I usually enjoy reading most of Techcrunch‘s posts from Michael Arrington on Twitter as I find them incisive and informative. Today’s rant against Twitter former Chief Architect just rubbed me the wrong way.

Is it or is it not Blaine Cook’s fault that Twitter seems to be in technical hell? Did Twitter’s early outages correspond to Blaine Cook’s vacations?

As far as I’m concerned, the answer to both questions is “who cares?!??”

Cook is not at Twitter anymore and blaming the guy who was there before has never solved any problem…

Twitter has not been playing the finger pointing game, nor should they. Their full attention is required to fix their performance problem and taking ownership is the best way to go about it. No excuses, just results.

Update: Twitter responds to Techcrunch’s post but is not taking the bait and stays on the high road. Excerpt: “The folks at TechCrunch singled out a former employee of Twitter by name in their questions but Twitter is a team—we share responsibility for our victories as well as our mistakes. (…)”. I’m starting to like the folks at Twitter

While acknowledging that Q2 results for Viacom (VIA) will probably disappoint, Chief Executive Philippe Dauman attributed the relative softness of the advertising market to a slowdown of an “uncertain (economic) environment“, pointing especially in the direction of the automotive sector. He added that there is no sign of a broader weakness in advertising. In other words, as soon as the economy recovers, everything will be a-ok.

Really?

I understand that the role of a CEO is in part to be the most active cheerleader for his or her company with the press and investors. How about a little less cheering more leadership instead?

Let’s not insult the intelligence of savvy reporters and investors. If the economy turns around, it might give a break to advertisers for some time but won’t change the fact that their current business is as good as gone. This is not a dooming prediction but a fact. The very respectable Q1 results for the media giant Viacom were driven by the success of a video game, this should give us a clue…

The issue is really quite simple: mass marketing is finished, kaput, gone, fertig, terminado, fini. We wrote about the death of mass marketing a few weeks ago so I won’t bore you too much on this.

The high cost high revenue model of media giants and advertising agencies is based on mass marketing and handling a transition won’t be easy. Everyone in the field has in some fashion initiated this transition, including Viacom.

We find the lack of acknowledgment of this structural crisis troubling in Philippe Dauman’s announcement. Investors always expect to hear the harsh truth and senior executives should face up to it. Success is not guaranteed but failure is if they don’t.

Hank Williams in his blog, “why does everything suck?“, wrote today about being in Blogger jail, and his desire as a blogger to disassociate the platform from the content (whether articles or comments).

A heated discussion started a couple of weeks ago on social data portability – we wrote a bunch of things at the time following the news – you can find the posts in this blog.

Hank’s plea for a more open environment for bloggers where information could flow is no different from the discussions on social data and their portability. Both advocate for an environment where platforms and data are kept separate.

This is of course a scary idea for most businesses out there trying to create an “unfair competitive advantage” (I hate this idea btw) by raising the threshold of switching services – not so different from your cell phone provider trying to make your life difficult to switch service. I’m not going to go too far down that path as this is a whole other article I’ll probably post on the Ignesis blog.

We wrote a few weeks back a post called “Who owns my data? What really matters is who controls it!” advocating that users should be on the forefront of (re)claiming their data and push for open standards. We are on the right track with so many services starting to emerge using RSS feeds and APIs to aggregate user data to provide stats to the user, like TubeMogul, assess performance, like Traackr, or simply enable central upload of content, like Oosha.

The loop is not fully closed yet but the trend is getting enough momentum to become hard to stop.

I was reading last night about the launch of Microsoft’s live search cashback, described in Sillicon Valley Insider as a “disruptive development”. Intrigued, I signed up this morning to try it. Painless process except that I had to remember my Hotmail password – not easy as I usually only use this account for spam…

After browsing and searching for products for 15mn, I’m still struggling to understand the value proposition. What’s the difference with Google Checkout that will celebrate its 2-year anniversary in 2 weeks?

How is the “cashback” of any interest to buyers? I know that the font is red and all to emphasize it’s important (see screenshot below), but really, who is going to look at anything else than the bottom line price of what they buy??? Ask airlines, they have been struggling with this for some time now…

Online shopping aggregators have made tremendous strives towards price transparency that has become the norm for online buying, so what’s the point of cashback? People will always look at the bottom line (price + tax if applicable – discounts/cashback + delivery) when they make decisions on a purchase.

