Micro Persuasion

The Promise and Peril of Ubiquitous Community

The following is also my column in next week's AdAge.

Over the last five years I have been asked countless times: "Steve, what's the next hot online community?" It seems as though everybody is on the lookout for the successor to MySpace, Twitter or Facebook. Nobody, even in a difficult economic climate, wants to be viewed as a latecomer.

Perhaps as a defense mechanism to avoid being wrong myself, I now give a boilerplate answer that I believe can last. In short, the next big community is not a single destination. Rather, it is going to be everywhere. To paraphrase Forrester analyst Charlene Li, social networking is becoming "like air."

She writes on her blog:

"I thought about my grade-school kids, who in 10 years will be in the midst of social network engagement. I believe they (and we) will look back to 2008 and think it archaic and quaint that we had to go to a destination like Facebook or LinkedIn to 'be social.'

"Instead, I believe that in the future, social networks will be like air. They will be anywhere and everywhere we need and want them to be."

This represents a significant shift. For the past 15 years, online communities have primarily existed as stand-alone destinations rather than the web's equivalent of running water or electricity.

The problem, however, is that this model can't scale. Tastes change and people are always migrating to trendier sites-especially as their friends do. As a result, the Internet amber is littered with fossilized communities that once dominated. These former stalwarts include AOL, Angelfire, TheGlobe.com, GeoCities and Tripod.

Community today is a different animal. People now expect it to be part of virtually every online experience. Most media companies now allow users to leave comments or even create profiles. Hundreds of thousands of brands, NGOs and individuals have set up their own social networks on Ning.com. The entire web is going social.

Now, however, connective tissue is emerging to bring these individual points of lights together as virtual constellations. Google and Facebook have each launched systems that allow sites to plug into their architectures to turn them social. The tools equip site owners to enable visitors to tap their existing networks and connections in a way that adds value to the total experience. So imagine a Facebook user who can easily see on Digg.com which stories his or her friends voted up. Or a non-technical site developer who, with a few small lines of code, can add utilities such as reviews, members' galleries and message boards to their sites or applications.

As exciting as this is, the transition of community from a handful of big reach sites to a ubiquitous platform is incredibly disruptive for marketers. It essentially makes social network advertising, which according to anecdotal evidence is already a mixed bag, even more difficult. (And thus monetizing social networks.)

The end result is that marketers will need to shift the way they approach communities. Static advertising is no longer viable. The solution is collaboration. Marketers will need to tap these emerging social operating systems to build meaningful connections through their sites and others before competitors do.

Participation is no longer optional and the fist movers who dedicate resources will win.

Even if Twitter is Just a Geek Haven, It's Still Very Influential

There's been an interesting discussion over the last few days about Twitter's reach. WSJ reporter Kara Swisher surveyed her dinner party and found out that no one there uses the micro-blogging site. Meanwhile Gina Trapani on Lifehacker is running a survey asking if Web 2.0 benefits only the tech elite.

Now let's look at the data. According to figures just out from Hitwise, Twitter is the 439th largest social networking site and 4309 overall. To be sure, growth is booming. But the site is still niche.

So all of the signs generally point the same way. Most of the social networking and online communities are definitely geek havens. MySpace, Facebook and YoutTube are three that have gone mainstream. So does that mean these smaller sites, like Twitter, are not worthy of a brand's time? Hardly.

Geeks are by far more influential than any other online contingency, except the big media. Geeks pass the puck from Twitter to blogs back to Twitter. Eventually it hits Techmeme, Saul Hansell at the Times takes notice and then the whole world knows.

That's why smart companies like JetBlue and Zappos are legitimately engaging on Twitter. It's becoming a front line for customer service. At a minimum, every consumer facing company should be monitoring the chatter. Even better, participating can cut problems off at the pass or even better foster evangelists. The numbers may never tell this story. For more, see Chris WInfield's mini case study.

An All Too Convenient Truth: Many Marketers Pollute the Web

Photo credit: Copenhagen Industry Pollution #1 by Miguel A. Lopes "Migufu"

Earth Day is around the corner and a lot of marketers are thinking about the sustainability of our planet. Some are recognizing that doing good also helps business. Edelman's Good Purpose study found that 73% of consumers are prepared to pay more for environmentally friendly products.

However, it's not just the environment that is endangered by toxins. The atmosphere we breathe online is too is being threatened by pollution - from marketers. The all too convenient truth is that it's very easy for advertisers to pollute the web with their garbage. Most often, that's not their intent. But it's the end result and it's reaching an epidemic proportion. Now business needs to take the same approach online as it has done offline through corporate social responsibility (Jason Calacanis echoed a similar theme recently.)

First let's look at the the obvious ways marketers poison the web. These all intend to game the system ...

• Spam: 94% of all email is spam (Postini)
• Splogs: 53% of all blog pings is spam, including 64% of those in English (UMBC)
• Click Fraud: Increased last year by 15% (Click Forensis)

Still, there's more. In subtle ways marketers are contaminating the Internet without even knowing it by spewing millions of meaningless messages across thousands of sites. This may be contributing to the slow down. They're not adding value to your experience or working to help you meet your goals in a very meaningful way.

Consider these popular techniques ...

• Banner Ads: A lot of money is going here but click-through rates remain abysmal and their overall branding value is being questioned. Many of them just litter the web and get in the way of what you want to do. Eye-tracking studies in the past have revealed "banner blindness."
• Social Network Advertising: eMarketer predicts advertising on social networks will reach $2.2 billion this year. However, traditional display approaches to date have not performed. As Ian Schaffer from from Deep Focus noted, marketers need to dig in and figure out how to make the experience better. This means what does work is creating authentic content, widgets/applications and more that people pull because they add value to the community. (Note: MySpace, a major social network, is an Edelman client.)
• Social Media Optimization: This needs to be watched like a hawk. As I have said before, if you participate and add value you are rewarded with Google Juice - and so much more. If you just set up sites and spam social nets to get links, then I am sorry, you're bad.

