twopointouch

Thanks to DrewB for this invaluable reminder of my status, via Ffffound:

I have three invitations to Ffffound, if you like pictures. First come, first served in the comments.

A great article in the FT this week by Sarah Murray (behind their paywall) about the power of the internet to make consumers powerful broadcasters. It ends with four quick tips for companies planning to join the social media space:

• See what’s out there. New services can help companies analyse their online reputations. Blog-focused search engines such as Blogpulse or Technorati allow companies to search by keywords.
• Respond pro-actively. Companies need to take part in discussions about their brands; these discussions will take place regardless, often in the most unpredictable ways. The discovery of the geyser-like effects of putting Mentos mints into Diet Coke or Pepsi led to thousands of videos on YouTube demonstrating the phenomenon.
• Manage online conversations. Companies that enter the blogosphere need to be prepared to post even the most critical comments about their brands, products or behaviour. They also need to respond quickly and with the right voice. Communications that come across like corporate press releases will attract criticism.
• Match rhetoric with action. No amount of online communication will save a company’s reputation if it is not reflected in its behaviour. And any gap between corporate pronouncements and corporate action will be quickly spotted and will be generally derided.

The last point is particularly important, controversial and interesting. As Katy Howell of Immediate Future told me a few months ago, this is an age where a company’s wrongdoings might be blasted across the internet in a matter of moments. There really is no damage limitation that can be applied except being good.

Thanks to Drew for the tip-off and more.

Richard Maven of e-consultancy interviews Catherine Smith, marketing director of Linden Lab, the creators of the popular virtual community Second Life. The digital world has hit the headlines recently because of the number of businesses that have bought a presence in the world, including Sun, Adidas, Volvo, Wells Fargo, Text100 PR, and most recently, social media consultancy Crayon.

So how do you do it and why would you do such a thing?

What are the main things companies should consider before getting involved?

If you are not authentic and do not offer anything to the community, you are likely to be ignored, at best. But those firms who commit to a long-term presence in Second Life have an opportunity to interact with their community in new and innovative ways.

We recommend that people join, learn and really feel things out before jumping in.

Is advergaming all about brand? How can advertisers measure response?

It is all about the brand at this point. Second Life provides a way for brands to reach out and connect with their audience in new and different ways.

Regardless of how you choose to measure this interaction, it would ultimately be qualitative over quantitative.

Is there a danger that users could be put off if Second Life becomes too commercial?

We equate more residents and companies coming in-world with a richer experience for everyone. Of course, this will require balancing the concerns of early adopters and other niche demographics, with that of the population as a whole.

Ultimately, the more people that choose to come in-world, the more opportunities it will create for all residents. We think residents recognise this and will accommodate an increasing variety of presences in-world. At present there is such a wealth of activity that participation in any commercial aspect is completely voluntary.

Personally, I’m not entirely sold on Second Life, though I am fascinated by the discussion. If I want to play computer games, then I’ll play a computer game. With 1.2mn members, a massive 35% of whom signed up in the last month, it’s nowhere near the size of World of Warcraft (8mn) or even Guild Wars (2mn). However, the lack of elves, dwarven warhammers and the like means that it’s more socially acceptable for grown-up marketing professionals to express an interest. I’d argue that this makes the level of coverage a little artificial compared to its real-life impact.

As with most social media engagement, as Catherine says, the metrics of ROI are pretty messy. It “provides a way for brands to reach out and connect with their audience in new and different ways” that can only be measured qualitatively. The trouble is that most businesses can’t do everything. How will they be able to measure the advantages of a SL presence against other forms of activity? Also, having a building or an island in SL kind of requires one or more people to be there. Empty shops don’t, to me, suggest a company that’s “engaged”. So that’s three FTEs if you want a full-time presence… for results that you won’t be able to quantify for ages. Good luck getting that past the grumpy FD.

* I know the headline has nothing to do with the story. Sorry. But I wanted to use it anyway.