If the idea is to be able to show exclusive deals for Live Search with cashback in the form of a discount, it only works as long as competing online retailers don’t align their prices, which they will undoubtedly do.

The only disruption I have found so far with Live Search Cashback is in the logic. What am I missing?

For the record, if there is a site out there set up by your customers that is called “is [name of your business] down?”, it’s good and bad news.

It’s great news they care enough to actually do this.

It’s really bad news that you can’t get your act together to fix it.

This is what has happened to Twitter. Check out http://istwitterdown.com/ that pings Twitter to tell users when the site is not working.

If Twitter doesn’t address its downtime problems very soon, it may go down in Web 2.0 history as one of the most unexplainable failures of its time.

One more problem: Twitter is actually down right now and istwitterdown is not reflecting it… Argh! Can someone set up istwitterdowndown.com?

So many people claim expertise in social marketing while so few actually have any that it’s not always easy to figure out who to trust to help you navigate what is still for most an unchartered territory.

Here are a few tips to marketers looking for a helping hand to start experimenting with social media. These are simple things inspired by personal experience and a good dose of common sense, always my best weapon…

1. If someone tells you they are an expert in social marketing, they are probably not… The field of social media is still very new and changing at light speed. There have been a few social marketing success stories but not enough to draw definite patterns in such a fast evolving environment. People who tell you they know exactly what you need to do are either taking you for a ride, or worse, haven’t grasped the complexity of what they are supposed to be experts of.
2. Check out your ‘expert’ for yourself. The least you can expect for someone operating in social media is for them to use the right tools for themselves and build their own brand image. Where do they blog? Can you find them on Facebook, YouTube, Linkedin, Flickr, Twitter, etc.? Do they show up in a simple Google search? Get a sense of who they are and how they use social media tools. In the process, you’ll get more knowledgeable yourself!
3. Has your ‘expert’ already added value to your business? I love this rule because it really addresses 2 important things at once. The first is whether or not that person is truly knowledgeable in this field. Very few businesses are on the cutting edge of social media and chances are that someone with deep knowledge in the field can contribute even before they meet with you. The second is whether or not that person really gets it. What do I mean by that? Unlike traditional marketing, social marketing, and social media in general, require reciprocity and transparency. You need to show your cards first before others decide to trust you. Have they?
4. Dog and pony show allergy. Maybe I should have started there as it’s probably the easiest way to screen out phonies: no company fancy 50-slide Powerpoint presentation with effects and no special website set up for this meeting with the Web2.0 bells and whistles. To give you an example, I attended a discussion last week on social media and the keynote speaker had prepared a total of 6 ugly slides to drive the conversation: he spent all their time thinking about the content of what to say and write, none about formatting. Great way to gain street cred and a great meeting.
5. How many zeros to the proposal? Budget is another way to tell who you have in front of you. I dare anyone to convince me any company should spend a 6 figure budget to start a social marketing project. Over the course of a whole campaign, you might end up spending that and more, but by small increments and by learning along the way what works and what doesn’t. If you are still recovering from a budget discussion on social marketing, you are probably talking to a good ol’ ad agency boy hiding behind buzz terms (see rule 7) and a fancy website.
6. Free! Before you spend big money on social marketing – let me rephrase, before you spend any money on social marketing, have you considered the following: is your company on Twitter yet? How about Facebook? Maybe a group on LinkedIn? Do you answer questions in Yahoo Answers? Shall I continue? If none of these things sound appealing to your ‘expert’, it’s because there isn’t enough money to be made for him there, not necessarily because you shouldn’t do them…
7. Language please! Here is another easy way to tell who you have in front of you. Do you hear “viral marketing”, “UGC”, “building brand equity”? All not good signs… See American Shelf Life for more. Also, if anyone talks to you about “banner ads”, have them escorted out of the building.
8. Fake doesn’t cut it. Another way to tell the people who really don’t get it is to see if their first approach is to try to rig the system and offer to trigger a “viral buzz” (argh! see above) by faking ratings, fans, etc. This is the old school trick of buying the first million copies of a new album to get it at the top of the charts… Let me address this specifically to the geniuses at EMI and Universal (if they still work there) who had interns add friends to MySpace band pages: it doesn’t work!
9. How old is your ‘expert’? I resent discrimination in any way shape or form but I figured that as I stand on the wrong side of this one, maybe people would forgive me. Without elaborating too much, there is a huge generation gap that people who didn’t grow up with MySpace, IM, and Warcraft have much trouble filling when it comes to truly understanding social media. I encourage you to read Mark Prensky’s research on this who introduced the concepts of digital natives and digital immigrants.
10. Speed trumps quality. This field is changing so fast that the only way to stay in the game is to do something. Too many planning sessions, brainstorm exercises, concept reviews and discussions slow you down. Prefer working with someone who is responsive, fast thinking, and not afraid of risks. Running short experiments we can learn from is Ignesis’ bread and butter and I could ramble for some time on this but I won’t… In short, you’re better off receiving a one line email with typos from his or her Blackberry within the hour after you meet instead of a detailed summary of your meeting the next day, articulating next steps, and scheduling the next brainstorming session…

