Virtual Sales or Virtual Advertising?
Soon, you'll be able to buy Coke in Cyworld.
Good for Cyworld, but is it good for Coke?
Now that I'm in the virtual biz, I've been thinking a lot about the promise of virtual goods.
It's certainly a very attractive idea... put something up there that cost you peanuts to create, get lots of people to buy it, and voila.... 99% margains.
But let's think about it for the brand. Cyworld has 20 million users worldwide. Let's say that half of these are active users, as oppossed to people like me that check out a lot of stuff and come back to very little.
Also, let's say that they could get 3% conversion rates on the Coke bottle, which even then is very generous, because not all of these people are active users.
So, that's 300,000 Cokes. Now, unlike regular Coke, you only need to buy one digital Coke, assuming the technology isn't there for you to drink it and need another. 300,000 virtual Cokes at what? Fifty cents? $150,000 in revenue for Coke plus the branding awareness within a closed network.
For a company that made $23 billion in revenue in 2005, I don't really think that's going to move the needle.
What if, instead of trying to sell these things, they paid Cyworld that money at a $10 CPM to put Coke vending machines in Cyworld for free.
That would be 15,000,000 impressions of Coke among a lot more than 150k users.
Personally, I think Coke would benefit more by spending the money to push (or have users pull for free) their way into these virtual worlds than trying to get into the business of selling virtual goods. Coke's business is to sell real drinkable soda, not 1's and 0's. If you're a brand thinking of selling virtual stuff, I think you're going to be sort of underwhelmed with the results compared to the buzz you could generate by freeing up your brands within these virtual spaces and letting them play.
Radar Love: Newsgator Go!
"When I get lonely, and I'm sure I've had enough
She sends her comfort, comin' in from above
Don't need no radio at all
We've got a thing that's called radar love
We’ve got a line in the sky, radar love"
I just installed Newsgator Go! on my Pocket PC-6700 and I love it. I had been falling behind a bit in my feed consumption and I definitely caught up this morning. I sync on my walk to the subway, read underground, and sync up again so that the web version knows which posts I've read. Very easy... very fast.
I do have a couple of feature requests, though:
- When I'm done reading posts in a feed, I can hit "Mark all" with a thumb button, but then I have to it OK in the corner to close out of a feed. I want a "Mark all and close" or a "next feed" button.
- I'd like to sort my feeds (and this is Newsgator-wide) by number of unread posts.
- Clipping doesn't really do anything for me. Its an extra step. I clip stuff, then I have to go back to the web to either tag it in del.icio.us or blog about it or get rid of it. I'd love to tag and/or blog about it right from my phone.
Do you brush your teeth on the way to class?: Always being ready for luck
When I was in college, my roommate and I got into a discussion about brushing our teeth before we walked across campus for class, whether we even needed to.
In our stupid male brains, we thought there was some chance, no matter how remote, that someone might want to makeout with us on the way... I mean, it was highly unlikely, but what if that hot girl in our English class caught up to one of us and just couldn't resist herself from planting one? Hey, you never know.
But if it ever did happen, wouldn't you want to have the freshest breath possible? How awful would it be if she pulled back because she tasted garlic from your lunchtime chicken roll. The small incremental cost of brushing our teeth far outweighed the huge, but infintessimally unlikely, downside of that awkward moment.
That's what I think about when I manage my digital self. You might think it's sort of unlikely that anyone might want to hire you from your blog, Facebook profile, etc... but I just encountered a situation the other day where a friend's personal blog actually went a long way to helping her connect with her potential employer, b/c of shared music tastes and just her overall familiarity with technology.
So, if you have an outdated blog, don't manage your LinkedIn bio, or have some "not ready for primetime" stuff on a social network, take a moment to update it. Hey, you never know.
King Nothing: When you want to connect, but not commit
I had a great brunch with Hannah and Laurent from SubMate on Saturday and it really got me thinking about how people connect online and offline.
At first, when I thought of connecting with people based on my commute, I have to admit, I didn't think it was such a hot idea.
Then, after talking about it with them, I realized that commutes were just an excuse... a way to do local. My commute not only defines where I live, within a reasonable arm's length, but it also goes a long way to defining my lifestyle... an actor from Bay Ridge would have a very different commute than I would.
On top of that, I started thinking about connections to the group of people who commute with me. Maybe I wouldn't want to date any of them, but I definitely want to talk local politics with them, because I hate to admit, but I don't know any of the hyperlocal candidates.
