There has been a ton of discussion surrounding data portability in light of Facebook’s decision to bow out of Google Friend Connect and go it alone with their own service. Mike Arrington accurately argues that data portability is the new walled garden. The current race for social networks is to open up their platforms so that they become the “centralized me”; a central control panel that enables me to distribute my information to other places on the web.

What Does This Mean?
While you may look at what is currently going on with social networks and think to yourself that none of this matters to your business, the reality is that it does. It has far reaching implications once all of these details are worked out. The battle that is taking place between social networks and users is the same battle that will be taking place between businesses and consumers. Right now the users are consumers and the social networks are the businesses.

What is being played out is the future of a consumer’s interaction with that business. In the future I want to be able to walk into a store and the sales people and computers in that store to know who I am. Why do I want this? Well, I want a better sales experience. Once I leave the store though, I don’t want that store to be able to contact me or store any of my personal information.

At the least, if they have a way to contact me, I want to be able to have the control to turn off their ability to contact me in the future.

The Conflict of Interests
While some businesses may live by the motto “the consumer is always right”, traditional businesses do not want to give up what was previously ownership of consumer data in perpetuity. The old sales model was to figure out a way to incentivize you to provide as much personal data as possible. The best example I can think of is the old boxes they used to put in restaurants that tell you to “fill out this form and get a chance at a trip around the world.”

Within days somebody would contact you and try to sell you a timeshare. Depending on what you said to the sales representative, your information would go into different stacks on their desk: hot lead, warm lead, cold lead. Would they trash the lead? Definitely not! A cold lead is always better than no leads at all. This is business. This is sales.

Contrast this with data portability. Imagine those leads simply disappearing off the sales representative’s desk because the consumer simply want s their data back. That means that the consumer has control over the sales cycle, not the sales team.

Data Portability Removes the Incentive
One of the primary reasons that you enter your personal information on Facebook or any other website is because it helps to provide a more custom tailored experience that’s personal to you. What Facebook Connect, MySpace Data Availability and Google Friend Connect does is enable some of your experience to be custom tailored without having to register.

This means that the incentive for a user to register is reduced substantially because they don’t need to register for your site to have a personalized experience. This is great for Facebook and MySpace because they become the center of your identity and get to own your most personal data no matter what. Google gets access to some of this data by default through their Friend Connect service.

While these new systems are great for organization’s sake, they don’t really help out the businesses that you currently interact with. Companies now need to try harder to get your personal information. While you could argue that the businesses still win because they get page views which help them earn more advertising dollars, the reality is that not all businesses simply make money from you visiting their website.

At some point you need to register because registering helps that company build their database and get value from the user. Could you see a sales guy who’s stack of leads starts disappearing from his desk because the users “wanted their data back”? That’s what data portability provides. While it makes a lot of sense for the consumer, it doesn’t make much sense for the business and that’s why businesses don’t want it to happen.

A Counter-Argument
While walking around a mall you can always walk into a store, take a look and walk out without ever having to interact with a sales staff again. On the internet you frequently are forced into registering for a site without being able to take a walk around and check out the goods. The new services provided by Facebook, MySpace and Google all help the consumer by enabling you to have a custom experience on the website without registering.

In essence you are checking out the goods before you buy. This empowers the consumer and it’s good for both parties. The business also gets access to data that they previously wouldn’t have had access to. At least now they can know who’s visiting their site (or store) while they’re visiting.

Conclusion
All consumers will one day have the power to control what businesses get access to what data.  Right now, Facebook, MySpace and Google are battling to be the companies that enable you to control that data. While this isn’t true data portability it is a step in the right discussion and at least the debate is taking place.

While you don’t need to be part of the discussion, it is a good idea to be part of it because one day data portability will be impacting your business no matter what type of presence your business has (virtual or physical).

Yesterday afternoon I got two emails me notifying me that I had missed a story on my blog. One was referring my delayed Animoto post and another was referring to my delayed post on Facebook leaving Google Friend Connect. I am not angry at the people that contacted me but I would like to at least express the dilemma facing people that blog about the news on a daily basis.

