Archive for the ‘Social Media’ Category

Social networking for publishers

November 10, 2008

Last week I spoke at the launch of Squiz’ new Open Source Social Networking Platform about the business and cultural implications of social networking for publishers.

The event was held at the Royal Society of Arts and it was interesting to see such a wide range of different types of publishers in the room.  There were conventional content publishers, both magazine and on-line, but there were also charities, universities, the RSA themselves and several companies who publish to employees via their intranets.

Social networks and publishing are converging

I believe we’re now seeing a big convergence of platform functionality between the social networking sites and traditional publishers.  After starting out as a pure social network, Facebook is introducing more and more ways for users to upload and share content.  It started out with the wall and now includes groups, photo uploads and many others.  LinkedIn is doing similar things with groups and discussions.

Social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn start from the premise that you already know the people and are therefore going to be interested in the content they are creating.  It’s like going to the pub with your mates and having a gossip.

Publishers understand their audiences

Publishers on the other hand come at social networking from a completely different perspective.  Publishers audiences are bound by a common interest.  Whether that’s the arts, technology, sewing or pregnancy, they consume the publishers content because they are interested in the subject matter.

Some groups are only interested in a transient way, pregnancy communities are, by definition, constantly changing.  Others are more permanent, if you are an Arsenal supporter then it’s for life!  The common theme though is that the community is drawn together by the content and consists of people that share a common interest but don’t necessarily know each other (at first).  It’s much more like a club than a pub.

CMS is evolving

The underlying concepts for social networking (and the requisite technology platform) though are the same.  It’s about connecting people to content and then back to people again to form connections and community.

Squiz along with some of the more enlightened CMS developers are now building this functionality into the CMS platforms and the launch was very well received.  Publishers seem finally to be getting to grips with the concepts and now have the tools to allow them to engage properly with their audiences.

Culture is the key

The biggest barrier is no longer the technology, it’s the culture and willingness to “let go” of the traditional one way broadcast model of publishing and start listening to what the audience have to say.

It takes time to create vibrant communities.  Publishers have to take responsibility for creating the right environment and nurturing the firestarters that will generate the user content.  You can’t just bolt community on to the side of your existing publishing business, culturally or technically.  You have to integrate it into the fabric of your organisation.

Content will always provide a “centre of gravity” for communities that pure social networks will find hard to replicate.  That gives publishers a big opportunity to provide the platform for their communities to engage with them and each other.

Posted in Content management, Events, Publishing, Social Media, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

ZDNet wins “Best business website 2007″

October 4, 2007

AOP Awards Sometimes, when you are months into a big project with a long time still to go to launch, you wonder if it’s all worth it. Will anyone notice? Was that big idea we had really the right one? What if somebody launches before you and steals your thunder?

Were you were mad to even set out on a path in the first place?

I’m sure we all have those doubts and there were plenty of times in the development of the new ZDNet site that I questioned my sanity.

I say new but in fact it’s been nearly a year since we launched (it’s one year old on 30th October) and last night at the AOP Awards, the publishing industry voted ZDNet.co.uk “Best Business Website 2007″

The judges said: -

“This site has displayed a fantastic use of web 2.0 and is in tune with the user. Really revolutionary, with a thinking behind the site that is streets ahead of its peers”

Amazing really that a site conceived nearly two years ago should be praised for being ahead of it’s time even now. When we started out on the project, some of what we were doing was completely unproven and we had no idea if it would work.

Last night proves that we weren’t mad (well not much) and that we had a vision that has become the benchmark for other publishers. It’s nice to know that somebody noticed as well.

Posted in AOP, Social Media, Web 2.0, ZDNet | 1 Comment »

Targeting User Generated Content

August 23, 2007

Myspace logoWay back in March, I wrote this post about the problems in monetising user generated content. Last week, my namesake at MySpace announced that they have been trialling contextual display advertising based on user behaviour.

Unsurprisingly, there were no technical details as to how they would segment the users as if they can crack the magic algorithm and make a success of it then they will be well ahead of the pack.

It’s a bold step with many unanswered questions, I believe the issues are twofold:

  • Firstly, can they make it work?
  • If they can, then can social networkers be enticed to click on ads?

As to the first point, if it works then they will be able to charge a healthy premium for access to target groups. Barrett is claiming that a premium of between 30-50% is “within the ballpark”.

However, if they don’t get it right then the potential to alienate clients is huge. FaceBook found this out recently when the government suspended advertising on the site after their ads were run against BNP groups.

The second question is harder to anticipate, this recent article bemoaned the poor CTR on FaceBook. Of course, this could be down to many factors, poor creative, lack of targeting, uninteresting products will all have an effect on lowering the CTR.