But, I'm not really a very political guy. So, I'm not likely to join a politically based social network. I'm like that with a lot of things. I blog about baseball sometimes, but I don't have a baseball blog... or a kayaking blog... I have a variety of interests, none of which I feel the need to fully commit to joining a community about.
That's why I like Last.fm... I listen to music, and stick the widget on my blog, and now I'm listening to music based on what others with similar tastes like. I don't feel the need to blog about music or go to shows with these random people. MyBlogLog is great, too... people show up to read and now we have a connection.
MyBlogLog is like today's version of a webring. Webrings were great... you read something you liked, you clicked and got another similar blog to read.... very simple.
I don't think I have a fully formed thought here... but to me, there's just something missing in all this. I post about things I sort of care about... and that should connect me in a loose way to others who sort of care about those things or really care about those things.... a web where everyone is a dynamic and loose hub and spoke.
Here's where I have questions and where things haven't quite settled yet... here I'm just thinking free form....
Will the web move more towards del.icio.us or MyBlogLog? People based or subject based. Am I going to consume based on microniche topics screened socially, or am I could to consume based on people whose microniche topics are of interest to me? I don't actually think its the same thing. It makes me think that MyBlogLog should beef up the consume and publish data... who writes like me... not just who reads me... Actually there's four categories of web connection I'm interested in:
Who reads me: MyBlogLog, coComment
Who writes me (reposts, tags, etc): Technorati, del.icio.us, Icerocket, Google Blog search
Who reads like me: Rojo tried this... I wish RSS readers would do more of this...
Who writes like me: Sphere?
And how much does this world have to offer the things I really don't write a lot about, like the Mets, kayaking, and politics... Is that what social networks are for?
Facebook lets me put my RSS feed on my profile, but not much else. I guess Gather was more of a publishing social network, but I don't want to publish on there. I publish right here and consume close by... so connect me.
Ok... that's it.. .I think I'm done. I had an idea for this post this morning in the gym and I let it get away from me w/o really coming to much conclusion on anything.
Subway Laptop
I'm pretty sure the rule is that you can only take the laptop out when you have a seat.
Subway Thumbing: Such Great Heights and Old Guy Pants... and How much I weigh
I'm listening to the Pretenders on my iPod singing the theme from the Living Daylights, which is a Bond movie I'm always torn about, because it has no sex and Timothy Dalton, but it has one of the best car scenes. I could use skiis, tire spikes, and a rocket motor on my Mustang...that would counter the rear wheel drive. You know what I just realized? Old men whose pants keep creeping up their torso as they get older aren't buying longer and longer pants...they're shrinking into the same size they've always worn. They're pulling 'em up that high so their 34" lengths aren't bunching up at the bottom. It's not so much a fashion problem as it is a posture and calcium deficiency issue. The Godfather theme is now playing. There's a really tall woman standing next to me...she must be 6'3". She's the tallest person in the car except for this one up front. If you're a guy who is really tall, it's like you got to some level in a videogame that no one else can get to. This woman is like the secret bonus level that all us normal sized guys can never get to. I was 5'11" at the end of my freshman year of high school...figured I'd get at least another two inches...nada. Didn't grow an inch after that. One more would have been nice. I was also 152 pounds. I don't remember feeling like a skinny guy, but I guess I must have been. I've always weighed myself. My grandmother has a bathroom scale that I would rush to everytime I got to her house. Kids love growing. I remember distinctly weighing 77 pounds, 85 pounds, 115... Right before I got to Union Square I was 192, but that was before I started biking to work and playing in all these leagues. By the end of that summer, I was down to 176, which I didn't like. Now I'm about 185. David Byrne playing My Fair Lady now. Canal St. Everytime I pass Canal, I think of how cool the ATTAP (Riffs) offices are. I need to move back into the city...and work right next door to my apt. I stopped to look around to find some thumbing inspiration... No one looks or is doing anything interesting at the moment. Actually, it's a really unremarkable subway crowd this morning. Lots of su doku and sleeping. Just caught the cover of the News...didn't some high school kid dress as Hitler last year. Don't we go through this every year? Didn't someone get eggshell in the eye or something more newsworthy? Either way, whether he gets punished or not, the kid is an idiot and so are his parents. Now, when you Google his name, forever, he'll be the Hitler kid. Have fun getting a job, loser. Its chilly in this car...the a/c is on. I'm excited to go to the gym...really love the NYSC on 35th and Madison.
