Micro Persuasion

Three Reasons the Internet is Eroding Apple's Mojo

"Rotten to the Core" by Pupski on Flickr.

I have been an Apple fan and a Mac user much of my adult life. I bought my first Mac in 1992 and have owned half a dozen since. I wrote for Mac magazines in the mid-1990s. I waited on line for many hours twice for the iPhone and I am writing this post on a MacBook Air that I bought sight unseen last year after the Jobsnote.

However, after yesterday's disappointing keynote, I am convinced the Internet is slowly eroding Apple's PR mojo. They are still having a good run, but the times are changing. Here are three reasons why Apple may not make the turn like it did before. There's a lot of lessons here for PR professionals.

1) Bloggers and Citizen Journalists

In the old days, Apple could keep a tight lip on the ship. Steve Jobs has built a no-leak culture since he arrived back in 1996. Today, however, with eyes everywhere and contract manufacturing in China, that's getting harder.

The bloggers are getting pretty good at least at directionally writing about what's coming. The professional journalist are feeding off of it and doing more fact checking of their own. By the time the press invitations are emailed, there's not a lot of oomph left - especially since the iPhone debuted. If you think about it, that was the last time Apple was able to shock and awe.

What does this mean? That expectations are high and Apple can't meet them since the launch of the iPhone.

2) The Rock-Star CEO Era is Over

For years we lived in an age where CEOs were like rock-stars. Edison, Henry Ford, Jack Welch, Sam Walton, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs - all are rock stars.

Today, however, employees and "a person like me" are far more trusted, according to data from the Edelman Trust Barometer. This isn't Apple's fault. It's just times are changing. Recent CEO scandals haven't helped. More importantly, Web 2.0 and social software is giving rise to individual voices and personal brands.

Apple is still living in age where its CEO or executive team are the only people who speak for the company. Compare that to Google, meanwhile, who have an army credible faces in the community like Matt Cutts. Got a Gmail security problem? Matt is on the case. Got a flaming Macbook? Email Steve and pray he isn't too obnoxious.

3) Cloud Computing and Netbooks Erode Apple's Edge

As an early adopter, I am a huge enthusiast of web-based applications. About 75-90% of my needs are handled in a browser. I do all my writing in Google Docs. I edit photos using Picnik or Photoshop.com. The only desktop apps besides a browser that I still use are Microsoft Entourage and PowerPoint. (Microsoft and Adobe are clients of my employer, Edelman.)

Now I am rare. A lot of you still love desktop apps but I think that's going to change. In the next few years you will do more of your computing online. And that means you will be able to be just fine using a netbook or even a phone. The category is still emerging and many are still 1.0 products. But I expect that to change and if the current economic climate continues, then it could erode Apple's notebook share.

"But Apple has web-apps," you say. "What about Mobile Me and the new iWork.com?" They're gorgeous, for sure. However, functionally, they don't hold a candle to Google or Adobe's web apps. And I think Microsoft's products here for sure will be strong. In three years iLife and iWork will have to be entirely cloud-based and the edge goes to the first movers.

That's one person's view of the situation. There are others. What's yours? (For more, see this thread on Friendfeed.)

Twitter Quitter Not Bitter

Over on Authenticities, the Edelman Digital weblog, I wrote about Hugh Macleod's abrupt, yet cordial departure from Twitter and whether a mass exodus is brewing. If you're not subscribed I highly recommend it. We're blogging daily. I and I have been posting there weekly. You can get the feed here.

(On an unrelated note, I picked up this great book on how the New York Post writes headlines. I want that job in my next life. The headline on this blog post was my first attempt. Like it?)

You, the 2.0 Citizen, Is Time's Person of the Year

Well, it looks like we were off by two years. Compare the two images below. The one on the right was created by Hypergene back in 2004. The one on the left came out today. Eerily similar eh? We needed the two years. This is a shift that's bigger than blogging and citizen journalism.

 

Yes, "You" were named this year's "Person of the Year" for 2006 tonight by Time magazine. Citing the explosive growth and influence of user-generated Internet content such as blogs, video-file sharing sites and social networks and digital democracy, the magazine picked us this year Reuters reports.

"For seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, Time's Person of the Year for 2006 is you," Lev Grossman wrote. 

