Rather than craft a whole new post, I’m just posting the exchange. Which you’re gonna love. Honest to God, we are that interesting.

Given what we were talking about a couple of weeks ago, I thought you might find the responses on this thread interesting:

Brightkite discussion: Would you be willing to pay for BK?

Seems a lot of people would be willing to pay, if they were getting something for it.

Eric

Very interesting, but people seem to forget they’re already getting something for what amounts to nothing at this point.  People need to be willing to pay for what they have and additional features.

Joseph

True, but it’s encouraging that they’re willing to pay at all if it comes to it. I think a lot of these places should be offering something for free, not for my benefit, but for theirs - to get people in the door.

Maybe it’s really to the company to decide how much of their own service they’re willing to give away in order to get new users. I mean, if I heard of Brightkite today, and only had someone else’s write up of it, and no experience with it, and was told that in order to get a firsthand impression of it I’d need to buy a month’s worth of time, I’d just pass on it.

E

Oh I’m not saying there shouldn’t be free trials and such; I’m saying that as advertising dollars continue to prove incapable of covering all the bases, more sites should opt for a low cost for-pay option as a base.  Something you could pay one or two bucks a month to use, with say a one-month free trial to get you hooked.

I think the free market would go to work and weed out all the crappy me-too services out there.  Customers unwilling to pay at all are worthless anyway, IMO.  If Facebook cost $5/mo and no one was willing to pay for it, what would that tell you about Facebook’s value and the value of Facebook users en masse?

~J

That’s really the nut of it, though, isn’t it – who’s really using this stuff? I think it’s mostly people with a casual interest. From most of the research I’ve done, Twitter is chock full of people talking about Twitter. So the hardcore users seem too myopic, and the casual users seem too cheap. Then again, that’s why this stuff’s really only good for branding and listening campaigns so far, as opposed to real social media marketing. Then again, that was true of the Internet itself like 12 years ago. These are indeed interesting times.

What I personally like about a free side/pay side is it gives these users indefinite time to figure out if they want or need more. I mean, I have a pro Flickr account, but it took me a year and a half to pay in for it.

E

It all comes down to cost vs benefit, and what I’d like to know is how much money the average “freeloader” costs a site like Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, etc.  We know that these sites are often very expensive to keep running, so the sweetspot in any free/pay system is going to depend largely upon how much profit the company wants to make (or perhaps more accurately, how much revenue the company needs to stay in business).  Of course that assumes you can simply draw a line in the sand and say “everything on that side is free, and everything on this side you have to pay for.”  How does that work with a service like Twitter?

The one thing we seem to be ignoring in general is that social apps are all about the people using them – they’re not about the bloodthirsty Internet marketers and other companies looking to cash in.  Social apps are huge because of the connections they help people make to other people.  I bet you’d be very hard-pressed to find anyone who’d say that access to companies like Zappos is the reason they participate.

What I’d love to see is Twitter (and social in general) charging for commercial use.  Individuals could continue to use the system free of charge, but companies (think Southwest, Discount Tire, etc) would have to pay.   Marketers salivate over directed advertising and such, but people hate it.  I hate it.  I think social apps like Twitter, Facebook, etc. should be funded by the people who stand to make money using them.  That means charging for advertising and charging to participate.  Such a system would substantially reduce the amount of noise and lend credibility to the companies that stick around.  It’s also far more equitable than an everyone-must-pay system would be.  The burden of cost would fall on the shoulders of those making money.  Companies could choose to abstain, but that would be foolish.

Dude, I’m so going to format this back and forth into a post on the blog, if you want to bill this time to something.

Eric

Works for me!

Joseph

This is why I’m a big proponent of Friendfeed, yet another social media site – a social media aggregator. It pulls together all of your other social media sites into one tidy area. If a site has an RSS feed, it can be plugged into Friendfeed. 

First, establish a new e-mail address for all of your social media doings. For this tutorial, I’m going to suggest you use Google for it’s personal page plug-ins that I will go into later.

