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.
Jack Dorsey’s Circular Focus in Square
Following Vanity Fair’s Sean Parker sketch, Jack Dorsey of Twitter and now Square makes the editorial cut under David Kirkpatrick’s steel pen. The focus on both is primarily their focus and their market timing.
While Parker carries a precise gut instinct for the right opportunities, Dorsey employs a predictive ability towards where community needs lie.
Intriguing about both is their singular or circular focus. Having worked with Jeff Skoll, dined with Larry Page and met Zuckerberg at a Google Zeitgeist conference – I notice the clean lines of their expression mimic the intensity of their entrepreneurial passions.
Theirs is a cleanness of personality; an ability to concentrate on one thing above all others, which is ironically anti-social given their social projects.
Also ironic, Parker had to convince Zuckerberg to think big on Facebook, and Dorsey’s direction has been for purity of the product design of Twitter and now Square, a plug-in to smartphones and tablets for credit card transactions.
Peter Thiel—the billionaire hedge-fund manager and co-founder of PayPal, who became Thefacebook’s first investor—says that around that time “Sean consistently argued that Facebook was going to be really big. If Mark ever had any second thoughts, Sean was the one who cut that off.”
Via the Dorsey VF piece, “Twitter Was Act One,” there’s definitely a management learning curve, which has put Jack Dorsey into a better stead.
More control over his products is also what connects these digital characters. Call it a focused ownership and particular attention to detail, like another chief innovator: Steve Jobs. Read more >>
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.
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.
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 >>
Overnight Startup Successes, Unfair Advantages and VC Pile-Ons
The nature of really breaking out of the startup pack these days is becoming a viral or word of mouth (WOM) overnight success. Outside of Facebook’s social graph anaconda, Twitter has been parlayed forward by Ashton, Oprah, Britney and many of the other known-by-one-name celebs into the next Digg/Facebook/etc.
If American Idol is a barometer of talent – or Susan Boyle, an example of instant stardom (even if it took xx years to get there); then Twitter and now FourSquare are showcases of how to enter the media fray successfully. Read more >>
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 >>
Netflix’s Winning, Innovative Culture
Netflix became more transparent recently, by posting its internal company culture preso, i.e., how it inspires great hires, values context not control, and rewards adequate performance with severance. Given that Twitter had its internal documents hacked and sent to many blogs, it’s a welcome blast of fresh air when a next-gen, New Medici-like company like Netflix shares its values.
Twitter Tools and Tricks
Reflecting on how mobile media has come to encompass “social media” – especially with Twitter leading the charge – below, please find a few helpful tools and tricks to support your Twitter addiction:
Twitter Tools:
- Seesmic Desktop (Adobe Air client for fast multi-account tweet management and search)
- TweetDeck (alternative to the above)
- Tweetie (the best iPhone client)
- MrTweet (search submission tool to help get followers)
- @geofollow (keyword submission tool)
- Twitpic (for better photo tweeting)
- Twitterholic (follower rankings and stats)
- Last, click here for an exhaustive list of 3rd party twitter apps… Read more >>
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…
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.
Twitter Vanity and Twitter Squatters
How much is your Twitter account name worth (not your Twitter following or value of Twits) to you? As an individual, a personality/ celeb or a real brand? I recently took a drive through the oh-so-simple registration, and there’s still a lot of top level twits (TLTs?) available. Remember all of those domain names you couldn’t buy because domain squatters were holding them ransom? Well, my prediction is that the great land grab – this time around a kind of Twitfest Destiny – is back. The year of the Twitter squatters (“Twatters”) is upon us. Read more >>
What’s the “Thread Count” of Your Friend Count?
I had coffee with a longtime investor colleague who threw a nice metaphor in my direction: “thread count” as it related to the depth of your friendships. As we all initiate, accept or add new digital relationships into our lives (yes, I did get ‘social’ with LinkedIn back in its early years with 1,500 linkedins; more recently with ~650 Facebook friends), how do we measure the relative quality of the quantity of friends we connect to? Do we connect to add relative quality value to our own persona, or is it done merely to create a personal, i.e., quantitative, fan club of sorts? Read more >>
Social Media vs. Privacy on the Web
I’ll admit it. I’m a social media junkie. And it’s not difficult to satisfy my addiction, considering the large number of social media sites that are quickly popping up as of late. But it has also got me thinking – considering the popularity of social media sites these days, should we be more concerned about our privacy? 5 years ago, it was only the early adopters who were on sites like MySpace and Friendster and most people were weary of sharing too much on the internet. These days Facebook has well over 100 million registered users, and over 222 million visitors per month. After the jump, a list of some of latest and greatest social media sites, along with ways you can ensure that the whole world knows everything about you… Read more >>
Has MySpace become “MySpaced”?
On reading Techcrunch’s advance review of a WSJ reporter’s new tell-all book on MySpace, I updated my Facebook status with bewilderment that MySpace passed on buying Facebook for $75M in 2004. And I made a Freudian typo… Read more >>
Social Networks as Tech Challenge
CES 2009 Panel: Social Networks & User Generated Media as a Technology Challenge: The Platform, the Content & the Network. Amid 150″ HD television announcements, this past Saturday I paneled a CES/Digital Hollywood discussion on the start-up requirements of social networks – what the technology challenges were, new ways to acquire users and monetize during recession. Read more >>