I hope these help you pick the right person for you. Try to hide your smirk if you come across one of the stereotypes I describe. These people do exist!

Please share your own tips on this with the rest of us. We’ll all get smarter.

Last week, we announced the battle for standards for social data among Google, Yahoo! and Facebook (btw, let’s shed a tear for Microsoft, absent from this short list. They’ll probably come up with their own standards in 6 months, stay tuned).

Yesterday, the first shots were fired in this battle with Facebook announcing they will block Google’s Friend Connect, in the name of protecting their users privacy against Friend Connect substandard privacy policy.

In their words, ” At Facebook, we always look out for the privacy of our users”. Really? Charles, I have one word for you: beacon.

Anyways, no reason to elaborate on this as this move by Facebook lacked all subtlety and there is barely a need to read between the lines to understand why they did what they did. Little scared of Google, aren’t we?

Just like in any battles for standards, we can expect more fighting before things settle down. The good news for all of us is that once this is all in motion, the momentum is very hard to stop and standards will undoubtedly start converging.

Last night I had a nightmare. I sat at my computer, and my Vista morphed into a Web app called Woogle, which included a productivity suite, a default search page, alerts, news, a Web analytics page, and all my social networking stuff in one place (and much, much more, all for fwee). I turned around and saw Bill Gates gagged and tied to a nice Aeron chair. Sergei Brin was looking over my shoulder, wearing a photovoltaic-cell powered propeller cap and holding a Subway Veggie Patty footlong.

Seriously, if I had this kind of nightmare, I’d need to get my head checked; but it’s a nice way to start a rant about OpenSocial. On the surface it looks good: Facebook and LinkedIn are the bad guys, because they won’t do open social standards. Google gets a bunch of cool Web 2.0 players on the Friend Connect band wagon, liberates us from social networking tyranny, et voila.

Except it feels like world domination and Microsoft all over again (Woogle = World Google). This way, we’re going to end up with the Internet Explorer of social platforms.

And to quote Dave Winer, one of the hyperbright bulbs behind RSS and SOAP: “Standards devised by one tech company whose main purpose is to undermine another tech company, usually don’t work. In this case it’s Google trying to undermine Facebook. And I don’t think it’s going to work.” This was said a few months ago. OpenAlliance now has 26 members, so at least from a popularity standpoint, it’s working; but I agree with the sentiment, and the long-term lack of viability.

I’m not having conniptions over Woogle. Who cares in the end about who owns the mall, as long as you can shop there. But this increasingly feels like the mall’s security guards are keeping my wallet and hand it over to me every time I go shopping.

The only way to make sure you and I own our data is to have real open standards backed by companies, gov agencies, and the public – not the oxymoron that brings together the words “Open” and “Google”.

by Lau-RANT

I get why Charlie Odonnell is terminally cranky about the data portability issue. (I was going to write, “I grok”, but my wife tells me only people who were frying on acid reading Stranger in a Strange Land say that, so…).

To give some context: there’s an industry effort under way to create open standards and allow your and my data to move from one site or application to the next.

Charlie says: who cares? If a site or app is useful, I’ll use it, and don’t care if my data ports or not. Why would you want to move your scintillating pictures of Bob mooning the frat house from Facebook to Flickr anyway?