Why do you need a new e-mail address though?As you go forward with several sites, you’re also going to get several notifications from them. New friends, direct messages, requests to look at someone’s something new and more will all come to this address. You can certainly use your current address, but you may find it difficult to deal with all of the new mail you’ll be getting. It can be especially difficult if you use a work email address, as you suddenly find notifications bundled up with more urgent messages. I find it’s simply easier to have a second e-mail address in place for them, and to check it when I go tooling around.

When you sign up, try to find a handle that you can use for all of your sites. This is the beginning of your social identity. I suggest something that isn’t necessarily your whole name, (which may be hard to find,) but something that defines you. Because my family is Italian and my name is Eric, I chose “Ciaoenrico.” That name was original enough it wasn’t already taken and I could register it most everywhere I went.

If you already have a username on Twitter, use that for everything else you sign up for. This will make it easier for people to know that you are you, whatever the site. Some sites, like LinkedIn or Facebook, require your actual name so don’t worry about this.

So now you’ve got your e-mail address. Next, go to Friendfeed.com and register your profile, again using your new “handle.”

Find a picture of yourself to use as your avatar. Like your handle, this should be used on every platform where one is asked for. Again, this makes you recognizable wherever you go.

Once you are registered, click on add/edit services. This is where you will enter the first site you frequent. I would start with Twitter, currently one of the largest “open” social networks in terms of user base.

Now when you go to your “home,” you should see all of your Twitter posts up to now. Each time you make a new post, Friendfeed will repost that information here. Once you’ve added more sites, they will also be listed in the order they are received.

There are currently 59 sites listed in Friendfeed for inclusion. If you belong to a site that isn’t listed, you can still include it if you know the RSS feed for your posts. Just select “Custom URL” from the list, and paste in the site’s RSS feed.

When you’ve done all of that, go back to your Google home page. If you’re still logged in, you should be able to just go to igoogle.com and it will be right there.

Click on “Add Stuff” to get to the Google Gadgets page. Search for “Friendfeed.” The first one up is the official plug-in and the one that you want. Click on, “add it now,” and go back to your home page.

Now your feed is visible every time you come back to your home page. You can come here to get updates on who’s now following you or messaging on your Twitter or Facebook or Linkedin, but you can also get a digest of what people are posting about – if they’re on Friendfeed too.

So you will want to start looking out for friends elsewhere that are also on FriendFeed. Or by doing searches on Friendfeed for subjects you are interested in.

By doing this, you will save yourself a lot of time in managing all of the social spaces you go to.

I hadn’t really used it much, truth to tell - but it was another of Google’s neat little toys. Now it’s gone, as even the giant of search has to scale back operations to save money.

There are a lot of other bookmarking tools to be used, of course - but this seemed like something necessary to Google’s larger social aspirations. There is still Google Reader, but that’s more of a FriendFeed competitor - and FF bangs Reader like a gong.

C’est la vie. There’s always Delicious. Perhaps Google will still have enough cash on hand to eventually buy Stumbleupon.

Here are some examples that are allowed:

www.offmadisonave.com
webinar.offmadisonave.com
http://www.offmadisonave.com/contact-us/

and some that are not allowed:

www.offmadisonave.com
www.mightyinteractive.com

If you are in violation of this new policy update, it is simple to fix. You can easily re-structure your campaigns and ad groups by grouping the keywords that use separate domains together. Note: You may lose some historical data and it will look like you are launching new campaigns and/or ad groups, but in the long run it will be worth it.

From a searchers perception, I do not think this will really change anything as it is more a back end policy modification. This is not like when they updated their Display URL Policy a year ago, which helped ease anxiety for searchers wondering where they would be sent when they clicked on an ad. That policy change made advertisers become more transparent about landing page URLs.

This new policy change by Google is simple enough to fix if your ads are getting disapproved, and hopefully this will help you organize your campaigns in the future.

To be frank, what they’ve done and claimed to be interested in sounds - and likely is - rather harmless. Knowing what I’m doing on line, what my shopping habbits are, selling them to marketers and the highest bidder… that’s really actally quite harmless stuff. 

