Mediarketising

(post on the3six5 here)
I woke up at 5:30am today to an unexpected alertness that I would only reserve for after a morning Americano or green tea. Waking up at 5:30am is not part of my daily routine and I find it to be a bittersweet emotion waking up so surprisingly early on a Sunday. The bittersweet feeling comes from a wanting to cash in on the free time available for Sunday morning slumber versus the carpe diem motivation to get the day going by catching up on unread Instapaper and The New Yorker articles or unwatched television shows or Netflix queued movies. These activities along with watching football comprise my weekly Sunday activities.

After extensive rolling around in bed, checking incoming tweets from the east coast, I ended up watching the documentary Inside Job. While watching, this documentary which paints a dark picture of how the financial industry and government has worked over the past decade, the Seattle sky started to turn eerily dark too. Snow was on its way as was expected for a few days.

By late morning snow started pouring down on Seattle. Seattle, a city known for its constant rain, receives little snow which made today a special treat. The white flurries and flakes masked the sky obscuring buildings usually in easy sight. Quarter-sized flakes started falling as midday approached adding to the winter special and the end did not seem in sight. The snow was moving faster until all of a sudden it stopped. The snow flurries cleared and what remained was a snow capped city with bright, clear visibility.

The happiness brought on by the beauty of the gleaming city was short lived as soon after the electric grid my apartment is in shut down. My apartment started to get increasingly colder with no heat pumping in anymore. Luckily my friends apartment nearby is in a different grid which left them with heat and almost as important, the Giants/Packers game. I was glad to see the Giants beat the Packers even though I am an ardent Jets fan, I am also a born and bred New Yorker. Now I just hope my power comes back soon.

The need of a TV to be in sync with a second screen is minimal today but I see a short future from now where it could be viewed as a great feature. The biggest influence on my thinking is what Facebook has recently done with the frictionless sharing of media consumption by users.

Several months ago, Facebook started pumping into the News Ticker songs, articles and movies (not in USA) that your friends were consuming and recently introduced a new class of apps called Timeline Apps which brings more verbs to Facebook. I’m sure you have noticed this as it’s hard to avoid on Facebook – the News Feed algorithm seems to give a greater weight to these stories as well and this is starting to change how people can discover music. No longer do people need to rely on experts, blogs, Billboard and magazines they can just tap into Facebook and see via the Music app which songs their friends are listening to in real time. This isn’t to say experts won’t have value; I’m not in that belief camp, but that people may begin to expect to receive real-time media recommendations from friends’ passive behavior. Music will change the quickest as it’s already happening and the barriers to joining are very low.

I think the same experience will become expected of TV viewing. I believe we are not too far away from where we tune into our favorite show and a status update gets sent to Facebook that “Noah is watching 60 minutes” with a little button that says “Join Him”. I expect this status update to be seen on my friend’s second screen devices where they would then have the option to click “Join Noah” on their second screen device and then start watching along with me. This is one of the scenarios I believe that really ties the screens together. A stretch for today but seeing examples of how Apple TV and Xbox can act as an intermediary between second screens and TVs, I’m optimistic!

Further, I believe TV is on the verge of a social infusion like this as the organization of content on TV makes sense only to the cable providers. People for the most part find new content on TV by channel surfing, something we are forced to do since we are at the mercy of how cable providers believe channels should be organized. This random assignment of channels to numbers makes no sense to the end user. For example, what reasons make sense to an end user that Comedy Central makes a good channel 704? It’s amazing we still have this. There are of course some topical categorization that’s being done (movies, sports, music) but for the most part it’s the most unintuitive system to navigate which is why I believe an overhauled solution is not far away.

Facebook’s new timeline based profile included a new option to update your Facebook profile with Health and Wellness Life Events. This new option is a cool idea and something fun to play with as we continue to document our lives online. I find it appealing to actually put (for example) on November 4 2008 I had the flu and mark that as a sickness rather than have that jumbled in with all my other status updates. The value returned back to me to sort through my life by Health and Wellness Life Events such as getting sick, losing weight, breaking a finger is astonishing to me.

This seems profound in its own right and I also see that this can build into a solid business for Facebook into how we document the spread of disease, likelihood of someone getting sick, and how much one’s insurance will be. Not all of these are specific to the new Health and Wellness Life Events but all can now be better assessed via Facebook’s new data inputs. I will write about each of these topics over the course of four posts: 1) the spread of disease, 2)likelihood of someone getting sick, 3)how much someone’s insurance will be, and 4)how this can be a business for Facebook. First, the spread of disease.