Sorry Charlie: because lots of people would. They’d love to move their contact list or page content to the happening new site. Why wouldn’t they? It’s a way for the other site to attract people. And the originating site should get on the band wagon because it will be a competitive advantage to offer portability based on OpenID or whatever the heck else. That’s the part I don’t care about.

And also because of exactly the reasons you mention, Charlie: laziness. Having to create an account every time something else pops up? Give me a break. Use my Yahoo or Gmail login furcrhissakes.
I’m not as concerned about privacy. Vauhini Vara’s article in the WSJ about using the Web to spy on your friends doesn’t send shivers down my spine, good people of the blogosphere. The Web is a vast exercise in exhibitionism and voyeurism. If that boggles your mind, or you feel inclined to huff and puff at the inanity of it all, just read Sapolsky’s “A Primate’s Memoir”, and get a refresher course on your own behavior. And on what makes social networking ventures successful.

Also, if you don’t like it, don’t play.

So: data portability standards are not boring. They’re good. They’re useful. And I don’t really care what they are as long as they’re there.

By Laurent Liscia & Pierre-Loic Assayag

Summary: If everything digital is getting cheaper, and in many cases, free, is there any money to be made? The question is not new, and in some ways, neither is the answer. We need tools to quantify the intangibles that make our economy viable and our world a better place to live; starting with motherhood.

The rise of Free

There’s a chapter in Dan Ariely’s “Predictably Irrational” book called FREE!, which also happens to be the title of Wired magazine’s Chris Anderson’s upcoming book.

For those aryavedic astrologers out there: it’s not a coincidence. In the digital world, free is a trend, and in some cases, it’s the underpinning for a whole business model. And if anyone chimes in with Google, Yahoo or Open Source, I’ll have to charge them a dollar every time they do. I think Chris Anderson owes me a few bucks already.

Dan’s premise is the following (I’ll be quoting him liberally):

1. The environment has a large, yet unrecognized, effect on our behavior. The Chinese aren’t squeamish about bumping into each other not because they have no manners or an alien sense of space, but because they live in much higher-density environments

2. Our intuitions about what drives our behaviors are flawed: when we say we buy the car with more horsepower because it can get us out of tight traffic situations, we’re full of it.

3. Emotions play a large role in our decision making (we are predictably irrational)

When it comes to free stuff, for instance, there is no downside, no physical or emotional coast to procuring it. Reason goes out the window, whether we need the free item or not.

I love Dan’s book, no really, I do, but I have a problem with the chapter on FREE! (beyond the usual frustration with people who are floored by pop psycho-economics and don’t seem to have heard of War and Peace): sometimes you can give a product away and people are still not going to want it. Ask 99% of all Web 2.0 start-ups, freeware creators, poets, and musicians!

Why?

Because there is a downside to any action, whether there is a financial cost attached or not: an expenditure of energy, whether it’s time spent, a learning curve, a need for greater receptivity, and so on. Making things free is a hook, but only if the item is compelling, desirable or perceived as useful.

Chris Anderson’s take on this issue is that the free business model, or “freeconomics” will become the standard for the entire digital economy. All business transactions in this economy will trend towards zero, and prices are destined to fall.

I hate to disagree.

This is true on the surface, and is also why Sony’s stock is in the toilet: because they have no control over the process. Vizio has control, because they are the low-price leader, and that’s also a dangerous place to be in this game of musical chairs.

Google’s stock on the other hand (oops, I owe myself a dollar) first sky-rocketed before plateauing: they control price formation on their Adwords site. Prices on some words keep going up, not down. It’s whatever the market will accept to pay for a qualified prospect at a certain time.

Here’s another counter-example: every gadget manufacturer wants to get into the “Apple zone”, i.e. charge a premium for a fetish device. Sure, Apple had to lower the price on the iphone; but its margins last much longer on its portable than any other manufacturer’s. And while Apple cannot completely escape the trend towards commoditization and falling prices, its whole model is to create devices that cannot be emulated easily; that are not, in fact, commodities. It’s a lot harder to do that for software, microchips, or TVs. This simple fact is a huge driver of stock price in the digital economy.

The trends towards free impacts first and foremost products and services that are perceived as commodities.

