Category Archives: Social Media

Tweets from the Edge

First published February 5, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I’m now on Twitter (@outofmygord if you’re interested), which, to use the emerging verb of consensus, means that I tweet.  I’m not sure I’m a Twaddict (a la Todd Friesen) but I am moving through Rohit Bhargava’s 5 Stages of Twitter Acceptance

1 . Denial  — “I think Twitter sounds stupid. Why would anyone care what other people are doing right now?”

2. Presence —  “Ok, I don’t really get why people love it, but I guess I should at least create an account.”

3. Dumping –“I’m on Twitter and use it for pasting links to my blog posts and pointing people to my press releases.”

4 .Conversing — “I don’t always post useful stuff, but I do use Twitter to have authentic 1X1 conversations.”

5. Microblogging — “I’m using Twitter to publish useful information that people read AND converse 1×1 authentically .”

My self-assessment has me currently lodged between steps 3 and 4, but with signs of promise. And so, through the phenomenon of synchronicity, it now seems that everywhere I turn I see signs of Twitter. One of the recent one’s was Kaila Colbin’s Search Insider column about Twitter’s monetization strategy, or lack of same. Twitter is not unique; virtually every social network struggles with this issue. I would like to add two observations from my perspective.

The Curse of the Early Adopter

Social networks seem to be perennially stuck on the edge of the wrong side of Geoffrey Moore’s Chasm.  They flourish with early adopters, who are by nature fickle when it comes to technology and any bright shiny object, but social networks have difficultly embedding themselves in the mainstream. I’m seeing signs that Facebook might successfully make the leap across the Chasm, based on my “Jill” litmus test. When my wife is familiar with a technology, it usually means it’s crossed the Chasm.  Jill doesn’t have a Facebook page, but she has visited it (due largely to the fact that we have teenage daughters — ’nuff said).

The problem in trying to track these things is that whatever the blogosphere is buzzing about bears little resemblance to what will actually gain traction with a mainstream market. We (and yes, I include myself) are exactly the wrong people to prognosticate about what may be the next killer app for the average Joe. We are all technology nerds. Everyone I know in this industry is a technology nerd. The ones who actually blog and emerge as thought leaders are the most hopeless of the lot. We exist in a rarified technological atmosphere and have largely lost touch with the real world. It doesn’t mean we’re inherently prone to be wrong about the marketability of new technology, but it also means we’re not inherently right. We’re guessing, and all too often we let our personal enthusiasm bias our forecasts.

Social networks are always held up to Google as the monetization baseline, and it’s an unfair and misleading comparison. There were a number of circumstances unique to Google that won’t be replicated with a social network. They include user intent, the nascent stage of the Internet during Google’s introduction, lack of visionary competition and the luxury of developing a critical mass of usage on its own real estate.  The problem with monetizing Twitter is that much of the interaction with it happens on a third-party app.

Social and Market Norms

Perhaps the biggest reason why it’s difficult to monetize social results has to do with how our online experiences are framed, and the concept of social vs. market norms.  Here’s an example. You take your family out for an Italian dinner. The meal is fabulous. The portions are huge. After one of the best meals you’ve ever had, you hand $180 to the hostess. She throws it back in your face, storms into the kitchen and you’re abruptly escorted to the door. If we were at a restaurant, this reaction would be rather surprising. But if we’re at my mother-in-law’s for Sunday dinner, it suddenly makes sense. The difference is the frame in which we view the scenario. If we look at it through a market norm, the rules that govern commerce and fair trade, it’s entirely appropriate to offer fair compensation for a meal. If we look at it through a social norm, the rules that govern our family and friend relationships, it’s an unforgivable insult.

This slippery slope between market and social norms is the treacherous one that a social network must tread. Here’s another example. You’re at a party and you’ve asked two friends about their opinions on the best car for you to buy. Another person at the party overhears this — someone who just happen to be a salesperson at the local Ford dealership. Sensing opportunity, the salesperson whips around and immediately starts telling you why the Ford Mustang is the perfect car for you. How would you feel? How would you respond to the information?  How uncomfortable would the discussion become?

The challenge is that you moved from a social norm to a market norm and you weren’t in control of the transition. The same is true when you use a social network to ask for information and suddenly the network uses that to present targeted ads to you.  Kaila was right to point to Twitter’s search functionality as its only monetization opportunity. Google has conditioned us to accept a search results page as a place we can look at through market norm eyes. Also, we’re searching all Tweets for mention of a product, not specifically asking our friends. The difference is crucial in how we accept the advertising message.

The confluence of social networking and search is exciting to contemplate, but expect a lot of trial and error in the quest to find the right business model. Personally, I don’t expect to find it any time soon, and I also expect a lot of miffed users as part of the collateral damage.

Chasing Digital Fluff – Who Cares about What’s Hot?

Marketers are falling over themselves in their rush to the digital landscape. Social media is SO hot! But not as hot as behavioral targeting. And if you think that’s hot, wait till you see what you can do with mobile!

The Digital Dogpile

blow-dandelionMarketers desperately scramble over each other, grasping for a tenuous handhold on some emerging tactic that gives them, however briefly, a fraction of an inch advantage over the competition. New digital marketing directors prove their worth through their savvy of online technology. They cut their teeth on Facebook advertising and put Powerpoints (or, because they’re uber-cool – Keynote presentations) together on the immense potential of the social graph.

Churn is the norm in digital marketing. And marketers are the worst, whipping the industry into a froth because they get all breathless about the latest thing. My inbox gets a hundred emails every single day talking about how freaking cool everything is and how we’re stumbling to figure out the importance of everything. If you’re not an early adopter…scratch that…if you’re not a bleeding edge pioneer, you’re a hopeless loser. The pace of marketing testing and adoptions just keeps spinning faster and faster.

