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