Despite all the money that's flowing online, most marketers completely miss the boat on what the web really can do for them. As I have talked about before, the Internet isn't just a communications medium. It works best when it's used as a platform for open collaboration. This means taking a PR-centric approach.

This means companies and consumers need to partner toward shared outcomes. This can be as simple as "we want to be entertained" to "we want to find the best world-changing idea." The latter is what American Express will unleash again later this year with its Members Project.

The web is facing it's own global warming crisis as marketers continue to pollute it. Consumers are voting with their clicks and eyeballs by engaging with authentic content that adds value, while ignoring the rest. That's good news that shows maybe we'll solve this crisis, even as business continues to tackle the larger issues that impact our planet.

Later:: Bryan Person asks if clueless PR pitches are part of the problem. Heck ya.

Trust in Peers Trumps the "A-List," Study Finds

There's an ongoing debate online and in marketing circles as well over who "matters": the super node influencers or basically anyone that a particular peer group looks to for information, entertainment, inspiration and more.

This meme got kicked around in the 'sphere a few weeks back when Duncan Watts released some research that contradicts Malcolm Gladwell's theory outlined in The Tipping Point. Today, however, there's new data that to me may just reveal that Watts is right. The key factor, once again, all comes down to trust. This comes as more of the action shifts to micro communities like Twitter or Friendfed and the quality of blog content, some say, slides downhill.

Mediapost reports that a new study from Pollara found that people who engage in social networks and communities put far more trust in friends and family who are online than in popular bloggers, or strangers with 10,000 MySpace "friends." Nearly 80% said they were very or somewhat more likely to consider buying products recommended by real-world friends and family, while only 23% reported being very or somewhat likely to consider a product pushed by "well-known bloggers."

This new batch of data largely backs up what my employer's Edelman Trust Barometer found earlier this year. Some 58% of opinion elites 35-64 in 18 countries said they trust "a person like me." Meanwhile, only 14% trust bloggers - a figure that has largely remained flat since 2006. (See chart below from our latest study.)

Source: 2008 Edelman Trust Barometer

On a similar thread, Louis Gray, who's blog by the way is amazing, crunched some numbers and he found that the top tech blogs extended their reach in feed subscribers as well as on the TechMeme leaderboard. That may be true, but who cares?

The question of targeting super nodes vs. smaller groups is all coming down to trust. While the marketplace - both marketers and publishers - continue to focus on reach, they are missing the big picture. Trust is by far a more important metric, one that clearly rules when it comes to influence.

Three Internet Careers That Soon Won't Exist

Earlier this year the New York Times detailed how careers in medicine and law - formerly bankable lifetime gigs - have lost their luster. College grads instead are pouring their resources into trying to create (or join) the next Facebook or MySpace. Maybe it's time to rethink those plans. Digital is going to become part of almost everyone's job.

After climbing to the stratosphere, jobs in Web 2.0 are way off their peak. The following Indeed.com chart shows a steep decline in listings that mention social networking, Web 2.0, Ajax and blogs. Naturally, the macroeconomic climate has a lot to do with this. However, when you look at other jobs that are historically sensitive - such as shipping, advertising or public relations - the slide isn't as dramatic. This (arguably) indicates that perhaps there's still a lot of air in the Internet specialist job market.

"social networking," ajax, "web 2.0," blogs Job Trends

"social networking jobs - " ajax jobs - "web 2.0 jobs - " blogs jobs

The web has finally become the dominant marketing and media platform and where everyone is largely focusing their resources. It's "the new normal." To me, this means that there will be less of a need for digital specialists across many industries. Some of these jobs won't exist in their current form within a couple of years. They will be integrated into broader roles. Everyone will be expected to know how to navigate the online landscape if they want to have a thriving career.

Here are three such jobs that will soon be integrated into other roles...

Social Media Consultant, Social Media Manager, etc.

Things don't fit into tidy little boxes they way they used to. My friend Dave Armano wisely calls this the Fuzzy Tail. He does a good job reminding us of specialist jobs that were big once - like blacksmithing - and are now no more.

On that note, let's take a look at social media. It doesn't have hard edges. For example, is a site like Engadget social media or just media? The New York Times has dozens of blogs. Does that mean it's no longer media? Beats me. Corporate HR will have an even harder time discerning.

This naturally leads to the next question - who should "manage" these sites? Is it the social media specialist or someone in PR with specific vertical sector expertise who also gets digital? My strong feeling is that it's the latter. (Then again, I work for a big PR firm so I should advise you to take this with a grain of salt.)

Net I believe that hiring someone just to "manage" social media is a luxury that companies will integrate into broader marketing communication roles.

Internet Advertising Sales, Online Advertising Sales, etc.

There's no doubt that the Internet is the future of advertising. Last week Advertising Age even dedicated its entire issue to digital marketing. Their coverage included a big section on careers.

Despite the recession (if we're in one), online ad sales jobs continue to climb . However, soon all advertising will be managed via digital technology and platforms, even if they end up running in terrestrial media. This means it will become very difficult to discern selling digital ads from just plain old ads. Clients will want to manage and measure their integrated campaigns through a single point of contact or channel and figure out how offline/online work together.

Just as onlne/print newsrooms have been integrated, so will ad sales. This means that media companies will want people who are cross-trained and thus the need for "online sales" specialists as they are known now will wane.