Step Away from the iPhone

Stop! Take a breath. Relax for a few minutes. Get outside and breath some honest to God fresh air. And don’t take your iPhone with you. Because here’s the scoop Kemosabe, all the technology in the world is useless until your audience figures out how to use it. And here’s the nasty little secret. Humans love bright shiny objects but we’re pretty slow when it comes to figuring out how to jam it into our already busy lives. Until that happens, your nifty online strategies will never be anymore than a pointless treadmill jammed on overdrive. You can run as fast as you want, but you’ll never get anywhere.

I do financial analyst calls every quarter and the last question on the call is always the same: anything else we should be looking at? Apparently, technologiosis (or technitis, or technophilia, take your pick) is contagious. My answer is usually the same..wait till people figure out how to use it.

Think about the buzz that’s been devoted to social networks and, more recently, real time search, in the last 2 years. That’s 2 years of foaming-at-the-mouth marketing buzz about how this channel is:

A) the savior of marketing
B) most effective connection with consumers
C) coolest technology without an identifiable purpose
D) biggest waste of time on God’s green earth
E) all of the above

The Geekiest Guy on my Block

Now, I’ll be the first to admit I don’t have a clue how to use social media in a meaningful way in my life. I have a Facebook page, I tweet, I have a Linked In profile, a Trip-It network, just to name a few, making me the geekiest guy I know. Maybe not at an online marketing show, but if you ever visit Kelowna, take a walk with me down my block and I’ll prove my techno-geek status is several Trekkie parsecs ahead of anyone else. I suspect the same is true for you. And you know what? I have no frigging idea why Facebook is important or why I should log into my profile today. It’s cool, but it’s not useful in an every day kind of way. And if I, who spend over 10 hours a day online and have a network of friends and colleagues that span the globe, can’t jam Facebook into my life in a useful way, how is the average techno-pleb going to?

As far as I can see, most of things marketers salivate over fall into the same category..digital candy that tweaks our dopamine supplying pleasure centre but serves no real, sustainable purpose in our lives. This puts it in the same category as 95% of my iPhone apps, 99% of the computer games on my laptop and the Wii my nephew got last Christmas – an obsession for approximately 27 hours, an occasional pastime for another 36 hours, then something we ignore for the rest of our lives.

The one difference, at least in my experience, seems to be teenagers. Most of things that seem to be passing fancies to us do seem to become useful in the lives of the average 15 – 23 year old. But, as I said in a previous post, when you look at what the live of a high school or university student looks like and what they want to do, a Facebook suddenly makes sense. For me, not so much.

An Eyeball is an Eyeball, Right?

So, even given this notorious degree of fickleness, why should marketer’s care? Eyeballs are still eyeballs, right? Even if the eyeballs we’re capturing this week will be completely different than the eyeballs we capture next week. This approach only works if you consider your market a faceless blob of unleashed consumer potential. If you actually want to get relevant messages to real people with real needs, the logic starts to break down immediately.

Effective marketing depends on reliable targeting. And reliable targeting depends on established patterns. And established patterns depend on sustained behaviors. And sustained behaviors depend on things we find useful. Otherwise, we’re marketing via fad, condemning ourselves to spending our professional lives and our client’s ad dollars chasing fluff in a hurricane. Our audience will always be “just passing through” on the way to the next thing.

I Miss Frank Cannon, PI

movies_070708_cannonMarkets have to stabilize in order for us to understand the individuals that make up that market. Also, brand relationships need a stable environment, allowing them to germinate and flourish.

When I was a kid, Kraft always sponsored Cannon. When you tuned in to see William Conrad somehow roll his fat old carcass out of his Lincoln Continental and pick off a sniper 3 miles away on a mountain top with his trusty .38 revolver, you could depend on Kraft telling you how to cook Mac & Cheese in every commercial break. Much as the entertainment value may have sucked (beggars with 2 channels in the Canadian prairies can’t be choosers) you knew Kraft would be there and Kraft knew who they were talking to. The audience had stabilized.

Until things pass through the temporary obsession phase to something that adds real value to our lives, we can’t consider advertising on these channels as anything more than an experiment. The trick in picking the right digital channels is not to look at the eyeballs they’re attracting today, but in how these things might be used in real, practical ways. That will give you an idea of how real people might be using these things next week or next month, when the technoratti have moved on to the latest bright shiny object.

Democracy Changed on November 4th

101227_obama_chicago_ap_605Even as a Canadian, I was amazed by what happened the night of November 4th.

Obviously, every journalist and pundit will be falling over themselves talking about the historic implications of this election. Democrats and Republicans alike were gushing and seemed a little speechless about the implications of Obama in the White House. I have my own feelings but that’s not what this column is about. For me, this election was fundamentally historic for another reason. It changed forever the fabric of democracy in America.

3 years ago, I sat in a hotel conference room somewhere (it might even have been Chicago) and heard Dana Todd, then the President of SEMPO, say that search would be a very important factor in the next election. I smiled to myself, because I had been watching the somewhat ham fisted use of online tactics in the election just finished. “Why”, I thought to myself, “do these candidates fail to understand the fundamental importance of online. Don’t they understand that this provides an amazing new platform for democracy. How could they be so clueless?” The one candidate that did seem to grasp it was Howard Dean, but unfortunately, Dean’s campaign had other challenges that eventually overcame his online momentum.

“But what”, I mused, “would happen if you took the lessons learned from the Dean campaign and fielded a candidate with a campaign that fully ‘got’ the power of virtual connection”. My guess would be that it would be incredibly effective. Even with that, I had no idea how earthshakingly important it would be.

Unknown to me, two people, Jascha Franklin Hodge and Joe Rospars, the architects of the Dean online machine and co founders of Blue State Digital, were already making plans for 2008. The candidate? A junior senator from Illinois who had just rocked the Democratic National Convention with a stirring speech: Barack Obama.