However, there is also the possibility that social networkers just don’t respond to ads in the same way that users do when browsing traditional content sites. If this is true then no amount of targeting will command a premium without a measurable ROI for the clients. Only time will tell…

Posted in Ad serving, Social Media | 1 Comment »

Byte Night Local Launches

June 8, 2007

Byte Night LocalToday we launched the Byte Night and Byte Night Local campaigns with a press announcement about the events. We’ve been building the “Local” site for a few weeks now and it’s been an interesting project to say the least! We’ve had fantastic support from a whole range of very dedicated people who have provided their time and expertise for free.

Trying to manage the specification, design, HTML, coding, video production and hosting with people who are trying to do their day jobs in parallel has been extremely challenging. The problem is not with enthusiasm, knowledge or commitment, that was abundant, the challenge was coordinating the various components to fit in with everyone’s busy schedules. Unlike a project where all the resources are under your control, on this one, none of them were!

The finished site looks great, we’ve mashed up the best of Flickr, You Tube, Google Maps and powered the whole thing with the CNET Networks community platform to allow registration and blogging, this is Charity 2.0!

I’ve slept out for Byte Night for the last four years and it’s an amazing event that has raised over £1.5M for NCH, the children’s charity that helps homeless young people. As well as the London event, this year we’re launching “Byte Night Local” with the aim of recruiting 250 people to sleep out locally, in their gardens or company premises so that the experience isn’t restricted to the people who can make it into London. I’d encourage you to sign up and support a really good cause and experience a little of what the people we are trying to help have to endure every night of the year.

A big thanks must go to Rod for the original idea, Michael, Jess, Belinda and the team at Banner who created the original designs and much of the copy. At CNET, to David for the HTML coding, Piete for the tech work, Tim and Simon for the hosting set-up and Chris for the video production.

Finally, Suzie at CNET for supporting the project, Sam and Louisa at NCH and Kath at Lewis PR for testing, copy and moral support through the whole process. It’s been a great experience and a true team effort. Everyone gave generously of their time which ultimately means that even more of the money we raise goes directly to the people who need it most.

Thank you to everyone, sorry if I missed anybody. See you on the 5th October, let’s hope it doesn’t rain!

Posted in Blogging, Byte Night, Charity, Social Media, Web 2.0 | No Comments »

Panel discussion on the dark side of social media

May 2, 2007

After attending the last three Chinwag events, which I would highly recommend, I’ve been asked to speak on a panel at the June event which is mysteriously title “The dark side of social media”. We’ll be talking about elements of social media that hit the headlines (and sometimes not) for the wrong reasons: -

  • Identity theft
  • Libel
  • Stalking
  • Scurrilous behaviour

and I’m sure much more. One interesting element of this from a community perspective is how do you decide where the censorship line is to be drawn? Unacceptable language in the Cbeebies community would be perfectly OK in the Quentin Tarantino discussion forum. Also, how we make the back end systems more intelligent in automatically reducing the chances of publishers displaying incorrect/libelous/offensive material on their sites?

So come along to the event, they are always great fun and lively conversations that involve the audience as well, hopefully see you there.

Posted in Events, Social Media, Web 2.0 | 1 Comment »

How many ways to perform “inside search”?

April 20, 2007

Search imageI’m fascinated by the many different approaches to search that are emerging to challenge the “inside search” we all know and love (hate) on web sites. You know, where you type in a keyword and get a large and random set of search results returned from a basic keyword index.

I’ve written about Ultra Knowledge before and how their automatic tagging sets them apart from the crowd but now the crowd are starting to take differing (and potentially complementary) approaches.

Collarity sits on top of the existing site search and monitors where the users click through to for each keyword. This then creates a “wisdom of the crowds” intelligence so that when the next user types that keyword, the system will suggest the most popular destination URL’s. This is interesting as Collarity don’t actually index the content which makes it fast to deploy. The downside of this is that it’s only as good as the underlying site search so if that doesn’t return relavent content then the value of the wisdom is reduced to the lowest common denominator.

Eurekster takes a different approach, allowing the users to rate the search results thus increasing the weighting of the most valuable results. It also allows users to create their own search results based on their knowledge of the subject making it a mashup of search and wiki functionality.

And this week I met with a UK company called Synature who have yet another take on “inside search”. Much more focussed on specific sectors (initially holidays) their product is about connecting like minded users using something they call “Attitudinal Matching”. They employ a psychologist who sets a series of 4-6 questions about how you feel about a particular subject. For example in holidays you would be asked to rank your requirements on a scale between “Beautiful” and “Exciting”. The results of these questions are then fed into a sophisticated system that can match you to like minded people and their holiday recommendations. Again, the system doesn’t index the content, just the user who created it and allows you to locate relevant content via the social network that this creates.

There are many others of course, if you know of anything interesting going on in the search space, please leave me a comment as it’s such a fast moving area it’s impossible to keep up.

Which is right? Well all of them have their pros and cons in different applications and the possibilities for combining them with each other and the social networking platforms is intriguing. Watch this space…

Posted in Search, Social Media, Tagging, Web 2.0 | No Comments »

User generated content, what are they talking about?

