twopointouch

Into town today for a roundtable lunch about social media with Yahoo luminaries Bradley Horowitz, Glen Drury, and George Hadjigeorgiou, plus a bunch of digerati like Mike Butcher, Hugh Macleod, Sam Sethi and Adriana Cronin-Lucas.

If you get a group of people like that in the same room for a couple of hours, then you can guarantee that the discussion is going to be wide-ranging. Understandably, then, we covered the Facebook and Twitter booms, anxieties about privacy and one’s digital footprint, the attention economy, and more. I’ll leave the last word on that part of the discussion to Mike who pointed out, “This is all so new. We can’t even begin to understand what its effects will be.”

Bradley - whose job description appears to be “making cool stuff happen” - kicked off the formal part of the discussion with a short presentation about the company’s strategy. Its mission, he said, was, “connecting people with their passions and their communities.” Internally, the company has a group called Brickhouse that is all about how it can transition the positive experience that people get from flickr and other recent acquisitions to other properties in the Yahoo stable. The photo-sharing site exhibits a number of virtues that aren’t always true of other social media sites:

• Almost 100% commitment. Other sites seem to follow a 1:10:100 rule when it comes to the number of creators, commentators and idle consumers. Perhaps this is because photos are something anyone can do, and an interest in sharing photos would be the main reason for going to the site in the first place. In any case, flickr doesn’t follow this rule, but rather has a much larger proportion of active users.
• Self-policing. One of Yahoo’s fears in purchasing flickr was that it would descend into hosting a lot of pornography. Apparently, this has happened on a lot of other photo-storage sites. However, because its users are so active and caring about the quality of the community, this hasn’t been the case with flickr.
• Quality. One issue Bradley pointed to with a lot of UGC sites - YouTube was given as an example - is that quality doesn’t rise to the top. A chimp doing karate seems to have gained a lot more attention than serious art shorts on that site, for example. The interestingness algorithm on flickr allows high quality pictures to rise to the top without explicit user interaction, such as voting. This passive input by users - also found on last.fm - is very much seen as the route forward for finding valuable contributions to social sites.

I’ll paraphrase the rest of the Yahoo guys’ comments, to take out any ambiguities, and I freely admit any inaccuracies are my own. Yahoo is keen to position itself as a different sort of company to Google. That’s understandable, since direct comparisons on search traffic aren’t going to look good for the company. Its take appears to be that Google is positioned as the master of the machine - creating the algorithms that keep people going back. It doesn’t want to position itself as the second-best in this regard. Second-best at search means zero traffic, as any current indicator of search traffic will reveal. Yahoo wants to be the best at sites that are people-centred; to bring the best parts of flickr, del.icio.us, upcoming and mybloglog back in as a core value proposition.

But Yahoo wasn’t just making a branding statement. Like Google and other media companies, its business, essentially, is in selling advertising. Understanding their users, getting hold of their lifestream, was revealed as a key strategy in its acquisitions. Through the four sites mentioned above, and further launches and purchases, they’ll know an awful lot about users. What will they do with that? They’ll sell it to advertisers. Because advertisers need to seriously raise their game when it comes to getting any response. I’ve had banner adverts switched-off in my browser for nearly three years (use the AdBlock Plus extension for Firefox or the ‘block content’ right-click command in Opera). How will the advertisers get me to stop filtering out their messages? By making those messages either very entertaining or very useful. If I get offers and suggestions that are genuinely relevant to what I do and what I want, then I’ll stop filtering. Of course, only a small minority of (quite geeky) people are actively stopping their browsers from displaying ads, but they are filtering them nonetheless, through the simple ability to just ignore them.

Yahoo knows this. It knows that to deliver value to advertisers, it’ll have to deliver audiences that actually care. And it’ll find the people who actually care through social media sites. NB: user data is currently anonymised, according to George, though Sam saw the possibility for Yahoo to act as a trusted broker for his attention. He’ll happily give up plenty of information about his life, in return for payment.

One last interesting tidbit: Yahoo has already mocked-up a Facebook-like shell site for internal consideration that can bring together user information from its various properties. According to Bradley, this will/would also allow for the import of information from third-party sites. More importantly, perhaps, a Yahoo equivalent to Facebook would also have an open API allowing the information users put into the site to be exported out again, à la del.icio.us. No more re-creating profiles and friends lists! There was a lot of speculation last year about Yahoo purchasing Facebook. It may well be the case that a DIY job is on the cards.

Edited for grammar