daily lives both on and offline within the constantly morphing cultural boundaries that is our modern cosmopolitan world. It is our normal daily life that we order lunch in German while phoning with a client in English, then pause to ask a friend a question in Spanish – and navigating in real time the cultural switches that go along with communicating with an Austrian, a Canadian, and a Colombian within the span of 10 seconds .

Equally, and in a similarly cosmopolitan and adaptable fashion, we comfortably and naturally move between online communities of Ivy-League professors, Latino youth, snarky gamers, and growling no-BS New York businessmen – each of these groups has as unique an inside culture and as much protocol that we must carefully respect, as any culture defined by geographic boundaries or national language. It is this ability to comfortably, naturally, and sensitively move among cultures – both in the online and offline worlds – that make us here at Abraham Harrison so effortlessly able to communicate effectively wherever our clients need us to. We are cosmopolitans in the fullest sense, and the sensitivity and adaptability we employ in our daily lives and as we move around the globe for business, pleasure, or family, we bring to bear intuitively in our online conversation marketing.

15 people, 5 countries, 4 continents, 6 ethnicities, and 8 languages between us. That’s the team at Abraham Harrison. It makes me very proud of our company.

More and more people are spending more and more time online to read, view, or listen to content, according to the Online Publishers Assocition. In fact, in just four years, there’s been an ease of 37% in the share of time we spend online viewing content. And in just one year, share of time for of content increased from 39.0% to 49.6%. And I’d bet that that increase is also an increase of real time…meaning it is not taking away from search or ecommerce or communication.

That’s significant. Because it show use that the web is becomng that much more integrated into our lives. It’s increasingly becoming the preferred choice of media. I’d say that this trend is happening for three major reasons: the rise of social media, the use of the internet as a news and entertainment medium, and the use of the internet as an application for our daily tasks.

The reason why so many of us put up proflies on MySpace and Facebook or we write our own blogs is because it gives us our own place. It’s our own pad. Our own digital self-expression that we each crave. We can’t do that watching TV or reading a magazine. But online, we can create our own personal brand. Or we can experience others, or exhanges ideas, or develop and solidify what we also crave…deeper realtionships with others.

Today, we check out today’s headlines in the paper and take a quick look at the evening news, but when we really want to check out what’s going on, whether it’s 2:17 p.m. or 2:17 a.m., we now hop online and go to our favorite news site. We don’t have to wait, so we don’t.

We get entertained on YouTube. We find others on Match.com. We find what we want on CraigsList.

This means that marketers are going to have to figure out just how to go about reaching us. Ad units I have no problem with, but they’re often ignored (as are most types of advertising). Pre-rolls drive me crazy unless the product/service is something I definitely need and it’s not interrupting a news clip that I want to see right away. Viral is cool, but how does it start? Search is there when you know you need it, but sometimes you need it when you’re not looking.

The challenges ahead are going to be fun.

There are several emerging trends coming down the pike, some of them seemingly diametrically opposed to one another. It’s too early in the game for any tensions to cause major changes, but tensions are there nevertheless.

It’s about closed platforms vs. open standards. It’s about how we communicate via email, blogs, etc. vs. who gets access to that communication. It’s about social networks and the advantages and disadvantages they bring.

The transformation of Facebook from a social network for college kids and its emergence as a competitor to LinkedIn as a business-oriented network is playing an key role in this. You could add Twitter, Jaiku, and by-invitation-only Pownce to this. I don’t know where all this will end but I’m predicting that it could be the advent of Web 3.0.

One great thing about a closed system is that it allows individuals to make connections with like-minded others who can gather together and may provide a mutually beneficial experience. This also allows communities of interest to develop, where people can gather and talk about anything from basket weaving to basketball. As one ‘friend’ I have on Facebook, Michael Martine put it, “I’m starting to realize you could almost live your life inside facebook.” In a telling point, Michael carried it further, wondering if the emigration that many of us are taking to these networks would leave bloggers who write stand alone blogs out there in cyberspace would lift “their weary eyes from their keyboards one day, wondering where everybody went, what happened.”

Writing in AdAge, Steve Rubel of Micorpersuasion carries it to a slightly different direction. In “The Case of the Incredible Shrinking Blogosphere” he writes:

“Recently, the conversation has focused on the rising popularity of micro-blogging platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Jaiku and the invite-only Pownce. All of these enable people to broadcast brief bursts of text…to their circle of friends…”

He’s right. And this isn’t so much about blogging as it is of how we use the internet as a means of communication, be it blogging or email or posting a video or whatever. In the wide open space of the internet, anyone can read that blog (or, to be sure, subscribe to it) or watch that video. That is, if they find it. Which, in most cases, they probably won’t. But on, say, Facebook, those who you have developed relationships with, the same people who have engendered a certain level of trust in, will now have easier and quicker access to the content you produce.

