intel3.0

Hurricanes and Viral Media

2009-10-09T16:23:47Z

In the wake of a visit by Chris Barger, General Motor’s chief social media guru, my wife Rebecca (who teaches design and public relations) and I were chatting about one of his comments and came up with this gem, which while it doesn’t resemble Chris’ remarks I think sums up his message on consultants selling “viral” results quite well:

“It is said that sometimes, the motion of a single butterfly’s wings can lead to a chain of events that build into a mighty hurricane. However, expertise in raising butterflies does not translate into expertise in raising hurricanes. Similarly, expertise in creating videos, even with a success story to point to, does not translate into expertise in creating viral social media!”

News: Announcing the VidSquid.net YouTube Application

2009-09-26T22:27:37Z

This morning, I gave a presentation that was a retrospective on the Twinfluence application I unveiled at last year’s Barcamp Tampa Bay, and unveiled my latest project: VidSquid. I talked about how to leverage APIs to build social media applications - specifically, strategy for leveraging these applications to build a social media community.

In short, VidSquid is a crowdsourced, free, audience response system for YouTube. Take any YouTube video, and VidSquid lets users rate the video second by second, positive or negative. Some of the applications for VidSquid include:

peer evaluation
improving speeches and presentations
commercials and advertising
discussing home movies
message campaign improvement
speech/language coaching
user interface evaluation
etc….!

The BarCamp team is producing a video of my presentation, but since the venue had technical difficulties that prevented me from showing my Keynote presentation on the projector, I’m not holding high hopes of how useful it will be. Therefore, I’m attaching my presentation below as a Quicktime movie. It’s a huge file - 91MB - and in movie format, since it includes a number of animations/movie clips (hey, VidSquid is all about movies!).

Although there are features I’ll be adding over the next few weeks, VidSquid.net is live and open to the public. Give it a try!

News: Social Media and Governance Presentation

2009-09-26T22:38:46Z

On September 14, 2009 I presented on the topic “Social Media: Strategy for Local Governance”. Due to many requests, I’m posting the presentation here. Much of the context will be lost due to the fact that I provide most of the context in my presentations verbally; but hopefully it will be useful to you.

The Science of Usurpers: Bing vs. Google, Meme vs. Twitter

2009-09-02T17:29:08Z

You’ve heard the term “scalability”. Scalability refers to the capacity of a site or service to grow exponentially. Before this term became popular in tech circles, however, it was documented in social network research.

Drs. Duncan Watts and Albert-Laszlo Barabasi literally wrote the book on the subject of the dynamics of scalability (Dr. Barabasi was kind enough to send me an advance copy, actually). The title “Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means” is a wonderful introduction for laypeople and experts alike to the dynamics of network-based systems like the internet.

All things being equal, it demonstrates why “first to market” is so important in these environments. As “scale free networks” form over time, new connections (read as “users” or “customers”) are more likely to connect to providers (nodes) that already have lots of connections… a sort of “snowball effect”. The image below (from Nature magazine) shows how early nodes have an advantage for attracting connections, thus giving structure to the overall network. In scale free networks, connections don’t follow a random bell-curve (normal) distribution, but rather what analysts call a “power law” distribution. All things being equal, once a scale-free network is established it’s unlikely that network nodes with lots of connections will ever lose significantly to newcomers.

However, all things are rarely equal. Just because you are first to market doesn’t mean you offer better or more satisfying value. Thus we enter “competition” into the equation, and “first to market” doesn’t guarantee that you will never lose your position on the top of the heap. After the forerunners demonstrate the value of the market, we often see “wanna-bes” follow. Most of the time, newcomers don’t displace the incumbent, and in the marketplace either fade away, get consumed, or find a smaller niche to cling to. However, Dr. Barabasi and others have introduced a second type of scale-free network: the “fitness model”. The fitness model presumes that each market participant offers a different level of value, satisfaction to its subscribers; the provider that offers the theoretical perfect service, that meets all of its subscribers needs and provides unflawed user experience would be considered to have 100% “fitness”.

What does the fitness model research tell us? First, that incumbents can be displaced by newcomers that offer sufficiently greater value (greater fitness) to overcome inertia, brand loyalty, networks-of-friends, learning curves etc. can eventually displace firstcomers for market share. Newcomers that provide equal, or slightly better value will stay behind… there is a sort of network inertia that resists newcomers whose only real offering is “option B”.

But here is the shocker - the research also shows that sometimes, if the newcomer’s fitness is high enough, a sort of “crystallization” can occur where they steal all the connections in a sort of massive upheaval.

What does this mean for Microsoft Bing? Microsoft released its new search engine with massive marketing efforts to displace Google. But Google is very much the fat spider in the middle of the web right now for search engines with a 65% market share. Given that Comcast’s July 2009 figures don’t show any big movement, I think it’s apparent that for most users, Bing isn’t sufficiently better than Google to displace it. However, remember that Google wasn’t the first search engine either; despite being the latecomer in 1998 or so, it beat out Lycos, Excite, and AltaVista because it provided more relevant results and a simple GUI.