I watched the entire process unfold, and at each step, I was impressed with the grasp of online momentum, its nuances and social connections. With Franklin Hodge and Rospars as architects, and with the help of a very Net savvy staff, Obama’s campaign built an online momentum that shocked Clinton’s handlers in the primaries and eventually rolled over McCain as well. Yes, there were many factors that led to success, not the least of which is the candidate himself, but I can’t help thinking that this campaign managed to crystallize it in a brilliant way online. Obama navigated the currents and eddies of online buzz masterfully, creating mini campaigns of intense interest and passion, mobilizing votes and raising money..lots and lots and lots of money. He (with his campaign architects) understood the fundamental connection of online, reaching many, hearing from many, one at a time. It was a campaign launched and won by we, the people.

On November 19th, 1863, another politician from Illinois gave what was intended to be a few impromptu remarks at the dedication of the Soldier’s National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.  Lincoln finished that speech with these words:

“that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

On Tuesday night, there was a new birth of democracy, the culmination of an election that used a new technology to bridge millions of gaps between Washington and people, to erase decades of division, estrangement and alienation. Yes, it was a brilliant campaign tactic, but it was more than that. It was an understanding that people needed to reconnect with their President and to have their voices heard. It was true democracy. No matter what your political affiliation and your feelings about Obama, the man, you have to feel hopeful that somebody in the White House finally “gets” the Internet and its awesome power to connect and effect change.

Interview: Branton Kenton-Dau of VortexDNA

In this week’s Just Behave Column, I had the opportunity to interview Branton Kenton-Dau from Vortex DNA. I’ve posted the complete transcript here for those that are interested:

Gord: 
So I think what we’ll do in this interview is cover off on a basic level what VortexDNA does, and then we’ll get into a little bit more about the potential I think it has for users.  So, it’s obviously an interesting idea using core values to try to determine intent. Maybe I’ll let you just walk through a little bit about how VortexDNA works, and why your approach is unique.

Branton Kenton-Dau: 
Yeah, thanks Gordon. I think that is a great place for us to start, and I think for us, it probably would go back to the human genome project itself, where we initiated as a society this project to map our human DNA.  And the great vision around that was that once we knew what our physical DNA was like we would be able to define the characteristics of your world and in particular help prevent  serious illnesses.  And one the outcomes of that project, was actually we found that there weren’t enough genes.  We found too few genes to map the 100,000 chemical pathways of our body; and that since then, where science is taken us is that it’s demonstrated that our physical DNA actually doesn’t determine who we are, but the whole science of epigenetics is saying actually it’s our environment, you know what we eat and particularly what we believe about ourselves which determines our propensity to be ill, to be healthy, to be successful or not.  So, actually our belief system is a major impact in determining who we are, and what is exciting about that is basically it represents a shift for us as a society from the very deterministic view of ourselves; that we are basically physical machines. Either we’re broken or not, depending on what our parents gave us, to the idea that we are actually beings that are creating our own lives with much more build out of what we  believe about ourselves at any moment and any time. That’s exciting because what we believe about ourselves can obviously be changed.  And basically what VortexDNA is is a technology that came out of the insight that the way we structure our beliefs is governed by the mathematics of complex systems.  What that means is that we know the structure our beliefs, and because of that we can then map out the structure of our intentional DNA, the intentions behind the world we create, and that’s basically the breakthrough, the technology. It provides a map of the way people organize who they are, literally who they are, through their belief systems.  And out of that, then comes the opportunity to create a better world for yourself whether that’s finding your best life partner or finding better research results or finding better car insurance rates because your particular belief system has a low propensity for accidents. It actually touches every part of your life, because we are actually mapping human characteristics.  The true genome, if you like, based upon the new science.

Gord: 
Okay, this is an interesting approach and undoubtedly a unique approach. I don’t know anyone else who is doing this. But you know, I approach this with a fair degree of cynicism saying, okay, obviously if you learn more about my belief system you can try to map that against the content of the internet. But how well does that actually work because my beliefs are the foundation, but on top of that, there are a lot of layers of intent for a lot of different things. How granular can your belief system be in disambiguating intent?  In some searches, I would see it working very well where it points to sites that you know resonates with my belief frame work, but in others where it is a much more practical “looking for information”, will trying to anticipate with my beliefs might indicate would be a good site, will that really be a good indicator of relevance?

Branton Kenton-Dau: 
That’s a really good question Gordon; I think that the answer to that is that we don’t know yet.  I think that we are at very early stages of really what is the science of human intention, I mean, that’s really what’s it about.  And what I can share with you is that we validated the technology last year against Google search results, and that’s where we were able to show that we can improve Google’s page rank by up to 14% which would improve it by a 3% improvement in click rates.  And, what that seems to be saying to us is (it does help), and that’s across the board, people obviously searching for anything and everything that’s possible on the web, we were analyzing that data.  We haven’t been able break that down to say whether or not if you’re hunting for a job, we are able to provide better recommendations than when you are looking for your recipe for custard or something; we just don’t know yet enough about it.  One of the things is interesting is that when we had our expert review done on that data by a Rhode Island consultancy firm, they said that they the way that the technology works, because it’s iterative, i.e. it learns as it goes.  He said that we probably have no idea yet of how efficient the system is, we don’t know because we are dealing with a very small sample and as more and more users and more DNA is selected on links of the net, then there is no reason that it can’t actually be more effective than we’ve demonstrated, but we just don’t know yet.  It’s just early days yet.

Gord: 
You made the comment that this is iterative and it learns as it goes, and from going through your site I see you answer an initial questionnaire; and I’ll get to the whole privacy question, or the perception of privacy question is probably more accurate, I’ll get to that in a minute. But you answer the questionnaire that creates an ideological or a value-based profile of you which then gets mapped against different sites.  But then, at anytime you can go back and answer more surveys to further refine what that profile looks like.  How much of this refinement process or this learning process is incumbent on the user as opposed to transparent in the background just by VortexDNA watching what are you doing and how you are interacting with different sites?

Branton Kenton-Dau: 
The answer is this system actually learns that every time you click on something, because every time you click on something, if you have downloaded the extension, the MyWebDNA extension, basically every time you click somewhere it’s a statement of your intentionality, so if other people have also clicked on it, it helps build up a map for that link of the intentionality that has been focused on the link.  So, we can feedback that intentionality into your own profile and therefore you don’t have to do anything.  Actually this year we will probably do away with the survey, so then you will won’t even need the survey to get started, that was just like a pre-heat process.  So, all we have to do is just surf as normal and you will be monitoring the state of your intentionality moment by moment with each click you make.