Then comes Scott Gilbertson of Wired and Karl Long of Experience Curve. Bascially, they both point out how the seemingly real benefits of closed off networking systems could actually lead to their downfall.

Scott writes:

Damn the Facebooks and the MySpaces. The last time we checked, there was this thing called the internet that had 6 billion users. It’s time to take our personal data out of Mr. McGregor’s little gardens and put it back where it belongs — free and open on the open web.

Social networks like Facebook and MySpace are taking the web by storm because they make it easy to manage your personal data and keep in touch with people you know. But to get value out, you have to put something in — photos, contacts, appointments, lists of your interests and your blog musings.

Therein lies the rub. When entering data into Facebook, you’re sending it on a one-way trip. Want to show somebody a video or a picture you posted to your profile? Unless they also have an account, they can’t see it. Your pictures, videos and everything else is stranded in a walled garden, cut off from the rest of the web.

Like locked cell phones and copy-protected music, Facebook is on the wrong side of the open-network debate. Facebook is a sealed bubble.

And he’s right. Who could argue with that? Put up something of importance and it’s shut out. It is an online version of completely closed circulation – the magazine is not available in stores and you have to get a register with the publishing company first and then find a particular author/creator for permission to read whatever he or she produced. And if they grant you access (permission) you can read what they wrote. This goes against the grain of what many of us have cherished – the open web, the marketplace of ideas.

Then, Karl, after pointing out that Scoble characterized Facebook as “a data roach motel. Your data goes in, but it rarely leaves” writes:

“it’s easy to get your information in there, but impossible to get it out, wasn’t that the AOL strategy?”

Hmmm… AOL helped a lot of join cyberspace and learn a thing or two but, hell, it’s been years. He then adds,

” I’ve been thinking a lot about this recently and I think the long term sustainability of a social network can easily be judged by asking the question “if everyone left tomorrow what value would remain?”

To which his solution is (if they remain closed off),

“I’m beginning think in the end it is how social networks engage their community in value creating activities that will determine their long term success. If your only value is the aggregation of eyeballs then you will get run over by the next wave just like AOL.”

Boy does Karl nail that one. So far, I’m getting value out of Facebook and I expect that that will continue. But I suspect that in order for these networks to fully succeed, they’ll need to develop more open platforms for transport of data and more transparency – at least for those who want it. If not, there’s a great business opportunity for some young yet-to-be heard of engineers.

Michael Martine predicts, “Microsoft buys Facebook and plugs their office online tools into it. Take that, Google! Buh-bye, Yahoo. Unless Yahoo buys them first. Another possible scenario: businesses start building their own facebook apps to integrate their workforce with it in a somewhat controlled manner.”

Once that happens, we could start to see the development of Web 3.0. Until then, the tension will grow between these emerging trends.

Side note: Pownce. As a marketing ploy they’ve decided to limit invitations to only a few selected people. Scoble called those that were invited to be on Pownce for these initial stages are, well, members of the online elite. “most of the “cool kids” are over on Pownce, if truth be told.” Well, he’s right. If you’re not elite enough or an insider, you probably didn’t get an invite. Sorta reminds me of certain country clubs I grew up near that didn’t allow blacks or Jews or Catholics. But not to worry, because ” Soon, we’ll let some more people in”. Thanks.

So much for the great world wide web where we all start out as equals. ;)

In response to Lenovo Outsources Marketing to India, Alice Marshall of Presto Vivace suggested that PR and Marketing is local. I responded, “when the culture is the “Internet” then it doesn’t really require geographical focus,” and Alice responded, “we don’t communicate to the Internet, we communicate to people,” and I responded, in short, “I have watched the sandbox the Internet has become, in which the Spanish, the Americans, and the Japanese communicate in a sort of Internet patois, developing an Internet Culture.”

People in Japan have a unique culture; people in Spain have a unique culture; people in the United States have a unique culture. It is true, but naive, to say that when we communicate with the Japanese, the Spanish, and Americans, we are communicating with people. Everyone is people, unless we’re communicating with ETs or LOLCats.

Since 1982, I have watched the sandbox the Internet has become, in which the Spanish, the Americans, and the Japanese communicate in a sort of Internet patois, developing an Internet Culture.

This written, International, Global, Internet culture is a lot more accepting of “foreigners” than the spoken, American, culture of the phone in help desk.