But the next big question: what about Twitter and its competition? Twitter has a very strong microblogging niche, and has grown to over 30 million users by some sources. It has successfully resisted newer services like Pownce, Jaiku, Plurk, and Friendfeed, and attempts by Facebook, LinkedIn and Plaxo to offer microblogging services. But now Yahoo is stealthily rolling out a new microblogging service, Meme. Despite Yahoo’s size and experience as an internet giant, that puts it in the “newcomer” seat, and we must ask the question - how much more fit is Meme than Twitter? Is it better enough to make a difference?

If you are an invited beta user, let me know your thoughts. But factor into the mix that Twitter has demonstrated many problems that put it far below “perfectly fit”, some of which are only now beginning to make an appearance:

Constant technical / growth problems (you can join the Fail Whale club! A recent attack on one user takes down all of Twitter!)
The development of spam tweets - and no tools for intelligently filtering/rulesetting them (no, I don’t want to join your mafia).
Surprise! Results provided by the Twitter API may not match reality.
Unrealistic exponential follower bases (I mean really, 1 in 10 Twitterers listen to everything twought by Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres? Seriously? Does anybody really know what having even 20,000 followers means?)

In my mind, Twitter’s biggest failure is that it very little resembles real-world social behavior (something I think Facebook does better). Twitter is obviously doing a lot very right, and I’m a big fan of their API. However, my gut feeling as a social scientist is that this microblogging space is going to change before the dust completely settles.

Twinfluence Evolution

2009-08-30T22:36:17Z

Well, godaddy grid is continuing to give timeout issues. Rather than sweat out a solution for this, I have established a handshake partnership with a fellow techie to bring twinfluence to its next incarnation - twinfluence 2.0. It should have a much sharper user interface, a simpler toolset, and offer a whole new class of rankings/analytics. We should hopefully have it up by mid October, if not sooner (we’re driven). We’ll also be rethinking our hosting and database solutions from scratch.

So, this means the existing twinfluence site will suffer “as is” as we get out the wrenches and blow torches… but in the end twinfluence should be more useful than it ever was.

Hang in there!

Internet and Technology Summit 2009 - Presentation & Analysis

2009-08-25T23:41:58Z

My presentation on “Social Media: Strategy and Intel” that I presented at a panel at this year’s Internet and Technology Summit in Tampa is available for download below. Twitter comments on the event were tracked under the hashtag #internetsummit. Thanks to David Glass for organizing such a successful and interesting event, and Bernie Borges for the awesome introductions. Our panel - social media, web analytics, and search optimization - was very talented and our presentations dovetailed nicely.

Presentation from the Internet and Technology Summit 2009

After the Summit, I did a quick conversation mining analysis around the “#internetsummit” hashtag that was used on twitter. You can clearly see some of the different “pools” of conversation going on, and what subjects were connected to which speakers!

August 8, 2009 - semantic analysis by Innovation Insight Inc.

Twinfluence Timeouts - Hosting Issue Again

2009-08-17T03:31:43Z

I recently looked at my access logs, and found that visitors are down by 60% for July… and checking twinfluence.com, I see most profile requests are timing out. I haven’t changed anything lately, and *sometimes* the profile requests work, so I believe it’s hosting issues again. I get a trouble ticket in to the host (godaddy grid, for those of you paying attention) and if we don’t get fast resolution… it’s migration time again.

Oh well, godaddy was an experiment I guess.

FlickrFetchr: A new Flickr album downloader

2009-08-17T03:37:23Z

This weekend, I had to write an application to download some album sets from Flickr. A friend sent me a guest pass for a couple of his albums, but none of the downloaders I found could handle guest passes or redirects. Since it works pretty well, I thought I’d package it up and make it available for other Mac OSX users. It’s freeware - enjoy.

Twinfluence / Twitseeker: Expect Some Turbulence

2009-07-17T17:40:34Z

Twinfluence and Twitseeker are very cpu-intensive. Â I’ve already used three hosts to support them: Bluehost (still the best for simple, low-end hosting), imhosted (OK, but went downhill fast), and inmotionhosting.com (VPS account - by far the most professional tech support that I’ve received anywhere and great for the price). Â Even though together, these two sites only use a fraction of their allotted RAM, disk space, and bandwidth… they use 10x to 20x what the hosts tolerate for CPU usage. Â And that’s not allowing for growth.

While inmotion has been working extensively (and pro-actively, I might add) with me to get my CPU usage within limits, I’m stuck to either migrating elsewhere or crippling the applications. Â So, I am going to experiment with some grid hosting or virtual dedicated options, so long as they fit within the budget of ad revenue that these domains are generating (an unfortunately significant consideration, as some of my hosting alternatives are looking at $150+ a month).

Cross your fingers, and I appreciate your patience.

Twinfluence: New Authentication Protocol

2009-07-17T17:28:57Z

I’ve switched Twinfluence over to the new twitter oAuth protocol using a php authentication library from Jaisen Mathai. Â This is a major security improvement; Twinfluence will no longer request, have access to, or store users’ private data.