Gord: 
Okay, so let’s deal with that a little bit.  If you are monitoring my activity, in some ways this overlaps with what Google is doing with their web history and their search history, where they are tracking your usage and trying to learn more about you as an individual, theoretically, and then altering the results on the fly based on the personal signals it’s picking up. What you are doing is you are layering this outline of core values and what our belief systems are over and above that to say, “Okay well, not only are we watching what you are doing; we are trying to understand what’s important to you as an individual.”  Now, if we take that and we say, Okay I am in a business where at any given time for any given hour I’m working, I may be doing research, I might be writing the column on hate literature in North America, so I am going to be going to the sites of Neo-Nazi groups, trying to find information..that’s just part of my job.  How do you know that that doesn’t reflect my belief system, how do you know that this is just something that I happen to need to find information on right now?

Branton Kenton-Dau: 
There are two parts to that.  One is that I feel we are very respectful of what Google and Yahoo, and their analysis in the whole semantic web push are doing in terms of trying to make the web more relevant to people and we do believe our technology is complementary to those approaches.  We don’t believe we are competing with any of those and, as you say, it’s overlay, it’s additive to those.  Having said that, we are really completely different to that because, it’s actually the structure, the pattern, the way your beliefs are organized that we are interested in, and what that means is that we actually turn your answers to your questionnaire, what you click on, into just a set of numbers.  There are seven numbers that correspond to different aspects of that pattern of organization, that makes up your intentionality.  And so, really when you are going around, what we are doing is as you click on something, we will compare your number, it might be 7632416 say, with the numbers that are held against that link.  So, what we are doing is we are comparing numbers, we don’t know whether you’ve gone to a Nazi site or whether you are looking for apple pie recipes. We have absolutely no idea and maintain no record of where you’ve been, in all those sites. So when your genome is updated, because you’ve gone to this site,  we might update your genome because you’ve been to that site to change one of your digits in one way, by one point or so, then that digit could be changed from any site you ;  the news or Yahoo! or whatever.  So, what makes us really truly unique with this approach, which we think is really important, is that we absolutely protect your privacy because we do not track your searches in any shape or form because we are just adding or subtracting numbers from that seven digit identifier.  So it makes no difference to us, and I think that’s a really powerful thing, because you know there is concern with people for what information people hold on them and all we hold is a seven digit number, and you could be anywhere, it could have been Walt Disney Movies, it could have been finding out about the players in your favorite football team, it makes no difference to us.  So we can’t tell even if a law enforcement agencies came to us, and asked to us, “hey, where has Gord been”, we would have no idea, we could not tell them.

Gord: 
So what you do is in your identification of all the sites, you look at the sites and you assign each of those a profile and then your profile is altered on the fly based on the profiles you are matching up with against your content then, right?

Branton Kenton-Dau:  That’s correct and they’re all number, those profiles are numbers so…

Gordon: 
Right.  So there is no history retained, it’s just a constantly updated value which in turn, with every time you go out, is compared against all the values of the sites that come up in a search engine for instance, and the best possible matches are highlighted in the search results then.

Branton Kenton-Dau: 
Thank you, that’s absolutely perfect.

Gord: 
That’s interesting.  And now, obviously, that’s a totally different approach and one that should put some fears to rest on the privacy side, but I’ve got to tell you when I checked out VortexDNA and went through the process of the download, the whole idea of filling out a  questionnaire identifying my belief system, it gave me cause for concern. It was funny because as far as identifying me as an individual, the demographic information I fill out here and there across the web is potentially much more of a cause for concern for my privacy, because there is identifiable information in there.  I don’t usually have a second thought about but something about putting my beliefs down and sharing them with somebody else was very hard for me to do. Are you finding..and you said that you are probably going to drop the questionnaire…but are you finding that as a sticking point for people signing up for VortexDNA?

Branton Kenton-Dau: 
I think some people never think about it.  We get up in the morning, brush our teeth and go to work and make our daily bread.  Sometimes we don’t have time to think at all, “why am I here?”, and when you ask the question, “what’s your purpose in life?” Well that’s a pretty profound question.  What we found is that some people don’t fill in (the questionnaire) correctly or too quickly or they just answer anything, they don’t really think about it deeply and therefore, because noise goes in, they just get noise out.  That’s where over the course of last year we actually developed what we call this idealized genome. We can just infer your genome by what you click on.  We think that’s a much better way, and we can do that for instance, by just playing a game.  We can show some images, pick some of your favorites, we can infer your genome that way.  So, lot’s of more, less mentally taxing and more fun ways that we can get you started in creating your genome, your profile, which we think would work a lot better.

Gord: 
Well, you mentioned this whole approach may limit your potential market just because a lot of people haven’t thought about what their core values are or what their beliefs are, so the whole appeal of VortexDNA might be lost on them.  Unless you are a fan of Stephen Covey or you’ve read Built to Last, or Good to Great, you may not get it.  What are your thoughts about that?

Branton Kenton-Dau: 
I think you are right, and I think that the technology is broad enough, so it can serve anyone, whatever their focus is in life, and that it’s our responsibility to make sure that it’s that easy to use. We like to be able to do it (transparently), say, if you want to play Pacman, this way you are building up your profiles, and we can enable you to do that.  And we should be able to that shortly.  At the same time, I think one of the really key things about the technology, and certainly from my point of view of what, you know, gets me up in morning is the fact that I think it really is empowering for people to understand that the lives that they create, they literally do create it, it’s not given to them. Who you are is not determined by your upbringing, or your life experiences, or by the genes your parents gave you; but it is actually created by you moment by moment.  And, it’s my hope that the technology would help. It’s really a very American thing, in the sense that there is all about human freedom ultimately, and it gives people more freedom as they realize, “well, I am the creator of my life and if I am going to keep stuck in this rut then it is what I believe about myself that is keeping me there.”  That’s what I find exciting about the technology, so I hope that may dawn on some people faster than others and that’s okay, there is no problem with that.  But I believe the technology has the ability to make a contribution to human freedom ultimately.