Pumpkin Carving 2.0
So I wound up having a somewhat traditional Halloween last night... wound up watching some scary movies and pumpkin carving. All the stores were out of pumpkins, so I headed over to my mom's house first to steal hers. She called after I left and said, "Did you take my pumpkin??" hehe. I decided to make my pumpkin a pumpmoticon... :)
links for 2006-11-01
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Is it possible that Indeed's traffic edge over Simplyhired is due to Fred's blog?
Get your money for nothing and your... oh... wait.. I used that one already. Um... "Freebird!": Ads and Social Networking
Scott Karp writes a great blog called Publishing 2.0 and he's talked several times about paying for advertising in a world where lots of content can be created and published for free. What's the point? Why bother? Why not just throw some free ads up and let virality take its course?
It's a great point, but I have a few counters.
In the instance of Wendy's creating a MySpace profile, which anyone can do for free:
"What if Wendy’s won’t pay? Will MySpace have to tear down the page? That would be a great advertiser relations program — policing for unpaid commercial pages and tearing them down."
Actually, that's entirely fair and should be expected. There are lots of instances of software and APIs that are free for non-commercial usage but paid for a commercial license. If you are using MySpace to make a buck, doesn't MySpace have a right to take a reasonable piece of that buck? There would have to be tiers, of course... My local pool hall shouldn't have to pay much more than the price of a Yellow Pages ad for their profile.
Plus, going paid for commercial, just like Craigslist is doing for NYC commercial real estate, gets rid of a lot of spam.
What's the value of paying? Think of MySpace like the RedHat of the ad world. RedHat packages free Linux with a service guarantee and support. That's what I think of when I think of Advertising 2.0... sure, viral videos are free to post, but you want more than just a single number--hits. You want demographics. You want to see what other types of videos people are watching. You need data and there's where the MySpaces and YouTubes should really be ramping up. Give me a whole reporting package that I can show my boss when I create a commercial MySpace profile that tells me a lot about the users. What's the #1 band of the people who friend me? Age? Race? You can't do that with a free profile but that's very valuable data.
That's one of the things we're focusing on with our upcoming consumer product. Anyone can sell a virtual t-shirt direct to consumers or as a sponsored ad buy, but I think the difference is in the data and ongoing relationship you build with the users. Businesses thrive on consumer data and I think that's going to be a major asset of Advertising 2.0. If you can put a viral video in front of someone, cool... but what you really need if you are a business is a call to action to convert those folks into customers or at least some useable data. The platforms have, need, or are definitely working on building out those tools.
In a world of human wreckage: Does MySpace have staying power?
When MySpace got bought for $580 million, I thought it was pricey. Then I thought it was a bargain. Now I wonder whether or not it will survive. A lot has been made of the future of the largest social network. Some people say that social networks have a natural limit to their size, because they cease to become cool at scale. Others think that they'll never be monetized well, because monetization means overcommercialization.
Will MySpace die? Maybe, but not because it's fundamentally impossible to sustain a social network online. I think there are some keys to sustainability for any social network needs to follow to last, and frankly, I'm surprised the networks we've seen so far do such a poor job at minding them. They're not groundbreaking by any stretch, and frankly, I think they're pretty obvious.
Don't shoot yourself in the foot...the site has to work. Friendster crumbled under the weight of its own initial viral success. It didn't throw nearly enough servers and bandwidth at their early problems and the site became nearly unusable at peak times. It really surprises me how often MySpace pages don't load or when features don't work. It's not enough to be crippling, but it is something to watch. If YouTube doesn't have this problem serving all those videos, MySpace shouldn't, figuring as much of the content comes from YouTube and Photobucket anyway.
Keep the bad guys out. This is really the Achilles heal of MySpace. Probably about 3/4 of the friend requests I get are from fake people. Mass invites from bands are one thing...at least those are driven by actual humans who might actually have something legitimate to offer me. The sexy webcam stuff I could largely do without. It's always from blondes anyway, and I don't really like blondes. :) Filtering spam shouldn't really be that hard to do. Part of it comes from defensive messures like sender flagging, but some of it is in the design of the site. Facebook does a great job of keeping the rifraff out by keeping communication within networks of people.
