It’s been such a shame to see the slow but steady demise of enthusiasm around social media in business these last few years. It seems the value of community has just not been able to be measured on the financial bottom line, and the results are unsurprising. Facebook went through an IPO and therefore charges for anything and everything that might be of value, corporate social networks have slowly diminished to nothing, and the all conquering advertising dollar appears to have won the day yet again.
After quite a few years getting just as enthusiastic about it as everyone else, I even joined a startup venture a few years ago to have a crack at turning the power of online community into a real way to connect people, communities and business. You would know of such ventures as the ‘social commerce’ phenomenon which has long since petered away.
Within the corporate environment, such great concepts as Yammer helped spur the creativity and sense of community within a big business – 80,000 companies joined Yammer in just 2 years, before being acquired by Microsoft for $1.2 billion and then, without enough emphasis or bottom line return from digital communities, Yammer was eventually closed off and merged into the Office suite of products. Talk about writing off the value of community!
At the global organisation I work with, where we have the Tibbr internal network (similar to yammer), and although I glance at that occasionally – it is rarely populated by anyone but senior execs with social media mandates and communications / marketing staff.
And for the business community at large – particularly small businesses – the real story is that social media no longer presents half the opportunity it once promised. The low cost, high potential of sharing your stories with an engaged community has gone. Led by Facebook and others intent on headed for IPO, social sharing seems to reach less and less people – unless the business or community group they’re talking about pays for it of course. For a while there, I even had to pay to promote my own status updates on Facebook to my personal friends if I wanted them to read it. A sign of things to come?
Deliriant Isti Romani.
I haven’t posted here in ages but am trying to get back into it. Here’s a net little infographic from my Nielsen colleagues in the US, taking a snapshot of Social TV engagement using Twitter in the US.
Nielsen infographic showing the state of Social TV using Twitter in the United States.
Great infographic by PWC Australia, with some great snippets of mobile device consumption in Australia:
- 19.6 million connected mobile subscribers
- 93% smartphone penetration by 2018
- 80% tablet penetration by 2018
- Investment in public cloud services to grow 63% to $5.2 billion by 2016
Probably not the fairest comparison given that Facebook only started monetising quite recently, but a stark reminder that Facebook is still securing its future (not that $6.4B a year isn’t enough to keep the business afloat), while Google remains a highly cashed up entity and still has strong market share (of course). Not sure where their numbers came from to say that Google has 53% of mobile advertising revenue so I’ll take the number with a grain of salt, but I think the comparative point is made all the same!
Nice little infographic by my Social TV colleagues over at SocialGuide in the US. The infographic speaks for itself, but seeing that 70% of TV tweets came during program time and not during the commercial breaks is fascinating. If the numbers correlated to the Australian market, the most interesting thing for me would be that other research (from Nielsen’s Australian Connected Consumers Report) shows that Aussies who are engaging in Social TV activity like to browse and search for products and services during the ad breaks – with a heavy skew towards products and services that have just been advertised.
Admittedly I used to be a skeptic about the future prospects of Network TV, and I used to think they would get overrun by digital content platforms. Conversely, all the evidence I see just keeps making a stronger and stronger case for the future of TV which is fantastic. I’m happy to be proved wrong.
Great to see NFC campaigns alive and well here in Australia. As I haven’t travelled for work much recently, I actually came across this campaign via the NFC world site and not in real life. What a shame! I’ve shamelessly borrowed their links here but all credit to NFC World for picking up the story.
Google’s Play store partnered with OOH! Media to enable visitors to a number of Australian airports to control a digital panel screen by tapping their NFC enabled phone or by scanning a QR Code for those devices not so proximity inclined. The screen was essentially a way to browse through apps the user might like to download before their flight, to entertain themselves.
I like the concept of the Red Crystal software, which enabled users to do this seamlessly without having to download any software onto their phone.
As usual with NFC, a great video demonstration of the installation really brings it to life.
Yahoo to acquire Tumblr for $1.1 billion
Yahoo’s recent $1.1B bid for Tumblr has polarised opinions for and against, amongst people I’ve spoken to.
On the one hand, the acquisition can be seen as a shrewd move by Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer to increase engaged audience amongst younger demographics. Bigger audiences across a wider spread of people can not only mean more advertising dollars to cater for those diverse audiences, but also a more effective management of the risk associated with being perceived as the fuddy-duddy network (I just made that up, but I think it’ll stick).
On the other hand, what’s the real value of having younger audiences on your network? I’m slightly more familiar with the Channel 10 TV network in Australia which has recently publicly stated its intentions to move as far away from the younger demographics as possible and to recast itself as a network catering to older audiences. Why? Advertisers know that while it’s cool to have young people watching or engaging with your content, it’s the older, more established markets that have money to spend on your products and services. They’re less fickle (most of the time), and they know what they want. They’re more established in life, and have higher incomes, less mortgages (or at least can handle them better). To showcase how younger generations respond to such things – the first thing that happened when loyal Tumblr users heard Yahoo might buy the network – was threaten to leave and find somewhere else that wasn’t run by fuddy-duddys.
Is it worth pursuing the younger demographics in the name of audience share? Graph via Comscore Datagems
So there’s certainly a big risk in going after the younger demographics.
Personally, now seeing what Yahoo intends to do with the $7.6 Billion it made from its 2012 sale of AliBaba, I’m wondering how the numbers stack up:
Tumblr, with $26M in revenue with accumulated venture capital debts of $125M. It was forecasting a $100M revenue year for 2013, all via advertising. Although the press release stated Tumblr has 300 million registered users, some educated guesses put it as low as 30 to 50 million people once you use the same measure that Twitter and Facebook do to measure their user numbers.