Gord: 
So, you are climbing up Maslow’s hierarchy to the top level?

Branton Kenton-Dau: 
Yes, I absolutely believe that and I think that  we as human beings are always trying to really understand our true ability to create reality, and that our intentionality is, if you like, part of ourselves that we probably put less effort into training than anything else.  We spend a lot of time on the fitness machines or jogging to keep our bodies in shape, but we haven’t spent a lot of time in what actually seems to be a real key factor in determining the success of our life, which is our intentionality; and so I am hoping the technology will help focus us on that.

Gord: 
We’ve talked about some pretty lofty ideals for a technology here. About  helping people with self-actualization, and become better people, and become more aware of both what’s important to them internally and externally.  All of which is great for any fans of Collins or Covey who might be reading this or listening to this. We are getting to the hedgehog concept here; you are obviously passionate about this, you’ve got something different that you can be unique in, possibly best in the world at.  Now, comes the money question. How does this drive your economic engine? What’s the business model for VortexDNA, and how do you see that playing out over the 2 years to 3 years?

Branton Kenton-Dau: 
We have given a lot of thought about that and made a lot of mistakes as well and I think U-turns on it.  But basically, the company I represent, we basically have a technology which we issue licenses to other organizations and participate with them as strategic partners. For instance, in rolling out the technology.  And there are two kind of key parts for that, two key aspects of the technology, one is that the technology can be used by any ecommerce sites, whether that’s an e-tail or social site, in order to provide better recommendations, using their algorithms.  So, that’s a pure B2B solution, and we have the company incorporated in United States at the moment in order to do that. We would be interested in anyone who would like to partner with us to roll that out.  And then, the other side is that we feel we can create a better web by harnessing the power of mass collaboration, just like Wikipedia, to map the genome of the web and out of that, will come better search engines, will come a better ability to find people like you anywhere you are, enhance your blog, pretty much a holistic upgrade if you like, of the web itself. And that, we believe, like search engines themselves, is a pure advertising based free service to users.  So, we see there is an application there and in fact within next 30 days, we will be launching the Web Genome Project with its own website, and that would be an advertising based play again.  We believe that that has potential in every country in the world and we are open to issue licenses to partners that would like to take up the opportunity.

Gord: 
This territory has been somewhat explored in the past, you know the one example I am thinking of with the Music Genome Project where Pandora tried to use your past songs you like to recommend more songs you might like.  So, is this somewhat similar to that except obviously a much broader scope. Anything that could be on the web, right?
Branton Kenton-Dau:  That’s correct, I guess the difference would be that what’s great about the Web Genome Project is that while you sleep, millions of other people will be clicking on things that will make the web better for you in the morning.

Gord: 
Right.

Branton Kenton-Dau: 
That’s what’s so cool about mass collaboration. You do your clicking, you click on whatever, a thousand links in your day, but while you are sleeping well there are millions of links that have been updated and have better DNA against them, so that you can find what you want better when you wake up in the morning, and that’s really exciting.
Gord:  It’s definitely one of those big idea things.

Branton Kenton-Dau: 
Yes.

Gord: 
To flip this on its side, as a community we are all clicking away, and this DNA matching is going, so it’s making the web a better place, as you say, collaboratively, but on the flip side of that, once you’ve identified or a profile has been built that’s been refined over time based on the sites you found interesting or you’ve spent time with.  That’s a unique identifier that says something about you so, theoretically, down the road, if somebody comes to a site, if the owner of that site can identify what’s important to that person based on the profile, it could on the fly serve up content matching those beliefs, is that another possible application for this?

Branton Kenton-Dau: 
Thank you, that’s what I was attempting to describe in the first application, that’s the B2B solution.   So an e-tailer or search engine can now take out a license to run the application, the user would visit the site, you won’t see anything different through your Google search or through your Amazon book recommendations, but that’s all being added to the recommendation engine behind, so you are just going to say “hey, for some reason, I just feel that I am getting better recommendations now”.  So, it’s our way of making the web more efficient and that technology is available right now. We’ve got three installations in United States currently progressing, and that’s the other, that’s the business-to-business model, and we believe that has applications around the world as well.

Gord: 
So, for any business applications the big question is critical mass, how many people will be downloading the plug in and using it?  This is fairly new, how long has the Firefox plug-in been available?

Branton Kenton-Dau: 
About a year now.

Gord: 
What has the adoption been like to this point?

Branton Kenton-Dau: 
At this point, it’s been slow because what we’ve actually done is that plug-in was actually built initially to validate the technology.  That’s what we had to do last year, and then we spent the rest of last year really building enterprise-grade technology that enabled to be used by clients. So we really start the year, as I said, the next 30 days will see the Web Genome Project being launched, so we are only just at the start of the technology coming online.

Gordon: 
Are there any plans to accelerate the adoption either through partnerships or bundling or other ways to actually get people to download the plug in and start using it?

Branton Kenton-Dau: 
There are, I mean for each of the people, partners, e-tailors that would like to use the technology, we’ll be producing custom versions with extensions for their users, so that, they will encourage their uses to download the extension, because that will help map the DNA of their links quicker.  So, that will speed the application and we have also got plans to provide custom versions of the extension also to people of different social networks, so that they can enhance the experience within social networks as well.  And then, also if you’re logged in to any service, if you have an account with Amazon or some other e-tailer, you actually don’t need to use the plug in because when you login they already know who you are, so you already will be able to get better recommendations from that person without using the plug-in at all. You won’t see it. It would be completely seamless and invisible to you, and you just get a better web experience.

Gord: 
So, if you log into Amazon for instance, I guess it just keeps the profile so that profile would not be portable then.  It would stay with Amazon, and I think to get to the broader context of what you are talking about, the portability of that profile, the fact that it goes with you from site to site, would be an important part of that, right?

