metarand

4chan: the counterculture netmeme

If you’re not already dialled in, the Guardian has a great article about Chris Poole’s influential message board – 4chan.

David Smith describes the site, which gets 8.5 million page views a day, as an ideas laboratory, capable of unleashing a ferocious creative force. It’s key value proposition is in pointing to what constitutes the current netmeme or zeitgeist of the moment:

Though most of what appears soon vanishes and is forgotten, the stuff that survives can easily jump to the wider web community and ‘go viral’, passing from person to person across the world.

Tags: 4chan, Chris Poole

Metarand Unplugged: Matthew Colebourne, CEO of coComment On Markets As Conversations

In this session of Metarand Unplugged, we talk with the CEO of Geneva based coComment, Matthew Colebourne.

As an aggregator of millions of comments across the web, Matt has a good understanding of how brands are beginning to grok that markets are conversations and that there is a huge opportunity to build deeper brand engagement through conversations.

Stream the mp3:

here

Stream the Session in Quicktime:

here

Tags: coComment, Matthew Colebourne

Playboy Embraces Social Media

Playboy has dived head first into the social media arena, setting up partnerships with Break, Howcast, Metacafe, Veoh and YouTube.

The entertainment-lifestyle brand sees this move as a great way to leverage off of the success of “The Girls Next Door” and create the Playboy Audience Network.

Mixercast will also be developing ad-supported content and contest widgets for use on the network, which will move to short-form content franchises. This suite of marketing and interactive content widgets will be used to extend Playboy-branded experiences to social networks and also to blogs and start pages.

A talent search is currently underway on YouTube to find the 55th Anniversary Playmate.

Playboy is aiming to create more of the interactive engagement in their digital business that they’ve achieved through the high-touch world of parties, events, location-based entertainment venues, and retail stores.

Tags: Break Media, Howcast, Metacafe, Mixercast, Playboy, Social Media, social network, Veoh, Widgets, YouTube

Cox Confirms Acquisition of Adify Ad Network

Cox Enterprises has confirmed that it has acquired vertical online advertising network company, Adify Corp.

Adify provides Build Your Own Network technology, which empowers media companies to increase their reach and boost revenue. Backed by Venrock and US Venture Partners, this Silicon Valley company will become part of Cox TMI in a transaction expected to complete in May.

Cox is a leading player in the automotive media vertical, but has pledged to remain committed to serving the broader media industry through Adify.

Some sources are reporting that the deal is valued at $300 million.

Tags: Adify, Advertising Platform, Cox Enterprises, US Venture Partners, Venrock

Marketing Is Simple, Right?

Identify target. Engage.

Think about this imperative statement set from the perspective of a marketer. Marketing is simple, right.

Now factor in the myriad methods for identifying targets. And overlay that with the exploding number of ways to engage with identified targets.

Whew! I know how you feel – seems overwhelming doesn’t it?
Where do you start?

OK, step back for a second and repeat after me” “Marketing is simple, right.”

This is the message being preached by Emmy award winner, Brad Jakeman. Take a look at the landscape.

There have never been more communications channels, yet it has never been harder to connect with consumers.

Brad believes marketers have become obsessed with the channel and forgotten about the content.
Consumers want brands to participate in their conversations, they want to engage and be engaged. For them the medium is peripheral to the experience.

Now let’s go back to our opening statement.

Identify target. Engage.

Flip this around and think about it from the consumer’s point of view. Given all the ways they could connect it’s also a question for them of which device, program, solution they decide to engage with.

Do I use my iPhone to twitter through twinkle, do it via my desktop on twhirl, dive into one of my browsers and send a message in 140 characters through a Facebook app or on Friendfeed?

The point is that the process of identifying and engaging is a dialogic one. It is two sides of the branding coin, one for marketers, and one for consumers.

To quote Brad, marketers need to create things people want to SEEK out, not SCREEN out. And the key marketing word of the moment: ENGAGE.

[Pictures courtesy of mleak]

Tags: Brands, Marketing

What’s the KeyPoint of a Facebook Application?