More on Time's Web site: cover story, sidebar on 15 who matter, story on citizen journalists, the Web 2.0 boom, taxonomy and a Second Life piece. Let's give ourselves a big round of applause!!!

::Later: Josh Hallett has a different take saying the cover should read "Them" as in I don't know anyone who posts on YouTube. That's all them kids.

Essential Yahoo Search Shortcuts from A to Z

Do you use Yahoo's Open Search Shortcuts? If not then you should check into it. This is one of the handiest hacks on the Web and I bet a lot of people don't tap into it.

Using Yahoo Open Search Shortcuts (OSS) you can turn Yahoo into the ultimate "one box" search tool. You won't need to go anywhere else to search your favorite sites - even Google or MSN Search. Using OSS any Yahoo search box - even one built into your browser - can become a tool that lets you directly query other sites. This is especially invaluable for PR professionals who every day have more sites we need to mine for insights.

Yahoo OSS lets you set up special trigger words that begin with an exclamation point. These tell Yahoo to execute a certain type of special search on the search term that follows the trigger word. For example you can set it up so that "!G (search term)" queries Google or "!digg (search term)" digs digg.

Yahoo provides a tool that makes setting these up rather easy, but I am going to save you time by listing my favorites here from A to Z. All you need to do is click on these links and Yahoo will ask you if you want to add these to your shortcuts. (You need to be logged into Yahoo first.)

!a - Ask.com

!b - Bloglines

!c - CNET News.com

!d - digg

!e - eBay

!f - Flickr Tags

!g - Google

!h - Help.com (tech assistance)

!i - Interactive Marketing Search

!j - The Wall Street Journal

!k - Google Books

!l - Linked In

!m - MSN

!n - Google News

!o - Odeo

!p - Google Images (p is for pics)

!q - Yahoo Answers (q is for question)

!r - Rollyo Searchrolls

!s - Search.com Metasearch

!t - Technorati

!u - University Search

!v - Google Video

!wp - Wikipedia

!x - del.icio.us (there's too many good d's so I use x)

!y - You Tube

!z - Dictionary (you try finding a good one for Z!)

Tags: yahoo, yahoosearch, searchshortcuts, lifehacks, google, msn, youtube, digg, del.icio.us

YouTube by the Numbers

Lee Gomes from the Wall Street Journal dives head-first into YouTube and dug up some fascinating data...

* In a single month the number of videos on the site grew 20% to 6.1 million

* YouTube has some 45 terabytes of videos

* Video views reached 1.73 billion

* 70% of YouTube's registered users are American, roughly 50% are under 20

* The total time people spent watching YouTube since it started last year is 9,305 years

Tags: youtube

Test Your Site's Link Popularity with Socialmeter

Socialmeter, which I spotted on del.icio.us, scans several major link-tracking sites and spits back an analysis of your URL's popularity. Currently they track links on del.icio.us, digg, Furl, Google, Netscape, Reddit, Technorati and a handful of others. The result is an aggregate count of most of the social links to a Web site and then some. It's handy not just for blogs, but for brand and corporate sites too. There's even a Socialmeter bookmarklet. Drag this link to your toolbar and use it on any URL.

Marketers: Think Like a VC

The following is also my column in this week's Advertising Age. I have added links to provide additional context.

Marketers: Think Like a VC

You'll Look Like a Genius for Spotting the Next YouTube and Build Audience Trust

When it comes to social media, there's one -- and only one -- thing you can bank on: No one puts down roots. This is only exacerbated in a flat world, where anyone can create tomorrow's hot site in a basement for pennies on what it used to cost.

To test this theory, I went back and looked at ComScore's list of top 50 digital-media properties for 2001. It is littered with community sites that are nowhere to be found on the most recent edition of the list: FortuneCity.com, Homestead.com, MadBlast.com and more. To be fair, there are also a few that have had staying power, such as iVillage and eBay. Still others have become part of larger portals.

For another view, I polled data from audience-trend tracker Alexa.com on the social-media class of 2004. The data, although not as statistically accurate as ComScore's, also point to the transient nature of online audiences. Friendster, once the "it" online community, saw its page views fall sharply in 2005, only to rebound dramatically this year. Meetup.com, another community, peaked in the first quarter of 2005 and has been largely flat since. Both are overshadowed by today's giants -- although judging by the hype a couple of years ago, the then-prevailing thought was that they might be giants.

