Infographic: Anatomy of a Fan (Who Needs to be Rewarded)
Via FastCoDesign.com – a great online complement to Fast Company magazine – a breakdown of how to qualify and quantify fans. The real context that still eludes “brands seeking social” from our New Medici POV is that there is no real “fan stratification or appreciation,” i.e., the fans that give you, the brand, the biggest word of mouth exposure receive no rewards, and the brands have no way of even recognizing them using FB Insights.
We get the network effect, but want to reward top influencers…
Example: Will Smith’s 22 million strong fan page posts get 110k likes and 14k comments on average. If I were Will or his PR/management team, I would want to know the top 25-1000 fans who are interacting and sharing. I would want them to become a core group that I can focus test with (with permissions), I can reward for joining my brand militia, and I can throw some traffic at should they have individual fan pages, blogs, etc. Sure, I cherish the growing quantity, but I want the contextual quality.
If you’re going to use the FB Marketplace or buy direct with the sales teams and spend $XX(XX)k, I want to know more than the demo insights and fan CPAs; I want to be able to communicate with the “biggest” fans directly, transparently and with collaborative integrity.
I would like these alpha fans to speak for my brand above the masses. Forget personal branding, I want a fan recognition and rewards’ program. Time for some Fanticipation!
More infographics after the jump…
Infographic: Real Cost of Going Social
While there are still companies that hold back on social, the network effect that happens when people share content, the sheer content management ease of use and low customer acquisition costs are simply overpowering arguments.
With an “are you crazy?” quote from Seth Godin to kick it off, the infographic below reveals the resource costs, “if you build it, they will come” fallacy on cost-free social advertising and a real-world breakdown or anatomy of a social campaign.
Social budget/ROI example: $52k for a social media strategist, $93.6k for a community manager (well paid imho), $15-30k for a micro-site, $20k for a mobile app (too cheap imho…). The ROI benefits: 85% customer engagement, 65% direct customer communications, 60% speed of feedback, 48% brand building and 42% market research. With Twitter, a 43% ROI, the monthly value of a follower is $2.38 and cost per follower: $1.67. Low CPA (cost per acquisition), indeed.
An Appocalyptic Tableaux: A Tale of Too Many Tablets
115 million tablets will be sold by 2014 according to the infographic below. 66.5% growth year over year.
Fascinating to think that while just about everyone (and their child) has a cell phone these days, that we’ll all soon have “x” tablets by household.
As the steady stream of upgrade/next-generation iPads arrive, year after year, expect each family to have two then three tablets lying around the house. Think of them as “media coasters.”
We’ll go from 65 apps per device to 650 apps without sweating the micro-transactions.
A peek into the Orwellian iPad-diction of society: The hand-me-down 4G generation will quickly see kids getting the short end of the digital stick; instead of a laptop, they’ll get the tablet and learn to type book reports on touch screens.
The adults will also go tablet for home use, putting much less time on their work laptops, eventually leaving them at the office. Office IT budgets will skyrocket down.
With all email and personal media (music/movies/photos) in the cloud, bluetooth keyboards and mice will fold up into the tablets for the workhorses (voiceover INPUT will be de rigueur), while most will dialog via 140-count (and briefer) communiqués.
Shorter but more frequent individual output will be swallowed by longer and more frequent input, aka consumption. Twitter will be eclipsed by a shorter version of itself; bit.ly will become a real-time and timed-out, unique symbol.
Eventually, we’ll “share” more via links we “like” than actually sharing original ideas. Curation will become less about the “best content channels,” and more about the “opinion channels.” Colbert copycats and O’Reilly orifices.
New Medici 2011 Predictions
- Cords will be cut – cable and satellite companies will have to package internet bandwidth with channel programming to keep sub fees north of $100. Cable and other triple players will move to provide bandwidth to all devices – think Mifi for everything as an upsell with loss of cable. In 2012, all television programming will be available day and date via web/mobile.