The KeyPoint Credit Union is reported by Jim Bruene to be the first financial institution to launch full-fledged account access through Facebook.

The application, which was developed by MShift, Inc, provides one-click access to account balance information for KeyPoint CU users. The app stands at 6 daily active users, which is 40% of the Facebook members who have installed it – so it has a whopping 15 person install base.

Checking out your balance on the site you most frequent is useful, but it’s not a gobsmackingly good experience you want to evangelize to all your Facebook friends, nor is it an engaging utility you cannot do with out. Widgets are great – for example, Wesabe has launched an account balance Mac widget which streams real time balance updates.

However, banking and other enterprise applications on Facebook and other social networks need to go beyond replicating the experience of web solutions. They need to focus on their audience as users, not as banking customers — what engages them, why would they be excited by your app — think brand recognition, think deep engagement and then think again — are you putting up an app because you can or do you have a purpose in mind. In many respects the enterprise Facebook apptivity is analogous to the early corporate approach to virtual worlds – “Woohoo, board members, we have a presence in Second Life…errrm”.

I am sure that Facebook and similar platforms will be an awesome playground for business, but on their users terms.

Do You Have a Facebook Strategy?

Used to be a time, not that long ago (pre May 25th – the launch date of the Facebook platform), when the most frequently asked question in VC pitch meetings was, “What’s your China strategy?”

Today, topping the faqs has to be, “What’s your Facebook strategy?”

For CxOs who have not yet cottoned on to the viral coefficient and engagement aspects of Facebook, here are a few metrics worth digesting:

* in the first 20 weeks 366 million applications were installed from the Facebook platform.

* this growth is continuing unabated and is set to track past 1 billion in the first year.

* in August – there were 14 million unique app users (this equated to 33% of all Facebook members)

* in August – there were 88 million app visits

* in August – average dwell time per visit was 4:30 minutes.

Asking whether a company has a Facebook strategy is also shorthand for asking whether its executives have embraced the open architecture model. Facebook is the tip of the iceberg, with many more opportunities to leverage deeply engaged user communities on the horizon.

[Stats courtesy of Justin Smith of InsideFacebook @ Graphing Social Patterns, picture courtesy of BeFitt]

Viral Video Internet Style

The folks at Cakke have created a compilation of recent viral Internet hits.

Awesome stuff. Thanks Laurel for the tip off.

MoSoSo Player Taps Hedge Funding

UK-based Trutap has raised a follow-on Series A round of $6.5m from the Tudor Group to bring total funding to date to $13m.

The company recently beta lauched at TechCrunch40 what they claim to be the first service to combine all the elements of a young person’s social life into one.

Their product allows their target market of 18-24 year olds to instant message (AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo!), group message, upload text and pictures to blogs and send pictures via their mobile phones.

I’m not sure I agree with their pioneer status, but it is definitely a space to watch…

Josh Dhaliwal, the Head of Client Services at the  Wireless World Forum, commented thus on the market opportunity Trutap and others are playing into: “Social networks will grow by 150% in 2007. We believe the long-term continued growth lies in mobilizing those relationships. We predict 2008 to be the breakthrough year not only for mobile social networks but also for mobile social networks in Europe and North America as mass use has so far only been limited to Asia.”

“There are 45 million mobile social network users in Asia, globally this figure will be 178 million by 2010. Mobilizing social networks is not about trying to replicate the full MySpace, Bebo or Facebook experience on mobile — but allowing the consumer to remain connected whilst unconnected.”

I agree with Josh – mobile social software plays should not simply try to replicate the web social networks, but utilise the key features of mobiles to extend the social frontier for users.

[Picture courtesy of Ti.mo]

Relevant Mind: What to buy on the web

Back in January I blogged about Mayfied and Bessemer funded Wize, a company which uses the wisdom of the crowds to alert consumers to products worthy of their attention. The company’s CEO, Tom Patterson, responded that he had spent the summer of 2006 as an EiR at Mayfield analyzing the really important uses of the Internet versus the current gaps in satisfaction.

