For some time know, I have been looking at the shifts in social bonds as a result of social networks.  The outgrowth of Facebook, MySpace and a number of similar services has us re-evaluating things we traditionally understood without ambiguity – like friends, groups, interests, and status.

My good friend Brian Solis has an interesting post today that discusses some of the changes that are happening.  As Brian writes in “Micro Disruption Theory and The Social Effect“:

“Relationships are so much more than the mere act of following or friending someone on Twitter or any social network for that matter. It’s the balladry of transcending online connections into real world relationships. It’s the cadence of interaction and the poetry of conversations that empower the human network and the escalation of the Social Economy.

On Social Networks we’re bound by context and not necessarily by the relationships that link us in the real world.

Source: Brian Solis, “Micro Disruption Theory and The Social Effect“

I think it’s an interesting notion that we’re bound by context.  I think that this is true at the most basic level – there is a general sentiment about the venue through which we network.  Social networks are marketplaces of intention.  Daters flock to online dating sites in search of relationships, LinkedIn caters to the business professional, Facebook caters to, well that’s not that simple anymore to provide a single context – but friendship seems a suitable bucket.

I think, however, that we’re just scratching the surface.  Our networks are being bastardized in lots of ways.  We glom together everyone into one pool and then we’re overwhelmed with having to deal with it all at the same time.  In our real lives, we are capable of maintaining many granular networks of individuals.  We’ve moved past the differentiation of social networks (see Social Networking Differentiation 2.0, June 2006) but there’s still quite a bit left unsettled.

It seems we’re ready for the next phase of differentiation – where micro actions are aggregated back together to resemble real things.
I’ll use an analogy to better describe just what I think this looks like.  If we imagine our network of relationships as a home, the foundation is made up of those real, physical relationships that we have with others.  Right now, we’re on the ground floor – where we welcome new people at our virtual front doors.  With time, attention, and enthusiasm, those same guests on the ground floor are invited upstairs: they’re the friends that come to visit from out of town, that make your home their own home.

The second level of relationships I call Affinity Networks.  They are truly contextualized networks of friends and family and other individuals that you care about.  Brian nails it when he points out that “We listen to relevant keywords to learn from others who share our interests and passions.”  Truth is, however, that those are just directional pointers to the individuals that are seemingly important or relevant.  Beyond that initial interest, it takes a great deal of interaction and discovery to actually forge real relationships that last through time.

Affinity networks differ in that they don’t deal with the people connected but instead with the subject at the core.  That “subject” may be a person, place, or thing, but everyone gathered shares a bond to this central concept.  Affinity networks allow us to re-constitute all the micro actions and gestures and give us focus again on those trends, themes, and individuals that mean the most to us.

I’ve often noted that as much as technology provides us new ways to reach out to more and more people, further and further away, it’s our nature to seek out the solutions that mimic or engender closeness, touch.  Seems we’re ripe for something new.

For more years than I can remember, I’ve advocated the position that all things social are inherent to our understanding of the world, making them unable to be bottled or packaged in any way that doesn’t automatically feel a little disproportionate to our understanding of them.

I’ll grab one old quote to illustrate this disconnect:

The two defining characteristics, from lago’s point of view, of an actual social network are that it cannot be compressible and that it would not be user-maintained. The notion of a self-organizing software mirror of the social network is very intriguing to say the least. The notion of compression carries back to the static visualization, wax museums, and other criticisms we’ve seen about these networks. Systems are already in place that are starting to become more autonomous, providing that automatic-user requirement. The question this raises though, however, is this: If software could mimic, and potentially predict the growth and interaction, in its entirety of a real social network, why do we need the nodes at all? It seems that the snapshots provide a context for evaluation that, despite the obvious limitations, can be leveraged.

Source: SocialTwister.com, “SNS: A Xerox of a Xerox” (March 04, 2004)

The crux of the matter is that we are incapable of not seeing things from a social perspective, it underlies all assumptions we make and frameworks we build.  This has been more and more on our minds here as we we work to flesh out of Practice Areas more clearly so we can communicate it to clients and peers.