Pew Internet Life’s new report Riding the Waves of “Web2.0″, another investigation into the meaning of the term, doesn’t contain a lot of surprises for readers of this blog, though they may find its conclusions controversial.

After explaining the origins and the perceived meaning of Web 2.0, the report argues that, “despite all of this commotion over collaboration, participation and emancipation from static information”, the things we do using web 2.0 applications are old hat. The report suggests that people have been uploading photos, writing personal web pages and discussing issues and products with other users for as long as the web has existed.

The closing paragraph sums this up nicely:

Whatever language we use to describe it, the beating heart of the internet has always been its ability to leverage our social connections. Social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook and Friendster struck a powerful social chord at the right time with the right technology, but the actions they enable are nothing new.

It then goes on to say:

A trip to the Geocities homepage on the “Wayback Machine” circa December 19, 1996 (courtesy of The Internet Archive) yields this decidedly quaint statement from the company: “We have more than 200,000 individuals sharing their thoughts and passions with the world, and creating the most diverse and unique content on the Web.” Replace “200,000” with “100 million” and you could almost imagine this sentence appearing on the MySpace homepage.

So what we have now, as far as this analysis is concerned, is more people doing the same things. Why, then, are people talking about a Web 2.0 at all? To a lot of people, we shouldn’t be. They’d say there’s no revolution, only evolution.

I am sympathetic to this view, despite my obvious allegiances: I get the point. A couple of extra considerations may change the conclusions of the report, though.

Firstly, more people alters things in more ways than one. 200,000 vs 100mn users is not just a 50X difference in scale. 200,000 is the population of a small town. 100mn is the combined population of France and Spain. More than 60% of the adults in the UK have internet access; among children, the figure is nearly 100%. The Internet is now an enormous social and cultural force. Communicating with my mother via email and using a shared photo site would have been impossible until 2005, because she didn’t “see any point having a computer”. Now, every member of my family is online. What the country (and much of the world) sees, reads, believes, our culture and common experience, is directly affected by cyberspace in a way that simply wasn’t true as little as two years ago.

Social Media - the blogs and podcasts and social bookmarks and customer review sites - now has a power equivalent to the mainstream, with bloggers having the ability to shape the mainstream news agenda and to make or break the fortunes of companies. Would there ever have been millions of dollars spent on laptop battery recalls by Apple, Dell and others without the ability of social media to move pretty isolated incidents directly into the eye of public attention? Without digg and YouTube and thousands of bloggers pointing their fingers? I very much doubt it. The expectation of free-flowing information, self-publishing and participation in a conversation are very widespread, and is again, something that did not exist until a couple of years ago.

The databases and other resources we use and create on the Internet, from search to flickr pictures to wikis are the product of almost everyone, not a select group of geeks. Web 2.0 services often rely on the power of network effects, the idea that the power of the network is the square of the number of users. There would be no point to a social network like MySpace, for example, if none of your friends are on it. If all your friends are on it, then it becomes the hub of your internet activity. This also makes ‘wisdom of crowds’ applications like Wikipedia, eBay reputations and Google plausible and usable, since we now have the necessary diversity and volume of data to generated useful results.

Second, in addition to general public access - in the Western world at least - the quality of internet access has also improved in a way that is more than numerical. When I first joined CompuServe in the early nineties, my brand-new modem operated at 28.8kbps. Now I get speeds up to 8Mbps. That doesn’t mean I can just do the same thing a lot faster, though that’s also true, it means I can do completely different things. I can upload all my photos; I can watch movies in real time; I can use rich AJAX applications that continually refresh the data I’m viewing or creating; I can speak to people using VOIP; I can download the new content from a hundred websites to my feed reader in just a few seconds. The focus of where I do things is slowly but irreversibly changing from my desktop to my online services.

So more people and faster connections are certainly the foundations of Web 2.0. But it is reductionist to claim that’s just an increase in scale. What those two ingredients actually enable is the ’something different’ that we really mean by the term: social media, read/write web, the wisdom of crowds, web as platform, rich applications, and the power of data.