Be the best a what you do best. YouTube was the first to flash and had the most link dense UI, therefore, the best technology for streaming, discovering and having your videos discovered. They still are. LinkedIn has great tools for maximizing the value of your network, even if the site is boring and they don't do a lot of the contact management I'm looking for. What is MySpace's core strength? Self expression? That job is outsourced to the freelayoutosphere. Music discovery? Music discovery is sort of accidently social on MySpace...land on a friend's page, hear their music. Tools like Pandora and last.fm represent the cutting edge in music discovery and last.fm provides a very rich social dataset that could drive powerful and addicting applications on MySpace. MySpace would benefit from innovating around this core functionality or integrating with a partner. Popping the player out of the page and and allowing user radio stations and multiple groups in one player would be a start.
Drive usage through usage. Despite the uproar, I think Facebook's mini-feed feature was brilliant. By providing information on what your friends are up to, particularly because these are people you know, it drives more interaction through data exhaust. MyBlogLog does this quite well. People stop at my blog, they leave tracks, I get curious, I click, I'm on their blog, they click back to me or leave me a message. Without trying, I wind up using the service more and more at each sitting. This is what gets people sucked in and continuing to use the site, because it turns the experience into a living and breathing thing where things are going on that you don't want to miss.
Commercial must be functional. Brands are not my friends so if I'm going to friend them, there's got to be a compelling reason for it. Whether it's to get digital assets like ringtones, or event dates, you need to improve my experience by adding commercialism, not distract from it. Going deeper than just friend requests would be great. I'm friends with Casino Royale on MySpace, but that hasn't gotten me anywhere yet. I couldn't even yank the trailer for display on my page. It hasn't driven a ticket purchase yet...no ringtone... Kind of superficial relationship actually.
Promote users. YouTube is becoming a place to get discovered. MySpace has Cool New People. del.icio.us had the /popular list. Even Typepad has a blog of the day. People want to see their name in lights, and they'd like a reasonable shot at stardom that feels like its in their grasp.
Communicate openly with users. One thing I loved about being on the VC side was the access to the creators of a web service. When I didn't like something or I wanted to request a feature, there was someone to tell, someone who would tell me its in the works or why it can't or won't be done. Craig Newmark accomplishes this by dedicating himself nearly fulltime to customer support and letting someone else run the business of Craigslist. Facebook has a blog without comments and MySpace has Tom, who most people don't really believe is really a person... at least you don't see him commenting on a lot of random profiles. This is a difficult thing to scale, but I think it's very powerful. I want to hear from the founders what they're working on, how they're solving problems, etc. That makes me more patient and makes me feel like I'm being listened to. Without open lines of communication directly with the staff, people give up and go somewhere else.
I hope MySpace does survive, because their tendency towards openness and scale have a lot of untapped potential, and I'd hate to see it die on the vine. That would make advertisers take social networks, and the power of consumers, less seriously.
New Functional Avatar Skins... very cool!
If you've never clicked through to my blog from RSS and seen my avatar or if you don't usually play around with him, today is the day to click through, up and over. We just released some functional skins and I'm featuring what we're calling the FAQ... its like a little audio profile. Now, you can get a whole bunch of scenes in the same avatar. Sweet! This way, you can keep the avatar as an audio introduction, but also have a daily message that gets changed.
I'm blue, da boo de, da boo da...
Adi, the CEO of Oddcast, throws a big Halloween party every year. Unfortunately, there aren't any good photos of my costume, but there's a candid shot that I was caught in that gives you a sense of it. I dressed as a Blue Man! :)
Timeoutnewyork.tv photo contest win
Check this out... timeoutnewyork.tv is using one of my kayaking photos for their website this week. Nice!
Girl power
Ok, so the worlds of finance, tech and probably to a lesser extent politics are still boys clubs, but I like to point out when my favorite gender makes some noise.
Found two cool new female bloggers...
A video blog on finance called Wallstrip hosted by Lindsay Campbell. She's still looking for a "booyah"-like catchphrase, but Jim Cramer should still be watching his back.
Ashley Cecil paints politics and other newsworthy items... literally. I'm really tempted to buy the Bubba painting... Gotta love that little stubby thumbs up he gives...she's captured it perfectly.
Also, BizDev2.0 is going to feature some very successful women in technology... Catherine Levene, formally of the NYT Digital and now working with TheFind.com, Tina Sharkey, SVP of AIM and Social Media at AOL, and now a late addition, Zia Daniell Wigder from Jupiter Media.
Now if we could only skew the 90/10 boy/girl ration in the audience.
Some people think this stuff doesn't much matter, but for me, getting perspectives from a wide variety of people is one of the reasons why I blog and participate in these communities. I hope we can see more of this in the future.
Because there's never been a more appropriate time to quote Rage Against the Machine
Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me.
I think I'll go Google someone on Yahoo! now.