Social Media Archives - Page 6 of 11

“…let him declare what he seeth…” or Apple vs the Web

“And with iOS 9 and content blockers, what you’re seeing is Apple’s attempt to fully drive the knife into Google’s revenue platform. iOS 9 includes a refined search that auto-suggests content and that can search inside apps, pulling content away from Google and users away from the web, it allows users to block ads, and it offers publishers salvation in the form of Apple News, inside of which Apple will happily display (unblockable!) ads, and even sell them on publishers’ behalf for just a 30 percent cut.

Oh, and if you’re not happy with Apple News, you can always turn to Facebook’s Instant Articles, which will also track the shit out of you and serve unblockable ads inside of the Facebook app, but from Apple’s perspective it’s a win as long as the money’s not going to Google.”

Source: Welcome to hell: Apple vs. Google vs. Facebook and the slow death of the web | The Verge

As I get older, I keep reminding myself that, after all, you can’t go home again. When I got to college, I was exposed to Plato in the Greek and remember reading πάντα χωρεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει” καὶ “δὶς ἐς τὸν αὐτὸν ποταμὸν οὐκ ἂν ἐμβαίης for the first time. My Greek isn’t what it used to be, but the translation is:

“Everything changes and nothing remains still and you cannot step twice into the same stream.”

When I think about the evolution of the web from when I started using it (1994) through all of my experience with Mosaic and Netscape and CompuServe and Prodigy and AOL to the glory days of a web without a center (post AOL crash), I look back with fondness. The web has been a constant source of challenge, fulfillment, joy, sadness, and especially income for me over these last twenty years.

In my mind’s eye, the “glory days” of the web were sometime around 2004 or so with the advent of Firefox as a capable replacement for Internet Explorer and just shortly before Facebook at the digital world. Things were exciting. GMail was new and in high demand. We all wondered what other wizard toys Google would unveil to us in their wonky way of doing such things. Web design was flush with new energy having been set free of IE, and web protocols were blooming (well, before the dark times of Flash). It felt as if the world would be transformed by this open information system. There were ads, for sure, but the ads were there to pay for the content and the experience (even the “punch the monkey” ads). We used MySpace, but no one spent all day there. It was a tool, not a roach motel. Then came Twitter in 2006 and we web nerds just knew it was the information backbone protocol we had been hoping for. Surely, Twitter would be handed over to the open source community. They had a very open API, after all.

Then came Facebook. But it wasn’t so bad at first. It was a prettier MySpace, that’s all.

Ze Frank had his shows and we all were excited about web2.0 and the promises of what new web tech like AJAX would mean for interfaces and capabilities. I was using Writely in 2004 and loved the idea of being able to use a fairly capable word processor in a browser. Then, Google bought Writely and it became Google Docs.

That’s ok, we still had our RSS feeds and the Mac fan-people had Net News Wire. FeedDemon wasn’t so bad on the desktop and we always had Bloglines and Feedgator on the web. RSS was going to transform the way we consumed content. I just knew it.

Then came Google Reader.

I’m being too nostalgic. The web was never that rosey and free and vibrant and promising as I remember. After all, I was in the web marketing business from 2003 onward. In reality, it didn’t change all that much throughout the web2.0 boom from 2006-2008 or the social media boom from 2009-2013.

However, the web marketing business is changing rapidly now in the Age of the Platform (or App). I would call it The Mobile Age, but “mobiles” is becoming a silly name for the pocket devices we carry with us at all times and perform more and more of our daily business and life through. They’re not “mobile phones” now. They are our computers.

The Age of the Platform was ushered in quickly by Steve Jobs and Apple. Pushing cell tower and mobile device technology with ever increasingly progressive iPhones and then iPads caused a fundamental shift in how we do computing (and marketing). I sometimes wonder if Jobs knew that he was going to go directly after the jugular of Google’s revenue business when he was on stage doing the first iPhone demo? Remember, the first iPhone did not have an app store and only included the native apps. Jobs was insistent that developers could use the Safari Mobile Browser to give users access to “app environments” through HTML 5. That didn’t last long.

Apps have changed everything on the web. They’ll continue to redefine conventions we’ve long held to be self-evident about everything from marketing to banking to security to communication. With its clever play to encourage ad blocking on Mobile Safari (still the only browser environment allowed on their omnipresent iDevices) and ultimately push users into their new News app (this blog is included in their collection… yay?), Apple is moving Safari off the main page and into one of the folders where you put the Compass, Tips, and Game Center apps (at least I do). Apple is breaking up with the web.