The fact that they don’t let users know abotu these things before hand is what’s so vexing. A friend told me once of a guy she’d dated, who would go to strip clubs and tell her afterwards, because, “it’s better to apologize for something you got to enjoy then to ask for permission and not get to enjoy it at all.” I think that’s how she put it.

Anyway, Facebook seems to be doing this a lot lately, where they do things that they must know will upset their user base, but appologize for it afterwards.

That being the case, I find it VERY hard to trust their Facebook Connect system. What access I could be giving them to my BrightKite or Vimeo accounts by using this I may only find out about afterwards - if at all. How and what they collect from users, as I say, is a surprise party each time. It is certainly pulling out ahead of its closest competitor, Google Friend Connect. But Google are no slouches, and they could easily add to their product what makes Facebook’s work, and clean up in this new market. Social being as important as it now is, it’s not an unlikely scenario.

They can do this because, so far, they haven’t ruined their users’ trust. Slowly, I’m afraid Facebook will make it impossible to say the same for themselves.

I do this because he’s smart, he writes interesting Tweets, and, on occasion, he will answer back to something I Tweet myself. That is somewhat miraculous, since he has some 66000 profiles he follows himself.

But I don’t follow him because he also has 61000 followers. That is incidental. As it should be. 

There is a Greasemonkey script (an add-on to the FireFox browser) floating around these days designed to get you and I our own 10s of thousands of followers, and people all over Twitter are using it. How? By finding people who have their auto follow setting turned “on.” If you know that, you can follow all of those people, and they’ll follow you back regardless of how silly your own posts are. As a result, there are several people on the site who have 20000 or so followers, with very few updates, good or bad. I actually saw a profile with over 10000 followers, and only 12 updates. I WISH I had screen captured that!

So yes, gaming sites is a long time form of entertainment, and gaming social sites is easy because of the non-Google-like security they often have. And, dare I say it, the people who use Twitter solely to collect people to follow them are schmucks.

But I don’t mind this Greasemonkey script, or any of the other scripts that allow you to hijack followers so you can inflate your own sense of importance. In fact, I welcome it. You see, IMHO, If EVERYONE has an army of so-called followers, perhaps then people won’t think as much of that statistic? Perhaps then we can get back to using Twitter the way it was meant to be used: Communicating with people we’d actually like to communicate with.

Maybe that’s also why I prefer Brightkite and Friendfeed: The number of fans you have is never displayed on the page, so it’s never a status symbol that you have a lot of them. Without them, people are forced to decide to follow me based on their own taste and intuition.

How terrible.

A great post from Jason Baer’s Convince and Convert on mobile campaigns, and their growing popularity. I’d started to comment on the post, but decided to simply use it as fodder for my own post, and thank him for it from the beginning. (Sorry, Chief.)

It’s funny - I only recently realized that my favorite social apps - Brightkite, Utterli and Flickr - were all my favorites because I access them from my phone anyway. So I’m definitely on board with doing more with my phone, once the technology is cheaper. (I’m pretty sure in 10 years what you get on an iPhone is what all cell phone companies will be giving away just for signing up.)

Cars will remain the biggest hurdle to SMS marketing though, IMHO, just because no one can be on the phone while driving - at least they shouldn’t be. It’s exciting to think that GPS apps can alert customers when you’re near Target, and that the thing they were drooling over is on sale, but if they don’t see it until they pull into the garage does it really work?

On the other hand, apps can now create bar coded coupons, which can be used at stores as easily as a paper one. Staying with the humble offering of personal opinions here, while SMS really is popular and bound to get more so, I’m thinking it is the phone app side that will replace it, and ultimately be more of a place for marketers. 

Elements of this article become what we predicted the outcome for requring payment of a social network would be. Two of the executives mentioned in the article out and say they would pay depending what the price is, (understandable,) and, “what else is around.”