Google claimed a lot of fame for their Google.org Flu Trends which “uses aggregated Google search data to estimate flu activity.” The assumption here is that Google is able to monitor searches that are flu related and when an abnormal influx of those searches happen in one area, flu is likely to break out or is occurring there. Remarkable feat, bar none.

When we look around the corner at Facebook’s Health and Wellness Life Events this adds a new dimension in our ability to monitor flu or other disease outbreaks. Google’s approach is great in solving where the flu is occurring and can work with authorities to quarantine or alert that area. What Google does not know is who has the flu and if there is a unique relationship between those people. If people begin documenting their life with Facebook’s Health and Wellness tools, authorities will not only be able to tell where people are getting sick but will be able to analyze who is getting sick, what relationships these people have with each other, and based upon a person’s social graph and check-in history the likelihood of their friends getting sick or already having infected.

A system of information like this would not only help authorities figure out who may be sick or will be sick but could advance into a notification system that could save people from coming across a disease. A smart enough system could alert people that a high influx of people in their social graph has recently come down with the flu, “start taking Dayquil”. A bit futuristic and probably years out but I don’t believe improbable.

The most fascinating piece about all of this is that this information will not be inputted via a government mandated form or from your doctor – this information will be submitted by people on their behalf. The value of communicating with your contacts that you are sick and being able to reference that information years later may be a strong enough value proposition to get people to enter this information themselves.

My next post will cover more in-depth on how this information can be used to determine the likelihood of someone getting sick.

As much as I enjoy listening to Gil Scott-Heron’s The Revolution Will Not Be Televised I have to disagree that the revolution will not be televised. I believe the revolution will not only be televised but it will be tweeted, Liked, and checked into.

For any event happening today some mix of all the above social networking actions happen. Some on Twitter, Facebook, foursquare, Instagram, SCVNGR, and the list goes on and on and we can assume that people in the revolution are sharing that moment with many people not at the revolution. Today those actions live separately and have no connective tissue that ties all these pieces of media together. You may see a tweet about the game and a photo on Facebook from the game but those pieces of content will never intersect and paint a fuller picture of the event. One could even say if a revolution was happening it wouldn’t be televised since who would know how to piece together disparate YouTube and Facebook videos of a revolution. We wouldn’t know and the revolution would not be televised. It would be happening in the street unbeknownst to the omnipresent eye of the internet.

Maybe that’s a good thing but shouldn’t there be something that ties all these pieces of media together to help televise the revolution? Shouldn’t the picture I took of the revolution connect together with someone else’s video of the revolution to help tell a fuller story?

I believe the next evolution of social media will not be a new way to share information but will be services that craftily piece together information already being shared. This evolution will tie together all these pieces of media and help tell the story from a million different points of views. The distinction between Jane’s Spring Break photo album and Mike’s Spring Break photo album will still exist but there will be expectations and needs that these photo albums should be aware that they are speaking to the same event and should meet at some point to make a richer experience.

Spring Break is far from being a revolution or even important but the idea of piecing together information from the revolution is. And note, the revolution doesn’t have to be the overthrow of a government or an increase in civil rights – as important as these are – the revolution is your son’s first homerun or your daughter’s first soccer goal. The revolution is the moments in life that you wish were pieced together better by all recording media. The revolution is moments we hope will be televised on our devices and shared with our friends but, today the revolution is not televised. It still lives in different parts and appears in different places. Sometimes we see pieces of a revolution come through on Twitter with collective hashtags but this is the exception not the rule.

I doubt Gil Scott-Heron ever had any idea that his words of passion would be used as a metaphor for remembering your revolution.

Facebook magic is Facebook’s ability to create an incredibly sticky (read: addicting) product that allows people to consume and share content with connections or in other words, a social product. I’d bet that as you are reading this there is another window or tab opened right now with Facebook and you wouldn’t be the only one. The Facebook magic is so strong that they have made it hard for users to find or understand the value in most other social products.

The Social Survival Equation is that any new social product must demonstrate to users that they can offer meaningful incremental value beyond what Facebook offers them. I call this equation, f+1, where f equals Facebook magic and 1 stands for that meaningful incremental value beyond what Facebook offers.

There are a lot of companies doing f+1 products: Twitter, foursquare, Instagram, LinkedIn, and a host of others. Some of these were able to establish themselves via offering different types of social connections (Twitter/LinkedIn) and others with unique product features (foursquare/Instagram). As new social products keep emerging I believe the litmus test for predicting if they will succeed is if they can offer meaningful incremental value beyond Facebook for the average consumer, or f+1.