Digital Talent Agents

During the AdAge Digital Conference last week, a Digital Agent with a major talent agency talked about how they have a group of people who crawl the web in search of undiscovered musicians, artists, etc. These agents then pair promising amateurs with Hollywood or branded entertainment projects. I last wrote about this three years ago. Then it was emerging business. Now, however, it is becoming the norm.

Just as with social media consultants and online ad sales, the need for such specialists will soon fade. Every agent will need to know how to identify and talent from the web. The line between digital and traditional will be obliterated as more amateurs recognize that they can market themselves using the web and will forgo going on auditions.

Next up I will cover three emerging digital career tracks that I think will be hot in the years ahead; jobs that at least I think will have staying power and may remain specialist gigs.

Historically, Most Online Communities Haven't Stuck

The following is cross-posted on a new blog I am contributing to called Authenticities. It's the official blog of my employer, Edelman Digital, which we officially unveiled yesterday.

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We're barely into the second decade of the the Net's development. Unlike the first ten years when corporations built the web, over the next decade the Internet will largely be created by the people for the people via online communities.

This means that the phrase "public relations" is (finally) taking on a literal meaning. It is our industry's charter to help clients navigate online communities and build authentic, meaningful relationships with their stakeholders. However, the challenge is if you blink, the entire vista will change.

Most marketers prefer to gravitate to the big hubs. These include Edelman clients like MSN Spaces and MySpace, as well as Facebook, Bebo, LinkedIn and a host of others that have lots of eyeballs. Any of these sites can serve as strong venues for marketing programs.

What we take for granted, however, is that they will be around in the long term. On the Internet, churn is constant.

Historically, online communities have perpetually come and go. The Internet Archive amber is littered with fossilized communities that once dominated, much the way the T-Rex roamed during the Mesozoic era. These include former stalwarts such as Angelfire, The Well, TheGlobe.com, GeoCities, Tripod and Friendster.

Only a handful of community sites over the last dozen years have had staying power. If you study them you'll find moats to protect them from competitors and fickle users. These barriers to entry include peer-to-peer commerce (in the case of Edelman client eBay), robust user reviews (Amazon.com) and deep entrenchment in vertical markets (BlackPlanet.com).

The online universe is about to grow even more complex, making it harder for some sites to maintain their dominance. Over the next several years social networking and community will become less about specific venues and more of a river that runs through the entire web. As Cisco's Dan Scheinman says, community will define not only how content is created, but also how it is consumed.

This means that although it will get harder for marketers to achieve scale, community engagement will become a much more efficient and effective way to engage an audience. This requires a shift in thinking though as community becomes like running water. The takeaway here is never bet against change - it's constant on the web.

Comparing SMM SEO and PR Tactics is Pure Poppycock

Last week I wrote about how some in the search engine optimization profession (not all) are openly espousing how to basically turn social media sites into heat seeking missiles for Google Juice - and not much else. Apparently there is a whole cottage industry called "Social Media Marketing" (SMM) that analyzes how to use social media for SEO purposes. That should give anyone pause.

Given my accusations, immediately and understandably many commenters jumped on the public relations industry for also trying to use social media to pull the wool over people's eyes. That's complete poppycock. There is no comparison. The reason is that over the last several years the PR industry has largely learned its lessons - often the hard way.

Call me an optimist, but in 2008 most in the PR business take a clean approach to social media. A key reason is that when our clients engage, their participation needs to be transparent for it to be credible. If they fail at following the common law of the community, which has happened in the past, you'll be the first to know about it. You can't always say the same so-called SMM SEO types. Their work is sometimes far harder to sleuth.

I want to discuss this a bit more by addressing some of the comments about PR that came back in response to my post...

Danny Sullivan: "the next time you're dealing with some client asking for visibility, just tell them that hey, if they have a great brand, good PR will be a byproduct."

Positive PR is definitely an outcome of good products, but not always. Public relations professionals play a key role in helping brands identify their core genius and to tell that story. The ultimate arbiter here is the public - either directly or through the media.

We always need to convince people of a product or service's worth, no matter how good it is. If we're encouraging brands to participate in social networks, blogs and social bookmark sharing sites then the bar is even higher. They must add their value before anyone will care.

Social Media Marketing through SEO, on the other hand, often aims to game the system for Google's sake. It can be difficult for someone to discern the role it played in generating Google Juice.

Aaron Wall: "Since when is a PR guy concerned about how wrong it is to game media? I mean...I spoke at a PR agency once, and their walls were plastered with framed media articles that favored their clients. How is that any different then a blogger linking to my content because they like it?"

Public relations professionals - the ones who do their job well at least - never game the media. In fact, every journalist would take issue with that statement. In the social web, the bar is even higher. If good content attracts legit blog links, then that's a completely valid approach.

Chris Kieff: I think the PR industry is just as dirty as the SEO industry. For every 8 of us good ones in both PR and SEO there are 2 lousy ones who give us all a bad name.

Every profession has people who are white hats and black hats. However, my contention is that it's very hard to uncover the nefarious SEO types while it's pretty easy to do so in PR. Fear of humiliation is acting as a deterrent in PR.

Andy Beal: "What about the multitude of PR firms that flood social media with company profiles of their clients–all with the sole intent of building their brand recognition. They want to 'appear' as if they’re engaging their customers, but really they’re just jumping in so they can figure out how to push their brand on users."

I believe these people will all be exposed if they are not adding value - period. We (the community and the industry) need to police these egregious programs, no matter where they come from. And that's happening.

Book Excerpt: Online Marketing Heroes

On March 10 WIley & Sons is going to publish a new book by Michael Miller called Online Marketing Heroes: Interviews with 25 Successful Online Marketing Gurus. The book features interviews with a host of digital marketing experts, including yours truly.