I do think Twitter is taking a step I hadn’t considered in offering new services that brands might find more useful than the average Twit would. There again, BudURL.com tried to do the same thing, and still it is easier to simply use a different, free services for what they offer: Link shortening and analytics. (Both tinyurl.com and Google Analytics do what BudURL does.)

As to, “what else is out there,” it remains to be seen if companies with strong Twitter presences will shift to a service like Plurk (shudder to think) if the former simply tried to charge them money for the service that was bringing them so much benefit.

That having been said, rather than share this post on my Twitter account as is my custom after blogging, I have only placed this link on Plurk today - not because I feel the end is well nigh for Twitter mind you, but more out of whimsy. After all, I haven’t used Plurk in so long, my “karma” there is at 0.00. I have a feeling many other people are checking their old Plurk accounts as well today.

Perhaps that’s the next thing we’ll all be writing articles about and creating webinars around? “From Karma Score to Conversion Rate!” It can’t be too far off.

Google made a name for itself by selling highly targeted ads alongside search results. Search results by their very nature are a perfect place for advertisements. Brilliant algorithms scour thousands of servers in an instant and bring me highly relevant information on demand. Companies and individuals can buy that space up top and off to the side in the hopes of getting eyeballs on content that doesn’t rank well enough on its own for organic search to do the job. This works very well, and Google has grown to immense success. We can look at the myriad services that Google provides and see that virtually all of it is supported by their core advertising business. This is a model we have already seen; Windows and Office pay for pretty much everything at Microsoft.

We use Google’s services because they work well and cost us virtually nothing. Advertising makes this possible. The problem with advertising is that it provides too many foolish entrepreneurs with the illusion of a business model. All of this effort is made so that the viewer can pay as little as possible, without regard to the actual value of any given service. Practically speaking, if your web app isn’t free, it costs too much.

A few weeks ago I sat down on a Saturday afternoon with a rare bit of free time. I’d been concepting a simple web application, and set out to build it. A few hours later, it was ready. I gave it a name, put it on the web, and asked a few friends to check it out. After about a week of feedback and further adjustments I tweeted about it. Several days passed with nothing to report, and then my little web app made a surprise appearance on LifeHacker. Were it not for Twitter, I wouldn’t even have known. Within a day it had been visited from every continent except Antarctica; within a week it had been visited by users in more than a hundred countries. Articles about it appeared in several languages on several startup-oriented blogs.

Each of these articles assumed my app is a startup, which is incorrect. I built it as an experiment, and state so on each page. It isn’t a business; it’s just an idea. It doesn’t cost me anything *extra* to keep it online, and until it does, I don’t mind it being free. I’ll improve the service and see if there’s really something there, but I didn’t build it wondering how I could monetize it. There is no revenue stream, nor is there a plan for one. I knew that going in.

This leads me to Facebook.

News broke this past week about Facebook planning to allow companies access to its user data. With a gigantic and energetic userbase filling in profile fields detailing everything from age to job history to favorite movies and relationship status, Facebook is sitting on a huge treasure trove of information. It’s a data miner’s dream, and Facebook appears set to cash in. That’s all well and good until you realize that we may not want all of this information going to the highest bidder. I certainly don’t. I get enough spam and junk (snail) mail, as we all do. The last thing I want is an even wider selection of companies to have access to my data with the sole purpose of selling me stuff. Worse, we don’t even really know how this data will be used in the first place.

It reminds me of a meme you may have seen. It goes something like this:

1. Build something cool.
2. Make it really popular.
3. ???
4. Profit!

The Internet is singlehandedly killing newspaper by taking away advertising revenue, and in an ironic twist of fate, many advertising-supported web sites are finding that the ads simply don’t cover the bills. Facebook falls into this category. Facebook’s advertising platform is arguably the best out there among social networks, allowing virtually anyone to create highly targeted ads. Despite the power of this system, Facebook isn’t able to make enough money selling ads to cover all of its costs. What happens when the largest social network on earth can’t make advertising work? They start selling off your data.