On March 8th, Foursquare, the location based mobile platform, released the third version of their application. The most notable change in this new version is the addition of an Explore tab that delivers personalized, location-based recommendations.

The idea behind the Explore tab is, as Dennis Crowley, Foursquare’s co-founder and CEO, wrote in a blog post announcing Foursquare 3.0, “tell us what you’re looking for and we’ll help you find something nearby.” For example, a user can search “chocolate ice cream” and Foursquare will return recommendations for the best chocolate ice cream place near you.

The recommendations are based off of many data inputs such as “the places you’ve been, the places your friends have visited, your loyalty to your favorite places, the categories and types of places you gravitate towards, what’s popular with other users, the day of the week, places with great tips, the time of day, and so on” Crowley said. Which means the chocolate ice cream that Foursquare recommends to me will not be the same place as it recommends to you.

The major breakthroughs Foursquare accomplished with 3.0 was that they have transformed their check-in service into a mobile recommendation service and have tied back the value of using Foursquare into something clearly tangible for users. The mobile recommendation piece is very clever since a user can immediately gain value from using Foursquare without needing to build a history of check-ins or a network of Foursquare friends. While you don’t need to check-in to gain value from Foursquare, the service gets incrementally better with every check-in you do.

The other way Foursquare crushed it with this new version is showing the value a user gets from checking in. The previous value to checking in was sharing that information with friends, getting deals, getting badges, and becoming mayor. These tactics worked extremely well to date to the point where every service was now trying to come out with a badge but would limit Foursquare to having a user base in the millions instead of the tens and hundreds millions of users.

Throughout the new product Foursquare reminds the user that checking in will help them. The Explore tab makes clear that recommendations come from checking in. Want better recommendations, check in! The value exchange is very clear.

Foursquare also further gamified the experience to encourage check-ins. They took a latent feature of points per check-in and surfaced them in two ways. They now make clearer the competition happening between friends after every check-in and also as a strong motivational tool by setting an explicit goal. Foursquare now shows users point goals to hit for 7 day periods of time. In doing so they have artificially created a need for users to complete something, reach the point goal, where before there was nothing to complete.

Foursquare’s rapid growth and comparatively large user base has given them the information needed to deliver this first edition of customized recommendations. The initial reactions from people who are trying Foursquare 3.0 think that this could give a lot of competition to Yelp. Those initial reactions are correct but Yelp can catch up.

Yelp has a lot of the necessary items in place to compete with Foursquare on customized recommendations. They incorporate friend connections on Yelp, Facebook connections, reviews and check-ins but have not used these pieces of data to deliver an experience quite like Foursquare. Their opportunity is to use their already established user base and data to learn more about user behavior and create a better experience.

Originally featured on The Next Great Generation

Whether we realize it or not, whenever we engage in some activity we are a part of a community of others who are engaging in that activity at the same time. Sometimes we are totally aware of these communities and can witness them like playing soccer on a team or are on an airplane. Sometimes we we are totally aware of these communities but understand them in an abstract sense like when we are stuck in a 4 mile long traffic jam or when we are watching a highly watched TV show. And sometimes we are not aware at all of the larger community like when we are reading the NY Times and are in a temporal community with all other people who are reading the NY Times at that moment.

I would group these three type of communities as the Seen, Known, and the Unknown. In other words, communities that can be seen, communities we are known to be in, and communities we are unknown to be in.

Currently its quite easy to communicate with Seen communities. I can just go up and talk to that person. Communication in this community is only held back by the willingness of its people.

Communication between people in a Known community can be easy or difficult depending on how that community is formed. I won’t dive into this but using the examples above we could further segment this community. For example, communicating with others stuck in that traffic jam is quite difficult. Today, it’d be very difficult to get a signal from a car 500 cars in front of you regarding how traffic is ahead. There are intermediary mediums that help do this like radio but no direct 1:1 communication solution. On the flip side, we are actually able to have a conversation with other people who are watching a specific TV show. Communication tools like Twitter help us talk to one another about what’s happening and we can specify that conversation with hashtags or @ replies/mentions. Granted this communication is not yet seamlessly woven together in the most elegant way, but it does help people form a temporal community around a shared interest.

The third type of community, the Unknown, is a space where technology should be able to come in and help people connect to form temporal communities. We don’t yet have the ability to communicate with others in this community. We can’t connect with people who are interested in going to a movie at the same time in the same area we are in. There are meetup groups but they involve people needing to have an endured interest in that topic. The problem is that a lot of people shift in and out of communities and we don’t have communication tools for those people. I imagine that over the next year or two we will begin to see more applications that help us connect with others in real-time to help turn Unknowns to Knowns but today there is no solid app that would change this. Although we are starting to see glimpses of how formerly Unknown communities are becoming Known.

