What is a struggling social network to do?
Before the emergence of Facebook, Myspace was once the 800 lb gorilla of social networks. While everyone knew that Facebook had been outpacing Myspace’s growth for quite some time, some observers felt that the Company had found its niche as a music centric social network.
But the headlines over the last few weeks have not been kind to the Los Angeles based Company as their CEO, Owen Van Natta was terminated two weeks ago, followed by a number of other high level executives following him out. A recent story on TechCrunch also outlined how an entire project team (5 people) at Myspace was recently let go. What was this project team tasked with? Just a complete re-design of the Myspace web site. The crazy part of the story is that one of the new co-Ceo’s that replaced Van Natta (Mike Jones, who was the former COO) has decided to completely scrap the project team’s work, even though the team spent close to 9 months and significant capital in creating this new web site. All of this begs the question, why would a Company like Myspace spend a lot of money and the better part of a year on a project that they didn’t intend to use? Such is life at a Company when there is not a clear corporate strategy.
For the past two years, Myspace has been on a journey to “find itself” but more specifically, find a niche that would differentiate itself from Facebook. Because lets face it, the war is over, Facebook won a long time ago. So what is a struggling network to do? It’s clear that Myspace has been trying to differentiate itself through its close connection with music. But is that enough to kick-start the growth of the Myspace? Probably not, hence why all of the inner turmoil at the Company. But they do need a clearly articulated strategy that conveys to the user why they are different than Facebook…or why users should come to their social network as opposed to others.
It’s worth noting that I have never setup a profile on Myspace. My Friendster experienced traumatized me for several months after I closed it down and by the time I was considering a move to Myspace, Facebook was already the preferred destination. What would it take for someone like me to setup a profile on Myspace? Hard to say as I don’t really feel the need to join another social network at this point. But one thing seems clear at this point, Myspace is suffering from an identity crisis and need to do something to create a niche for themselves. If they want to be a music site, then they should fully commit to that plan and drastically change their marketing strategy. But they need to do something quickly, before the only people left on their site are affiliate marketers hoping you click on the latest “Acai berry diet” offer.
Social Media for YOUR Stalker
Along the same lines of my celeb post earlier, and the foursquare comment below – there is tons of information about you online.
Do a google search on yourself every now and then – what do I find – loads of information on me, with the most dangerous from social media
and what do you find -
- Twitter feeds
- Facebook page and pictures (you MUST opt out of making your page searchable)
- GetGlue Page- a rating service I signed up for in exchange for getting freebies.
-yelp reviews
- amazon reviews.
In fact anything I entered using my real name somewhere, its on there. Social media allows an amazing amount of collaboration and participation. Just beware – when it’s not “anonymous”, the whole world will know.
Social Media for Celeb Stalkers
Nowadays, you don’t need to pick up Hello magazine for the latest headlines about your favorite celebs. Now you can open up your browser to gossip blogs like Perezhilton, TMZ, Gawker’s Defamer to name a few.
Not in front of the computer – don’t want to listen to someone else’s commentary about what your celeb is doing.. Voila – Twitter to the rescue.
The other day I did a search and I realized – I can FOLLOW my celebs. You’d think they were simply their press agents publishing info about them. You’re wrong!
Check out @Kimkardashian
She’s been praying about the Tsunami warning in Hawaii.. earthquake victims in Haiti… those suffering in .. Chile and oh, what’s this – she’s on her way to Vegas and she convinced the pilot to let her into the cockpit.
Other celebs with bonafide real tweets
Kevin Smith – screen writer of Dogma et al
Kirstie Alley – Fat Actress/Cheers
Jordin Sparks – American Idol star
Wanna know if your celeb tweeter is real – go to twitter.grader.com and test it out.
What do you realize from all this? All people are boring, even celebs.
Foursquare for Dummies
One of the things I’ve learned from this class is just how out of the loop I am, in terms of what’s new (and not so new) in the online world. I hadn’t ever heard of Groupon, Foursquare, or a bunch of other seemingly well known and popular services. And acrossair seemed like something out of The Matrix. Below is a basic guide to Foursquare for others like me.
