I am making a slight shift in my content strategy. My Posterous-powered site will continue to feature insights, observations and essays about emerging technologies. It will include any content - text, photos, videos - where some degree of depth is required. This includes my AdAge and Forbes columns. I have also renamed it the Steve Rubel Stream to better reflect its mission.
Now I am also adding a Facebook Page that will feature everything that's posted here plus exclusive content for those of you who opt in and become a fan. It's very similar to how I approach Twitter - which also features links that I don't always share elsewhere. The difference is that the new Facebook Page will sit in between what I do here and Twitter and hopefully spark a rich discussion from a broader group of people who don't necessarily read blogs or use Twitter.
Please become a fan today. My initial post asks for input on the pros/cons of creating different content for each social network. As always, if you have thoughts on how I can evolve this I am all ears.
Like almost everyone else on the planet, it seems, I am spending more time on Facebook than any other site. The lone exception is Google. The reason I know this is that Safari, my browser, lists Facebook as my most visited site when I access its top sites feature.
In addition to using Facebook to check in on what my family, friends and colleagues are up to, I have been using it as a newsreader for months. The screenshot below is my reader. This is something that the company suggested everyone do here. Although I suspect that most users haven't taken the steps top create a dedicated news list as Facebook suggests, there's not doubt that the social network is becoming a critical source of information. Yesterday, Hitwise published a fascinating report that illustrates just how large Facebook looms as a source for news.
But something bigger is going on here...Facebook is eating the web.
Yes, Facebook is becoming the web for millions and millions of people. As I have written before, there's already a wealth of amazing things you can do within the site without ever leaving. What's more, as I also speculated, the site giving rise to headless media companies like Zynga that don't need a web site to succeed.
First, Facebook will move from being a solely place where people connect to each other to a site where people connect with businesses and, more importantly, the people who work for them, as I wrote yesterday. This, as my friend Robert Scoble, points out is an area where others dominate. But I expect Facebook will catch up fast. They will buy Yelp and/or Foursquare - or just implement similar technology - and become the yellow pages of the web.
Facebook may not even need to buy Yelp to make it happen. They are already slowly becoming the yellow pages. Everywhere I go I see signs like the one above telling us where we can find a local business on Facebook. In addition, last night during a fascinating session on the future of journalism (archived here), Sree Sreenivasan from Columbia Journalism School noted that movie posters don't have URLs anymore. They just tell us to go find them on Facebook. That's significant.
Second, Facebook will start to give web developers more tools to build entire rich micro-sites that exist solely inside the social network. Check out what 1800Flowers is already doing. Such a move will encourage more companies to focus 100% of their web marketing efforts on maximizing their Facebook presence. And why not? The site has 350+ million users, half of whom log in at least once a month. It's much easier to go where people are than to get them to come to you.
Third, Facebook will get serious about search. It's an untapped monetization pipeline that can bring in billions - especially when they couple social algorithms with crawlers. Phones too.
So what could derail Facebook? A lot. People could tire of it. But I don't see that happening. In fact, I see us putting more of our content inside Facebook and I see them making it all easily searchable and accessible from any device and leveraging connections to make it all even more powerful.
Now history says I will be wrong. AOL tried this and lost. But AOL did not have the algorithms and social connections that Facebook has in place, so I think we're in a different era. Facebook could eat the web or, perhaps more likely, become a parallel universe web. But, the question is this - will the web allow itself to be eaten or will two webs emerge? Time will tell.
Those of you who know me or have been reading my work for awhile are probably well aware that I love Google products - especially Gmail. I even stopped using Google Reader in favor of subscribing to email newsletters from the blogs I care about so I can peruse/search them there. One less inbox that I have to manage is a good thing.
So, with that, you would naturally assume that I would love Google Buzz. Well, I just got it in my Gmail today and my first take is that it's Google Wave Light. Is the technology great? Sure. However, it's way too complex for the masses. It doesn't organize social information, it makes it even more of a mess.
Like it or hate it Facebook offers what Jeff Jarvis calls "elegant organization." Twitter, while less organized, is equally simple. Google Buzz is only a service a mother could love - maybe Sergey Brin's mother. It's the Anti-Friendfeed. Here are five things wrong with it...