There’s no functionality for a browser or webkit on the new Apple TV. Can you imagine the possibilities? However, it’s not needed. We have apps.

Look Homeward, Angel.

Is this a bad thing? I don’t think we can segregate movements like this into “good” or “bad” categories. Tech is agnostic morally, and we decide to do with it what we will. For those of us who reminisce on the ideals of an open and federated web where the market decides what ad formats or sites get exposure… well, we can have our idealism and try to keep blogging (though without ads).

Twitter … Facebook … Google, Apple, or Microsoft ecosystems … I look at all of these things as negatives (personally). Lock in is never good. Reach, engagement, user bases … all those metrics I deal with daily in my job working in web marketing are important variables to consider. However, we are too eager to throw ourselves into a binary decision of being an Apple fanboy or Android fangirl without pondering what we’re exchanging in this transaction.

When I think about how the web has evolved and how it might evolve further in the future, I think of Atticus Finch teaching Scout how to read.

“What was even the point of websites, certain people will find themselves wondering. Were they just weird slow apps with nobody in them?? Why? A bunch of publications will go out of business and a bunch of others will survive the transition and a few will become app content GIANTS with news teams filing to Facebook and their very own Vine stars and thriving Snapchat channels and a Viber bureau and embedded Yakkers and hundreds of people uploading videos in every direction and brands and brands and brands and brands and brands, the end. Welcome to 201…..7?”

Source: The Next Internet is TV | The Awl

I think of how Scout comes home after the first day of First Grade and is completely disillusioned. Her teacher was surprised at Scout’s reading ability and told Scout that her father mustn’t read to her anymore because he “didn’t know how to teach.” Atticus, being the archetype and lawyer that he is, calms Scout and makes a deal with her (and keeps reading to her).

We rely so much on our own perceptions of the past experiences we have to make assumptions about the future. We project based on (presumed) lived out reality. Our brains deceive us, though. When we come home, sometimes things have changed and our memories don’t hold up to the exposure to daylight. We need Atticus to tell us that it’s going to be ok, and we do know how to read properly, and he will continue reading to us at bedtime.

In the marketing business, I walk a fine line between intuition and metrics on an hourly basis. My clients trust me, but they have their own perceptions of taste, design, and ethics that I must navigate and counsel as well. My background in religion and teaching suits me well, but I’m constantly aware of the notion of Πάντα ρει (“everything flows”) that Plato channeled through Heraclitus. Everything flows. Perceptions, marketing techniques, web technologies, app platforms.

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Rather than believing the teacher that tells me that I don’t know how to read properly because my father is not a real teacher, I should realize the utterly unfathomable trajectory that issues such as ad blockers, advertising, and definitions of the web present for humanity. Since the advent of hyperlinks in the early 90’s, we’ve seen the development of a technology that has changed or shifted how we do most everything from reading to producing to consuming to being treated for our over-consumption.

The web’s not dead.

Everything flows.

Now back to my marketing spreadsheets.

The Future is Messaging and Google Seems Oblivious

“Unlike other AI-based services in the market, M can actually complete tasks on your behalf. It can purchase items, get gifts delivered to your loved ones, book restaurants, travel arrangements, appointments and way more,” Facebook’s VP of messaging products David Marcus said in a Facebook post.

Source: Facebook’s M Is Here, and Google Should Be Worried

Messaging is big in Asia. Services like WeChat in China and Line in Japan / Thailand / Indonesia are how people communicate, buy things, book things, and operate. Sort of like how we (the enlightened) are amazed that people live inside of Facebook and think of it as the internet. There are even WeChat Stars like our YouTube stars. It is strange for us in the US to wrap our heads around (or at least me).

However, it won’t be for long. I remember sitting in a presentation by a Rakuten VP (they are a large Asian marketing firm that acquired messaging app Viber last year) at a conference in 2004… they were demonstrating data associated with the rising use of mobile phones to purchase items in stores or do cross comparisons via SMS in SE Asia while using brick-and-mortar stores as showrooms. I was blown away and thought “there’s no way anyone in the US would ever buy something on a mobile phone…certainly not furniture or computers.”

I was wrong. Best Buy is the best showroom Amazon could ever hope for (at least in my personal experience).