Today, Umair Haque has a wonderful distillation of the secrets to Obama’s success – a testament to the strength of network thinking and social insight.  One particular bullet struck me, which inspired this post:

4. Maximize purpose. Change the game? That’s 20th century thinking at its finest – and narrowest. The 21st century is about changing the world. What does “yes we can” really mean? Obama’s goal wasn’t simply to win an election, garner votes, or run a great campaign. It was larger and more urgent: to change the world.
Bigness of purpose is what separates 20th century and 21st century organizations: yesterday, we built huge corporations to do tiny, incremental things – tomorrow, we must build small organizations that can do tremendously massive things.

Source: HBS, Obama’s Seven Lessons for Radical Innovators

“Tomorrow, we must build small organizations that can do tremendously massive things”  It is this emergence of purpose that allows most people to “call bullshit” on the vast majority of systems and services unleashed on the unassuming yet early-adopting masses.

The greater and deeper the value we create, the stronger the purpose.  Yes, we can.

There’s some interesting chatter today regarding the future business models of the blogosphere – and other forms of social media – around the water fountain today. As usual, Scott Karp provides an interesting canvas for conversation. Over at The Blog Herald, he points to some analysis done by Sahar Sarid:

Sahar’s historical analysis is certainly compelling. If other media ultimately adopted a paid content model, why not blogging? I agree that there is fairly strong case that some blogs may ultimately be able to adopt a paid model, but there is an equally strong case why most blogs will not.

The case for paid subscription blogs is the same as the case for any other paid content:
1. Must have
2. Not available elsewhere or better than what you can get for free
3. No ads (although not necessarily)

Source: The Blog Herald, “Could Blogging Adopt A Paid Content Business Model?”

Of course, Scott is referring the public notion of scarcity. The reason that works are able to accrue value stems from the belief of others that there is unique value to the content created. The second part of his rules limits the nodes of creation in the network.

The difficulty with scarcity models in the domain of social media is that, well, there is no scarcity. The more important aspect of this market value is the distance between “good enough” and “not quite good enough”. On January 27th, I wrote about the Vanishing Point Theory of News. At that time, I proposed that there is a diminishing returns on my investment in media creation and consumption based on my ever-changing interests.

In the blogosphere, there is no shortage of individuals covering a specific topic. Let’s pretend that Engadget shut down – what do you anticipate might happen? Likely, there would be some moaning (where I don’t know) but millions of people are not going to give up their interest in technology and gadgetry. The built in social network will kick in and spit out another candidate for the go-to site for technology news. Further, some or several enterprising folks will make quick work of aggregating an experience in kind. What are the odds they would charge a fee up front?

This cycle seems impossible to break considering the economics at play today. The appeal of the Freemium model seems to fit much better in our current thinking. I’m willing to pay for that extra edge, for that extra shot of espresso. If I’m paying for content, doesn’t the promise of exclusivity get brought to the table? If I’m paying for gadgets, gizmos, networks or people – suddenly, the value is measure in other ways.

Give me my damn accessories!

Technorati Tags: freemium, longtail, paid content, scott karp, vanishing point theory of news

The tumultuous state of the newspaper industry is one that has not only been long in the making. Over the past couple of years, I’ve covered a number of different aspects of this change – an analysis that has only accelerated with the work behind SocialRoots. In many ways, I can relate to the utter blur that is the future. It’s hard to see an empire die, especially one you’ve worked arduously to build and protect. Perhaps the hardest part, aside from the financial dire, is the potential dilution of values and practices.

An interesting post on Search Engine Watch got me thinking about the industry again. As is the usual coincidence, I had a conversation last night about the hyper-local business model after being asked if we now had ubiquitious WiFi in San Francisco now (we don’t). Mike Boland does a great job summarizing the current state of affairs:

The reality is that the web has commoditized national news. The only way to differentiate it is to have a specific angle of coverage at which you excel (Wall Street Journal), or unique voices that demand a premium (New York Times). Notice that these are two major papers that can get away with charging for online premium access.

The third strategy is to leverage a position that can’t be replicated by aggregators; local. This hasn’t really been done in a meaningful way online by local newspapers, or any national publisher with a patchwork of local assets. The opportunity exists, however, to create attractive and unique local destinations.