Alibaba, on the other hand was unwanted by Yahoo despite making $170 billion in revenue last year. It has less users – the company claims 79 million registered users – but in a transactional marketplace, it’s only the revenue and revenue per user that counts. Needless to say, with much of Alibaba’s audience starting in and around China – the prospects for scalable growth remain high, even to the pessimist.
So I’m worried that multi-billion dollar companies are selling off businesses that are making money, to buy ones that might. I’m always an advocate of pursuing new ideas, chasing the growth and changing things for the better, but I’m yet to be convinced that Yahoo is headed the right way. I’m happy to be proved wrong.
Deliriant Isti Romani – These Romans are Crazy!
The interesting thing about digital convergence for those that have worked professionally to develop and foster it is that it becomes harder and harder to define what you do, when the lines between different parts of the industry are blurred.
For example, what does it really mean these days to say to someone that you work ‘in the digital industry’? A few years ago, this was a coveted thing to claim, but in 2013, being a digital person could mean you know something about how to use a computer, which might make you thoroughly outdated, or it might mean you know something about social media – which would make put you on the same level as 1.1 billion other people. The list goes on.
Similarly, User Experience (UX) practitioners were once a fabled entity that were craftsmen far beyond the skill of any designer – but look up any decent online designer’s LinkedIn profile these days and you’ll inevitably see that they’re also a UX person too (whether you believe it or not).
So with convergence a thing of the past – and not something still to come – it leaves people like myself, who led the original charge into the digital era – to find new ways to continue to guide people, brands, and other organisations (Government and non-government) smartly into the next wave of ubiquitous media consumption.
That becomes tricky – we now see waves of experts in mobile, people who know analytics, people who know responsive design, and whatever else the buzzwords are of the day. The continuous proliferation of expertise in various areas of the digital economy still leave the most important question unanswered:
Where are we headed?
I saw some interesting work at Nielsen’s recent Consumer 360 conference which we hosted up in the Blue Mountains recently which took a broad look at the impact of convergence on advertiser brands (particularly retail). One of the key takeaways was something that those of us at the forefront of the industry know all too well:
Australian Consumers are far ahead of Australian organisations when it comes to consumption of digital media devices and platforms.
Ross McDonald, Media Industry lead for Google Australia, pointed out their estimates that only 1 in 3 Australian companies has a mobile-ready website. His advice to advertisers and other organisations with respect to digital? “Do more, and do it faster”
The challenge remains for industry leaders to find ways to nurture and accelerate this development.
It’s no secret that people are becoming more savvy to ways of seeing what lies ahead in technology and product development. Platforms like Kickstarter and a host of copycats have now made it possible for everyday consumers to be able to get in on the ground level of a great idea, and in some cases, even have some ownership of that idea as an early stage investor.
That concept extends far beyond technology, and even reaches as far as fashion these days. Consumers using that age-old concept of people power can vote for, invest in or give feedback on any product concept before it goes to market, helping shape and refine the product while also giving those same consumer first-rights access to the product.
The infographic below is from the guys at trend-watching which showcases some of their views on Pretailing.
As an enormous advocate of ubiquitous, real-time information, the Boston terrorist attack has for me highlighted the light and shade of the digitally converged era.
The light: like never before, people are seeing photos of evidence collected from the scene within hours of it being found, stories of real people, graphics, video footage, and breaking updates by the minute. The police willingly overshare evidence because they know – 1) collectively we have a better chance to find the bad guys if everyone has the evidence, and 2) if they didn’t show it to people right away, the digital natives and conspiracy theorists among us would protest to no end that the government was hiding something from the people it sought to protect. I’ve never actually seen this kind of detailed sharing of evidence so quickly before – I mean, I knew what the bomb looked like 24 hours after it happened, and I live 16,000 kilometres away!
What I’ve witnessed over the last couple of days goes one step beyond the recent popular coverage of how Twitter and Facebook have become the source of real-time news. What we’ve seen happen since the Boston terrorist attack is the media trying to stay one step ahead of the digital era by reporting everything, as quickly as possible lest they get beaten to the chase by some 14 year old kid with an iphone, a twitter handle, and a quest for 10 seconds of fame. And unfortunately that’s where we’ve learnt some hard lessons about breaking news journalism in 2013.
So convoluted have been the messages and ‘facts’ reported by different media outlets that this morning I heard several hundred media turned up at the courthouse to see the suspect Boston Police and the FBI had arrested overnight. The only problem was – there apparently wasn’t even a suspect yet. This only came to light when the attorney general Eric Holder himself put a stop to the misinformation being spread.
The best journalism is that which is well thought through, well researched, facts are verified and more often than not – it takes courage to find and tell that story. How the hell do you achieve that in an era of gratuitous need for real-time data? Real-time data means that each individual seeks to collect the data and do their own analysis of what is happening. We therefore end up with approximately 2 billions different points of view, all at once. We lose sight of the bigger picture and some of the factors that make good journalism and story-telling exactly that.
I’ll always continue to advocate technology that empowers people and connectivity, and delivers what we want when we want it. I sure hope for all of our sakes though that the editorial masterminds that are still out there somewhere find a way to do better in the converged era. For now, I’ll wait until next week’s edition of The Economist comes out to understand what’s really happening.
Deliriant Isti Romani – These Romans are Crazy!
Deliriant Isti Romani (These Romans are mad!) 