I personally write 7 to 10 articles on a daily basis to makes sure that readers are up to date with what’s going on in this industry. Occasionally I have to attend a meeting and may not be able to break a story before Mike Arrington or one of the other prominent bloggers. The fact is that news blogging is an addictive and never ending cycle. The 24 hour news cycle has been reduced to practically a minute and some readers are unforgiving of missing news stories.

The reality is that blogging is still not as big as mainstream journalism and when readers set their expectations of what is mostly a one man team at the same level of 5 person or more teams, expectations cannot be reached. I am one of the hardest working people I know but I have also recognized that the news blogging cycle spirals towards death. I’ve decided to remove myself from that and start living healthy.

This means I may not break every news story but I’ll still continue to blog my butt off. I’ll also make sure that my readers keep up to date on what’s going on in this industry. At a certain point you have to figure out what your priorities are. Mine has become good health over non-stop blogging. I apologize if I miss a story but that is now a fact of life. To those readers that understand my predicament: this blog post is not for you.

Last week I had the opportunity to speak with Chris Cunningham of AppsSavvy. AppsSavvy is a company based out of New York which focuses on building monetization opportunities for social application developers and building custom branded experiences for companies. They do this by connecting brands with the application developers that have the proper demographics to match up with the client’s campaign.

They have successfully executed campaigns for movie companies, TBS, Adidas and a number of other large organizations. The company is heavily focused on providing sales support for the developers that don’t have the resources to reach out to brands on their own. I have spoken on a number of panels where I emphasized that the best ROI for application developers will come from reaching out directly to brands rather than relying on the traditional CPM model that most developers are currently relying on.

AppsSavvy is surprisingly the only company which is currently focused on providing branded campaigns for clients. As Chris says during my interview with him, there is currently limitless inventory on Facebook and not all of it is being filled. Companies that are focused on continuously building distribution won’t win in the long run because there are already plenty of distribution channels.

This goes back to the developer dilemma that I spoke about on Wednesday. Chris and the AppsSavvy teaming are helping developers that build valuable applications connect with brands and they have continued to see growth since their company launched. Listen to my podcast with Chris to learn more. I forgot to mention one other thing: Chris and his team are currently seeing average CPMs of $8-$12!

 

 Interview with Chris Cunningham of AppsSavvy [15:37m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Yesterday afternoon Facebook announced that they would be leaving Facebook Friend Connect due to privacy issues. Ultimately the post sounded as though Facebook was concerned about users putting their personal data at risk. Well, Google has sent us a statement in light of Facebook’s decision:

We’re disappointed that Facebook disabled their users’ ability to use Friend Connect with their Facebook friends. We want to help you understand a bit more about what’s going on on the Friend Connect side with respect to users’ information.

User privacy is of the utmost importance, and Friend Connect was designed to strongly preserve it. The larger issue here is users’ control of their data. People find the relationships they’ve built on social networks really valuable, and they want the option of bringing those friends with them elsewhere on the web. Google Friend Connect is designed to keep users fully in control of their information at all times. Users choose what social networks to link their Friend Connect account to. (They can just as easily unlink it.) We never handle passwords from other sites, we never store social graph data from other sites, and we never pass users’ social network IDs to Friend Connected sites or applications.

For example, here’s what an application running on a Friend Connected site can access about a user, Joe, who has linked in his hi5 account:

7547238438 joe [picture] 9438265867 8348357012

Translation: Not much. A third party app has access to:
- Your Google Friend Connect ID. This is a number. It is not a name, and it is not your hi5 ID.
- Your friendly name that you entered into Friend Connect (or from hi5 if you didn’t).
- Your photo. And only if you’ve chosen to make that photo public on hi5.
- The Google Friend Connect IDs of any of your hi5 friends who are also members of this site. (NOT all of your hi5 friends. Not their hi5 IDs.)

That’s it. These apps have no knowledge of who these friends are. They have no access to additional profile data — yours or your friends’. No idea who else is on your friends list on your social network.

Google’s statement attempts to discount Facebook’s argument that data is insecure. What I think we are witnessing at this point is simply a battle of the PR teams at both companies. Google attempted to make an announcement that included Facebook for the soul purpose of discounting Facebook’s platform and making the playing field appear level.  At this point, it is now completely a PR battle which has been successful so far at generating a lot of buzz. We’ll see how long this lasts.