For Tom the “what to buy” process (product research) kept coming up as a major opportunity.

I totally agree with Tom – there is hurt there. I recall my experience a few months later when I wanted to get a new mountain bike. The process of researching what bike to buy was painstaking. Besides trawling through product sites I wanted peer group validation. A friend had bought a Specialized and so this got me interested in them as a brand. I was still undecided and it was only when another colleague arrived at a breakfast meeting on his Specialized Stumpjumper that I was sold!

Not everyone has the time or motivation to trawl the web or wants to rely on serendipity to get their next bike or set of golf clubs.

Others have noticed this hurt spot in the way we buy products on the web.  Looking to buy a new road bike, it dawned upon another entrepreneur, Aaron Mann, over the northern summer of 2007 that there has to be a better way.

I caught up with Aaron, CEO of Relevant Mind, for a chat about what his company does to reduce the pain in deciding what to buy. The self funded, San Fracisco start up launched on the 24th September and they liken their product to having a highly knowledgeable friend to ask advice of while going through the buying decision making process.

At a 45,000 foot level what Relevant Mind does is make it easy for people to connect to what’s going on in user communities related to products and services they are interested in.

Their starting point was crawling Internet forums because the data on these forums doesn’t move around much and so it is easier for them to index and organize it. Their focus has been on how do you make information that is out there more accessible to more people.

Essentially, Relevant Mind is trying to find the nexus point between research on a product and what it does and what your peer group feels about it.

In one of their verticals they are aggregating about 9 million posts from over 200,000 users. They then datamine all that information against the products that they have – organizing and making this information useful.

I asked Aaron to drill down into how their system works. He explained that they have raw posts sitting on one side, and products on the other. It is then an iterative process of generating the best set of results and the learning part of that is basically running a bunch of reports that come back with how many results they are getting per product. On the real outliers, the ones with zero or a hundred thousand they know their search term combinations aren’t correct so there will be some manual intervention.

He recognizes that one of the challenges moving forward will be mining other information sources. It’s relatively easy to mine user groups and blogs, but social networks like MySpace and networks of networks like Ning present a greater challenge.

Aaron assured me that they do have a Facebook strategy. The first part of it is to look at ways they can add value to users. He points to Visual Bookshelf as a really good model for them. Because Relevant Mind organizes around people’s special interests, their hobbies and their sports those are often the kind of things users might want to feature as part of their profile.

For example, if you do a lot of surfing, what boards do you have? What kind of mountain bike do you have? These are the kinds of things users want to share with other people that are interested in the same thing.

The second and deeper part of their Facebook strategy is to watch how the user interactions grow in terms of what they are discussing on Facebook. Right now he finds the groups very active in certain things but not around many of the special interests (personally I find Facebook groups to be one of their weakest points). He is really interested to see how places like Facebook develop a really cohesive user community.

I asked Aaron what his take was on microblogging and he sees tools like Twitter evolving around products and services mainly for things a user is trying to find out about quickly. If a person does not have the time to do a lot of research, reading and diving into what communities are saying, microblogging can be useful. This is because it enables a user to extract data quickly due to the fact that information is coming through  in a constrained format.

Relevant Mind has initially launched in products that tap into the special interests of some of the six person management team, namely road bikes and golf. They intend to launch climbing in a fortnite, and have a range of other outdoor sports and interest areas, like cooking, that they will target. In total they have a list of forty high dollar item interest areas they will focus on.

Their revenue model is linked into affiliate programs. On product page there are links to all the places where people are talking about that product and then there is a tab called ‘buy now”. This tab features that product available new from multiple retailers as well as current eBay auctions.

Because they want to be as transparent as possible for users, Aaron is ambivalent about product sponsorship and advertising on their site.

Relevant Mind is planning a capital raising in the near future and they are also presenting at Chris Shipley’s DEMOfall this week in San Diego.

Another interesting company extracting value from the collective wisdom that is available on the web for web users.