Wiley has graciously approved the posting of the chapter that features an interview with me. It covers my background, thoughts on blogging, PR, digital marketing and my work at Edelman. You can download it here as a PDF.

Sound bites...

* Technology works best when it takes on a do-it-yourself character—and when it becomes free

• Google’s free search has replaced the PR professional’s traditional paid research tools.

• Generation Y is abandoning earlier technology, such as email, in favor of text messaging, instant messaging, and social network communication

• To take advantage of social networking, figure out where you andyour community overlap and how they want to communicate

• Going forward, the concept of community is the common element running through all online media and technologies

An Experiment in Lifesourcing

What if you could tap into your social net (or even strangers) and ditch time intensive information tasks that you have to do in favor of the higher value stuff that you're best at? After an experiment in "lifesourcing" some work to India, I believe such a scenario might become common in the business world or even more widely - one day. Here's my story and where I think this could lead.

I first heard about lifesourcing - e.g. personal outsourcing - last summer when I read Tim Ferriss' runaway bestseller, The Four Hour Workweek. His mantra is to free yourself up to do the stuff you and only you are best at. Seth Godin covers a similar theme in The Dip.

Though it's very early, my gut says that it's conceivable that as people cope with the Attention Crash, they will zero in on their core competencies and seek to offload the rest in order to become more productive and remain competitive in the workplace. There are several forces at work here: the massive and independent-thinking Gen Y workforce, big time disruptions in IT, the growing ubiquity of social networking and peer-to-peer platforms and the rise of a giant talent pool in Chindia.

Back when I read Tim's book, I didn't see an immediate fit for lifesourcing in my day-to-day as an executive at Edelman. In fact, given that so much of what I deal with is confidential client information, it's darn near impossible.

Still, I remained extremely intrigued to run a pilot. It seems to bridge to a growing "digital nomadism" movement. For more, check out what my former colleague Mike Elgan and folks like Lea Woodward and Skellie are writing about.

My blog seemed like a natural place to dabble in lifesourcing since since pretty much everything I do here eventually enters the public domain. So, on Tim's recommendation, I posted a job on Elance. I searched for someone who could take my raw reader survey data and convert it into percentages and nice charts. This was a rather trivial assignment. However, for an Excel-challenged dude like me it was a major timesaver.

Even though the job was small, I was stunned when dozens of bids flowed in within the first few hours. The bidders seemed extremely aggressive and hungry for the job. After 24 hours of fervent bidding, I selected Sri from India based on his feedback rating, correspondence, experience and price. I also selected him because I was eager test a project with someone based in India.

After some back and forth and a bit of clarification in what I was looking for, Sri got to work. The amazing thing is that almost all of his emails came during my workday, not his. Sri turned around the job quickly and professionally and it cost me all of $50 - the Elance minimum. (I will share the charts in a subsequent post.)

Granted, this was a very simple assignment that probably anyone (but me) can do in an hour or two. Still, I was impressed. And it gets me thinking about where this might go when you combine lifesourcing and social networking - especially if the costs come down.

Social networking and online real-time communication/collaboration tools are a way of life for many Gen Yers. They already use these systems to get stuff done both inside and outside the enterprise.

Over the next five years I believe that lifesourcing will become a core part of every social network, be it b2b or b2c. Like IM or corporate blogging, social lifesourcing will start as a bottom-up movement as workers tap into the Net to get work done in the most efficient way possible, no matter where these resources may be. A groundswell may build as word spreads and workers try hard to compete with those who are farming out work elsewhere.

Still, there are big pitfalls. It's a guarantee that companies will try to put the kibosh on such activities as their information seeps beyond their virtual walls. This is already happening on social networks. Many employees have water cooler groups on Facebook. Others are dabbling in using LinkedIn to get questions answered.

It's conceivable that these interactions will migrate from simple collaboration to peer-to-peer transactions over the next few years. The implications here - if this happens en masse - are huge. People will focus on their core competencies. This in theory will make everyone more productive and prosperous. However, it remains to be seen if this will become a mass trend given all the inherent risk.

SEO Shenanigans Pose a Clear and Present Danger to Social Media

As someone who reads a lot of blogs about search and social media (a term I am still not nuts about but has stuck), I have recently witnessed a disturbing trend. Some respected experts are advocating launching social media marketing programs solely for the purpose of influencing search engines, rather than with the intent of fostering collaboration and genuine communication.

This represents a clear and present danger to the fabric of the community. If you care about the social web, then you should be alarmed.

Search engine optimization (SEO) professionals of late seem poised to take over blogs, digg, StumbleUpon and other sites with a range of tactics, some legit, others more questionable with the intent of building Google Juice and nothing more. Read these blogs and you'll see it's often all they're talking about. I am not the only one out there who feels this way.

Consider some of the following blog posts that I found in my Google Reader database...

Boost Organic Results. Link Build with Social Media (Search Engine Watch)

The Inconvienent Truth About Social Media Marketing (Search Engine Land)

Building a Company With Social Media (Search Engine Land)

Realizing SEO benefits through blogging (HitTail)

How to Use Blogs, Podcasts, Wikis and Other Social Media Tools to Find New Clients, Make Money and Create the Lifestyle of Your Dreams (Conference)

To be clear, I do not object to the way that blogs, digg links and Wikipedia rank highly in search results. What does get me hot and bothered is when consultants and bloggers propose launching such an initiatives solely for influencing search. SEO, like word of mouth, should be a byproduct outcome, not a primary objective. Any brand that plays in this space should be aiming to create value. Do that and the other stuff will follow.

But the SEO shenanigans for the sake of SEO has to stop. If you're going to play in our sandbox, follow the community's (unwritten) rules.