The TV example above is one where before Twitter this community would not have been able to communicate. Facebook groups and pages allow for likeminded people to topically converse where as before this communication had to be orchestrated by other means. Foursquare let’s people form temporal communities around a location or event and share experiences. Ditto, an iPhone app, also comes really close to connecting people in temporal communities but the experience today doesn’t quite get there. The experience seems too broad to fit anyone’s specific purpose but it is new and hopefully improving.

I never really thought too much about TV apps before mostly because the experiences always seemed unneeded. Why would I want to see that I got a new friend request while I’m watching a show? Why would I care to see my normal Twitter timeline while watching Always Sunny? The trend here is that the TV apps I have been familiar with only port the same UX you have on other devices and do not make them more relevant to watching TV. In hindsight, since this experience was so broken should be why one should think about it, but I digress.

Inspired by @dens’ post on Yahoo’s Internet Widgets for TV, my brain started ticking on how TV apps can be more about enhancing the TV experience rather than just porting your web experiences on your TV.

I will write on how 3 major applications we use everyday: Facebook, Twitter, and foursquare can be used as TV applications and make your TV watching experience better.

Facebook
As mentioned before, seeing that you have a new friend request or that your sister just posted new pictures on Facebook doesn’t have much relevance to the show that you’re watching. In fact it really has nothing to do with the show you are watching. I think this thinking is not using Facebook’s data in the right way.

Have you ever scrolled through the 500 channels you have to only find nothing to watch? I’ve been there too, not fun. It’s really difficult to organize all that data of shows currently on TV. Facebook’s data could help with this.

I would like to see my TV shows and channels sorted by Liked by my friends. Currently shows are sorted by channel number, alphabetically, and type of channel, none of which makes intuitive sense for users. Users have to learn where channels are. Sorting shows and channels by what your friends have Liked would help us find content that is more relevant to us. Not only would it help us find that cool show we never watched but it would also give feedback on the interests of your friends and family in a new context. “I didn’t know Grandma likes Jersey Shore.”

Adding on to this, users should also have the option to Like a show or channel from their Facebook TV app. Not only would this accrue to your Facebook profile but this information should also help inform your TV to make recommendations on other shows you would like or which shows/series you would like to have recorded. Even further, our DVR or TV cloud folder should speak with our Likes and if we have a lot of space available to record a show, our TV should automatically record shows we Like and then ask us to keep/delete.

Twitter
Seeing your Twitter stream on your TV is nice but doesn’t necessarily add to your TV show. If the people you follow happen to be tweeting about that show, then yes that’s really cool but unlikely to be most of those tweets. Sometimes this does happen with really big events but for everyday TV watching the tweets would not match your show. A relevant Twitter app should be able to pull together an ad-hoc conversation with people that are watching that show. This would require the Twitter app to find the #hashtags and keywords relevant to that show and only serve up those tweets. Adding to this the app could create a Twitter stream that only shows tweets from people who are tuned into that channel or have have checked into that show with applications like Miso. Definitely some hurdles to overcome to get here for this one, but not impossible.

foursquare
I really liked @den’s idea on showing a notification of when a friend checks in somewhere close by and I think we could further foursquare’s usefulness for watching TV. foursquare can tell where you have been and probably with a good accuracy what town/city you live in. I’d like to see our TVs take this data and interpret it to recommend shows we would want to watch. I use to live in NYC and loved watching all shows that came up about NYC or even movies that took place there. I also have traveled to Vegas a few times and like seeing movies that took place there. Finding movies, shows, etc on NYC/Vegas is by the chance that I happen to be watching at that time or surfing the channel guide to find something good to record. I’d love to see recommendations of shows based on where I have been. Home Alone 2 is coming on … record it!! Oceans 11 is coming on … maybe don’t record but you get the idea

I would also like our foursquare checkins to be able to recommend other programming we may like. If foursquare sees that out of all restaurants I check in to, 70% of them are Italian, there’s a good chance that’s my favorite type of food. This information should inform our TVs to recommend the new Mario Batali cooking show that is coming on. Take this idea with sports. If I check into a hockey rink a lot, my TV should recommend the next NHL game coming on.

I know liking Italian food does not equal wanting to watch how its made or that liking to play hockey means you like watching hockey but those pieces of data that we are submitting should come back to enhance our everyday lives in all possible ways.