Five years from now, everyone in America will live inside the major messaging app that we settle on. Whether that’s FB’s Messenger, WeChat, Line, Snapchat (doubtful), Viber, Hangouts, WhatsApp or something we haven’t heard of yet, we will decry this newfangled “messaging media” and “messaging marketing” and look fondly on the days when we all just had Facebook newsfeeds or Twitter timelines.

Remember ICQ and AIM? We’re going back.

Messaging apps are what comes after “social media.” Facebook gets it. Even Apple (iMessage) and Blackberry (Messenger) get it. Google seems to be dragging its feet, which is scary to me.

How Content Marketers and Sites Make Money as Agencies

One of the more interesting line items in the financial statements is “cost of revenue,” which “consists primarily of amounts due to third party websites and platforms to fulfill customers’ advertising campaigns.” (An unspecified percentage of “cost of revenue” refers to the cost of maintaining BuzzFeed’s own servers.) In other words, “cost of revenue” appears to refer primarily to the money BuzzFeed is using to buy traffic from Facebook (and likely other websites too) on behalf of brands advertising on BuzzFeed.

Source: Internal Documents Show BuzzFeed’s Skyrocketing Investment in Editorial

BuzzFeed is an interesting beast because it sits at the fulcrum point between “old news” and “new media news.” BuzzFeed does have quality reporting and long form pieces, but unlike the New York Times those pieces often sit beside the latest funny cat gifs or a hilarious video of a kid after a dentist visit.

How BuzzFeed makes money has been a question that “old news” sites like the NY Times have been trying to figure out with paywalls, subscriptions, email captures etc. None of that seems to be helping slow BuzzFeed down or improve the doom of the more traditional news site economy given the large number of people who get most of their news (quality or otherwise) from Facebook.

Those of us who like to follow these things point back to info like this from 2013 when BuzzFeed was beginning to make serious money and turn heads:

BuzzFeed, for example, has an entire in-house team dedicated to buying ads that drive users to its sponsored posts. Through a program it calls “Social Discovery,” the company buys traffic from a range of sources including Facebook, Twitter, and StumbleUpon, as well as other content-marketing services. It pays to have links to its sponsors’ posts show up in Facebook users’ news feeds and to force them in front of users on StumbleUpon, for example… Peretti said the company is not buying traffic to boost its numbers or meet advertiser commitments. Its brand partners are actually beginning to use its media-buying team as an agency of sorts, asking it to package posts on BuzzFeed with a paid distribution element, too. It doesn’t pay for the ads itself to boost the number of views the content it sells to advertisers gets.

Source: How BuzzFeed Gives Native Ads a Traffic Boost – Digiday

So there you go. If you’re a news site, become an agency with an in-house team to do arbitrage and market your native ads via viewers from Facebook and Twitter (as they are more than happy to take your money). Television and radio has been doing this for decades.

All this has happened before, and will happen again.

Will Google Buy Twitter?

“Obviously, Google could continue to just pay Twitter for access to its firehose, as other services do. But now that its in-house social network has proven to be mostly useless as a social connector between its various services, it needs some other way to plug social into those services and get access to unlimited real-time data, and Twitter is arguably the best method available.”

Source: Google’s failure with Google+ makes it more likely it will buy Twitter – Fortune

I love Twitter (much more than Facebook). I know using a term such as “love” for what amounts to a social network is hyperbolic, but it’s close to being true. In 2006, I latched on to the service as my social network of choice because I was fascinated by it’s ability to deliver news, info, content, and “streams” in near real time. Plus, Twitter was very open with its API meaning that a whole ecosystem of 3rd party apps and services developed. Twitter, in effect, became a coral reef as Dave Winer described here back in 2007.

I had breakfast with a colleague at a tech conference in 2007, and the topic of Twitter came up as we were both checking our phones (pre iPhone) and comparing how we were accessing the service. We discussed our hopes for the service and the web, and decided that Twitter (or something very much like it) would inevitably become a new protocol similar to IMAP or POP (that we use for email still) and deliver us streams of information based on who we followed or “tracked” (track was a key feature of Twitter early on until the dark times) in whatever app we chose. Twitter was going to be this generation’s love letter to the open web and protocols and standards. We were wrong.