The false promise of free

[Beginning of “and another thing” rant]

This trend is problematic in some respects, and not just online. Technology prices are integral to the computation of the Consumer Prices Index (CPI); and they have fallen so steeply over the years that the overall CPI has been kept in check, ushering in an unprecedented era of growth with no inflation – something of an economic impossibility just 25 years ago.

For those of us who live in the real world, not just on Second Life, that era was a bit of an illusion: home prices were going up faster than anybody’s wages, medical coverage is the inflation story of the century, you can’t buy a decent medium-size pizza for less than $15 these days – and of course, now, energy’s going through the roof. Sure, we’ve had ever-more powerful laptops and cellphones. But we can’t very well eat them or spend a vacation inside of them. Except for the aforementioned second lifers. We have been lulled by the digital economy into believing that inflation had vanished.

It should not come as a surprise to anyone that the dreaded Nixonian monster, stagflation, has risen from its ashes: stagnation with high prices.

[End of rant]

Freeconomics and the economics of influence

The part of the digital economy trend I want to focus on is not the fact that gizmos are getting cheaper; or that many apps or services are free, but are used by their proponents to capitalize on eyeballs, premium services or cross-selling opportunities in a phenomenon called “cross-subsidy”.

No, I’d rather focus on completely free stuff: freeware, free content Web sites, blogs and user-generated content. I’m thinking specifically of Wikipedia, Craig’s list, Amazon reviews, Nine-Inch Nails, band pages and music on MySpace, this here free blog, CNN.com etc.

First, let me show how this is not new. I’m pretty sure that the people who painted the critters on the Lascaux walls were not given seashells or rabbit stew for it. Women were never paid to raise their children. Priests of any ilk used to survive on donations alone. And by definition, volunteers have never received a dime for their services.

Yet, the services performed, whether by entertainers, volunteers, and most of all mothers, are critical to the product of a nation. The lack of accounting tools to quantify these contributions, and the lack of willingness to do so, has skewed the economic picture towards hard production numbers. One of the best things about the digital trend towards free is that it is encouraging us to re-evaluate, or re-inject actual value into some of the most precious things in our economy and everyday lives.

If you believe in Wilson’s sociobiological model, mothers raise their children because they ensure the survival of half their genetic make-up. There’s a reward in seeing half-copies of themselves running around; and in the process of raising these children, mothers also reproduce themselves psychologically, to some extent: the reward is influence.

The same applies to artists who share their work; to software creators who give their creation away and enjoy the social influence they gain; volunteers see the fruit of their labor and experience the gratitude of their beneficiaries; experts who give away their knowledge.

If we generalize, we get a new definition of influence: influence is the powerful reward for this powerful free stuff.

In some cases, the financial upside is obvious: bloggers build credibility via their posts, and improve their standing as experts. This makes them more employable. Artists can gain a following by giving their music away online: this is not so different from being noticed when you’re singing in the subway. And successful freeware usually makes the transition to premium or ad-supported, if enough copies have been downloaded. See Lenny Mendonca and Robert Sutton’s article on Mozilla’s success: In 2006, Google searches originating from Firefox delivered revenues three times greater than Mozilla’s expenses.

In other cases, such as Wikipedia, the upside for the influencer is murkier, and usually exists in the contributor’s mind’s eye – but it’s always about influence.

Let me explain: Wikipedia’s value to its users is hard to quantify but undeniable and contributes to the economy’s growth by providing individuals, corporations, and government agents with rich information available at their fingertips (saves time, increases accuracy of info, thus decisions made). Here’s where things are less clear: how does one turn this intangible value for users into intangible (or tangible) value to its contributors. Some free services, like Mozilla, have already figured it out, others, like Wikipedia, not yet. Where Traackr helps is by providing a “currency system” for intangibles which is the first step to figuring out how to extract value.

Our goal at Traackr is to quantify influence online: whether a person is an expert, an artist, a socialite. If your influence is in the offline realm exclusively, we won’t be able to do anything for you (just yet): sorry, mom! But if you’re an Amazon reviewer, a blogger, an artist; your contributions are peppered across the Web; and you need a consolidated picture of whether you’re reaching people, then Traackr is the right tool for you. It will help you measure the elusive upside that has made the new digital economy such a difficult paradigm for so many.