Facebook launched a new program earlier this month in connection with their location-based check-in app, Places. Deals allows businesses to offer discounts to Facebook users when they check in using Facebook Places. For people who have been using Foursquare, Gowalla, SCVNGR, Loopt, and other location-based services, this is not a new feature.

To date, though, this group of people has not been large. According to Pew Internet, only 4% of online adult Americans use location based services (LBS). Compare this to the statistic that 33% of American adults access the Internet from their mobile device and you can see that location-based services have a long way to go toward greater awareness and adoption.

The large majority of people who could be using location-based services are not, and with the introduction of Deals, these services could start to see a serious boost in membership. More users on location-based applications will be good for the social media industry, Facebook, businesses, and, most importantly, consumers.

Facebook’s quick introduction of Deals only a month or two after Places was announced shows Facebook’s real intentions with Places. Facebook wants businesses to register on their site, creating company Places pages. Deals’ explicit focus on adding value to a customer’s experience at a business is one of many features Facebook could have added to Places and, in addition, they could have offered a Tips app for people to provide feedback and advice to others, like on Foursquare. They also could have offered a Create Your Own Scavenger Hunt app like on SCVNGR.

Why would Facebook want to introduce a service that would increase the number of local businesses indexed on Facebook? I believe it comes down to “Likes.”

Facebook’s competitive advantage as one of the dominate forces on the Internet is its database of social connections between people, places, and things, or as Facebook calls it, The Social Graph. This allows Facebook to offer up relevant advertising, friend suggestions, and the status posts you see in your News Feed. The backbone of Facebook’s future is attaching a “Like” button to everything, online and offline.

Many businesses already had a Facebook presence prior to Places, but now, businesses connected to Places add a critical piece of data to Facebook’s databases: Not only are brands connected to Facebook, but individual stores and locations are registered as well. Each new Place added on Facebook is “Like-able.” I believe Facebook uses the check-in as a gateway to offline “Likes.”

Deals could ultimately help shift the title of “LBS King” from Foursquare to Facebook, which raises an obvious question: Should incumbent LBS leader Foursquare and others feel threatened by Facebook Deals?

The answer is no.

Foursquare and other location-based services are creating their services for other purposes, not to amass “Likes.” Foursquare centers around serendipity, SCVNGR around competitive games—and the other location-based apps have their own mission statements. I think Foursquare should be wary of Facebook’s actions on their territory, but not too alarmed (yet).

Originally featured on The Next Great Generation

Today (9/20/2010) foursquare released version 2.0 of their mobile application. It is clear from the redesign and the blog post introducing version 2.0 that tips and to-dos are being pushed to more prominence. This change puts Yelp in foursquare’s sights. I see this as what could be the first major battle between an originally web based service against an originally mobile based service.

Yelp came around before foursquare was available and has built up a loyal following of users. Yelp’s advantage in this case is their history and they have successfully transferred this history to the mobile phone with their application. Their application is quite good but their advantage in this case is also their weakness. Yelp’s reviews are based on how web users consume information. The treasure trove of content they have is based off of the assumption that people are sitting down at their computers reading through submissions.

This design aspect is also evident by the layout of business pages on Yelp. Yelp offers lots of information on mobile business page. This information can be easily consumed when sitting at your PC but when on the go, these features can be seen as redundant and unneeded to the core experience people are looking to achieve with a mobile app.

Yelp provides a great service and has amazing functionality packed into their app but I believe Yelp needs to prioritize their app better in light of how people need/use mobile apps.

I say this since after seeing foursquare’s trimmed down approach. The ability to discover and review places nearby on foursquare are natively easier. foursquare offers less functionality than yelp (no picture adding in foursquare!) but the features they do offer are key to the review experience. The focus on tips and to-dos put reviews front and center for foursquare users. The service hinges on a good check-in experience but how will people check-in more? By finding good, new places to check-in too. And the big kick to Yelp’s treasure trove of content is that the reviews are written for the mobile user in mind. This is a crucial advantage for foursquare.

I don’ have any stats to back this up but assuming there are more smartphone users in urban areas, I’d say that foursquare has the better plan for now. Yelp’s mobile app set up is more convenient for non-urban areas since the focus is not on location based discovery but on service type discovery. As smartphones proliferate to the suburbs, foursquare may need to change it’s feature functionality a bit catering to the undense geography of suburban communities if it chooses to play in that arena. If not, I’d see Yelp holding on to surburbia. Oh yea, there’s also a thing called Facebook Places, more on that another time.