Today a class of sites such as Facebook and YouTube are the ruling parties. Once they achieve a critical mass, they command a premium for advertising. Many of these started as home-grown projects but became huge businesses virtually overnight. The collaborative Digg news site, for example, is now the web's 24th-largest, according to BusinessWeek. It cost $1,000 to launch in December 2004.

Will these sites continue to ascend? History says some will, others won't and the rest will be acquired by larger players. With new communities popping up every day, my advice to advertisers is to get in early to build trust with the audience. You want your brand to be seen as an enabler of the community's hopes and dreams, not someone who's just betting on the fastest horse.

In other words, think like a venture capitalist even as you keep your marketer hat on. Sometimes you'll look like a genius for getting in early on the next YouTube; other times you'll miss. But the key is to remember that audiences are always on the move. Invest in building the conversation where they're going, not to where they've been.

Social Nets Creep on Portals, Study Sez

Richard MacManus has published some fascinating data from Compete that shows how the social nets are approaching the traffic of the big portals. They found in June, two out of every three Americans visited a social networking site.

I don't doubt that the trend is true. However, the research methodology appears to be flawed. So I question the statistics.

The problem lies in how Compete defines what's a social network. They identify ten in their chart. One of them is Blogger, which is part of Google. So technically they counted some of Google's traffic twice.

::Later: Compete writes in that they only counted Blogger once and did not count Orkut either when figuring Google's footprint

Nielsen: Social Media Sites Booming

Nielsen NetRatings reports that sites that empower people to participate or create content are driving half of the top 10 fastest growing web brands in the U.S. These include Wikipedia and Flickr.

Del.icio.us: the Few, the Proud, the Geeky

Hitwise publishes some aggregate traffic data on del.icio.us, a social bookmarking site owned by Yahoo. I love del.icio.us. Its appeal and influence are growing. Note del.icio.us' growing news footprint, according to Topix.net. Also, check its pulse on Google Trends.

Nevertheless, despite this surge, the site is still small and largely for geeks - at least right now. However, these geeks are all highly influential. Here's some of the stats Hitwise published:

* In July del.icio.us ranked at number 6,793 among all sites in terms of visits
* Over the period 59% of visits to Del.icio.us were from males, and 41% of its visits were from those between the ages of 25-34
* Del.icio.us also has a large skew towards users with household incomes between $100k and $150k per year (36% vs 13% for the online online population)

Widgetbox to Enable Picture-in-Picture Marketing

Widgetbox, which right now is in private beta, is in a word, a winner. (OK two words.) Using Widgetbox not only can you find great widgets for your blog, but you can create and share them relatively easily if you know a bit of code. It's akin to TypePad's platform but open to everyone.

Most of the widgets that have been uploaded into the Widgetbox site come from individuals but they pull data from Web 2.0 sites, such as Flickr and digg. What I am most excited about is the potential for marketers to launch widgets and use Widgetbox as a distribution platform. There could even be sponsored widget placement revenue in it for Widgetbox if it takes off with bloggers.

WidgetBox is an outstanding platform for experimenting with picture-in-picture marketing. Marketers should be uploading widgets that in some way help bloggers enhance their sites or make money. At the same time, we should be finding ways to integrate some of the user widgets back into our own marketing sites. Through this share-and-share-alike model, everyone wins. Good stuff.

Tags: widgets, pictureinpicture, pictureinpicturemarketing

Reddit Results in RSS Readers

Reddit is a collaboratively filtered news site that's similar to digg but does not nearly get the same kind of press. However, if you're lucky to have someone upload a link to your site and it takes off - watch out. The Reddit Effect is huge.

This is exactly what happened to the LifeDev blog. What's interesting is that the boost he saw from Reddit wasn't a one-time deal. It gave him an increase in RSS feed readers. Oh and by the way, his blog post about his experience earned him a return trip to the Reddit home page.

Also be sure to check out this link from juxtaviews. It's a new interview with the Reddit team.

