From a Direct Marketing Perspective, Facebook Beacon is a Terrible Idea

Facebook really is boring me with their marketing attempts. I’ve basically begun to snub my nose at it because, quite simply, what they’ve rolled out so far will never work or sustain any sort of revenue for advertisers (or marketers). There are already too many concerns over privacy, data ownership and FB’s long term sustainability as a platform to cause much skirt hiking.

Beacon is a horrible idea and has been sloppily executed. It reminds me of the toolbar apps from 2002.

I like (love?) Facebook as a social network, but as a marketing paradigm, it’s just not a good fit… at least for marketing in its current stage of evolution. Perhaps one day marketing will be able to find employment in social networks, but at this point we’re still too closely linked to offline models and metrics that break down when you try to translate them to the social networking world (or the web in general in my opinion).

Google owns advertising and will continue to do so (especially after they move into mobile and/or release their GDrive application and start paying users to host their data in exchange for ads to compete with Amazon who will do the same… yeah, you heard me).

Tony Hung has a good run down of possible futures for Facebook if Beacon crumbles.

Reality Check

Thanks to Phil at BadAstronomy for the reality check…


In the new Hubble image of the galaxy M74 we can also see a smattering of bright pink regions decorating the spiral arms. These are huge, relatively short-lived, clouds of hydrogen gas which glow due to the strong radiation from hot, young stars embedded within them; glowing pink regions of ionized hydrogen (hydrogen that has lost its electrons). These regions of star formation show an excess of light at ultraviolet wavelengths and astronomers call them HII regions.

Go out and look at the stars tonight. It’ll make you a better human.

Look Who’s Back: Local TV

television.jpgCenterNetworks has news of a partnership between Google and Hearst-Argyle Television:

Hearst-Argyle Television (NYSE:HTV) and Google have entered a new strategic agreement today where Hearst-Argyle, operator of 29 TV stations and more than 30 Websites, will become an official reseller and will use its Web sales force to provide marketers in its 26 local markets access to Google AdWords.

What this means is that Hearst-Argyle will now sell more comprehensive advertising solutions to its clients. Instead of just print and television, now they can also leverage online – helping to increase control over a client’s advertising budget.

Hearst-Argyle isn’t your daddy’s TV conglomerate anymore. With web properties such as HighSchoolPlaybook, they are branching out into a collaborative media group that is leveraging the existing (and dedicated) viewership of local TV stations to do a combination of traditional media buys, cost per action advertising and now collaborative deals with players such as Google.

Couple these social web properties and the deal with Google with increased political spending in ’08 and the upcoming Olympics (Hearst-Argyle owns NBC affiliate stations), and the picture is quite rosy for the company.

Don’t overlook companies such as Hearst when discussing the future of media or social media… they could be pointing to the future of media attention and spending.

Seesmic is The Next Big Thing (I Think)

MarketingProfs has a nice piece on the up and coming Seesmic video site. While it is easy to dismiss Seesmic as Yet Another Video Site, there is a good deal of market differentiation which sets Seesmic apart. Think Twitter with video and the ability to really scale once the kids start playing with it:

What do you get when you combine video, social networking, micromedia, and a very savvy French entrepreneur? You get Seesmic.

The site is a social network where the primary content is video. Users record video, post it to the site, and other users reply in video.

Seesmic is the brainchild of French blog star Loic Le Meur and aims to do to video conversations what Twitter did to text-based conversations.

And here’s a little video I just did:

http://seesmic.com/Standalone.swf?video=cZDXD40rKt

Video as a Personal Communication Tool

Widgets Helping Small Web Companies Succeed

I talk alot about widgets here (for good reason), and it seems that 2007 has lived up to its name of “The Year of the Widget.”

Here’s an interesting piece on a small company that made it big with a little help from the widget:

SAN FRANCISCO — For nearly a decade, GarageBand.com was the quintessential struggling Web company, barely hanging on as it burned through $17 million.

Until widgets.

Since it developed a widget, one of the mini-Web applications now flourishing on Facebook and other social-networking sites, the company — renamed iLike — has become an overnight sensation.

USA TODAY – Widgets Make a Big Splash on the Net

GDrive Could Change the Way We Do Computing

Even though I love my data and am vigilant in keeping backups and offline storage of emails, pics, docs, etc I do use and enjoy the wide range of Google products. This morning, the Wall Street Journal had a piece on new details of the supposedly eventual release of Google’s “GDrive” or “Platypus” or “MyStuff” which would allow you to sync up your data in the cloud and access it from anywhere (including mobile) in a safe and cheap environment.

Marshall Kirkpatrick says this could be a game changer and gives three very good reasons why in a solid post that you should consider when thinking about the future of the web and the data we produce and construct in our individual molecular social graphs:

It’s easy to be cynical about the details coming from the Wall St. Journal this morning. It’s easy wonder whether Google will ever bring its storage product to market, whether it can be trusted given the number of times its own company blogs have been hacked and whether it’s even a good idea given the near omniscience the company will soon possess. I believe, though, that important new information is coming out about the GDrive and the product will play a fundamentally different roll in our lives than existing online storage products purport to.