1) I can't easily find my content within Gmail. I have to go to my profile page to find it
2) I can't easily hide the items from my inbox. This requires a filtering hack that mere mortals do not know even exists
5) Finally, it shows in some ways Google is losing their focus. They're getting too big and therefore launch half-baked products that take them away from their core. They are feeling the heat from Facebook and Twitter instead of remaining true to their mission to organize the world's information.
In short, Google Buzz leaves me crying Serenity Now - and I am a social enthusiast with his hands in lots of pots!
Call me when this is baked but once again Google is showing that social is really their Achilles Heel. Google Social Search is a winner. Google real-time search is also a winner. They show what Google does well. This product shows Google at their worst. So, now that I have it, I don't see Google Buzz taking off and I am tempted to even turn it off. How about you?
One of the great people I run into everywhere is Scott Monty, who heads social media at the Ford Motor Company. In this four and a half minute video, which I shot yesterday, Scott talks about what he does in his day job, how social media is integrated into Ford's communications engine (pun intended) and how he works with his executives.
One of the best parts of my job is that I get to every day work with and learn from some of the smartest minds in the business - the Edelman Digital team. Today we published a brand new white paper with 10 ideas for the new decade. You can download the white paper here (PDF) or view it below.
In the video below I outline the big themes in the paper. My full introduction follows.
# # #
During the last decade, we’ve seen social and digital media move from being purely the domain of tech-savvy types into a mainstream phenomenon. All you need to do is consider one statistic: Twitter was mentioned on television nearly 20,000 times in 2009, according to SnapStream. As a result, companies are investing in it and – slowly – seeing results.
Given the hype, much attention has turned to guessing what will become “the next Twitter.” It’s ample fodder for tech and marketing pundits, the media and clients - especially at the beginning of a new year and a new decade.
However, in many ways this is the wrong question to ask. Where once it was hard to sleuth out emerging platforms like Twitter, YouTube and Facebook before they grew, now they just seem to surface out of nowhere. You’ll know the next Twitter when you see it.
The bigger opportunity for clients, we believe, is to identify the global societal and technological trends that are reshaping how we think, act and buy - and to pivot into them early. Trends today tend to develop more slowly and are harder to see, allowing clients to take a more thoughtful, thorough and systematic approach.
In the following pages you will find 10 essays on such trends written by some of the smartest thinkers in digital marketing. These ideas, when looked at together, reveal four key themes:
The shift to digital technologies by both consumers and marketers is now global and pervasive across all aspects of our life and growing daily.
Our engagement with each other is migrating rapidly from computer to handset.
Companies (and organized interests) are just beginning to wake up to the engagement imperative - and how to fund and develop it over time.
And finally, the future is about carefully using the data people generate to make smarter decisions, while adhering to concerns over privacy.
We hope you enjoy our 10 ideas for the new decade. We welcome you to challenge us on our thinking. After all, that’s the only way we can grow.
As I have shared, Gmail is my Ginsu Knife. As they roll out features, I keep finding new uses for them - sometimes inadvertently.
Gmail has a cool Labs feature that puts a little search box in your sidebar. I use it all the time to pull up information for lifestream posts since I publish to my Posterous-powered site via email. This little box is already capable of quite a lot but it also can pull up the latest weather.
All you need to do is enter in a city name and weather and you get the current conditions as well as the forecast. You can access the search box with a keyboard command too - just type in g then / - and enter your query.
Late last year I was interviewed by The Social Media Examiner on the future of the medium. In this nine-minute interview we discuss: why you need to have a presence on all social networks where your customers are spending time, how to use mixed messages to tailor your stories to different venues,how to measure social media metrics, why the different vectors of reach, engagement and reputation lead to trust and why it’s important to understand people & understand business.
The single biggest challenge that marketers face over the next ten years is attention scarcity. Bank on it.
According to Andreas Weigland, Amazon.com's former chief scientist, more data was generated by individuals in 2009 than in the entire history of mankind. Human attention, however, is finite - and arguably, it shrinks as we age.
