Jon DiPietro is Domesticating IT

I occasionally post subjects with the subtitle, “I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means.”  The subtitle pays homage to one of my favorite sources of movie quotes, The Princess Bride (you can view this particular quote on YouTube).

I’ll be conducting an inbound marketing workshop at the ISA Marketing & Sales Summit in a couple of weeks. We’ve just launched a blogging contest that is giving away an iPod Touch. Although I’m judging and not eligible to win, I’m linking this article to help spread the word.

Browser content (i.e. HTML on port 80) now accounts for less than 25% of all Internet traffic.

Your entire Internet marketing strategy may be based on a mirage. Many companies are focused on search engine optimization and pay per click campaigns. This is all well and good as long as Google remains the gatekeeper of the Internet. But here’s the thing; there’s a new sheriff in town and the entire 18 year old ecosystem of the world wide web is in danger. This is according to Wired Magazine who today published “The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet.”

The premise of this article is that we are willingly giving up the freedom and openness of the traditional world wide web in favor of a more closed, less free version; apps. Wired argues that like the rail system and electrical grid before it, the Internet is entering a period of consolidation and domination by a few power brokers.

Over the past few years, one of the most important shifts in the digital world has been the move from the wide-open Web to semiclosed platforms that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for display. It’s driven primarily by the rise of the iPhone model of mobile computing, and it’s a world Google can’t crawl, one where HTML doesn’t rule. And it’s the world that consumers are increasingly choosing, not because they’re rejecting the idea of the Web but because these dedicated platforms often just work better or fit better into their lives (the screen comes to them, they don’t have to go to the screen).

Now. let’s keep in mind that Wired is not entirely unbiased in this debate. They and their publisher, Condé Nast , have put a large portion of their eggs into Steve Jobs’ basket. But to paraphrase the late Kurt Cobain, “Just because you’re biased doesn’t mean they’re not right.”

Tilting at Windmills

We laughed at Prince when he said it, but this article should make every marketer’s blood run cold. If our usage of the Internet is indeed moving from open, HTML-based web sites to the walled gardens of applications and streaming content, it means that search engines are indexing an increasingly small piece of the pie. They simply aren’t the ubiquitous arbiter they once were, since much of the Internet’s activity is happening outside of their field of view. Basing an entire Internet marketing strategy on search engines is like looking at a windmill and seeing a dragon.

That doesn’t mean that you should halt your search engine marketing tactics. It does, however, mean that it should be a shrinking share of your overall marketing strategy. The question then becomes, “What fills that vacuum?”

Gift Marketing

Moore’s Law has resulted in bandwidth and storage costs that are becoming too cheap to meter. This enabled the Web 2.0 sites we’re all using today and led to the emergence of social networking. Consequently, we’re able to scale our peer groups and get increasing amounts of information and recommendations from trusted sources instead of advertisements and algorithms. The problem for marketers is that much of this takes place inside the walled gardens of Facebook. As the old saying goes, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

And so we have brands jumping into social media. However, one of the problems they’re grappling with is the juxtaposition of norms; economic versus social. They’re not used to this whole social thing and many of them are trying to transplant the old advertising models that were based on economic norms into the world of social networking.

Think of it this way…  You’re having a dinner party and invite some close friends. Your doorbell rings and it’s a smarmy, uninvited used car salesman. He lets himself in and starts denigrating the car in your driveway and listing all of the special deals they have. While this behavior may have been tolerated on his lot, it certainly doesn’t belong at a dinner party and you kick him out. Imagine, instead, your best friends call ahead of time and ask if they can bring this really cool guy who was great fun at their last barbecue. He shows up and in the course of normal conversation finds out you’re having trouble with your headlights. He takes a look and shows you how to adjust their alignment and fixes the problem. You find out later (from your friends, not him) that he works at a car dealership and you commit to visiting him when it comes time for you to upgrade your vehicle.

In this new trust economy, companies are going to have to start thinking much more in terms of social norms. Even though the name of the game is making money, they are going to have to follow a different set of rules than they’re used to following. The first rule of inbound marketing is creating compelling content that people want to share. The secret to creating this content is thinking of it as a gift.

Is repackaging your brochure into a blog post a gift? Not so much.
Is showing up unannounced polite? Definitely not.
Do gratuitous, insincere compliments build trust? Not exactly.

Search engine optimization is certainly not dead. But as Hans and Fanz said, “Hear me now und believe me later,” that giant sucking sound you hear in your marketing strategy is the vacuum being created as search shrinks. You need to be prepared to fill it with content marketing that focuses on building new customer relationships socially.

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Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.

Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.  This week’s High Five deals with two ends of the social media marketing spectrum; fun and failure.

I wrote about the historic influence of games last October when I predicted that the future of software is Facebook.  There have been some major business moves involving big money this week, illustrating how pervasive entertainment is in the world of Internet marketing.  But games can get a little rough and like mom used to say, “It’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt!”

#5: Disney About To Acquire Playdom

Disney is obviously the 800 pound gorilla of fun and games.  They tend to be a bit conservative as a company, so it’s not a shocker that they are a little late to the social space.  But any company with the brand power and balance sheet of Disney can make big moves quickly.  Their first major move was the acquisition of the children’s game site Club Penguin.  Establishing a stronger beach head in social gaming gives them more channels to keep their brands in kids’ faces.

Link: TechCrunch

#4: The Web Means the End of Forgetting

It is said that an elephant never forgets, but neither does the Internet.  Cautionary tales of moments in which relatively minor lapses in judgement are posted online and lead to long term personal and/or professional consequences continue to pile up.  What happens at the night club not longer necessarily stays at the night club thanks to ubiquitous smart phones and social media.  This New York Times article focuses on personal reputation, but obviously brands are no less vulnerable to an ill advised Tweet or boneheaded Facebook photo.

Link: The New York Times

#3: Will Zynga Become the Google of Games?

For all its hype and media coverage, Twitter has yet to turn a profit.  The creators of FarmVille and Mafia Wars, however, are on track to eclipse $500 million this year.  Yeah, that just happened.

Link: The New York Times

#2: Expert Notes Few Marketers Do Social Media Well

It’s no longer disputed that social media is (at the very least) the most important marketing game changer since television.  And so it’s natural for marketing companies to update their service offerings to say they can implement social media marketing.  The vast majority of them are ill-prepared and simply applying old techniques to a new technology.  Anyone can slap together a Facebook page and create a Twitter account, but how are they measuring success?  Is it integrated to an inbound marketing strategy?

Link: MediaPost

#1: Older Actors Upstage Youth at Comic-Con

You can always tell when an element of pop culture jumps the shark: the old fogies start showing up.  As Hollywood increasingly goes back to the future by recycling classic comic book stories for “new” films, purists inevitably balk and rebel.  Kind of like the changing demographics on Facebook, no?

Link: The New York Times

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Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.

Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.  This week’s theme is, “Google v Facebook: Clash of the Titans.”

#5: MailChimp Integrates Facebook Likes Into Email Campaigns

This is an interesting, though not very surprising, development. It’s an interesting application of online/social media marketing with “old school” outbound email marketing.

Link: All Facebook

#4: Why Facebook Killed A $100 Million Baby

Have you ever sent any of those annoying “gifts” to Facebook friends?  Me neither. But apparently there were plenty who did.  Facebook’s announcement that they are shuttering the gifts ecosystem signals their progress toward the Credits business.  This next generation will establish a global system for games and applications to raise revenue using a universal Facebook “currency.”

Link: All Facebook

#3: 7 FBML examples to rock your Facebook fan page

Many don’t realize the extent to which they can customize fan pages.  Facebook uses a variation of HTML called “Facebook Markup Language” that allows for highly customized tabs and this article provides some common examples of how this can be implemented.

Link: Web Distortion

#2: Google Secretly Invested $100+ Million In Zynga, Preparing To Launch Google Games

Since Facebook’s launch of its social search platform earlier this year, there’s been lots of talk about its threat to Google’s supremacy.  We’re now learning about Google’s strategies and tactics for counter-striking.  As with so many innovations in the history of computing, one of the first beachheads will be gaming.  If you’re dubious about how influential games could be, you may want to read The Future of Software Development Is… Facebook?!?!

Link: TechCrunch

#1: Google’s Facebook Killer “Google Me” Confirmed By Former Facebook CTO

Information is starting to emerge about Google’s response to the Facebook threat.  This article provides evidence that Google is planning something, and we later learned about the weaknesses they intend to exploit.  Check out this Sneak Peak at Google’s Facebook Killer.

Link: Gizmodo

Feel free to provide your thoughts and/or contributions…

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OK, I will admit it – I may have a slight man-crush on Clay Shirky. I quote him often, watch any video he’s in, and read everything he writes. The term “thought leader” is overused in our hyperactive blogosphere, but the term truly applies to Shirky. His first book, “Here Comes Everybody – The Power of Organizing Without Organizations,” looked past the obvious points everyone else was making about social media and unveiled the long term effects it would have on organizations. Put another way, he was thought-leading.

