@T: ALWAYS THE TWAIN

Socnets and user statistics

In recent days several articles and coincidental life events have made me compare social networks with real-life friendships. Yesterday, there was the news that a Harvard University survey has found that user engagement and repeat-return usage on Twitter is noticeably lower than the headline news about sign-up growth of 2000+ percent would suggest. Additionally, as with other social networks, Twitterites seem to be complying with the 90-10 rule: principally, 10 percent of members produce the content (in Twitter’s case 30 percent of it) whilst the other 90 percent either passively consume or relay on the links.

*  http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/cs/2009/06/new_twitter_research_men_follo.html

Separately (and connectively), it’s been announced by the new CEO of MySpace, Owen Van Natta, that the company will be reducing its workforce by 30 percent to improve cost efficiencies and provide users with the type of personalization which increases their stickiness to the site. By my reading of it, this should in turn should make MySpace more attractive to potential advertisers since they’re more interested in what I’d call “captive spiders who weave” than “time commitment gnats”.

* http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/88a7d514-5aa1-11de-8c14-00144feabdc0.html?nclick_check=1

* http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/06/16/myspace-layoffs-slashing-_n_216330.html

* http://www.businessinsider.com/myspace-is-in-far-worse-shape-than-its-new-executives-thought-2009-6

Regardless of whether it’s Web 3.0, Web 2.0, Web 1.0 or Web wannabe #1, the metrics technology companies and PR-marketers-advertisers are interested in are still the same:

· unique monthly visitors

· average time between visit(s) — in days

· average user engagement during a single visit — in minutes

· average # of links clicked through within defined time

· average # of pages visited

· # of votes / comments / download / shares of an article

*     CPCs, CPAs, CPMs

This is the case whether we refer to Nielsens, Compete, Technorati, Hitwise or Omniture methodologies for extrapolating site traffic and user engagement.

Since I have direct experience of managing a global portfolio of TMT investments which involved assessing balance sheets to ascertain whether or not I would re-invest / write down / exit the company, and I’m sufficiently tooled mathematically to analyze numbers beyond PR blurb and occasional media hype (“explosive growth!”, “up 2000 percent year-on-year!”, etc.), I tend to take the numbers reported with a healthy grain of salt.

Personally, I believe the pseudo quant benchmarks we currently use to track online success are only a 1/3 of the picture of the why-when-where-how-what-whos of user behavior and probably another 10 percent can be extracted from online sample questionnaires of the sort conducted by Survey Monkey and another 5 percent from standard market data research of the type reported in ACORN / Datamonitor / Jupiter Media Matrix etc. All-in-all, even with the likes of Adsense incorporated into the equation, I would say that we have a less than half complete perspective on online behavior, users’ underlying motivations (transient as well as established), content valuation and trust dynamics.

Therefore, it’s not surprising that few Web companies have consistently genuinely understood their audience, the content they’re seeking and interested in, the dynamics of community ethos, their need for purposeful participation and…………….HOW TO GENERATE INCOME from and with users.

Ultimately, this is why no company has created the definitive and foolproof online business model where profitability is self-generating, user loyalty is guaranteed and there is true symbiosis in company-customer revenue share…………(yet).

Personalization and preferences

In any case, I was thinking about personalization and the difference between online engagements compared with real space interactions because three events recently happened within my circle.

(1.) My friend Josephine bought a new apartment in NYC.

(2.) An entrepreneur friend asked me to help him produce a dynamic version of his insights on business.

(3.) My mother says she’s ready to date again; sadly, my father passed away over 2 years ago and this is the first time in many years she’s been single. My parents were married for 35 years and had known each other since childhood so this is really new territory for her.

Now, if I was a Facebook aficionado I’d probably buy Josephine an e-card and post it onto her wall — that is if she was even on Facebook which she’s not (and it’s not as if she’s a technophobe, she’s a developer at a big US bank) and if I actively used FB which I don’t. If I was a Twitterite I’d IM out the entrepreneur’s advice as “How to make money: tip for the day” in 10-word tweets. Plus if I was registered on an online dating site I’d probably scour the male prospects of retirement age for my mother and/or openly pin up a “WLTM” notice with her photo attached.

Of course, I’m doing none of these things.

This tells me that whilst the Web and technology are making good progress there are still some areas of personalization, privacy and trust where the services currently offered simply……..DON’T DO IT and we revert to established social norms.

As it is I managed to find the most serendipitous card possible for Josephine. Typically online sites including the e-card repertoire of Facebook will only show the front cover of a card and not the back nor what’s on the inside (message, layout, font style etc. — although www.moonpig.com does allow us to create DIY cards), and we can’t get a feel for the weight and quality of the paper used. Sometimes, these things matter because we may have an entire theme for the gift(s) and accompanying card we want to send our friend(s).

This is the front and back cover of the card I’ve sent Josephine:

Not only is it super-duper cute, it’s also LOL (and not simply because it’s made by EMOTIONAL RESCUE LTD!).

My pet name for Josephine happens to be…………..“Rabbit” and, well, I’m a tiger cub to her so the kitty on the back makes this the most fortuitous and specific card ever! Maybe it’s a “sign” and further proof that our life paths were destined to cross — LOL.