Social Media Celebrity Watching

Over the last few months I have been using a new metaphor to help explain the social media universe. I basically say it consists of:

* Galaxies: centers of gravity that attract the like-minded - e.g. YouTube, Digg and Second Life
* Stars: online celebs, such as Robert Scoble, Thomas Hawk, AskaNiinja, etc.
* Planets: individuals who follow the stars, yet are influential in their own right
* Shooting Stars: insta-celebs that create viral videos or memes and then fade
* Comets: recurring themes, such as transparency, veracity and entitlement
* Asteroids: desolate, lifeless places with negative energy — think splogs

My advice from there is to explore the universe, make friends and build colonies. One of the hardest things to do is to find the stars that are relevant to you in the galaxies you care about. Note, that this doesn't always mean A-listers. It could mean finding the 60 people that have the most influence in your area of focus regardless of how many Technorati links or friends they have.

Increasingly I am encouraged that the big social networking sites (e.g. galaxies) and others are making it easier for PR pros and marketers to find the stars that are most influential on certain topics. For example, digg has the Top Diggers page. Another is Share Your OPML. Although it focuses on a relatively small universe of tech influencers, it is rich with data about who reads/influences who. Flickr Inspector helps us learn more about Flickr users. And finally Wikipedia publishes lots of great data. The Globe and Mail profiled the most prolific contributor.

Today we got another big chunk of data. This time it's from del.icio.us. Over on the Yahoo Search blog, they announced that del.icio.us is now publishing lists of the most active users by tags. For example, you can scan this list on the Flickr page to see who's posting most frequently about the photo site. Even better, I can pull up data for brands. This page shows me the most influential del.icio.us users who post on Apple.

So what do you do with this data? You use it to find your evangelists and your vigilantes. Basically, PR professionals should figure out how to make friends and build colonies with the evangelists while also engaging the vigilantes in dialogue. Data is your friend in the process.

Tags: del.icio.us

YouTube's Share of Traffic Larger than MySpace

YouTube is looming larger than MySpace, according to Alexa data analyzed by The Guardian. YouTube has a 3.9% share of all Alexa Toolbar users' traffic compared with 3.35% for MySpace. This is a sample that some say is representative of the broader online population. Others disagree. BusinessWeek has some additional stats, including these doozies: the site now accounts for 60% of all videos watched online, 65,000 new videos are uploaded daily and 100 million are viewed.

Tags: youtube, myspace

Google is Blind to Shifts in 2006 Like Yahoo Was in 2001

In a wide-ranging piece on MarketWatch, Ben Charny talks to a number of researchers and financial analysts who are worried that Google is getting trounced by upstarts in three of the hottest sectors of the web - blogging, video sharing and social networking. In particular, the analysts interviewed are concerned that once Google's search revenues cool off, there will be nothing to fall back on. The article also notes that Google has had no home runs outside of its core search offerings, a common meme in the media these days.

If this all sounds familiar, it should. Back in 2000 and 2001 Yahoo CEO Tim Koogle took heat on a similar topic - Yahoo's dependency on banner advertising. He waited too long to diversify the portal's revenue stream. Then, the bottom dropped out of Internet advertising and he lost his job. In 2002, incoming CEO Terry Semel set a course to add new revenue streams beyond display ads, which Yahoo did through subscriptions, partnerships and acquisitions. Most notably, Semel was able to turn Yahoo quickly so that it capitalized on a brand new form of advertising - contextual search.

History is repeating itself and Google would be wise to learn from Yahoo's experience. The cacophony over click fraud has never been louder. At the same time, marketers are beginning to pony up huge sums to reach audiences that are gravitating towards social networks. The center of gravity in online marketing is beginning its slow shift to an entirely new format that Google is currently not monetizing. It has some great assets here, but it better figure out how to start making money from them. For now, Google seems to be asleep at the wheel much like Yahoo was back in 2001.

Technorati Tags: Google, Yahoo

Social Media Power Players

The Wall Street Journal profiles the Moguls of New Media. We're not talking about the entrepreneurs here who created galaxies like YouTube and the like, but the stars who populate them. 

Netscape Needs to Find its Calling

I was too tied up last week to blog about the whole Netscape debacle. Kevin Rose from digg weighs in on it here. I have, however, discussed it with the media on a couple of occasions so I thought this would be a good time to share my thoughts.