His encore book is “Cognitive Surplus – Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age,” and it is vintage Shirky. Every page is dense with original ideas about how social media is going to affect society. The very title of the book suggests that there is a surplus of brain power up for grabs. But since cognitive capacity is a zero sum game, the surplus has to come from somewhere. This begs the question, “Where do people find the time?”

The Essence

Shirky tells a story about a conversation he had with a television producer who was trying to determine whether or not to have him on her show. He talked about the controversy of Pluto’s “delisting” as a planet and the sudden spike in activity on its Wikipedia page. Shirky waited for her to follow up with questions about the social implications of this phenomenon, but “Instead, she sighed and said, ‘Where do people find the time?” Hearing this, I snapped, and said, ‘No one who works in television gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from.’”

The 1970's television show "Gilligan's Island" had many pondering the eternal question, "Ginger or Mary Ann?"

He estimates that there are roughly a trillion hours spent watching television worldwide each year. The advent of the industrial age and, with it, the 40 hours work week meant that the post World War II industrialized societies had an abundance of free time and television swooped in and soaked up most of it. We laughed at ourselves for spending so much time contemplating the such mysteries of the universe as, “Ginger or Mary Ann?“.

Social media represents competition for our free time. The big difference between it and television is that our every use of social media is, by definition, a creative act. Whether it’s uploading vacation photos to Flickr or sharing pearls of wisdom on Twitter, we have made something that didn’t previously exist. We can debate the value and merit of this content until the cows come home, but what is not debatable is that watching television creates nothing.

The question now becomes, what will come from the creative activities of “The People Formerly Known as the Audience” as he calls them?

Means, Motive and Opportunity

In three of the book’s chapters, presents the implications of the Cognitive Surplus in the framework of a legal argument; means, motive and opportunity. “The harnessing of our cognitive surplus allows people to behave in increasingly generous, public, and social ways, relative to their old status as consumers and couch potatoes.” They payoff in the book comes from the motive and opportunity topics, where the rubber truly meets the road.

The Skinny

Why it rocks:

The book is fruitcake-dense with ideas, evidence, and challenges. It looks well beyond the horizon of such comparatively insignificant questions as “Google versus Facebook”, or “How much is a follower worth?” Cognitive Surplus is a book about how human beings will harness each others’ brains in order to work together at changing the world.

Why it doesn’t:

It’s not the easiest read in the world. Not because of his writing style, but simply because you spend so much time contemplating the implications of the machine gun pace of ideas he unleashes.

The Verdict

This is an important book. It may not necessarily be important to you, but the concepts are far reaching and somewhat mind boggling. If you’re wondering what role LOL Cats may play in the future of mankind, Shirky goes a long way toward putting all things social media into context.

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Paul Adams is the Senior User Experience Researcher at Google. He posted a presentation on Slideshare that is providing a glimpse at the philosophy behind the rumored “Facebook killer” that Google is working on. This presentation indicates some fundamental differences between its view of social networks and the way in which Facebook is currently implemented.

The title of the presentation is “The Real Life Social Network” and it exposes some fundamental differences between the way our relationships exist in real life versus the way they are modeled on Facebook (or pretty much any other social network for that matter). Given Google’s specialty – writing algorithms that model relationships – it’s easy to see how their background in search algorithms has imprinted the thinking in this presentation.

Groups

One fundamental design flaw with most social networking applications is that they force us to into using one generic group of “friends.” Adams says his research indicates that people actually have between four and six groups of relationships. When they examined 342 groups that people used to describe their real life networks, only 15% actually contained the word “friend” at all! Furthermore, 61% of the names were unique, which means that there is not a lot of common ground in terms of how we categorize our real life networks.

Connections

Not all connections are created equal. Adams talks extensively about “strong” and “weak” ties between people. Strong ties exist among family and close friends and tend to be in the single digits. Weak ties make up the remainder of our relationships, which caps out at around 150 (see Dunbar’s Number). Any connections beyond that are classified as temporary connections.

Privacy

While it seems almost too easy to assault Facebook for privacy concerns, Adams does so by tying it in with the concepts of groups and connections. If it’s true that we have these different relationship groups and that the strength of our connections within each of these groups varies, then it logically follows that our desires for and expectations of privacy will differ greatly as well. It will be important, not to mention challenging, to support these different models in a way that is easy for people to understand and implement.

The interactions between these different groups and different types of connections is a complicated dynamic that, according to Adams, is greatly oversimplified in current social networking applications. Presumably, this document is a sneak peak at Google’s major push toward a new platform that aims to end the threat Facebook poses to Google in the form of social search. They’ve clearly identified three major weaknesses that they plan to exploit.

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