Twitter - my favorite social network - is in an even worse situation. Many of us wonder how Twitter makes money, and I think the smart bet is that right now they don’t. Twitter’s problem is its purity, for lack of a better term. The service is so devoid of cruft that advertising sticks out like the proverbial sore thumb, and those who come across as spammy are universally derided. How do you monetize such a system?

This is the problem with the modern Internet. Everyone has been convinced that everything on the Internet is free, and advertising dollars are starting to show their limits. Dot-coms worldwide are having to acknowledge the fact that having a bunch of users means nothing if you can’t convert that into sustainable revenue. It’s a potentially rough lesson to learn, but in these economic times we’re all going to have to acknowledge a few simple facts. This stuff is not free. Servers cost money. Developers cost money. Maintenance costs money. New features cost money. If you have an idea for something you want to run long term as a business, you can no longer count on the great advertising hope to pay your way. You cannot count on VCs being willing to run in the red without a realistic plan for getting to the black. If you’ve got a great idea, be sure you know it’s economically viable.

Otherwise, you may end up having to sell your users’ data, and that’s going to piss them off.

Side note: I started writing this entry shortly after having a lovely discussion on the topic with Eric, whose superior writing abilities enabled him to finish his post first. This post can be seen as a follow-up or addendum to what he wrote.

I was talking with Joseph today - he’s one of our development wizards and master of all things Ruby on Rails. The subject was Facebook’s announcement that they were going to sell their user data. (Read the article at The Guardian.)

Now, as Internet marketers, our natural reaction is, “hooray!” because, for a price, we can make better decisions about what people want without having to do all that expensive, time consuming mucking about with focus groups.

I’m sure this will be debated extensively in the days to come, but what Joseph was more interested in - and by extension, what I was interested in - was how all of these social networking platforms plan to make money in the immediate future.

Everyone knows times right now are hard. This is true for all of the social sites you use right now as well. Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook, Myspace, and all sites similar to them, are for the most part free and have been since their inception. Now that the venture capital resources are drying up, each is scrambling to figure out how to make ends meet.

If you don’t like Facebook selling your information, you could just get charged a monthly fee instead. If you love the service, you shouldn’t mind paying a subscription for it. The problem there is, “we’ve all grown up thinking that everything on the Internet should be free,” Joseph pointed out to me. 

I have to admit I’m as guilty of that kind of thinking as anyone. That link up there to the guardian.co.uk? I don’t pay for their story, but the link is public so I use it here to give this blog stew of mine some meat.

“All of these services have been free from the start,” Joseph went on, “and if they started charging money now they’d be in competition with all of the others that aren’t.” Utterli, which is a micro blog that lets you record audio posts, has something unique - so I would stick with it. But would I keep Twitter if they started charging money? What would keep me from jumping ship to identi.ca or Plurk or one of the other places that does basically the same thing? And then jump ship on that site once they’d soaked up all us new users and tried to charge us money too?

The problem is compounded for Facebook, as they run advertising on their network. If they offered a premium account where you don’t see ads, they would lose ad revenue, and they wouldn’t be the darlings of online marketing agencies like us. (Their ads really do convert well, btw.) Conversely, if they ran advertising on a paid account, people would be angry for having to pay AND see ads for the new season of House.

Sites like Twitter charge nothing AND have no ads. Even if they did, there’s no reason to believe the ads would be all that effective, since user information is so scant. Without user information, there’s no targeting. Without targeting, you’re paying hundreds of dollars to put an ad in front of a lot of people in the hopes that one or two of them will be interested enough to click, and that those few people can be convinced to buy something… It’s the route Myspace took, and the reason no one seriously buys any space there, unless they’re promoting a movie blockbuster.

Ultimately, I don’t think there is any harm to Facebook selling user data, because it’s the same data their ad servers have been using themselves this whole time, and no one seemed to care. People who do have issues with the lack of privacy will leave Facebook for something else – and if they’re being consistent, won’t have filled out their profile that completely anyway.

But if you are a social networking junkie like so many others are today, you should be concerned with how your favorite site plans to survive.