The end result is downright ugly. It's like 25 lanes of traffic trying to squeeze through two Lincoln Tunnel tubes during the peak of rush hour. Your marketing programs may be the biggest, baddest bus in the flow, but you're competing with everyone else for the same space and time. Chances are, however, your bus is empty. Park that idea for now. We'll come back to it.
Each individual, whether it's a stay-at-home mom or a twenty-something online addict, will develop his/her own coping mechanisms. Some of these decisions will be conscious. Many of them won't be. And that spells trouble for marketers.
Already one of the ways we're coping is by digging deeper into social networking sites to connect with our friends and interests. According to Nielsen, globally consumers spent more than five and half hours on social networking sites in December. This represents an 82 percent increase year over year. Human beings have always been drawn to each other. Social networking just makes this easier and scalable - or does it?
Robin Dunbar, professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University, discovered that we are only capable of managing 150 friendships - this includes brands. Once again, we're handicapped by our darn brains.
Marketers know they need to be engaged in social networks. Some 45% of senior marketers surveyed by The Society for Digital Agencies said that social network engagement is their top priority. However, many marketers that I speak to don't understand the sheer scale that's required, given the above challenges.
To succeed in a world where attention remains scarce and our brains are limited, businesses must go beyond campaigns and move to real-time engagement. I believe the best way to accomplish this is scale. This means every business must become a social business by deeply integrating their often decoupled employee engagement and digital engagement initiatives.
In short, to revisit the aforementioned metaphor, you must go big, get your employees on the bus, put more buses into the traffic flow or go home.
So what exactly does this look like? It means unshackling your employees. It means equipping them with tools, policies and the means to engage with stakeholders around the clock. Finally, above all, it means allowing your workforce to unlock and share their company and subject-matter expertise.
However, the reality there are very few companies understand this. Most are still taking a campaign approach to social networks where it's the brand, not the people, that are the voice - and there's usually only one.
What's worse, the Berlin Wall stands tall inside Corporate America. Robert Half Technology found that only 10% of corporate chief information officers grant their employees full access to social networking sites. Those that do probably aren't guiding them. Manpower reports that only 20 percent of companies have social network policies.
Change must begin at home. If you don't get your employees on buses, your competition will and it will be harder to covet attention. This is every business' challenge in 2010 and beyond.
During a recent meeting with Forbes they shared with me a summary of their recent survey of Chief Marketing Officers (embedded below). There are two notable trends here - which Forbes isn't connecting, but I am.
First, social media is seen as the single most promising marketing vehicle amongst all respondents and those who oversee more than $5M in annual spend. Note how social media surpasses other tactics that get a lot of attention - notably mobile applications and search engine marketing.
Second, some 73% of CMOs surveyed oversee PR. I don't have the data, but I imagine this is a new trend. In the past, PR would sit in all kinds of other departments. Now it seems to be more closely aligned with marketing.
Now the Forbes study doesn't say this, but I fundamentally believe that other than placing ads, PR is in the best position to manage a business' social media endeavors. The reason is that engaging in social circles requires an understanding of psychology and also it is an uncontrolled discipline. Both of these play well to the skills of PR practitioners. If I were a CMO controlling $5M in spend with an interest in social media and I oversaw PR, I would connect these dots. I suspect that's what many are doing.
According to Nielsen, the average American visited 87 domains and 2,600 Web pages in September. Outside the U.S., those numbers tend to be smaller, and fresh data indicates that just a few sites dominate the mix. Many rely on the news to find them rather than seeking it out - and those who do hunt for news are likely to do so via a single outlet of their choosing and/or via a search engine or even YouTube. It seems that, curiously, the diversity of the sites Americans frequent remains small even though their choices have grown infinitely.
In this essay I touch on why - faced with infinite choices, powerful search tools and equally helpful friends - Americans are adapting their habits and becoming less loyal to general sources than ever before, and why engaged companies can still find relevance in social spaces and influence their stakeholders in this Age of Media Agnosticism.
TechCrunch reports that the Associated Press is using their Twitter account to push their followers to their Facebook page. On that hub they syndicate many stories blog posts and dispatches as full text. Unlike Danny Sullivan (here and here), I think this is a downright brilliant and visionary move. What's more it's a natural for a wire service like AP. Here's why.