The Blogosphere Sounds Off on Hyper-Local

We’ve seen the “nichification” of news in the social media universe – there’s a blog, podcast, or video blog on almost any topic conceivable. Naturally, this is not new considering our history of online special interest groups (BBSs, newsgroups, forums, chats). the key difference, of course, is that the surface area for social media is simply an order of magnitude larger – propelled by not only the increased ability and reliance on search but also on the implicit and explicit social networks that connect these publishing posts – millions of regular people consume social media, they just don’t know they do.

Which brings us to today, at the proverbial doorsep of a hyper-local movement. If we trust the signals from the major search players, we’d be safe to bet that there’s gold in them mountains. There’s no coincidence that Google, Yahoo, and MSN are building up their local ad serving technologies and partnerships in the preparation for the next arms race. Chris Anderson reminds us of another reason, the Vanishing Point Theory of News:

Our interest in a subject is in inverse proportion to its distance (geographic, emotional or otherwise) from us. For instance, the news that my daughter got a scraped knee on the playground today means more to me than a car bombing in Kandahar…There’s nothing new about this (it’s a truism of the American newsroom that Paris, Texas counts for more than Paris, France), but it bears repeating. The future of media is to stop boring us with news that doesn’t relate to our lives. I’ll start reading my “local” newspaper again when it covers my block.

The Vanishing Point Theory of News

Yet, I feel somewhat unsatisfied with this direction. I’m not sure why I feel separate from my “community.” It could be that my lifestyle is near-nomadic. It could be a generational detachment from culture as a whole. I’m not sold that I need more of here. When I grew up, we had the Rockland Journal News as our local paper. I never read it. I did read the New York Times, however. Why? We were instructed to do so for school. We were made to have the impression it was “better”, whatever that means.

It seems to me there’s a slight gap, let’s call it a blackhole, where the return on hyper local publishing has diminishing returns. Seems the distribution of interest has what resembles a Planck Distribution – does anyone remember these from school?

At the global and national levels, we’re interested and that increases as we get more and more local.  At the other extreme, there’s the “news” as it pertains to our families and friends – our personal news network if you will.  The gap, in the middle, seems to be where there’s a current leap of faith that there is tremendous interest in what we call the “hyper local” news.

Surely, there is evidence that people are willing to create this type of media content.  There’s even evidence that it’s being consumed.  Of course, that evidence is still sparse and, more importantly, not contextualized relative to the other spheres of media influence.

Is hyper local news the Evil Knievel of media?

technorati tags:hyperlocalnews, chris+anderson, longtail, media, influence, news

Guy Kawasaki provides us with some insight into his first year blogging:

1. 2,436,117 page views for an average of approximately 6,200/day.
2. 262 posts generated 6,961 comments and 1,937 trackbacks. That’s 25 comments/post and 7 trackbacks/post.
3. 21,000 people receive RSS feeds via Feedburner and 1,457 receive emails via FeedBlitz.
4. Total advertising revenue: approximately $3,350 = $1.39 cpm. (This assumes that I can get Google to pay me. I’ve tried several times during the year to get my snail mail PIN so that I can get paid, butI’ve never received it. I don’t mind Google getting the float…)

How to Change the World: A Review of My First Year of Blogging

Over the past year, when asked why the SocialRoots Marketplace was needed, I’ve often used Guy Kawasaki as a prime example of just what’s wrong with our advertising-only centric view of social media monetization. Consider Guy’s example: a regularly udated, top 50 blog with significant traffic by a well know speaker and author squeezes out a slim $280 a month. Sounds lovely, no? Sign me up.

Some will be quick to point out that many people are able to monetize their online publications with less traffic and notoriety. I might counter that I am not interested in writing about home theatre, HDTV, mortgages, or other gadgets, but that would just be me making a point.

Chris Anderson points out on his Long Tail Blog:

Just another reminder that the reason to be a Long Tail producer is not direct revenues. Instead, it’s exactly what Guy uses it for: marketing for his books, VC firm, speeches and consulting. For which he’s exceedingly well paid. Indirect revenues rule!

The Long Tail: Don’t quit your day job

Lead generation and referals are definitely another viable option for extracting value from your personal publication. Of course, we’re not all consultants either, but it’s a step in the right direction.