So, it is my opinion that while the Internet, and its culture, may be overwhelmingly influenced by the United States, it has now become a global possession.

Online analyst n. Hired by companies like Coca-Cola and AT&T to monitor what’s being said about them on social networks and blogs, online analysts use the Internet as a vast unpaid focus group. Via New Media Strategies Career Page and New Media Sense by way of Wired’s Jargon Watch

Online Analyst

New Media Strategies (NMS), the Industry Pioneer & Global Leader in Web 2.0 in Online Brand Promotion & Protection, offers a challenging and exciting team environment that will give you the opportunity to play a key role as a stakeholder in a company named:

• One of Inc. 500’s “Fastest Growing” companies in America, three years in a row
• One of the “50 Great Places to Work” by the Washingtonian Magazine, two years in a row; and,
• Listed in the Washington Business Journal as one of the “Best Places to Work”

New Media Strategies is currently looking for dedicated talent with a strong desire to learn and contribute to the fields of online marketing, market research, and communication.

Qualifications include:

• 2-3 years professional experience
• Strong analytical skills and writing ability
• Ability to thrive in a dynamic, fast-paced work environment
• Solid foundation of core marketing and PR principles
• Robust understanding of the Internet

I started at NMS as a Project Manager and then became their Technology Strategist:

Chris Abraham, Technology Strategist, New Media Strategies, Inc. — 9/2003-5/2006

Job Responsibilities at New Media Strategies

- Developed online word-of-mouth marketing strategy and tactics used on Usenet, message boards, social networks, and blogs

- Developed online advocacy and outreach campaigns for clients’ products, services, and message

- Produced internal and client protective and promotional SEO campaigns and search strategy to highlight positive online conversation and suppress negative conversation on popular search engines

- Developed in-house expertise on blogging, new media, podcasting, technology, citizen journalism, and CGM, including training, teaching, and the development of blogging and online marketing strategy

- Developed, deployed, and launched client and internal corporate blogs, marketing blogs, vertical industry blogs, PR blogs, promotional blogs, public affairs blogs, social networks, and podcasts, including Club TomTom, New Media Sense, Extreme Mortman, and others.

- Managed online advertising campaigns using Yahoo and Google contextual ads

- Client service work included Sci-Fi Channel (Mad Mad House, Tripping the Rift, Battlestar Galactica), Buena Vista (Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), TomTom, Paramount Pictures, Coca-Cola, McDonalds, Disney, Reebok, EA (UXO, Sim-City Online), RCA (American Idol CD), and NBC (Revelations), etc .

“Fisking, or to Fisk, refers to the act of critiquing, often in minute detail, an article, essay, argument, etc. with the intent of challenging its conclusion or theses by highlighting logical fallacies and incorrect facts. The practice was named after British journalist Robert Fisk after he issued a dispatch from Pakistan describing his savage beating at the hands of Afghan refugees.” Via Wikipedia

Fisking from Wikipedia

The term Fisking, or to Fisk, is blogosphere slang describing detailed point-by-point criticism that highlights errors, disputes the analysis of presented facts, or highlights other problems in a statement, article, or essay.

Eric S. Raymond, in the Jargon File, defined the term as:

A point-by-point refutation of a blog entry or (especially) news story. A really stylish fisking is witty, logical, sarcastic and ruthlessly factual; flaming or handwaving is considered poor form. Named after Robert Fisk, a British journalist who was a frequent early target of such treatment.

More broadly, the British newspaper The Observer defined fisking as “savaging an argument and scattering the tattered remnants to the four corners of the internet”.

Origin

Though “Fisk” was originally used as a verb by Eoghan Harris in 1999, “Fisking” in its current meaning was coined by bloggers in 2001 . Its origin followed a trenchant three-paragraph attack by Andrew Sullivan in response to an article written by Fisk in December 2001. Though the term was not coined by Sullivan at that time, it appeared soon after on Instapundit and Sullivan’s weblog .

Fisk’s reporting style – openly mixing fact with analysis and criticism of Western government policy – has made him a figure of some controversy. Sullivan was responding to a dispatch by Fisk from Pakistan that recounted his beating at the hands of Afghan refugees:

They started by shaking hands. We said “Salaam aleikum” – peace be upon you – then the first pebbles flew past my face. A small boy tried to grab my bag. Then another. Then someone punched me in the back. Then young men broke my glasses, began smashing stones into my face and head. I couldn’t see for the blood pouring down my forehead and swamping my eyes. And even then, I understood. I couldn’t blame them for what they were doing. In fact, if I were the Afghan refugees of Kila Abdullah, close to the Afghan-Pakistan border, I would have done just the same to Robert Fisk. Or any other Westerner I could find.