The four major steps to understanding and using Foursquare:
Check-in: Once you’ve signed up for a free account, you can “check in” wherever you are, using the iPhone’s GPS to locate your venue. With its mashup of services like Yelp, Twitter and Facebook, Foursquare allows you to peruse restaurant and bar reviews, get tips from regulars – and even shout out to your friends to come join the party. That’s just the beginning, though; what makes Foursquare stand out is its function as a real-time, real-world competition. Which brings us to …
Points: Every time you sign in to a venue – be it a club, pub or even your best friend’s apartment – you’re awarded a certain number of points based on how many times you’ve been there, your number of stops that night or how many nights in a row you’ve been out on the town. For now, all this gets you is bragging rights and a spot on the online leaderboard – but Foursquare’s Web site hints that more is on the way.
Badges: Besides points, your travels can also earn you badges. Sign in to the same place three times in one week and you get the “Local” badge; sign in late on a weeknight and earn the “School Night” badge. There are already a ton of badges, both obvious and obscure, and if you have an idea for a new badge, you can submit it online.
Becoming mayor: Our favorite Foursquare feature. If you’ve signed in to a venue more times than anyone else, you become the “mayor” of that place. Your status not only makes you a mini-celebrity among Foursquare users – your profile pops up whenever someone signs in at that venue – but some savvy businesses have begun to advertise special discounts to their mayors. Still, you have to be vigilant; other users can swoop in and take your crown. And gloat about it.
A New Use for Smartphones: Radios (with Pandora app)
While I’ve never even used Pandora on my computer, I just read about how Pandora just became available as an app for the Android system. Apparently, it’s already available for iPhones, Blackberries, and Pres (does anyone really have a Pre?) While admittedly I’m somewhat behind the technology curve as it seems most people already use Pandora on some level, I’m going to give it a try on my Blackberry. I doubt the sound will be that great, but I can probably figure out how to hook up some small external speakers that I can throw in my bag…
Pandora, which runs a popular streaming radio Web site, on Wednesday released its application for phones running the Android software from Google. It’s available for download in the Android Market. Pandora is available on the iPhone, BlackBerry and Palm Pre. Of the 65,000 people who register for a Pandora account each day, 45,000 do so on mobile phones, said Tim Westergren, above, Pandora’s founder. ”I’m beginning to think that our future is going to be more mobile-centric than I had even thought, and sooner,” he said.
The biggest surprise — and success — of Pandora’s mobile applications has been the way people plug them in to speakers in their homes and cars, Mr. Westergren said. Those two places have historically been where people listen to 80 percent of radio. ”It’s giving Pandora access to the two big pieces of the radio market we’ve never been able to reach before,” he said. ”It really allows us to become a much more serious and viable alternative to broadcast radio.”
The Difficulty in Tracking Web Traffic
There is a lot of debate over how to accurately measure web traffic. While the average consumer isn’t super worried about how accurately web traffic is measured, those who purchase and sell advertising space care a great deal about these numbers. If a site’s traffic is not being fully measured, that site will not be able to charge advertisers as much as the advertisers would be willing to pay if the traffic was recorded at higher levels. And advertisers obviously want to be able to have confidence in the size of their target audience before shelling out money on advertising agreements.
Web-traffic measurement, despite recent advances, remains fraught with conflicting numbers. The Internet’s inherent accountability, stemming from the digital trace left by every Web site visit, has spawned a multitude of measures, but little clarity.
For big sites such as Facebook and Yahoo, the differing numbers might matter chiefly for bragging rights. Smaller sites, though, say that mismeasurement of their traffic could cost them when advertisers seeking a broad reach dismiss them because of their seemingly paltry audience sizes.
Bob Bowman, chief executive of MLB Advanced Media, the Major League Baseball digital arm, goes further. “Our numbers are wildly different from what comScore and Nielsen are showing, to a point where it’s materially damaging to our business.”
ComScore and Nielsen say such criticisms reflect a misreading by Web sites of their own user base, which is reflected most often as a tally of monthly unique visitors. Online publishers typically can gauge their own traffic through logs on their Web servers recording every request for the site, or by assigning unique tags, known as cookies, to each Web browser that visits the site.
Both of these techniques, though, tend to overestimate visitors, for several reasons. For instance, the same person might visit from home, from work and from a mobile device, and be counted as a different user each time. (A computer also might be shared by several people, which could lead to an undercount.) Another problem arises because many people frequently delete their cookies, so they are counted multiple times. And then there’s the problem of search engine bots that view web pages multiple times, further inflating the traffic count.