- Netflix will double (or more) its sub base with streaming model, and become an even higher value acquisition target; it now currently needs to figure out social media to close all gaps with Amazon.
- Resurfacing of digital media IPOs (or accretive acquisitions): think Spotify with US penetration, Facebook, Zynga, Groupon, Flipboard and possibly Pandora.
- Music and media discovery will be most valuable digital utility, with people programming their lives – and transparently tracking their consumption (personal CRM or our “time clock” theory), which will be shared, of course, via social media.
- 3D will rise at home, decrease in theaters – more television programming and surplus of high quality 3DTVs with many ITV channels also moving into 3D to differentiate.
- Apple will ditch optical drives on all but highest end laptops (wireless/Bluetooth SuperDrives to follow; Apple to move into 5TB home networks servers and own cloud ecosystem) and desktops. iPad 2 with 3G/4G package will sell 1.5x original unit and knock out all touch players save Android. iPad 2 will merge video UGC with ARG successfully, e.g., users will connect via video conference to engage with branded content. Video conferences will become programming when edited right.
- Film studios will drift away from traditional sequels/remakes and renaissance with new franchises – think next Harry Potter, Dark Knight, Hangover.
- Ad agencies and major lifestyle/consumer brands will dive into social media acquisitions, create more innovation incubators and buy consumer content/video sites to roll-up audiences. Think Y Combinator owned by Adidas. Similarly, talent agencies will launch incubators to find next production/distribution efficiencies and create more and more backend strategies versus faltering pay or play.
- In the gaming world, “Angry Birds” success will be remodeled (usually badly), but will also create new initiatives to merchandise media on a 360 level, i.e., games, films, tv will finally leverage their assets fully outside of release windows. Pop-up events will be “demanded” as exclusive media and merch will be next big thing.
- Digital content will become vastly more personalized. Once discovered (see #4), smartly aggregated and tied into social (e.g., Flipboard), users will start visiting fewer and fewer niche sites, plus heavy Facebook…
Social Filtering Beyond Friends
Social filtering sounds a bit like whittling down your friends (or wannabe friends) with their throwaway wall posts, but it’s going to be a very big business not only for Facebook but other companies like Gravity, founded by MySpace’s Amit Kapur. In a recent Techcrunch article, Kapur talked about the info overload situation.
Today, we live in a world where we’re constantly overwhelmed by information. There are over 90M tweets per day, 34 hours of YouTube video uploaded every minute, and every Facebook user has an average of 130 friends who are becoming more and more active all the time. We also experience this with content farms flooding search results and with the thousands of articles available everyday on traditional websites like the New York Times and ESPN: of which only a handful appeal to each of our individual interests.
What’s interesting here is the idea of personalizing larger form content or utilities to users – we’re talking bigger social integration than you typically get with the NY Times, HuffPo’s social news or iTunes’ Genius Bar and the newly created Ping.
Of course, will the consumer respond or even pay for this personalization? Our predilection is that the early-alpha adopters will certainly pay with their feedback and “pro benefit” upgrades of a more personalized web (that’s a lot of potential onamotapoeia), but the masses will just enter it via osmosis.
Branded/Social Engagement: Embracing New Economic Models
From my former boss and mentor, Jon Feltheimer, CEO of Lionsgate, speaking at MIPCOM.
I especially liked his paragraph below – which I’ve sliced up – as branded and social engagement is where audiences now permanently live; whether consumers “own” legacy technology or “rent” the next-generation digital devices…:
We need to create new relationships, relationships with people who install telephone lines and build mobile networks, relationships with people like billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, 26 years old, who connects millions of people through bits and bytes.
Ironic that tv networks have since been surpassed by social “networks,” where the direct to consumer, or network effect, moves the needle faster to the right than any and all traditional marketing and distribution means. Read more >>
iHollywood Session: Social Media 101
From my September 15, 2010 presentation at the Intercontinental in Century City. Some of the basics – the audio (my speaking) will be put up as a video:
Social Network Effects: “If You Build It, Will They Come Back?”