Even funnier is that I’d never been in that card store before; it was a completely accidental foray because I decided to get off the bus a stop early and had to cut through a side street to get to my destination. Moreover, once inside the store I couldn’t even find the “New Home” card section. There was an entire profusion of cards for Father’s Day on 21^st June and the displays were haphazardly labeled which made the shopping experience not as smooth as it could be, btw.

Just as I was about to leave the store I spotted the tiny section at the back given for cards of the ilk:

· “Sorry you’re leaving!”

· “Congratulations on passing your exams!”

· “Get well soon!”

When I saw the card I bought her I LOL’ed. This elicited a really strange (aka startled) look from a fellow shopper; people aren’t accustomed to spontaneous LOL when you’re alone I’ve discovered over the years — they think you’re either crazy or there’s something on their face like a pen mark or gigantic spot — and despite attempts to socialize myself out of spontaneous LOLs, I do it quite a lot even when I’m by myself because there are a billion and one unexpected wonders in the world which spark up that LOL ……………like finding the perfect card for my friend.

So along with the spot-on personalized card, I’ve sent her presents with the Chinese elements of earth, wind, fire and water.

Although we can’t see each other often because of the distance (and costs of transatlantic flight), we do have proper talk-TALKs on the phone which just can’t be replicated in online IMs or lengthy emails. Both forms disintermediate important bits of the emotional content of real conversations that enable us to correctly pick up verbal signals about the other person’s mood, feelings and frame of mind. In fact, during the American Presidential nominations Josephine and I had a long and involved discourse verging on disagreement about who was the better candidate; my money was on Obama from the outset, hers on Hillary Clinton who was then the Senator for New York. It’s unimaginable that a series of tweets would have enabled us to explore our positions the way that that telephone conversation did.

Of Josephine’s many brilliant (and unsung) qualities are her empathy, her tolerance towards others and her patience. We have completely opposite tastes and opinions on politics, music, fashion, education, career issues, etc. etc. etc. so in a social network environment we’d probably never have become connected — because recommendation algorithms aren’t sophisticated enough yet to link people based on perception, trust, values and personality traits and not just cultural interests (books we read, films we’ve seen, gizmos we’ve bought, etc.).

So it’s my luck and good fortune we met by chance in real-life actuality rather than cyberealty.

Josephine recently wrote that I am “quite different and always have the drive to try something, I have to be more like you when I grow up ” which is incredibly sweet since she’s older than me. Ironically, my mother hopes I’ll be more like Josephine when I grow up because she’s a lot less boisterous, a lot less opinionated about everything, does not get into stand-offs on matters of principle like I do and has a steadier and less tiger-fierce disposition. LOL.

My mother’s obviously a great woman for experiencing me @ full velocity and intensity, up close and personal for so many years, and still speaking to me, :*).

Now, onto personalizing some Flash files for my entrepreneur friend.

Well, there’s absolutely no way that even the best Flash developer in the world would be able to turnaround a specific and functional design that he’d like within a few hours, as I did. This isn’t for any technical reason; of course that Flash developer is a gazillion times more talented than I am code-wise. However, they wouldn’t have the advantage of cumulative perspective on him, his tastes and his motivations which I’ve been lucky enough to gain over many years.

Here too the personal effect comes into play. It also means that I’m more likely to be spot-on in my solution which, essentially, is to transform his classical content into more contemporary forms and we trust each other to brainstorm more openly.

Btw, I LOVE Asimo and the Kindle so you can all see how passion for a brand / product / concept can translate into other media and be adapted and personalized by someone like me. In the Kindle flash format, the pen scribbles the title and the content is loaded as an external MC swf upon click of the button.

Twaining personalization for populus sites and the potential of Semantic technologies

It’s fantastic for user choice that socnets like MySpace are interested in increasing personalization and granularity for what are mass audiences (150+ million registered members) so that our online relationships more closely proxy our off-line ones. Beyond the technical innovations of the Semantic Web — RDF, visual knowledge representation, ontologies, SPARQL, FOAF, axiomatic acronyms etc. — what semantic technologies are also attempting to do is to increase the picture we have of online behavior beyond the less than half of the picture I mentioned earlier.

At some point, there will be some contextual information that’s traceable at every time-point on the continuum and can be extrapolated on the nature and meaning of relationships of the type that explains why we’d choose to buy and give a particular friend this specific card as different from all the other mass-produced cards out there. Why we would read one particular article or purchase that FMCG / white good / investment item / property in preference over another.

A whole myriad of qualitative data points that are not currently provided by what I called the “pseudo quant metrics” of online behavior. This is also why I’m developing a matrix of media sensor tools; there’s a definite information gap here and to-date none of the semantic technologies I’m aware of are dealing with it.

As for the personalization question, there seems to be some fluidity in each successive cycle of the Web wave which is actually similar to our bricks+mortar existence.

We went from consolidated portals with their high volume push content (“pile them high, sell them cheap”) and cursory customer feedback to specific micro-tribes of blog sites (“customize everything” — phone covers, iTune libraries, interior design — and identify cultural leaders and first adopters) to the current coalescence of content with context (“the social graph of consumers and their comments”).

Management of techcos deliberate continuously between implementing features of universal appeal to help a platform gain critical momentum and mass traction versus delivering very specific and customized tools that individual users request for their needs.

It’s not an easy dichotomy to resolve but it’s fairly certain that some companies will crack the conundrum in time.

Crossing my fingers again…………