ComScore recently introduced a new tool to address some of these issues. Clients that add a comScore cookie to their site are now having their audiences counted using both comScore’s panel and their own direct traffic counts. ComScore starts by scrubbing the cookies of bots and international visitors. Then it uses its own panel data to attempt to correct for cookie deletion and repeat visitors.
While several ComScore clients have reported jumps in traffic from this new approach, many smaller sites still complain that they are being left out. ComScore has offered to measure nonclients’ traffic for a $5,000 fee that covers six months. This has made small firms feel that they need to pay to prove the true level of traffic their sites receive.
The issue of measuring web traffic accurately is one that will likely be fought by all parties who have a vested income in the reported numbers. Hopefully, new methods that can be more universally agreed upon to measure web traffic will be created.
The Difficulty in Tracking Web Traffic
There is a lot of debate over how to accurately measure web traffic. While the average consumer isn’t super worried about how accurately web traffic is measured, those who purchase and sell advertising space care a great deal about these numbers. If a site’s traffic is not being fully measured, that site will not be able to charge advertisers as much as the advertisers would be willing to pay if the traffic was recorded at higher levels. And advertisers obviously want to be able to have confidence in the size of their target audience before shelling out money on advertising agreements.
Web-traffic measurement, despite recent advances, remains fraught with conflicting numbers. The Internet’s inherent accountability, stemming from the digital trace left by every Web site visit, has spawned a multitude of measures, but little clarity.
For big sites such as Facebook and Yahoo, the differing numbers might matter chiefly for bragging rights. Smaller sites, though, say that mismeasurement of their traffic could cost them when advertisers seeking a broad reach dismiss them because of their seemingly paltry audience sizes.
Bob Bowman, chief executive of MLB Advanced Media, the Major League Baseball digital arm, goes further. “Our numbers are wildly different from what comScore and Nielsen are showing, to a point where it’s materially damaging to our business.”
ComScore and Nielsen say such criticisms reflect a misreading by Web sites of their own user base, which is reflected most often as a tally of monthly unique visitors. Online publishers typically can gauge their own traffic through logs on their Web servers recording every request for the site, or by assigning unique tags, known as cookies, to each Web browser that visits the site.
Both of these techniques, though, tend to overestimate visitors, for several reasons. For instance, the same person might visit from home, from work and from a mobile device, and be counted as a different user each time. (A computer also might be shared by several people, which could lead to an undercount.) Another problem arises because many people frequently delete their cookies, so they are counted multiple times. And then there’s the problem of search engine bots that view web pages multiple times, further inflating the traffic count.
ComScore recently introduced a new tool to address some of these issues. Clients that add a comScore cookie to their site are now having their audiences counted using both comScore’s panel and their own direct traffic counts. ComScore starts by scrubbing the cookies of bots and international visitors. Then it uses its own panel data to attempt to correct for cookie deletion and repeat visitors.
While several ComScore clients have reported jumps in traffic from this new approach, many smaller sites still complain that they are being left out. ComScore has offered to measure nonclients’ traffic for a $5,000 fee that covers six months. This has made small firms feel that they need to pay to prove the true level of traffic their sites receive.
The issue of measuring web traffic accurately is one that will likely be fought by all parties who have a vested income in the reported numbers. Hopefully, new methods that can be more universally agreed upon to measure web traffic will be created.
NYC REALTY CHECK – Zillow.com
A 17 years old student astonishes the U.S. with an article pro downloads
The young Canadian Kamal Dhillon could never have imagined the impact his school paper for ethics class. The students from Balmoral Hall School wrote an essay on downloads of copyrighted content on the Internet and Dhillon’s article won the contest. The article, entitled “Not bad, only illegal,” was published by the local newspaper in Winnipeg, Canada, and then jumped the rest of the country and the U.S. thanks to news aggregators, blogs and social networks. The article, among other things, states that sharing music is not worst than lending a book to a friend or to many friends, and argues that people understand that and do not respect the law. In other words, if there are hardly any consequences for something illegal and people do not perceive that it should be illegal, people will break the law.
Shopping online?
There are so many retail e-commerce websites out there selling clothing and accessories. It makes me wonder if there will be a huge dip in brick and mortar retail stores.