AP sees that the future of media is headless, which I wrote about here six months ago. Paul Gillin echos my thoughts and calls this the siteless web.
Wire services like AP and Reuters have in one sense flourished since the dawn of the consumer Internet. You can't visit a news site without running into one of their stories. Often, some of the featured and more popular stories on Yahoo News (an underrated news giant) are from wire services. However, there's an inherent problem today with that model and this approach tries to solve it.
As wires like AP and Reuters syndicate their content everywhere, they have struggled to build any kind of meaningful relationship with readers. In some ways they've become so ubiquitous they're commodity. Others, like the New York Times, have done a much better job by offering benefits to registered members - but also with a lot more investment and infrastructure.
The AP is now changing the game for news by not only going where attention spirals are taking us but by also using their content to curate a conversation on Facebook and - above all - build relationships.
As of this writing, the AP page on Facebook has 9,400 fans. I bet this will grow over time as people spend more time on Facebook and slowly become more accustomed to getting their news there, in addition to friend updates, games,etc. Swap out the word fans and replace it with subscribers and suddenly you can see where I am going and why this is a smart idea. It's CRM for news!
Over the weekend Robert French from Auburn and I have been debating on Google Buzz the value of Facebook as a news source. It does have a ways to go but it's coming. Six years ago, as an experiment, I lived off blogs as my sole news source. I might try that again with Facebook. I continue to be impressed with how media companies are starting to experiment and the utter richness of the conversation that occurs in a very navigable, digestible format.
LATER:: In response to this post, Viki asks on Buzz if I see a similar future for Google Buzz. In a word, yes. With content infinite and attention finite, the media will go where people are. This includes Twitter, Buzz and YouTube. The media is already all over Buzz - case in point, the Huffington Post. However Facebook is the 800 pound gorilla - for now.
UPDATE: A couple of notes to clarify this post. First, the chart above, which I pulled from compete.com, shows the top sites that Facebook drives traffic to. Also the headline has been updated to reflect that Facebook is driving more traffic to portals than Google. The San Francisco Chronicle story, linked below, notes that Facebook is only starting to encroach on Google for other sites. The trend, however, still holds.
We're at the beginning of a major shift in how we find, consume and interact with information. If the 2000s was the Google decade, then the 2010s will be the Facebook decade. Already, you can see the writing on the wall - pun intended. Case in point: a search for "google decade danny sullivan" pulls up his Facebook note higher than a blog post (an item I wanted to include here for context). But that's nothing. Look at the data.
"According to Web measurement firm Compete Inc., Facebook has passed search-engine giant Google to become the top source for traffic to major portals like Yahoo and MSN, and is among the leaders for other types of sites.
This trend is shifting the way Web site operators approach online marketing, even as Google takes steps to move into the social-media world.
Some experts say social media could become the Internet's next search engine."
That last line is key. I see Facebook starting to look more like Google while Google tries and stumbles at becoming more social. Bing will start to play a central supporting role here. I see Facebook and Bing becoming an "Axis of FTW" that will disrupt Google on every front. (Microsoft is an Edelman client.)
Facebook pages will disrupt Google - especially if they were to integrate Bing Maps and location technology a la Foursquare. This can quickly position Facebook as the Web's Yellow Pages, an area that Google and Yelp currently dominate
Facebook will make search more social, allowing it to become annotated and curated. This up-ends Google's core business. It also makes the Facebook self-serve advertising model smarter and more effective as it collects more data about where it sends traffic. This threatens Adwords
Social networking is here to stay. It's where attention spirals are flowing and no one looms larger than Facebook. (Link sharing on Facebook rose 500% in six months.) And while Facebook has plenty of critics and they run into the occasional privacy concerns, I believe that they will dominate the landscape the next few years. In fact, I see them becoming the number one web site in the world in under three years. It could eat the web.
Now a lot could go wrong. It is possible that Facebook will become AOL the sequel. But I don't see it. There's no alternative and the more we put into Facebook the more value we gain from it. This is a different era where vertical integration (e.g. owning and controlling the whole experience) is a major plus, especially if it's elegant and simple. There's too much information and things vying for our attention today. This turns vertical integration and simplicity into a competitive advantage.