He related their anger to Western political and military activities in the region, such as arming certain Afghan and Islamic groups during the Soviet war in Afghanistan, leaving after the war, ignoring pleas for support during the civil war that followed, then bombing civilians during the 2001 war in Afghanistan.

Sullivan responded to Fisk’s piece in his blog, arguing that Fisk’s sympathy for his assailants was pathologically relativistic and racist.

What it means is that someone – anyone – is either innocent or guilty purely by racial or cultural association. An average Westerner is to be taken as an emblem of an entire culture and treated as such. Any random Westerner will do. Individual notions of responsibility or morality are banished, as one group is labeled blameless and another irredeemably malign. There’s a word for this: it’s racism.

Anyone who fisks someone else can, in turn, be “counter-fisked” by others.

Comparisons and distinctions

Fisking can be compared to the Usenet style of responding to an argument’s specific points by quoting lines prefixed with the “>” character (which contrasts with the style often found in e-mail of top-posting a reply all in one piece). The difference is that with a Usenet line-by-line discussion, a large number of tangential arguments often develop while the main point of the original article and original response gets lost.

Fisking is different from flaming, with which it is sometimes confused. Fisking is not merely verbal abuse, although it may contain a substantial amount of derision, scorn or even profanity.

Fisking is similar to the line-by-line method in policy debate, where one debater addresses each point sequentially, dealing with each piece of an argument in turn, as opposed to addressing the entire thesis of his or her opponent.

Fisk’s use of the Internet

Toronto Star columnist Antonia Zerbisias interviewed Fisk in 2005. Fisk stated “I don’t use the Internet. I’ve never seen a blog in my life. I don’t even use email,” and Zerbisias reported that she had to define the term “fisking” for Fisk.

“The spread of information doesn’t always lead to happy results. Last year, a residential adviser at North Carolina State went snooping on Facebook and ratted out nine students for underage drinking, turning them over to the campus police. Mr. Zuckerberg explains that this kind of thing used to happen a lot, before Facebook users learned the rules of the game. But he understands that this is all just part of the process. “It just took a certain amount of people getting in trouble and then they learned. We need to give people tools to share whatever information they want.” I guess that goes for checking out hotties as well.” Via the Wall Street Journal

There is a story on digg I really don’t believe: Digg.com hits 750,000 fake Digg Accounts. It says that marketers, spammers, and advertisers have up to 5000 puppet digg accounts in order to game the diggosphere. I don’t buy it.

I actually left this comment, “Yeah, even though I am a marketing guy and am super interested in the digg effect, I also do Internet analysis and web strategy and I got to research and interview the gang from digg. They have poured all of their money and resources into the back end to try to prevent the kind of gaming that Wired, et al, tend to accuse them of; that said, I have to say that the diggs that do get wickedly diggdotted are all pretty good stories. If advertising groups or PR teams were majorly invested, they would certainly pass more crap; and spammers actually have nothing but crap to pass. Just my two cents…”

I don’t buy it. I have worked for some seriously focused online marketing and PR firms and they just couldn’t do it. Show me a company that is selling such services, even on the DL.

read more | digg story

FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Disinformation) (pronounced: fud) An acronym. It comes from something known as the “FUD factor,” which is often used by software companies. For example, if Company B launches a new product, Company A will spin the FUD factor about B’s product with the goal of delaying consumers’ buying decisions until Company A can turn its vaporware into a product for sale. Company A may ask questions like, “Yes, but is B’s product robust?” or “Is it scaleable?” or “Is it based on the latest industry standards?” It actually means “spreading fear, uncertainty, and disinformation.” Via NetLingo

Although links from Wikipedia result in traffic and new users, figuring out the culture of Wikis – and Wikipedia specifically – is a much larger document. Suffice it to say that in most cases, openly and generously contributing to a Wiki is a very powerful way to become an influencer in a very influential web resource. Directly promoting your company or adding your company entry always results in very negative blowback. I have made all the mistakes and have had a lot of great successes as well. Wikipedia isn’t a wilderness, it is heavily guarded and has a very strict protocol you can learn more about.

Taken from the back pages of fashion mags’ “What’s in your Purse,” the grassroots meme on Flickr is not only exploding messenger bags all over the world, but “hotspots” allow Flickrers to not only show you what’s in their bags, but also tell you, “this is my iPod, this is my PowerBook, and this is my $500 fountain pen“ (okay, they do tend to be hipsters). And the secret incantation is either whatsinmybag or whatsinyourbag — or both!