Social media gets… well, anti-social

Posted on 19th February 2009 by User Image

I wish I could be more surprised about this news, but there’s a local/social media site in the US (and as of last year I believe over here now too) call Yelp who have been accused of some, let’s say ‘anti-social’ business practice.

There are a few sources for this, but this article in the East Bay Express (with thanks to them for the excellent illustration I’ve borrowed here) sums up the allegation pretty well.

Sandlines has a lot of interest in the intersection of local information with reviews/user generated content and to me this is up a level from what I’d feared about this intersection. I’d been concerned about customers using their ability to post bad reviews as a negotiating stick as something that fundamentally undermined the integrity of review services – much as happened on Ebay before ‘negative feedback’ was banished.

But Yelp appear, from this article, to have taken this to a whole new level.

Qype, who’ve been cast as a company who’ve, erm, borrowed liberally from Yelp’s business model have, I hope, left this element Stateside?

As I was writing this article Yelp’s CEO published a response on the Yelp Blog – sandlines is not qualified to offer judgment on which side of this dispute is correct.

However, I remain firmly of the view that – if your business is publishing customer reviews (whatever the business) – then editorial integrity should dictate that you do not mess with those reviews for reasons other than decency and accuracy. You certainly should not (IMHO) massage results in return for commercial consideration.

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All a-twitter

Posted on 11th February 2009 by User Image

Sandlines

the price of success

I’ve been twittering on and off for a while now – trying to figure out how it fits in with all my other activities – and gradually finding it more and more interesting over time. Already this year, the buzz around the microblogging service has kicked up several gears: Stephen Fry’s often witty stream-of-consciousness has been a highlight, but I’ve been gradually seeing more and more of my friends and business contacts using it.

Links back and forth with blogs (alerting to updates), Facebook, various IM and LinkedIn status messages seem to have potential.

One of my LinkedIn connections has been using his status to advise media sales people when he is in ‘buy’ mode – I’m curious to learn how this will impact the quality of his media buys.

Twitter has also gained considerably attention in mainstream media this month: suddenly DJs on Radio 1 are talking about it incessantly.

So perhaps it is unsurprising that @gordonm‘s tweet yesterday about Twitters desire to monetise their service by charging businesses for using the service in a commercial fashion was essentially a link back to the Brand Republic site.

I don’t know how many followers @gordonm has at the moment, but the suggestion of how effective this can be found in @stephenfry’s history, where his mere mention of a site can bring their servers to a standstill. Mr Fry has over 150,000 followers today.

So how long before Twitter becomes part of the marketing landscape? And how will they develop sufficient revenues so that they can improve their up-time (Twitter.com is down as I write this)?

One interesting example: on Monday my flight from Heathrow was delayed by 2 hours. I tweeted “Desperate rush to h’row this morning was futile: flight delayed 2 hrs +. Grrr.” This from my iPhone.

Almost at once I had a response from Boarding! inviting me to post details of airport to them to meet up with other stranded travellers.

It’s going to be an interesting one to watch: can Twitter do what other social networks are struggling to do and crack the social networking revenue stream conundrum? My guess is there’s a way to make it work via mobile perhaps. AFullerView evidently has some ideas as well.

Anyone else?

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3.2

Social Media Marketing – part two

Posted on 19th November 2008 by User Image

Sandlines

Facebook? No thanks.

Thanks to Dylan Fuller who, over in the Local Search Summit on LinkedIn drew my attention to this article. It seems that P&G are no longer interested in running advertising on Facebook. Ted McConnell, GM of Interactive marketing over at Proctor and Gamble said:

“I have a reaction to [Facebook] as a consumer advocate and an advertiser: What in heaven’s name made you think you could monetize the real estate in which somebody is breaking up with their girlfriend?”

Now there’s a hefty dose of rhetoric about the circumstances that McConnell describes, but the point is clear: he sees Facebook (and their peers) as C2C communications, not media opportunities. He feels it is arrogant to interrupt it.

I’m unsurprised by this reaction – and I tend to agree that banners on FB are not the way forward. But it’s nothing new. After all, ad placements have funded Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, Gmail …. for years – and often quite successfully.

But it’s the placements that occur outside the composition and reading of the emails that works best – i.e. the log-on or log-off pages, or the pages that confirm an email has been sent in the old style webmail accounts. Which is logical: you’re not interrupting someone in the middle of another conversation.

Several years ago, when I was at Yahoo!, I devised a campaign for Vodafone that was deliberately designed to sit inside these types of C2C interactions. There was an obvious relevance to such a campaign that fitted with the creative tone. However, these types of campaigns have always been the exception rather than the rule.

Historically advertisers have been shy of placing brand sensitive advertising near user generated content. The risk of negative association has been deemed too great. Imagine, placing your family friendly cereal brank ad next to content that celebrates gore or porn. Not an attractive proposition.

Meanwhile the low responsiveness of such placements have made the inventory generated on UGC amongst the most commodotised online.

So what is a social network to do?

Invent a new model, is what. Old skool advertising is (Sandlines believes) never going to be the way forward for such businesses. They need to figure out a way of converting the obvious engagement they build with their user communities into a commercial proposition. And the starting point to that is to consider where the exchange of value can occur that benefits all parties: the community members, the marketer – and of course the network owner.

Simple, huh?

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3.3 (1 person)