The web continued to evolve and social networks became prime motivators in Twitter’s unfortunate path towards becoming a silo after 2008. The last seven years have seen Twitter grasp for its identity as a cast of rotating leadership ping-ponged it from an open web alert service to a celebrity hashtag outlet to a news delivery system to an advertising network. Twitter never had a chance. That’s not because of a zero sum game with Facebook. The two could exist perfectly well and both have billions of users. They are very different services and have entirely different purposes and possible futures (much like Apple and Google or Microsoft and IBM).

Will Google buy Twitter?

I have a feeling they will. Google understands its best bet for the future is a web that exists with fewer silos and more users. That doesn’t mean simple data mining of social networks, but it also means more users on the web for the advertising of the future (which will not be based on clicks or tracked by cookies but function on very personal levels based on the uniqueness of human experience… see Google Now).

The Reddit Revolt and Social Silos

The sudden revolt has thrown one of the world’s most popular sites into chaos. It wasn’t immediately clear why Taylor, who joined the company in 2013, was fired. But the response by moderators was as swift as it was ruthless. Within hours, the moderators of /r/IAmA took the subreddit private, effectively shutting it down. That started a cascade of moderators shuttering dozens of subreddits—/r/askreddit, /r/todayilearned, and /r/pics among them—that is still growing, crippling a site with some 160 million users. Many more subreddits, including /r/science, have expressed solidarity with Taylor but remained open.

Source: Reddit Is Revolting | WIRED

Reddit is in a state of turmoil from the firing of a popular staffer as well as a continual breakdown of communication from company officers and subreddit moderators. Reddit itself functions primarily due to the hard work of popular and niche subreddit moderators who laboriously spend time curating and improving the experience of the “internet’s front page.”

What’s interesting to note here is that moderators from hundreds of subreddits are using this as an opportunity to voice their frustration with how the company supports and enables them to do what they do. There’s also ongoing questions and antagonism between community leaders and the company’s new CEO due to her attempts to limit harassing and defamatory posts by users.

Reddit’s distributed model lends itself to such rebellion. Similar things happened to Digg when it began its decline, which gave Reddit a boost of audience. There are cautionary tales of dozens of forums undergoing similar events and eventual departure of key users and members as well.

What does this mean for other social silos such as Facebook or the post-open Twitter or Google+? In my mind, one of the key benefits to the path that Facebook has taken with making key features into standalone services or apps (Messenger, Pages, Instagram, Whatsapp etc) or Twitter with Vine is that these social networks are now more insulated from being left behind due to a mass exit based on inner turmoil.

Much like NASCAR fans decrying the sports’ and associated tracks’ latest announcement asking for Confederate flags to be left at home and, passionate people who feel entitled due to a conception of buy-in can feel betrayed and threaten to leave. Social spaces on the web are built to fail, and companies have to both diversify and continue to attract a membership that is comfortable with evolution.

Not Enough People Listen to Thinking Religion (or Why I Despise Facebook)

With the mass hysteria around the Serial podcast at the end of 2014 and the continued excellence of other NPR shows such as This American Life or RadioLab, it’s no surprise that the press and media were eager to claim a “return of the podcast” early in 2015.

Podcasts are nothing new and have been delivering content to folks like me for over a decade since they were first implemented by Dave Winer and Adam Curry. Podcasts have, for better and for worse, always been seen as something of a geeky pursuit. They were never difficult to actually make or listen to, but it just felt as if the technology for mass adoption wasn’t there. We lovers and makers of podcasts sat by while the music industry was transformed first by Napster then iTunes and now streaming, and then the visual media industry was transformed by YouTube and Netflix. We watched promising companies like Ev Williams’ Odeo pivot from podcast transformer to Twitter parent company. We knew we had something good and our time would come.

However, it felt like 2015 was going to be the year of the podcast in terms of mass adoption. It makes sense… technology has finally caught up to the medium. Almost everyone has a mobile device of some sort, more often than they have computers in 2014 and beyond. Most of those mobile device owners are comfortable enough to find media and apps via Netflix or Spotify. There’s been a growing acceptance of the notion of “on demand” media consumption whether it’s House of Cards or the latest comic book on Comixology. Data rates have gotten faster and cheaper (somewhat) and people are more comfortable with downloading or streaming media rather than having it delivered passively by TV and radio. Serial was the siren song of podcasting’s new era. A time when podcasts stopped being just about tech and finally ventured into other mediums. We have Adam Corolla, after all. Surely, if you make “good stuff” and put it out there in your niche, people would find and start listening in 2014. Right?