Branton Kenton-Dau: 
That’s why we see the extension would be great if people did use it or it just became embedded in web browsers generally.  Because it will give you a more universal better experience. 

Gord: 
Okay so looking forward, you’ve done a lot of development on the backend to build the infrastructure, and the theory is there.  Now, it’s just a matter of having it proven out in real world situations, right?

Branton Kenton-Dau: 
That’s exactly what we are about to see. That’s why these installations are taking place at the moment in the United States to validate that, and we are getting started with the Web Genome Project, it is all about delivery this year.

Gord: 
Well, it’s fascinating, like I said it’s one of those big idea things that is fascinating to contemplate.  Is there anything else you wanted to add before we wrapped up the interview?

Branton Kenton-Dau: 
We’ve worked on this  pretty much, well, it’s been an 8-year project, so it’s not been a fast thing for us, but I just thought I might share  a couple of books that have been really important to me which you probably know about anyway. One of them that I just finished reading is The Intention Experiment by Lynne McTaggart who is also the author of The Field. What is nice about that is she just documents all the rigorous science that is basically saying that we are shifting our paradigm, to understand we are more like any energy fields, if you like, than physical bodies, that’s the definition of us.  And just the science has come out of Stanford and other places that validates that, is just awe inspiring.  And then, the other one is The Biology of Belief by Bruce Lipton, which gives that whole transition process from us believing we are physical genes to the whole science of extra genetics, if it’s actually our environment including our beliefs which is a key factor in determining who we are; and I just wanted to share those because I found those two books very inspiring.  They happened after the fact. We didn’t build the technologies because we read the books, but with the books now, we say “oh yeah, that’s why our technology works.

Gord: 
Well, it’s interesting you mentioned that because it seems like anytime I ‘m talking to people about really interesting things there has been this almost renaissance of understanding about what makes us as humans tick, starting in areas like psychology, neurology, and evolutionary psychology and a whole bunch of different areas.  And it all started to happen in the early 90’s, and just for the last 10 years to 15 years, it seems like so many paradigms have shifted.  We’re just looking at things in a whole new way and I agree with you, it’s very inspiring and exciting to know that everything seems to be in such flux right now.

Branton Kenton-Dau: 
I absolutely agree with that, and that’s been our sense as well.  It’s just such a privilege to be part of that process.  I know your comments and what you are doing is aligned with that as well.  You know, we are all doing it, but when we are creating together, we are creating something which is new and exciting, I think, and we all have our parts to play in it.  I find it a privilege to participate in this, really, it’s human movement in taking us forward at such a rapid pace as well, so we are now absolutely aligned with what you were saying there.

Face to Facebook

The one thing that’s interesting about Facebook is that it’s really a framework in search of a purpose. What’s not interesting about Facebook is that Microsoft just bought a tiny sliver of it for 240 million dollars.

The problem with the world today is that we all try to jump on an online bandwagon without really seeing where it’s going. As the usage numbers stack up, we pile on, determined to hang on for the ride, whereever the destination might be. It remains to be seen if Facebook can avoid the fate of the online community platform. There’s a lot of headstones in this particular cemetary, including Orkut, Friendster and MySpace (sure, MySpace is still breathing, but barely). I’ve been in a few meetings recently where everybody is talking about how to tap into social networking. I think the thing that’s missing is that social networking isn’t a killer app. It’s human behavior, and that comes with some challenges. Humans are unpredictable.

Here’s one way we’re unpredictable. The same group that made Friendster a hot online community, Orkut the next big thing and MySpace the next Google moves from community to community, lighting a fire and then moving on, leaving nothing but a burned out shell. These are the online “nomads” who are always pushing the envelope. Green fields are their motivation, but once main street gets a little civilized (i.e. boring) they pick up stakes and move on. When the dollars chase the next hot online community, this is the gang they’re chasing. Good luck!

Here’s the second way we’re unpredictable. Even if we’re not all online “nomads”, we have a tiny little sliver of us that’s curious. We have to check out the new hot online neighbourhood. Think of it as visiting a show home. We want to look at the furniture, oooh and aaah over the decorating, but we have no intention of actually moving there. The online translation would be registering to become a member, visiting once or twice, and then never visiting again. So here, we have a compounding effect. The nomads visit  and start creating buzz (everyone loves the nomads, because they’re just so leading edge). Then the tire kickers (that’s the rest of us poor schmucks) visit for a look. Suddenly you have a hockey stick registration chart that everyone drools over. You’ve got the traffic, now you just have to monetize it! Investment and acquisition offers pour in. Life is good. Two Porsches in every driveway. But then the nomads move on to the next green field (Rule One of Online Communities, There’s always another Green Field), the tire kickers don’t come back (they’re checking out the show home in the new hot community) and the hockey stick breaks in half.

And here’s the third way we’re unpredictable. We like to pick communities that make sense to us, that do something for us, that make us feel at home. We’ll choose the community, the community won’t choose us. This manifests itself in a number of ways. Every brand is trying to create an online community around their brand. I don’t want to belong to a brand based community. Most people I know don’t. Certainly not if the brand is something like potato chips or underarm deodorant. Maybe some one some where has enough time in their day to squander some of it on www.nevergetcaughtoffguard.com (I kid you not, a viral game put out by the good folks at Right Guard) but it sure the hell ain’t me. Harley riders frequent an online community, but in true Harley fashion, they took over the joint and basically kicked the landlords out. No, we create communities where it makes sense. Netflix is a community. Amazon is a community. TripAdvisor is a community. eBay is a community. They’re communities because they give us a chance to connect with other that share our interests while we’re doing something that’s important to us. The community aspect just evolves out of our desire to see what other people think about the things we’re interested in.