Overall, I do think Jason Calacanis' attempt to court the influential residents of his competitors' sites with cash, while noble, screams desperation for Netscape and appears short-sighted. My reaction today is consistent with how I felt initially: AOL is not giving Jason the time he needs to build a community and they are impatient. Such impatience leads to poor business decisions.

Nevertheless, I do think the new Netscape will succeed, but it's going to take time. Although digg's rise is nothing short of remarkable, it was spurred by the community. The digg team didn't grow it. The people did. What Kevin and crew did was create the means for the community to do its thing. In this case that "thing" was a desire to coalesce around a common passion - technology - in a unique way that was simple, yet engaging.

Netscape needs to find its calling. What will it be - politics, health? Who knows? The community will tell us. Once it appears, Jason and the Netscape team then should quickly build new enhancements that help the audience share content in that vertical in a way they can't anywhere else. Once this happens, Netscape will become a successful site. But paying people to come over is not the answer. That's like bringing Dom Perignon to a frat house party. It might look good, but it's out of place.

Technorati Tags: digg, Jason Calacanis, Kevin Rose, memediggers, Netscape, AOL

The Next Giant is an Old Friend

Danny Sullivan, writing for ClickZ, says don't look now but Yahoo Answers might be a social phenomenon the likes YouTube or MySpace. As of June 3, Yahoo Answers is growing nearly at the same rate as YouTube, even if the site is far smaller. It has surpassed Answers.com as the number three reference site. I am rooting for Yahoo Answers to become a force to be reckoned with. Yahoo, perhaps more than anyone else on the planet, knows how to serve advertisers.

Technorati Tags: Yahoo Answers

Digg Weather Report

Richard MacManus has a great rundown of digg trends. His findings...

* The top diggers have the best chance at getting a story on the home page
* Digg users also have their favored blogs and websites, which get a disproportionate amount of attention than other less fortunate sites
* Sunday is the least active day and Thursday the most active
* The percentage of submitted stories that make it to the digg homepage during the week is around 15-19%

Fifteen Things I Learned on del.icio.us

Regulars here know that I am an avid del.icio.us user. Not only do I file my bookmarks away here, but I scan the site regularly to find new things to blog.

What you might not know is that del.icio.us can tell you a lot about how tech-savvy influencers perceive blogs, brands, Web sites, pop culture icons and more by running URLs through the service. This will tell you a) how many people have saved a particular link and b) how they are labeled by the community through tags.

Some notes: First, you can speed this up by grabbing this bookmarklet and dragging it to your favorites. Use it to check any URL. Second, every URL filed away in del.icio.us has its own RSS feed at the bottom of the page so that you can track the specific link. This is a must for all tech brands. Further, if you're in advertising or PR, be sure to run your campaign microsite URLs/media coverage links through the del.icio.us URL filter. You'll get great data for reports. Last but not least, keep in mind that the del.icio.us community is more tech savvy than most so the more geeky the link, the deeper the data. Also, this feature is sometimes slow to load.

So with that, here's a sample of 15 things I learned from the collective psyche that is del.icio.us. (Yea Seth, more diggbait)

• The MacBook Pro is on a lot of people's wish list
• Everyone gets that TechCrunch is about Web 2.0 and PaidContent.org is about media, but people have very different perspectives on what Fark largely covers. Some say news, others say humor.
• People who bookmarked Gnomedex were looking forward to seeing Adam Curry (a 2005 speaker) and to network
• One of Flickr's greatest attractions is its cavernous storage
• People use Odeo to search for music nearly as much as they do podcasts
• Some people found Subservient Chicken slightly disturbing. They called it strange or weird.
• AdAge kills AdWeek and some even tag it "PR"
• Drudge Report is considered a blog by many
• More people appear to be interested in what Mark Cuban has to say about business rather than sports
• The number one tag for comcast.com - bills
• Post Secret is art
• Dooce is funny
• My blog is tagged marketing more than it is PR, while Om Malik's broadband blog is tagged Web 2.0 more than it is telecom
• People perceive Bloglines more as a place for blogs than for news
• Best Buy is bookmarked far more than Circuit City or Frys.

If you find gems, leave them in comments. (UPDATE: Someone added this blog post to del.icio.us so you can track it here.)

Tags: del.icio.us