March 23, 2007

One of the major components of the Web 2.0 revolution is User Generated Content or UGC to its friends. But while it undoubtedly adds colour and content to the traditional editorial on a site, just how useful is it?

The main problem with UGC is that nobody knows what the content is about. It’s difficult enough getting editorial teams to classify content consistently, so asking users to do this is unlikely to work. Of course we’ve seen the concept of tagging work brilliantly on the likes of Flickr and del.icio.us but even here there are a lot of inconsistencies. People don’t all use the same language, have the same idea about what the content is about and, some just can’t spell.

The upshot of this is twofold. Firstly, its pretty difficult to automatically connect editorial content about a subject to its UGC cousin. There’s no consistent tagging or mapping to enable this to happen automatically. So for example if I were reading an article about tagging, it would be great to see all the member blog posts that were related to that subject.

The second is more important to publishers which is that there is no easy way to target advertising at the readers of UGC. So despite paying $580M for MySpace, NewsCorp couldn’t run any of their conventional display advertising on the site. There was no targeting available other than the basic site demographic. They have solved their commercial problem in the short term by doing a $900M deal with Google to run AdWords on the site. Big advertisers though who want to reach the MySpace audience don’t want to do this through AdWords.

They want their brands and imagery associated with quality, targeted content, not mixed in with all the random ads in AdSense for unrelated products. If you have any doubt about this, have a look at the ads that get served against your emails in GMail for seemingly unrelated products. It’s a great game and depending on the subject matter you can expect to get some spectacular results including one example I found that combined British Airways, satellite TV, the best tennis grip and lingerie. I’ll leave it to you to work out what the email was about…

So what is the answer? Lots of sites have introduced tags as navigation devices either in clouds such as or associated to the stories as on my fovourite site ZDNet. The holy grail is to automatically tag all content consistently across the site whether its editorial, UGC or vendor content such as whitepapers. That creates a consistent way to connect content together and also to identify what its about so as to be able to target advertising.

The new search engine on ZDNet, provided by UltraKnowledge is designed to tag all content consistently regardless of where it originated from. At the moment it is only indexing the editorial content but soon it will be rolled out to the vendor and UGC areas. At that point, it should start to provide the targeting the publishers require to make money from inventory which was previously low value, run of site.

Posted in Ad serving, Social Media, Tagging, ZDNet | 2 Comments »

Open source vs commercial software

February 1, 2007

I spoke with some guys at the AlwaysOn show yesterday who have an interesting business model aimed at tech support professionals. Spiceworks have a radically different take on free software. They allow anybody to download their application which monitors devices on the network. It incorporates a ticketing system and also the ability to share experiences in a forum environment with other Spiceworks users.

In return for the software, Spiceworks then serve ads within the application. Shock horror you are thinking! But what’s really ingenious about the ad serving part is that it’s related to your specific network equipment. Not only that, if a disk is running out of free space, the system will suggest potential local suppliers for a larger one.

Squarely pitched at the SME marketplace where the IT team is 2-5 people supporting up to 250 users and who typically don’t have a huge support network, they have only focussed on the US market so far. It’s a fascinating mash-up of web 2.0 application, community functionality and adsense type ad serving and it’s coming to an IT department near you soon…

Posted in Ad serving, Social Media, Web 2.0 | No Comments »

AlwaysOn conference day one

January 29, 2007

Started in NY tonight with Tony Perkins and Bill Cleary doing a double act where they presented video blogs from Davos and San Francisco respectively. These were a bit like “You’ve been framed” only not as consistently amusing but did set the tone for presentations that are now sure to be laced with video for the rest of the event.

While videos clearly add an element of interest and production not previously encountered in Powerpoint slides, I can’t help but think it’s cheating a bit to rely too much on them.

They were followed by Peter Hirshberg from Technorati giving a similarly light hearted, video laced presentation about web 2.0 and their new product built in association with Ogilvy.

Not exactly sure what that product is as it wasn’t really that clear and no demo was forthcoming.

The main theme, as to be expected was all about how social media is taking over and the need for publishers and advertisers to take an active role in the “conversation”. The intro’s were obviously designed to be lightweight rather than in depth. Let’s hope tomorrow brings a little more substance on what and how publishers and advertisers can engage rather than lots of people simply urging them on.

Posted in AlwaysOn, Events, Social Media, Web 2.0 | No Comments »

ZDNet stars at Association of Publishers event

January 18, 2007

I blagged myself an invite to the latest AOP event this week where Suzie Daniels was up on stage with the likes of Yahoo to talk about the social networking experience ZDNet has gained from this part of the site.

The audience were all on-line publishers of one description or another and Suzie talked about the lessons learned so far, the importance of having built a solid platform and the cultural changes that are taking place inside the organisation. There was a very lively Q+A session at the end and It just demonstrated how far ahead the team at ZDNet are with their thinking.

It has prompted several comments across the blogosphere, the most notable, this one at the Guardian.

Posted in AOP, Blogging, Social Media, ZDNet | 1 Comment »