So what does this mean? I believe business web sites will become less important over time. They will be primarily transactional and/or for utility. Brands will shift more of their dollars and resources to creating robust presence where people already are and figure out how to activate employees en masse in a way that builds relationships and drives traffic back to their sites to complete transactions. Media companies will do the same - they will be "headless."
Google and search will remain important for years to come. However, what we're seeing is the beginning of big changes where social networking and Facebook will further disrupt advertising, media, one-to-one and one-to-many communications, not to mention search.
Last week Edelman, my employer, published our tenth annual Trust Barometer study. You can read the full report here. One of the more juicy statistics that Advertising Age and others noted is that trust in peers surprisingly dropped dramatically from 47% to 27%.
"This is bad news for PR agencies because social media has been the ‘point of the spear’ for so many firms. This is what brings in new business."
While he's right that social media has been a big business driver, I respectfully disagree with Tom that this is bad news for the PR agencies. It won't make the PR industry's case for social media budgets any less compelling. In fact, it's awesome news. Here's why...
If you dig into the report, you'll note that the Trust data shows that we're desperately seeking out experts. This is unsurprising given the torrent of information we're all contending with. We're self-curating and in the process seeking out higher authorities.
Taking this a step further, this is where PR agencies shine. We have decades of experience positioning companies, NGOs, execs and employees in the ranks as subject-matter experts. So what does this have to do with social media? A lot. Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, you name it are by far the fastest and most effective ways for an any individual or a company to build a thought leadership footprint. So, if you think about it, this isn't 2012 scenario as Foremski suggests. All it means that we'll have to work harder to build credibility through online thought leadership. If you're doing this with scale, you will win.
In addition, beyond that, we will have to do it all to break through the noise. So I don't see this as bad news at all. Richard Edelman, our CEO, sums this up best with his quotes in Advertising Age:
"The events of the last 18 months have scarred people," Mr. Edelman said. "People have to see messages in different places and from different people. That means experts as well as peers or company employees. It's a more-skeptical time. So if companies are looking at peer-to-peer marketing as another arrow in the quiver, that's good, but they need to understand it's not a single-source solution. It's a piece of the solution."
Bingo. All this means is less fluff more substance. And that's a good thing.
Last week during the launch of Seesmic Look in New York, I gave a presentation on communicating in the age of streams. You can watch the video here or below (if for some reason the embedded video doesn't go direct to my part of the talk, simply scroll to the 1:24:04 minute mark). My slides can be found here. I have embedded them below as well with the YouTube video too.
A quick summary ...
All of us - whether you're a stay at home mom or an executive - are going to have to cope with the firehose. There's more information coming at us than we can handle. Information will scale. Human attention is finite. This presents a major challenges to those of us who are in the attention business. It's like 25 lanes of traffic trying to squeeze into the Lincoln Tunnel all it once. Your marketing campaign is just one bus.
To mitigate this ongoing trend of streams, communicators will need to: 1) be as ubiquitous as possible, 2) adopt multiple messages, stories and formats and 3) make sure you allow your employees to get out there - in other words, use the force, don't fight it.
"The online social landscape today sort of feels to me like search did in 1999. It’s a mess, but we don’t complain much about it because we don’t know there’s a better way.
You might be sick of hearing this from me, but strongly believe that Facebook is the next Google. It took me a while to "get religion," but now I have it. Just as Google brought a simple way to search the web, my observation is that Facebook is poised to do the same for organizing and - this is key - centralizing social content
Google will continue to dominate "pull." But Facebook will aggregate content, make it social and rule "push." Using our social circle it will surface content that we care about just when we want it - and allow us to comment on it all. As more people use Facebook to connect, share and create, a network effect takes over - and the system get even smarter.
Here's an example. In my newsfeed today I saw an item from CNN about Sarah Palin. Within minutes it had dozens of comments. Some 20 minutes later it had 300 comments. Now that pales in comparison to the 2775 comments (as of this writing) that the actual story on CNN.com has. However, over time through Facebook Connect, I suspect this to become more cohesive so that you can follow the conversation in either place.
Facebook has done an extraordinary job at making social elegant, simple and organized for millions. Couple this with the search deal with Bing, I believe they will be a force to be reckoned with - one that challenges Google on every turf.