And there lies Facebook’s challenge. Being a cool community isn’t enough. Being a hot community isn’t enough. And communities online are rather amorphous. As I said above, communities can form in the click of a mouse online. We don’t need a lot of infrastructure to start connecting. And we don’t tend to stick in one place long. But..and this is a big one…if Facebook can create an open ecosystem where developers create functionality within the community rather than outside it, it has a chance. It won’t be the fact that it’s a community that keeps Facebook alive. It will be that it attracted enough functional critical mass to one place. It’s heading in the right direction, but we’ll see if it gets there soon enough.

The Wisdom of Consumer Crowds?

Following up on the theme of the rewiring of our brains, is the internet making us smarter consumers as well? There certainly seems to be evidence pointing in that direction.

A study by ScanAlert  found that the average online shopper in 2005 took 19 hours between first visiting a store and completing a transaction. In 2007, that jumped almost 79% to 34 hours. We’re taking longer to make up our minds. And we’re also doing our homework. Deloitte’s Consumer Products group recently released research saying 62 percent of consumers read consumer written product reviews on the Internet, and of those, more than 8 in 10 are directly influenced by the reviews.

In James Surowiecki’s Wisdom of Crowds, he believes that large groups, thinking independently with access to a diversity of information, will always make a better collective decision than the smartest individual in the group. Isn’t the Internet wiring this wisdom into more and more purchases? When we access these online reviews, we’re in fact coming to collective decisions about a product, built on hundreds or thousands of individual experiences. As the network expands, we benefit from the diversity of all those opinions and probably get a much more accurate picture of the quality of a product than we ever could from vendor supplied information alone. The marketplace votes for their choice, and the best product should theoretically emerge as the winner.

Of course, nothing works perfectly all of the time. As Surowiecki points out, communication can be an inexact and imperfect process, and information cascades based on faulty inputs can spread faster than ever online. But it’s also true that if a cascade leads to rapid adoption of an inferior product, we’ll discover we’ve been “had” faster and this news can also spread quicker. The connections of online make for a much faster dissemination of information based on experience than ever before, ensuring that the self correcting mechanisms of the marketplace kick into gear faster.

There’s a pass along effect happening here as well. For social networking buffs, you’ve probably heard of Granovetter’s “Weak Ties”. Social networks are made up of dense, highly connected clusters, i.e. families, close friends, co-workers. The social ties within these clusters are strong ties. But spanning the clusters are “weak ties” between more distant acquaintances. The ability for word to spread depends on these weak ties. What the internet does is exponentially increase the number of weak ties, wiring thousands of clusters together into much bigger networks than were ever possible before. This allows word of mouth to travel not only in the physical world but also in the virtual. I looked at a fascinating follow up study to Granovetter’s where Jonathan Frenzen and Kent Nakamoto also looked at the value of the information and the self interest of the individual and their “strong ties” within a cluster as a factor in how quickly word of mouth passes through a network.

Deloitte’s study graphically illustrates the weak tie/strong tie effect. 7 out of 10 of the consumers who read reviews share them with friends, family or colleagues, moving the information that comes through the weak ties of the internet into each cluster, where it spreads rapidly thanks to the efficiency of strong ties. This effect pumps up the power of word of mouth by several orders of magnitude.

But are we also becoming more socially aware in our shopping? The research by Deloitte also seems to indicate this. 4 out of 10 consumers said they were swayed by “better for you” ingredients or components, eco-friendly usage and sourcing, and eco-friendly production or packaging. The internet wires us into communities, so it’s not surprising that we become more sensitive to the collective health of those communities in the process.

What all these leads to is a better informed consumer, who’s not reliant on marketing messaging coming from the manufacturer or the retailer. And that should make us all smarter.

How Should I Compare Thee to Google?

First published September 20, 2007 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

There is a substantial amount of online speculation being generated around the question of where Facebook is going, and will it beat Google?  John Battelle is currently drafting a list of questions, including those two, to run past Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg at the Web 2.0 Summit.

At first glance, asking if Facebook can beat Google is a bit like asking if a penguin could beat an aardvark.  Beat it at what? What’s the contest? Or, perhaps more appropriately, asking whether your neighborhood can beat your table saw. Talk about comparing apples and oranges — and at least those are both fruit. Facebook is a community and Google is a tool.  But the question may not be as farfetched as it seems, because undoubtedly, as each grows and explores new monetization opportunities, more common ground will emerge between the two.

The Next “Google” Is….

To be honest, I don’t quite understand this compulsion to compare every new online business model to Google.  It’s a bit like comparing every business in your city to a successful grocery store, or a gas station.  Businesses are unique — and this is true whether you’re looking online or on Main Street.  They have different revenue engines, different objectives, different customers, and different ways to connect with those customers.  I suppose you could compare bottom-line revenues, this usually being considered the lowest common denominator with most businesses, but I’m not sure what the point is in that.  What are you trying to prove?  The success of the company?  If the supermarket makes 150 times as much as a coffee shop, does this mean the supermarket is 150 times more successful?

Facebook: A Sense of Place

Nevertheless, let’s return to the question of whether Facebook will supplant the Google juggernaut.  Let me spend a few minutes looking at the inherent differences between the Facebook model and the Google model, at least as far as they sit today.  Facebook is an online environment, a community, and as such it’s a totally different animal than Google.  The nature of the interaction with users is completely different; the intent of the site is completely different.  Facebook creates an online space, and search is only incidentally used to navigate that space.  True, as the space becomes larger and more rich, search will become more important as a core functionality within Facebook. Communities need to be functional (something that Facebook seems to get better than any of its competitors). They need infrastructure, and because searching is fundamental functionality no matter where you are online, the same will be true in the Facebook community.

Google: The Right Tool

And it’s that core functionality that has allowed Google to grow and prosper while the many predecessors to Facebook have emerged, flourished briefly and died on the vine, including Google’s own Orkut.  Google is, right now, still the Swiss army knife of the Web.  When it comes to online functionality, and in particular, finding things online, Google is the undisputed champion.  I’m currently mulling over the concept of how we navigate online and physical spaces and the fact that, while we need spatial cognitive maps to navigate our hometown, we don’t need them to navigate the Web. There is no static physical 3-dimensional space that we have to memorize routes through.  Online landmarks occupy no physical location. Rather, we have a conceptual space, and we use search to navigate based on informational proximity, rather than physical proximity (thanks to Nico Brooks for planting this virulent little “thought weed” in my rather overgrown mental garden). Google has been tremendously successful because it’s the knee-jerk choice for millions of consumers to navigate the Web, looking for stuff to buy.