2008 Digital Trends Part II: Living Room 2.0

Entertainment, Mac Fan Version by Horrortaxi

This is the second in a series of posts on the big digital trends to watch in 2008. Part I is here.

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For much of the 20th Century, the living room was our virtual social hub - a tangential connection to the broader world around us. The experiences, however, were never really social. However, they felt that way because we all experienced the same events from the same spot in our homes at precisely the same time.

Let's call this era Living Room 1.0. It was marked by dates like December 8, 1941 when 81 million of us flocked to the living room to get closer to the radio to hear FDR's famous "Infamy speech." Years later, as television began to dominate, it was where we "participated" in major global events, such as the Challenger Disaster, the Thrilla in Manila or Neil Armstrong's first steps on the moon. The living room kindles strong memories (both positive and negative) for anyone 30 or older. And while the technology changed from radio to TVs and later video games, the experiences were really universal.

In the broadband era, however, the living room appears to have lost relevance. Today, the web is where we turn connect with others - and the connections are real, not imagined.

Consider, for example, the big news this week - the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. Many of us I bet, unlike days of old, did not participate in this global event from our living rooms. Rather, we did so in real-time with peers on Twitter via a gaggle of connected devices that really can be anywhere - bedrooms, offices, home offices or, above all, our pockets. (Consider too that Bhutto's son and heir apparent is a Facebook user.)

So is the living room as a social hub dying? Hardly. It's quietly undergoing a revival - dare we call it Living Room 2.0. The revolution started with the advent of HDTV, which is now in 13% of US homes and growing - slowly. However, the real magic happens when we connect Internet-enabled devices and services to those sets. Suddenly, the living room becomes social again because it bridges our offline connections (the family) to our online friends around the world.

Right now it's largely the early adopters who are benefiting from the revival of the living room as a social hub. There are very few Robert Scobles of the world who connect Mac Minis to 50" TVs so they can use Dave Winer's Flickr Fan to view photos of their friends in glorious hi-def. This will change, however, as the devices get simpler, cheaper and the benefits are more pronounced.

For example, one of the biggest Living Room 2.0 successes is arguably XBox Live, which is now becoming a social network. (Edelman handles all XBox PR for Microsoft.) They won't be alone. By the end of 2008 every device that already has a place in an home theater set-up will connect not only to the web but, increasingly, to existing social networking platforms like OpenSocial, MySpace, Facebook and others. This means that devices like the Wii, Slingbox, Vudu, TiVo, Apple TV or even your trusty digital cable set-top box will start to allow you to connect with the rest of the world online. And then it will become more mainstream.

So don't reminisce about the days of old when we gathered around the TV or radio and felt a sense of connection to the world at large. What's old is new again. This time your living room is going to get a lot more crowded. Get ready to invite the world over because Living Room 2.0 is going mainstream in 2008.

How to Share Items in Google Reader and Still Keep Them Private

There's been an uproar in the blogosphere and elsewhere this week over who - by default - can see your Google Reader Shared Items (a new feature). The short answer is anyone you have chatted with over Google Talk.

If this spooks you out there are two widely reported workarounds: a) don't share any items or b) make sure you hide anyone that you don't want to share with. However, there is a third undocumented trick that lets you share items with a private group and no one else. I plan to expand on this with a post later this week about how I am now using Google Reader as a Personal Knowledge Management System to complement my Gmail Personal Nerve Center.

The key is to make use of Google's underutilized tagging feature. At the bottom of any item in your reader you will spot a small link that says "tags." This system overlaps with, yet complements Google Reader folders. Click on the field to create a new tag. To illustrate for this blog post, here I have added the tag "myteam" to a cool post by Paul Stamatiou (which borrows one of my favorite photos of all time).

Next, click on "Settings" at the the top of the Reader interface, then click on Tags. Find the tag you just created and make that tag - and only that tag - public.

Finally, and this is key, share the tag page only with people you trust. They can subscribe to this tag page in Google Reader. Further, this page will not be spidered by any of search engines. What's more, even if someone should find your private Google Reader number (which shared items does expose when you hover over profiles), no one will be able to find this page unless they know the secret tag name.

It would be great if Google would tell people this so I wouldn't have to (and simplified the whole process). Right now, they make it too hard to find. Still, there is a workaround that lets you have your cake and eat it too. UPDATE :: The psychic gang at Google posted this just as I wrote this post.

Charting 2007's Three Big Web 2.0 Trends

"The best thing about the future is that it only comes one day at a time." - Abraham Lincoln

Thinking about the future is fun. It's what I am paid to do. However, I never contemplate the days ahead without the context of the past. After all, the future is always grounded in history. That's why I have become a heavy user of Google Trends.

The tool is closest thing we have to a global rear-view mirror. Blog search and conversation charts only go so far. They capture what a small subset of the most vocal, tech-savvy users are saying. Search engines, on the other hand, show us what's on everyone's mind - including the giant underwater iceberg of silent users.

Like 2006, this was a big year for Web 2.0. Here are Google Trends charts I pulled looking at three broad 2007 Web 2.0 trends, along with my comments. I chose to focus here on broad trends, as opposed to the gyrations of individual sites, which always change with fickle users. (Micro blogging is an exception because the term is rarely used so I looked at Twitter instead.)

All of the data is global in scope and only as current as mid-December. Of course, all of this is just directional. Ideally, it would be great to cross-reference all of this with other sources, like Compete.com. Still, they do provide perspective.

Trend I: Social Networking

* Data: Searches for social networking and news volume both doubled in 2007. However, more recently, the volume has started to show some signs of weakness. Meanwhile, geographically, interest in social networking from India and Singapore is skyrocketing. Search volume for individual sites, like Facebook, appear to track the broader meme.