Via an SAI pull-out, Sean Parker of the Founders Fund (and former Facebook prexy) puts together a strong argument [video after the jump] at last year’s Web 2.0 conference on how network effects – i.e., empowering users to share content/data/relationships – matters more than the corporate governing or collecting of user data and activity, better known as CRM.
There’s CRM which is “customer relationship management,” but as Parker argues, today it’s more about “customer social engagement” (new acronym alert … CSE), empowering network effects that leads to more growth across market share and eventual monetization.
Borrowing loosely from Field of Dream‘s much reworked quote: “If you build it, they will come…”, it’s much more relevant these days to think of “building to get users to come back again and again (and again) with more intent” and with those returns, bring more consumers/relationships to bare against digital properties.
Look at how early Facebook or Twitter adopters dragged their ‘kicking and screaming’ friends, colleagues and relatives into the social family. Read more >>
Facebook: Transparency and Personality
The New Yorker puts together a great “Letters From” series, and Facebook’s press team is smart to begin promoting a POV (“Letters from Palo Alto”) from Zuckerberg and others (Vanity Fair’s “With a Little Help From His Friends” piece on former Facebook President Sean Parker written by Facebook Effect writer David Kirkpatrick).
Whether these personality pieces are timed to upstage (or upstate) Sony’s “The Social Network” film is an interesting question, but more importantly it reveals individual depth on the 21st century’s next media king: Mark Zuckerberg. (Of added note, Zuck is #1 on Vanity Fair’s top 100 media power list). Read more >>
Reelist: 500 Million Facebook Friends
Sony Pictures keeps on improving its marketing game online. With the upcoming “Facebook” film, The Social Network, directed by David Fincher, Sony’s domain choice in 500millionfriends.com is inspired branding.
Compared to all of the usual/uninspired studio domains, e.g., blankmovie.com, blankthemovie.com, blank-movie.com, blank-thefilm.com and the random .net absurdity, 500MillionFriends is welcome creativity/cleverness from a major studio.
The teaser below explores the hyperbolic yet real-life world of Facebook’s origins, with lines like: “Your best friend [Eduardo Severin] is suing you for $600 million dollars…” With a majority of Americans using Facebook (okay, 3-4 out of 5 Americans), how do the filmmakers take an everyday utility like Facebook, and market (then tell) a story that captures a blockbuster audience?
Digital Sky Technologies Aims $1B Digital War Chest at Asia, Australia and UK
Yuri Milner, Digital Sky Technologies’ CEO, continues to raise successive funds around digital investments, following money into Facebook, Groupon, Zygna and the recent April acquisition of AOL’s ICQ. With a new $1B war chest – or warhead – as its next stage of funding, DST will likely be adding $10-$100M+ to digital companies that do not have the same media cache as digital brands in the States.
Strong in the social space already, expect DST to pursue digital companies who are already profitable, partner well with the Facebook mothership, and scale very well. Read more >>
Vicious Capital: 15 Snap-On, Start-Up Acquisitions by Big Tech Firms Last Week
The thrust of new acquisitions has been increasing interest in what many believe is a next wave of tech acquisitions – primarily around cloud computing and mobile, some might argue – yet as this trends, it promotes another wave of utility offerings.
With FourSquare walking away from Yahoo (or the converse), Zynga walking away from Facebook and other start-ups looking at sales instead of IPOs, it appears a good time to look at the big tech players and see where there is complementary utility or opportunity.
I.e., if Cisco can go after ad-based social networks (Eos) and flash video devices (Flip cams) and HP can go after mobile handsets (Palm), what does this portend for other big tech players looking to diversify their tech offerings?
Per GigaOm: Technology companies over the last few years cut costs to the point that they now have cash surpluses — which they haven’t been shy about spending to acquire venture-backed startups. The Wall Street Journal has picked up on this trend with a story this morning that cites data from Venture Source showing that 15 startups were acquired in the last week alone, and another 14 have gone public in the last year.