Short answer: No.

It’s not anymore difficult to make a podcast than it is to make a blog post or even a Facebook post for those willing to trade their digital souls for even more comfort and supposed eyeballs. However, it is still difficult to find an audience for your podcast that makes you “feel” like it’s worth doing.

I have this conversation often with clients who are interested in podcasting as a form of marketing their church, product, startup idea, service etc. “Let’s do this,” I say, “but be aware that this is not going to make it onto any iTunes top charts and you’ll be lucky to have a dozen consistent listeners after a few months if you make it that long.”

That’s because it’s hard to show up week after week (if you’re doing a weekly show, which is what I’d recommend since that’s the accepted format at this point) for months at a time and record yourself talk either solo or with a group, do the post recording work of either editing but definitely uploading, posting it somewhere, and attempting getting the word out only to see that you have 11 listeners to a show four months in. Clients, like all of us, want fast results whether they say it or not. It’s human nature. It’s why we like using Facebook instead of a personal blog to post details of our lives or businesses… people “Like” us there and we get tangible feedback for our time or work or thoughts. “I am important because people listen to me!” is Facebook’s psychology 101.

Podcasting is different. There is little in the way of the gratification machine at work to tell you that you’re doing a good job, even months or perhaps years, into your show. Excellent podcasters like Dan Benjamin will tell you to show up and keep showing up. He’s right. But what about if you’re just starting out. “Is it really worth all that time, then?” my clients ask.

I should have a good answer to that question prepared given how much I hear it and that I’ve ran a podcast network called Thinking.FM since 2011. I came up with the idea in 2009 after I started podcasting in 2008. I did a 22 minute daily show for almost six months. When that show ended, it had a few thousand listeners. “I’m important because people listen to me!” I thought after doing the very hard work of not just talking about something I thought interesting for 22 minutes every day, but also the pre and post work that was required to do a daily show in 2008 (not to mention I was working from home with my newborn daughter who ended up being a frequent guest on the show inadvertently).

Podcasting is still figuring itself out and the mass majority of consumers are still figuring out the medium as well. Sure, there’s an Apple Podcasts app that comes pre-installed on all iPhones now but how many people ever tap on “Tips” or “Newstand” either?

My answer is yes, you should podcast. It is fun. It is hard. It is cost and time intensive. Eventually, it does pay off in ways not measured by Likes or retweets.

For example, my friend Thomas Whitley and I do a podcast called Thinking Religion. It’s an amazing show (I can say that because I’ve been listening to podcasts for a while and we talk about amazingly interesting things from two different perspectives). Our latest show (29th episode) was by far our best:

Prof. Thomas Whitley and Sam Harrelson attempt to bring some thoughtfulness to the topic of religion again this week with a discussion of presidential politics and religion, metaphysics in the public sphere, ISIS and the antiquities black market, and whether we can recover lost texts.

Thinking Religion: Is There An Original New Testament? | Thinking.FM

You can listen by clicking on this player. Go ahead.

After doing the show weekly for almost thirty weeks now, we’re lucky if we have a few hundred listeners. Most times, it’s much less than that.

“But Sam,” you say, “it’s a podcast by two history / religion dorks talking about God knows what for 90 minutes. Why would anybody listen to that?”

Good point if you’re looking to get huge CPM advertising deals from Ford or use your podcast to market your church or your service or your products to millions!

But that’s more than likely not realistic. Moreover, it’s not the best use of your time, money, and resources to go for that goal. Instead, think long term. Think about possible connections and implications of your recorded word and the effects they may have on someone interested in you, your group, your product, your church etc. Think about how you can make someone’s life better, give them hope, solve their problem, or make them dream.

It pays off. Trust me.

Millions of listens and huge advertising payoffs are not the intent of Thinking Religion or Thinking.FM in general. It’s also not the point of any of the podcasts I help my clients do and promote. Instead, quality means more than quantity. That’s the reason I personally despise Facebook as both a personal medium and as a marketing medium for churches and non-profits and startups… it reinforces the notion of immediacy when it comes to Likes and feedback response. It’s a Skinner box (that’s a podcast I did with my wife, Merianna) with no sense of permanence or longevity. In my practice of marketing, permanence and longevity mean everything.

That’s why I podcast. I want to plant sequoias and say that my main crop is the forest I did not plant. Go and do likewise.