* Insight: Social networking is evolving from a group of sites into several competing platforms that power thousands of sites. Eventually, we won't think of social networks as sites but as a feature. This data might just be the first sign of such a progression.

Trend II: Micro Blogging

* Data: Micro blogging doesn't register on Google Trends, so I chose to compare Twitter and blogging (as opposed to "blogs" which is a much broader term). What's fascinating here is that searches for Twitter surpassed for "blogging" in April and never looked back. Meanwhile, news volume for the two are neck and neck. Twitter is particularly strong in Japan. That said, interest in micro blogging has dropped off dramatically this (nearly 50% off their peak in the spring).

* Insight: Blogging is work and the payoff (emotional or monetary) can be hard to come by, particularly for those of us who want to see a rapid return on our investment in time. Meanwhile, personal publishing is evolving because of the increasing sophistication of mobile devices and the Attention Crash. Micro blogging fosters connection with less work all while working well with mobile devices. Blogging remains important, however, as the traditional press rapidly embraced blogging, it has encouraged individual publishers to find new ways to spread their influence.

Trend III:: Web Applications

* Data: Google searches for web apps doubled in the second half of the year. That said they are dwarfed by stalwarts like Microsoft Office or Apple's iWork suite. Interest in Google Docs has flattened since they rolled out their presentation application. The US leads the way in web based applications.

* Insight: The search data seems to reflect what others have said - that web applications are not on most people's radar. This data is consistent with what Microsoft and Apple have said - people like their desktop apps. Web applications are in their infancy. It should be interesting to see if they will remain a niche category in the years ahead. The lack of the ubiquitous connectivity could be a major stumbling block.

Reader Integrates Google's Stealth Social Net: The Address Book

The trusty address book in your Gmail account (assuming you have one) is actually much more than just a simple database of names and contact info. It's Google's stealth social network. The reason is that the search engine is increasingly utilizing the Gmail contact list as a pseudo web service to power its other applications. It's brilliant because, in the process, Google will turn every service from one that is static to something social.

Google is the first to recognize the power of address books, but they won't be the last. This is something I have written about before - every portal that offers webmail will become a social network.

Tonight we have a new application of this concept to play with in the wild. This one closely follows Google Maps, which took the same approach.

Google Reader became the latest Google service to leverage the Gmail contact database and become more social. The Reader team turned on a new feature that is powered by the Gmail address book. The popular RSS reader now lets you easily see what your friends are sharing from their river of news and allows you to do the same. This turns Google Reader into a social network, complete with profiles - the same found in Google Maps.

This change is small, but significant. It's indicative of how Google (wisely) plans to attack social networking. It is tapping into the Gmail address book and using it to transform all of its static services into on-the-fly communities. Factor in OpenSocial and you can see the beginnings of something big.

Social networking isn't just about a few standalone sites but a bunch of different address books that actually make the entire web more social.

The Moneyball Marketing Era

The conventional wisdom on Madison Avenue is that reach rules. In other words, in the digital realm you can't go wrong making a buy or launching a campaign on a site or social network that has scale. However, that's all going to change as money flows online, competition rises and marketers find they need to pay more to drive sales.

To cope, advertisers should adopt new digital media planning model. This one ignores common metrics like unique visitors, pageviews or even time spent in favor of more esoteric statistics like cost per action. We're entering the Moneyball Marketing Era - an age where some big online properties will suffer a slow death by a thousand cuts from tiny niche sites that deliver greater ROI.

Moneyball Marketing liberally borrows the concepts outlined in Michael Lewis' 2003 bestselling baseball book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game. In the book, Lewis chronicles how the Oakland A's and its general manager Billy Beane were able to build a successful team in a rather unconventional way, all with a significantly smaller budget than rivals like the Yankees have.

Beane and his team eschewed conventional wisdom that dominated baseball for decades. Rather than selecting and evaluating players based on common statistics like home runs and runs batted in, the A's switched to a model that favors on-base percentage (how often a batter makes it to first) and slugging percentage (a way to measure a hitter's power). The end result is an elegant, efficient model that enabled the A's to get better players for less money. The methodologies described in Moneyball have since been adopted by dozens of contending teams and in some industries as well.

Here are three ways you can apply Moneyball Marketer in your organization today:

1) Become a Super Cruncher - Look beyond the common methods for evaluating media and identify more meaningful, perhaps esoteric statistics. For example, make a buy based on a site's ability to drive consumers to complete high value tasks.

2) Skip Reach, Go Niche - As hard as it is, try forgoing some of the larger sites in favor of emerging niche ones that deliver a higher percentage of your target. Work with them to create measurable, outside-the-box programs. For example, consider Takkle - an emerging social network focusing on high school sports.

3) Think Relationships, Not Impressions - The most successful companies in business today recognize that relationships rule. Consider launching programs that allow you to hone your relationships with narrow segments of your audience. Go beyond impressions.

How the Portals Will Win the Social Networking Wars

Every time I make a prediction, there's a better than 90% chance I am going to be wrong. But this one, you can take to the bank. The portals - AOL, Yahoo, Google, Windows Live, all of them - will be big winners in the social networking wars.

"What," you say? "How can that be? I already spend all my time on Myfaceborkutspace. My life is there. My friends are there. I lose an hour each time I even log into Myfaceborkutspace. Portals are so Web 1.0. I am all about Web 3.14159265."

I can't rebut this argument. Social networking is certainly rising and there seems to be no end in sight to the phenomenon. However, what I do know is that people will jump around from one Myfaceborkutspace to another and not all of them will win. This is particularly going to be true as social networking evolves from a destination into a feature of every web site.