If the era of select IPOs – with musings on Facebook, Demand Media, Groupon or Zynga – creates volition for a round of quick M&A sales, all the better for the industry. As we’ll report, venture capitalists (like big tech co’s) are feeling the heat of not making investments in new companies over the past two years.
Now that LPs are putting pressure on VCs to show some ROI, it will be interesting to watch the force of M&A that feeds the “vicious capital” cycle.
Venture Capitalists and their LPs will push for a lot of M&A sales which will ultimately feed the bigger tech companies need for snap/strap-on investments and company growth. Consolidation, M&A and diversification will service all parties. Read more >>
The Ten Spot: Apr 26, 2010
Back to the basics of the the Ten Spot – quick, relevant New Medici reads with an exact dose of interpretation.
1. For Web’s New Wave, Sharing Details Is the Point – NYT DealBook
The transparency brought about by Google search and Facebook community/beacon/(end of) privacy has created a slew of startups who cater to ripping open the social graph and letting everyone peek in, follow and link to your daily activities and habits.
From the likes of DailyBooth.com, Blippy.com and Groupon.com, the concept of “socially challenging” others to share interests in online creation and consumption is trending. The next logical step will be a return to a new and improved Facebook Beacon that extends the group mentality while providing multi-level marketing incentives to the individuals who create interest in new items, i.e., transactions (think ThisNext.com meets Groupon). This allows group rewards and either revshare or ranking points for the individual curators or arbiters of taste.
Blippy, which opened last fall, was the first site to introduce the notion of publishing credit card and other purchases. Last month it attracted around 125,000 visitors and closed an investment round of $11 million from venture capitalists. It hopes to one day to make money by, among other things, taking a commission when people are inspired to imitate their friends’ purchases posted on the site.
To Silicon Valley’s deep thinkers, this is all part of one big trend: People are becoming more relaxed about privacy, having come to recognize that publicizing little pieces of information about themselves can result in serendipitous conversations — and little jolts of ego gratification.
Steve Jobs defies the odds (recovering Apple), the gods (surviving cancer) and yet his consumer design “sculpting” and management fearlessness are really the two definitions he will be known by. In this above must-read link, an insider opens up about the mindset and fearset of the leading Designer CEO out there.
From secrecy to ordering the best-of-the-brainstorms (in terms of his managed teams), Jobs is building a line of devices that separate the chaos, the noise and the hacks of more open systems to bring its users a little hardware clarity (and style)… Read more >>
Venture Capital Goes Super-Size to Outsize Competition
Is super-sizing your funds a way to create venture runway to steer past or through the downturn and stay competitive in the global market? Many startups – like Mahalo, Ning and LinkedIn – pride themselves on raising enough funding to survive the nuclear winter of late 2008 and basically all of 2009. Facebook decided to add runway and incent its employees through a follow-on $100 million passive investment from DST, Russia’s Digital Sky Technologies group, who also put $180 million into Zynga in December.
Last Tuesday, Intel Capital and 24 VC firms set to put $3.5 billion over two years into US startups to bump up America’s competitive edge. Intel Capital is earmarking $200 million individually.
Via the NYT: in a program called the Invest in America Alliance, Cisco, Intel, Google and Microsoft, among other big tech employers, are hiring 10,500 US college tech grads to regain international ground lost. Per Intel’s Paul Otellini:
Unfortunately, long-term investments in education, research, digital technology and human capital have been steadily declining in the U.S. So, too, has the commitment to policies that made us such an entrepreneurial powerhouse for more than a century.