ReadWriteWeb – GDrive: Three Ways It Could Be a Game Changer

Social Media Marketing Strategies

The always informative and wise Jeremiah Owyang has a top 10 list of posts regarding social media strategies. This is a must-bookmark post:

I’m answering a lot of questions and see myself referring to the same blog posts and concepts over and over. There’s a few posts that I recommend that you read, some of them were published a few months ago, but are starting to become very relevant. In fact, I’ll send this post to a few clients that need to get up to speed…

Ten Web Strategy Blog Posts I wish you’d read

Zoho Writer Allows Offline Editing

A few backs the continual innovative team at Zoho announed the integration of Google Gears into the Zoho Writer web app. Zoho Writer is analogous to Google Docs and similar online word processing applications. The first cut had offline viewing facility alone. However, this release pushes the online word processing space ahead as it allows for offline editing.

Here’s a video from Zoho explaining more details:
http://zoho.com/zohowriter-zoho/zohowriter-zoho.html

Scoble and Amazon’s Kindle Monetization Mistake

Robert Scoble recorded a 13 minute video laying out his main beefs with Amazon’s new ebook Kindle reader. Most of his points pertained to the Kindle’s poor design (which I agree with). However, one of his points include:

4. No ability to send electronic goods to anyone else. I know Mike Arrington has one. I wanted to send him a gift through this of Alan Greenspan’s new book. I couldn’t. That’s lame.

While the Kindle (and ebook readers in general) is still a very niche product, it is interesting to see that social network sharing via gifts and commodity purchases is becoming seen as a required standard feature for new devices or platforms in this increasingly “socially networked” world. There’s a reason Facebook applications that encourage sending gifts, etc become popular quickly even though they require cash… people like sending gifts.

Look for this trend to continue.

Mark Cuban and Ted Stevens in ’08

If Mark Cuban were to hypothetically run for president in 2008, he might want to consider Ted “Series of Tubes” Stevens for his running mate based on these types of sentiments…

In an open letter to Internet service providers published earlier this week, billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban calls for telecoms to put an end to peer-to-peer (P2P) filesharing. Cuban expresses concerns that P2P “freeloaders” are clogging the tubes with commercial content. His letter doesn’t focus on piracy, however, and instead primarily attacks companies that use P2P for legitimate commercial applications. We’re always interested to read the musings of Mr. Cuban, but this time we’re pretty sure he’s missed the point…

This argument comes from the man who funded Grokster’s legal defense back in the day and invested approximately $1.7 million in P2P company Red Swoosh. Cuban has been focused on the problems of bandwidth to the home for some time, however, telling Ars in 2006 that he is in favor of a tiered Internet.

Seriously, how out of touch is Mark Cuban?

Mark Cuban to ISP’s: block all P2P traffic; Ars to Cuban: um, no

The Question of Reading and National Consequences

Great study on the alarming declines in reading by young adults and college educated adults from the National Endowment for the Arts:

The story the data tell is simple, consistent, and alarming. Although there has been
measurable progress in recent years in reading ability at the elementary school level,
all progress appears to halt as children enter their teenage years. There is a general
decline in reading among teenage and adult Americans. Most alarming, both reading
ability and the habit of regular reading have greatly declined among college graduates.
These negative trends have more than literary importance. As this report makes clear,
the declines have demonstrable social, economic, cultural, and civic implications.

To Read or Not to Read: NEA Study (pdf)

Link Optimization – The Next SEO?

Dave Winer writes today regarding TinyURL’s recent downtime and what it means for the web:

Now that URL length has become an issue for users, it might be even better for designers to view URLs as part of site design. Look at the address for the page for the Wii at Amazon. Wouldn’t it be easier to find if the address were:

http://www.amazon.com/wii

Try clicking on it — it actually works!

Why should a user ever see the longer crappy url?

In other words, url-shortening isn’t just for Twitter users, it’s for everyone. Maybe most people don’t look at the urls, but some do, and maybe more would if they made more sense?

Imagine if web developers would start taking link optimization into account along with search engine optimization. As Winer points out, long link strands are increasingly becoming irrelevant as most people just go to Google if they need a link they can’t remember and click from there.

However, if you’re selling a product or a service, how valuable is it that the link to that product or service have an increasingly easy format and structure for users or customers to remember? Perhaps not valuable for all merchants or advertisers… but potentially very valuable for many.

Expect to hear more about link optimization as the web grows up and grows out to mobile.

The Kids Are Alright

We should be listening to what the kids are saying and watching what they are doing as we endeavor to create a better web. Otherwise, we’ll continue to fill the role of typical adults and muck the web up:

Rather than a teacher creating class blogs, and registering all the students one by one, and creating a single feed of their posts, it’s the students who are doing this around their friendship or collaborative work groups. Since the content and mechanism are in the hands of the students we see the same exponential growth in content and delivery that we have seen in the real world net, but have really struggled to harness for education. I’d argue that with increased flexibility in the means of delivery we’d also see increased content creation to mould around all these different media.

Imagine if Facebook took that to heart! There’s wisdom in youth.