So what does this have to do with the portals? Actually, a lot. They will be big winners, no matter which social networks dominate over the long haul.

The portals own the glue that keeps many of us connected to our structured social networks (e.g. Myfaceborkutspace) and the looser ones - e.g. a personal network of contacts. And that glue is a trusted communication system that works with every person and social net.

No matter which social network(s) you participate in, even if you float, you're going to turn to your trusted communication system to manage it all. This will include any or all of the following: a) web-based e-mail, b) instant messaging (which is nowadays integrated), c) RSS and d) telephony tools like Grand Central. And who dominates those? Yup. The portals - all of them. They have a pretty good lock in, especially as they give you all the storage you need.

This is not going to change. The big blurring of work and home technologies is allowing people to achieve greater flexibility in thieir lives. Webmail and IM are big drivers here. We're hooked but good because we use these four tools to also manage our interactions on social nets. I expect the portals will eventually build in new features that make this even all the more efficient.

Further, a lot of interactions you have within a portal site are monetized. So more social networking translates into more bacn, emails and IMs from contacts you want to follow, RSS feeds, voicemails, etc. This cascades into more ad clicks, searches and banner/rich media ad views. The result? Free money for the portals. Thank you Uncle Myfaceborkutspace! Even better, they didn't have to build a competitor. They just sit back and simply cash in.

Turn Gmail (or any E-mail Account) Into a Social Network Hub

There's been a lot of chatter about the entire concept of social graphing. I have no idea if there is validity here or not. And certainly people smarter than I am are talking about the potential viability of the entire concept.

However, what I do know is that a lot of us are increasingly participating in social networks and we need a way to track it all. Also, most of us are hooked on email too. So, the good news is you can easily combine these addictions (um I mean "tools") to your advantage.

Thanks to gobs of storage, a pretty strong reason to stay locked-in (three and a half years of heavy email use), my Gmail account is the nerve center that runs my life. Yes, just as Gmail remains my personal nerve center, it now also tracks my social graph. I use Gmail as a Grand Central Station-sized hub that helps me track every social network I participate in and my friends' activity there - as well as my own.

Here are four tips that have helped me. Many of these tips will work on most social networks that provide RSS, SMS or email alerts as well as on all big webmail sites - e.g. Windows Live Hotmail, AOL Mail, Yahoo Mail or even Exchange.  What I love about it is that it also works great with Treos, Blackberries and iPhones. This series has several parts...

• How to use Gmail to post to social networks
• How to track your friends and their replies using Gmail
• How to build a "lifebase" inside Gmail that maintains a record of your various friends/connections
• How to use Gmail to prioritize the right friends and weed out the ones you want to un-friend

Use Gmail to post to Social Nets

Let's face it, life is busy. Who has time to go to a site, log in and post something new. SInce I already spend a tremendous amount of time inside Gmail, I have rigged it so I can easily post directly to the social nets where I choose participate. In my case, this consists of Twitter and Facebook. It's simple.

In Twitter's case I use Twittermail. I have a super secret address that I send mail to and it automatically posts to Twitter, edits me down to 160 characters and formats my links. 

Facebook doesn't have email in functionality for status updates, but you can use Teleflip  or another email to SMS gateway to get around this. Configure it so that any mail you send it auto forwards to FBOOK (32665). Use the @ symbol to update your status. Other commands are posted here and listed below.

Track Your Friends and their Responses with Gmail

So now that we covered how to get stuff posted to social networks from Gmail, let's start using it to get updates so you can track your peeps - and their replies back at 'ya.

In the case of Twitter, it's simple again thanks to their API. Twittermail can automatically email you any replies to your Tweets. In addition, I use Twitter Digest to generate  a feed of all of the friends I want to follow the most. I then stick this feed in my Gmail clips, which rotates whenever I am using the account. Even better, you can run a Twitter Digest feed through R-Mail (now owned by NBC and soon to be called SendMeRSS) and have it land in your inbox as an email message once daily.

How about Facebook? Easy. Log into your account, find the status update page, grab the RSS feed and run it through Feedburner. Why Feebdurner? Because you can keep it the feed and your friends updates safe from search engines, yet still subscribe to it via email. This doesn't just apply to Facebook but any site that lets you track friends via RSS.

Use Gmail (or other Webmail Service) to Build "a Lifebase" of Friends

Now, I don't know about you, but in my business relationships are everything. Increasingly social networks are becoming a theater of operations for PR. So we need ways to track our interactions over time. Enter email.

Using any of the methods described above, start subscribing to feeds via email for the friends you want to follow closely. If a feed doesn't exist in the social net you want to track and there's only text message capes (like Facebook), use an SMS to email gateway.

With the emails set up, then build some very smart filters in Gmail. For example - "from:R-mail subject:Scoble." This will find all messages that come in from R-mail from Scoble's Twitter stream. I have this search automatically filtered and archived to a special "Friends" label as Lifehacker describes here. Using this method, you now have a nice way to track a friend's entire stream - should you wish.

Use Gmail to Prioritize Friends You Care About Most and Weed Out Duds

If you follow the steps above you will start to amass a lifebase of all your friends and their social networking activities. This works especially well on services that offer unlimited storage, like AOL and Yahoo. Over time, you will open certain messages and ignore others. This will reveal just how valuable a particular friend's update is to you.

Using Gmail you can find these all instantly with a command like this - from:R-mail subject:Twitter is:unread. Then you know which friends you should toss - at least from Gmail.

These are just a handful of tips and this concept is evolving but even before someone builds the big social graph in the sky, I am just getting along fine using Gmail, thanks to a bit of hackery.