Twains On A Collision Course…

So, that’s a very quick view of how the two properties diverge. But let’s look at how they share similarities. For all Google’s success as a tool, it longs to be more than that. The introduction of iGoogle, which will be driven by Google’s moves into personalization, will make it more of your own online, conceptual space, encroaching on Facebook territory. And Google wants your iGoogle portal to be the place you organize the ever-increasing functionality of the semantic Web. That objective puts it on a head-on collision with Facebook. Both are encouraging an open platform development ecosystem where developers can plug new functionality into their infrastructure.  This last note is somewhat ironic, because philosophically, Microsoft has always wanted to be the one to create the development infrastructure of the new Web. Looks like another case where the big M was left sputtering at the starting line.

Facebook, in turn, is looking to be the place where you define yourself as an individual in the new online landscape. It wants to be your home in the emerging online “cloud.” Their exponential growth is nothing short of amazing. Other than Linked In, I have never received a significant number of invitations from any social network. But in the past two months, I’ve received more friend invitations from Facebook than I have linking requests from Linked In. And these are primarily people in my age group, so they’re hopelessly old and far removed from anything resembling a “cutting edge.”

My 14-year-old daughter is aghast at the notion that I even have a Facebook account. It’s akin to me tagging along with her and her friends on a visit to the mall. Our general manager, a grandma (although a very funky grandma) is hopelessly addicted to Facebook. Obviously, there’s more here than your usual “flash in the pan” social network. As Facebook incorporates more online functionality for the individual, and Google looks to create a sense of personalized place for that same individual, expect the two to go head to head.

I’ve always thought that the importance of “favorite” places online has been somewhat disregarded. We are creatures of habit, and unless we’re looking for something out of the ordinary, we’ll probably keep treading down the same online paths over and over. That’s why every new start-up is at an immediate disadvantage, unless it can provide something sufficiently remarkable and differentiated from what previously existed. Google did this, and it appears that Facebook is on the same path. And in that way, these two do beg comparison.

Seth Godin’s Web 4.0 and the iPhone

Just as I’m doing one post about Seth’s log, he’s in the middle of making another post. Here it’s about Web 4.0 (yeah, he’s skipping a version or two). But in reading how Seth envisions the Web 4.0, it struck me how close it is to a vision I’ve had for some time (in fact, some of his examples sound eerily close to ones I’ve used in articles and presentations).

Seth’s quote:

“I’m booked on a flight from Toledo to Seattle. It’s cancelled. My phone knows that I’m on the flight, knows that it’s cancelled and knows what flights I should consider instead. It uses semantic data but it also has permission to interrupt me and tell me about it. Much more important, it knows what my colleagues are doing in response to this event and tells me. ‘Follow me’ gets a lot easier.

Google watches what I search. It watches what other people like me search. Every day, it shows me things I ought to be searching for that I’m not. And it introduces me to people who are searching for what I’m searching for.”

For those interested, here’s are a couple versions of my vision:

All Roads Lead Online: What Happens When Our Entertainment Choices Converge with Online and Become Interactive.

Tales of Mobile Woe: Looking for True Usability in a Handheld Device

It’s interesting and overwhelming to ponder. I think the next 5 years will prove to be cataclysmic. It’s all about making the Web more useful. It’s about making it ubiquitous and weaving it into our daily lives. And that’s where the introduction of revolutionary new handheld devices will shake things up dramatically. Apple’s iPhone could mark the beginning of a whole new phase of handheld functionality. As Cory Treffiletti points out in his column this week, Mobile Marketing is getting a lot more interesting with the promise of this functionality. On the flip side, Steve Smith reminds us that the mobile interfaces of most properties have a painfully long way to go.

MySpace Working to Monetize Traffic

Just last week I took a CNN analyst to task for not seeing the importance of MySpace. How quickly things come to pass on the online world. Yesterday came the announcement that News Corp is looking for a search partner to help them monetize the incredible traffic that MySpace is generating. See, create an online community and there will be ways to monetize it. Analysts, look up just a little from the quarterly returns and try to look a little further down the road.

MySpace #6 in Search, Google Still #1

ComScore just released their April search market share numbers, and for the first time, they’ve added MySpace on the list, debuting at a respectable number 6 with 43 million searches and a 0.6 share.

This is an interesting generational development. Kids always need to carve out a space for their own that doesn’t seem controlled by adults. Online, this appears to be happening at MySpace. Will this territoriality change the search habits of a new generation? I can admit I’m way past this generation, so I don’t “get” MySpace but I’ll be watching with interest anyway. 43 million searches is nothing to sneeze at.

Other numbers from the ComScore release.

Google gained market share in the US for the ninth consecutive month, with 43.1 percent. Yahoo came in second with 28 percent and MSN third with 12.9 percent. Yahoo has dropped almost 3 points in the past year, and MSN dropped 3.2 points.

Despite my admiration for Ask’s new interface, it appears that not many are sharing my enthusiasm. Their market share has also dropped slightly in the past year, from 6.1 % down to 5.9%. By the way, I can’t say I’m a big fan of the Apostolos Gerasoulis commercials that Ask is running. In their attempts to position Ask as an alternative to Google, the message comes off a little desperate. And as cute as Apostolos’s son Eli is, I’m thinking this is the kid everybody asks for help with homework, but who probably won’t get invited to many parties in high school. (I may or may not have personal experience being this type of kid). Anyway, see what you think.

It does appear that we’re searching more than ever, with total search volume up to 6.6 billion queries a month for the US. That’s a 4% increase over March.

Overall gist of the numbers? Playing it safe won’t beat the Google juggernaut. Time for some bold strategies.