If all goes well, we’ll share another interesting model with the world in the next couple of months.

technorati tags:long+tail, chris+anderson, guy+kawasaki, blogging, monetization

Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail, has an interesting post about some emerging trends in our behavior, largely surrounding our newfound love and dependency on technology and all things gadgetry:

I begin my economics of abundance speech with Carver Mead’s mind-bending question: “What happens when things get (nearly) free?” His answer is that you waste them, be they transistors or megabytes of bandwidth capacity. You use them profligately, extravagantly, irresponsibly. You shift out of conservation mode and get into exploitation mode.

The Long Tail: The Rise of Freeconomics

This reminds of me of the trailer at the movie theater where there’s the annoying cell phone guy that is on the phone in all the inappropriate places and cackles at the end, “Don’t worry, I’ve got like a million minutes.” I certainly do see that this newfound obsession with abundance does impact the way we live our lives.

Chris’ main distinction, which I think deserves a secondary nod, is that the price has to approach free or virtually free. I think there’s an interesting phenomena that does happen at the end of that spectrum, or perhaps it’s more of an inflection point, that the value of an object becomes abstracted. The most common case where we make this evaluation is with the “free give-away”. Many the entrepreneur has fought with pricing for their product or service – constantly balancing the value proposition of free versus that of paid. Recently, we’ve seen many fall into the Freemium model for pricing. Why? It’s easy to choose. By segmenting our feature set into convenient columns, we force the customer to evaluate the value – using the language and imagery we choose. Of course, it’s our challenge to find the right mix to create the proper slope – but it’s easier than retracting a free offer, isn’t it?

In many of our minds, free translates to disposable: Buy this shredder, get a free toaster. We are forced to reconcile either our need for the second, the quality of the second, or both. Of course, the second one is trivial in nature.

In other minds, it’s an extension of the original offer, not free at all: Buy this PDA and we’ll give you a free SD card. Can I really use the PDA without the card? No – it was already part of my purchasing research. We’re more likely to wonder why it wasn’t included originally, not value the token.

Lastly, there’s the notion that free implies some form of bait: Try our product for free or return it in 30 days for free! Everyone’s been burned on this one, right? The process for the return is so difficult or tedious that you actually end up eating the loss. It’s established a general distrust in our collective minds that “some things are too good to be true”. We’d rather pay and know the extent of our liability than relinquish it to that unseen abyss.

But the science of free, it’s still evolving. As Chris points out:

With apologies to Levitt and Dubner, I’ll cheekily call the emerging realization that abundance is driving our world “freeconomics”. Understanding when to shift out of scarcity mode and start giving away what you once held dear is a core competency for our age.

The Long Tail: The Rise of Freeconomics

They same common sense is not all that common; perhaps the same can be said for abundance.

technorati tags:freeconomics, chris+anderson, longtail, abundance

Mark Cuban has a very compelling piece up today that discusses some of the economics of the Long Tail. It is interesting mostly in that it is a very harsh, and potentially telling, view on just what success might take. There are quite a few interesting points, though I recommend you read the whole thing.

Mark’s first point is to provide more context around the Long Tail’s topography. He identifies new labels for two areas of the graph – The Vert Ramp and the Content Ceiling. Mark’s done a nice job explaining it but I just though the diagram needed some help so I created a new one:

Now, as I’ve shown it here, there are the Capital Needs on the Y-axis and Commercial Interests on the X-axis. Mark makes a good point that when you really are in it for the money – you need to be in it for the money. The last PEW study estimated that more than 10% of “bloggers” wanted to blog for the money. I’d imagine, however, that given the insight that blogging might net them more than pennies, quite a few more individuals would be interested in shaking the money tree. As Mark notes:

First content providers, whether podcasters, vloggers, bloggers, movie makers, writers, poets, whatever the content type make the decision of the creation of the content is about love or money. Is the goal of the finished product commercial, or purely personal ?

If the goal is commercial, whether to make money directly or indirectly from the content, then the battle to fight through the Content Ceiling begins.The bottom line is that people want to get paid for their work. Creators have a vision. They think there is something special about it, and they want to get rewarded for their effort. Its a simple goal in concept, but its incredibly difficult to achieve.

Is the Internet A Long Tail Ghetto ? – Blog Maverick

Mark introduces the notion of a Content Ceiling – reflecting the point where the tail starts to transition upwards. The Ceiling is actually the threshold where enough circumstances become positive that an actual business can ignite. For this reason, Mark refers to the many individuals toiling in the lower recesses of the Long Tail as the Ghetto. In the Long Tail Ghetto, there is an abundance of people pouring their blood, sweat, and tears into a proposition that barely nets them minimum wage.