As many VCs raise more to create investment mines in nascent countries such as India and China, the market seems to be correcting in trending tides: first startups who squirreled away cash, Angel capital/investment groups who are finding High Wealth Individuals (HWIs) looking for early discounts, tech companies seeing their international talent and US competitive edges decreasing, and now VCs who see value in creating big funds. Read more >>
The Ten Spot: Oct 29, 2009
via ‘Paranormal’ Now the Most Profitable Film Ever | The Wrap
“Blair Witch’s” $248.6 million worldwide haul a decade ago – juxtaposed against its $60,000 production costs – represented an almost unthinkable 414,233 percent return on investment. Doing the same basic ROI math on “Paranormal” (65.1 million minus 15,000 divided by 15,000 times 100) yields an equally unfathomable result of 433,900 percent.
via Jackson has earned $72 mil since death| THR
Even before the “This Is It” opening, Michael Jackson had earned $90 million in the past year, with most of it coming since his death five months ago. That sizable sum put him third on the Forbes list of dead celebrities making the most money.
via CBS Digital Exec Quincy Smith Eyes New Role in Investment Banking | AllThingsD
[Posted May 11, 2009] Quincy Smith, who guided CBS through a series of big transactions during the Web 2.0 era, is planning his next deal: a move to start his own boutique investment bank or consultancy. Smith is still running the CBS Interactive unit, a job he took in November 2006. But he has been telling associates recently that he plans to start his own company, possibly as soon as this summer. Read more >>
Banking the Unbankable, Coinstar Empowers Young Gamers
Truth be told I’ve known about this initiative by Coinstar for a little while now, mainly through following one of the companies (Rixty) listed in the release, so I was thrilled to see this news hit the wires yesterday because it’s a great example of a traditional brick-and-mortar based business finding creative ways to get in the new media world game. The basic premise is that Coinstar is allowing consumers (read: pre-teen and teen gamers with no access to credit cards as a way of paying for their digital entertainment addiction – I mean, hobby) to turn in their coins in exchange for pre-paid spending cards for onling games, virtual worlds and social networks.
Social Farming, think Gold Farming with Social Identities
The business of Gold Farming – where paid gamers amass gold to sell to less-experienced users to game the MMOGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Games like WOW (“World of Warcraft”) is a well known practice. In a parallel world of connections, perhaps equivalent to “gold” in terms of business leads or viral marketing armies to launch brands, one could imagine a new kind of innovative farming for profit around social media relationships. Think “Twitter sweatshops,” “Facebook factories,” “Diggsourcing” and “LinkedIn (Assembly) Lines.” After the jump, a metaphorical goldmine…
MySpace Facelift, New CEO Owen Van Natta
MySpace’s “loss of face” to Facebook, a rough and tumble economy and a pivotal change of company seats, i.e., Peter Chernin, at News Corp (and MySpace’s own COO and senior technical team’s exodus) has contributed to a major executive facelift of MySpace. While their track record of change with Jeff Berman as President of Sales and Marketing and pitch towards being framed as a “social portal” has helped, the inability to keep up with Facebook’s growth rate and product innovation has forced change at MySpace. With the forthcoming announcement (today) by new CDO Jon Miller of former Facebook COO, Owen Van Natta, to the CEO spot, Fox and Murdoch are betting on social competitiveness to regain position. After the jump, we’ll look at Van Natta, and outside choice, Jason Calacanis’ recommendations. Read more >>
TwitLit, Twitter’s First Multi-Book Deal for Gary Vaynerchuk
Call it “Micro Diaries of a Mad Twitterer,” but early 30s Gary Vaynerchuk has amassed a meta-canon of video blogs (aka vlogs) and Twitter-Facebook updates. Specifically, these are not normal ‘human’ numbers of vlogs or Twitter updates – GaryVee (GV), as he goes by, has 208,000+ Twitter followers and upwards of 20,000 once-counted Facebook fans. He’s creating a legacy of video bloggers – Samantha Ettus at Obsessedtv.com – to build on his “personal branding” meets “social business” platform. And the recent non-digital coup: a book deal with HarperStudio – 10 social branding books for a 7-figure deal. A breakdown of the deal, the frequency dilemma for GV, and his growing personal brand network – after the jump… Read more >>
The Launch of Twitterbook
Much of the social media news in the past couple of weeks has focused on Facebook’s release of a number of new features. Some of the features have been welcomed, while one in particular has garnered most of the attention and criticism.