Analysis: Why Some Web 2.0 Sites Will Never Attract Big Ad Dollars

Accountability - e.g. a company's return on investment in advertising - is an evergreen topic in the marketing community. Naturally, when it comes to the emerging sphere of Web 2.0 sites, advertisers want to sleep easy knowing that their money is generating a return. So with US ad spending on social networks expected to reach $2.5 billion by 2011, this is a good time to poke at conventional wisdom with hard data. It's not pretty.

Based on a informal analysis, my belief is that many online communities, bloggers, social networks will never attract a critical mass of advertisers because they are not set up properly to attract visitors who have a commercial intent to buy products and services. Online media is not sold this way now, but I bet it will be in the very near future.

Today, most advertisers size up community sites, blogs and social networks using traditional media buying models - namely, reach and frequency. Unfortunately, the reality is that many Web 2.0 sites, can't deliver marketers the numbers they want because of the effect of Long Tail. It's simple supply and demand economics at work. This is why efforts like the one announced by comScore and Federated Media are fundamentally flawed.

This week in New York I am participating in an all-day roundtable discussion about how to measure the impact of online influence. Edelman, my employer, is convening some of the industry's leading thinkers on this subject. It is my hope - and our challenge - to come up with new ways to measure the potential the web has on influencing purchases. Quantifying eyeballs is not the answer. We need new thinking.

My personal conviction - one that I plan to table - is that search should be the most important driver for how advertisers size up the influence of different community sites and the individuals who make them up. The problem is no one is thinking this way. Everyone is overlooking the organic impact of Web 2.0 on product-related searches in favor of quick and dirty old school metrics.

Microsoft AdCenter Labs has some demonstration technology that illustrates this vividly. (Microsoft is an Edelman client.) Their Online Commercial Intent tool uses terabytes of search data to calculate the likelihood of a web site to attract buyers.

I took a handful of different URLs and ran them through the Microsoft tool. To give you a sense of a benchmark, Amazon.com has 52% purchase intent. Here are my results (numbers are rounded) ....

Consumerist - 49% of visitors have a commercial intent
Gizmodo - 47%
Autoblog.com - 45%
Treehugger - 41%
Techmeme - 41%
Engadget - 40%
Gridskipper - 38%
YouTube - 38%
TechCrunch.com - 37%
digg.com - 34%
del.icio.us - 29%
PerezHilton.com - 27%
Wikipedia - 14%
Flickr - 14%
Facebook - 10%
Twitter - 5%

While a lot more analysis is needed, as you can see a lot of sites don't fare particularly well. They're set up to attract eyeballs, but perhaps - purely from an economic sense - not necessarily the right ones. Eventually ad spending will recede and marketers will place a greater focus on ROI. Purchase intent and search will play a key role. If you want to attract advertisers, start conveying that you attract buyers and make sure you are delivering on that promise.

Replystreams: The Next Step for Lifestreams

Since my post about lifestreams last week I have been digging it a bit more and found there's an active community of people out there who are aggregating their bits into a single site. Rex is the latest to join the club. He also explains where this idea originated. So what's next for lifestreams? How about aggregating all of one's replies into a single site - yes, a replystream.

In about as long as it takes you to read this post, I was able to build a test replystream site again using Tumblr (you can also do this with Jaiku and many more sites). You can find my replystream at http://replies.steverubel.com. The page currently aggregates all @steverubel tweets from Twitter via Terraminds and in-bound links to this site from Technorati. Rather than syndicating the full text of a blog post, I am just rolling these up into a river of items that all link you back to the original content creator.

Here's a free idea for a smart developer/entrepreneur. We need a tool that will roll up one's lifestream and then thread the entire replystream underneath on a per-post basis. Then you can institute a smart contextual ad system that pays both the content provider and the replier. Oh and widgetize the entire product so it can go anywhere.

As content gets sliced and diced into thinner pieces that can fit anywhere, the greatest value will be created through smart aggregation. Take Dave Winer's NYTimesriver.com for example. That's what I learned during my few days playing with Tumblr. With everything living in RSS, aggregation can be pretty disruptive if you think about it. Just the ethical implications alone - yikes.

The Web Changes How We Define Friendship

There's an old saying: "you can never have too much money or friends." But that's before social networking came along. And while the adage for money still rings true, a shift maybe under way in how we define friendship. You can thank the web and social nets for that.

The American Heritiage Dictionary defines a "friend" primarily as ...

A person whom one knows, likes, and trusts.
A person whom one knows; an acquaintance.
A person with whom one is allied in a struggle or cause; a comrade.
One who supports, sympathizes with, or patronizes a group, cause, or movement: friends of the clean air movement.

Wikipedia goes a step further. It notes that in the US and elsewhere that quality of friendships has been steadily declining.

It seems, at least to me, that how we define who is/isn't a friend has changed dramatically. The Gig blog notes that this is particularly a dilemma on Facebook. Where as on other social networks, like Twitter, I let everyone in, on Facebook I have limited my network to only those who I have corresponded with or met in person. I go by the traditional definition. This unfortunately leaves many people sitting in Facebook purgatory. I don't add them to my network, yet I don't have the guts to outright Faceslam them either.

Others take a very different view. Some people I know (I won't mention them by name) like to regularly brag about how many friends they have on Facebook. I don't blame them for saying so. I blame society. In America at least, he/she who can dies with the most friends - even if they are virtual - "wins."

It's clear from all of this that our entire concept of friendships is changing. It's becoming more about quantity and less about quality.

This can be a very good thing. I am friends with people in social networks from other countries. Technology makes that possible.

On the other hand, these same technologies enable anyone to add me as a friend, even though we've never met.

It leaves me all confused about what friendship will look like in 10 years. It seems like it's declining in quality, even as technology scales it in quantity and helps our networks spread far and wide. What's your view?