For all the talk of the internet changing distribution, the reality is that in order to break through the Content Ceiling and to climb the Vert Ramp, 99.9 pct of content creators are going to do need OPM (Other Peoples Money). The internet alone is not going to get the job done. You can put your content everywhere and anywhere the net allows you to be hosted, but for most people the amount of revenues for that content you had before you started the hosting process will be the exact same as what you have after the hosting process.

Is the Internet A Long Tail Ghetto ? – Blog Maverick

This is an interesting point as well, though I am not sure how much I agree as of yet. On the one hand, I believe that the economics of the Long Tail are fundamentally flawed if not solely than that they still revolve around hits. We are still in the very early stages of learning what influence and attention are valued, but ultimately, I believe that the eyeball model will cede in many different places to one based on influence. To that end, moving from a small scale publisher with a small audience, you will need a lot of money – the kind of money that makes publishing and distribution broad and meaningful quickly. Mark’s point seems to be that the crux of that happens in unline (that place not online).

Naturally, my role at SocialRoots taints my views on this world. Whereas I believe there is a ghetto.. I think there’s also a market. When the conversation is made granular – note a different set of tools is required to handle boulders than gems, it may be that distribution and reach are things that can equally be distributed.

If a hit today is 100M (viewers, listeners, readers, downloads, etc), what will it be in 3 years? How many tails are there? As infinite as the tail itself?

technorati tags:mark+cuban, long+tail, socialroots, content+ceiling, vert+ramp, blogging, podcasting, social+media

Chris Anderson, purveyor of the Long Tail, has been heard discussing the related concept of the Abundance Economy. While I would love to provide you with a succinct definition, but David Hornick has done a very nice job already:

The Economy of Abundance allows business owners to defer choices to the end users. What better way to find out what consumers want than to give them everything and see what they actually buy. That is the paradigm of abundance. Why get your news programmed by CNN.com when you
can have your news bubble up from the collective wisdom of end users at Newsvine or Reddit? Why get your television programmed by CBS when you can leverage the collective wisdom of the web to find great shows like Lonelygirl15 or Ask a Ninja?
No longer will the success or failure of content be dictated solely by the Economy of Scarcity (e.g. Walmart). Rather, it will be dictated by the will of the consumers, as empowered by the Economy of Abundance.

Much like the Long Tail, the idea of the Economy of Abundance is not prescriptive. It does not tell you how to run your business. But it points to another significant force at work in the new economy and suggests that entrepreneurs should think creatively about how their businesses might be transformed by utilizing abundant resources in a disruptive way. Like the Long Tail before it, I suspect that I will be seeing the Economy of Abundance permeate the presentations that I see in the coming months and year.

Source: VentureBlog, “Chris Anderson Strikes Again: The Economy of Abundance”

This ties in, of course, to the crowdsourcing theme started yesterday that all data needs to be transmuted into information before it is truly useful. In this abundance-driven model, it seems quite reasonable that we are increasingly forced to deal with depleted reserves of attention.

Perhaps the scarcity Anderson says ruled the world has simply been re-assigned to our own attention engines?

technorati tags:longtail, scarcity, abundance, chris+anderson, david+hornick

It’s nice when you can hear someout out in the trenches confirm the ideas bouncing around in your head like a ball-bearing tickling the sides of spraypaint can.  I just had one of those experiences reading Steve Rubel’s post, “Three Ways to Ride the Long Tail”.  The crux of Steve’s points relates to the power of niches:

Reach metrics are the currency of the advertising community. We’re obsessed with eyeballs, gross ratings points and page views. But in a Long Tail world, reach has entirely new meaning. Many niche sites, for example, can’t hold a candle to the traffic at the head of the media curve. However, what they do have going for them is credibility.

Micro Persuasion: Three Ways to Ride the Long Tail

I could show you slides from my pitch to correlate, but that would just bore you ;)  Steve makes three good points:

• Rethink Reach
• Fund Niches
• Demand More From Media

I definitely recommend it – especially if you’re curious about just what SocialRoots does.