Earlier this morning Animoto announced that they had received funding from Amazon.com. This wasn’t surprising news considering Jeff Bezos’ decision to include Animoto in his presentation at the YCombinator Startup School event. I’ve written about Animoto before over at AllFacebook and have used it numerous times to create videos including the one displayed below.

Animoto automatically integrates music and video to create unique custom embeddable videos. You can use Animoto’s library of music or upload your own music to include in the videos. If you ever want to make a really slick presentation definitely use Animoto. There are no details as to how much money was raised in this new round of funding but this round makes a lot of sense.

Ultimately Amazon is investing in a company that is using Amazon’s EC2 and S3 services to scale their business rapidly. That’s a pretty smart play by Amazon! Congratulations to the Animoto team. This company is on the fast track to success.

As PR/marketing guy I am always being asked, “How do I use social media as a pr or marketing to reach the public?” I wish there was a simple 1 2 3 answer but there really isn’t a cookie cutter solution to using social media as a tool.

I was at an event the other night and this very question was asked to me by the founder of a small startup. He and I chatted for several minutes, giving advice and listening to ideas when I had an epiphany. I began to tell him that he needed to find his social media sweet spot.

He needed to find the point where spending time and resources on social media can produce the most ROI. I began to explain this in detail and found that I was drawing a simple graph. The graph, sketched on a napkin, will forever be framed in my apartment but I decided to create a digital representation and share it with you.

I began to outline all the social media outlets this gentleman was interested in spending his resources on. I then took to drawing points of allocation (hours spent) on a graph, those points represented how his resources would be divided up among social media outlets, and filled those points in to represent total expenditure of his time spent on (based on 200 hours).

What I came up with was a physical representation of how to use social media to find the best results. It is amazing how when something is physically presented to you it can really help outline a marketing plan. After looking at the chart my friend realized he wanted to host and attend events while connecting with people on twitter. He would then spend time following up on Facebook and posting/commenting on blogs with occasional forum posts in certain topic areas.

Certainly we would have to iron out some details on how best to accomplish these tasks, but the basics were there in a simple graph. The graph you see is for his company alone, no other product or company could receive the same benefit with this social media distribution and that in essence is his social media sweet spot.

If you were marketing a product or service maybe you would be heavier on video and less on twitter but more on blogging. If you were political maybe you would lean more toward forums with a heavy burden on Twitter and Facebook. The idea is this: you have a limited amount of resources to expend, even in social media, so to create the strongest ROI you need to decide how best to allocate your time and money. Creating a simple marketing graph like this will help you know how best to do this.

Remember the graph isn’t static; you can change the values as you experiment in social media to fine tune it for the best results. Have any of you made a graph like this for any of your social media clients or to evaluate your personal branding?

Yesterday, Plaxo announced that it is being acquired by Comcast. The reported acquisition price is around $160 million according to Mike Arrington. This is far below the amount that Bebo was recently acquired for by AOL. Plaxo doesn’t have as large of a user base and is instead being acquired for their technology rather than their user base.

Traditional media companies are going to need to start buying more and more new media companies as consumer attention turns away from the television, newspaper and radio. We saw further proof of this trend this morning when it was announced that CBS is Buying CNET for $1.8 Billion. Ben Goulb, the CEO of Plaxo, says that the aim of the acquisition is to “deliver on a vision of making ’social media’ a natural part of the lives of regular people, not just early-adopters.”

While that may be true, it doesn’t appear that the early adopters are big fans of the acquisition. The majority of Twitter chatter was about how people would be closing their Plaxo accounts. Those fragile early adopters! While a few people may be closing their accounts, expect social networking to be integrated into your television experience in the coming years. This acquisition is just one step in that direction.

What are your thoughts on news of this acquisition? Are you even a Plaxo member?

Back in March I wrote about the launch of the Sometrics Facebook application. Peter Kafka is reporting that Sometics has just received their first round of funding from the L.A. based Mailroom Fund. The Mailroom Fund is “sponsored by William Morris Agency, Accel Partners and Venrock.”

Sometrics is currently the leading social analytics application on Facebook and it also has the potential to expand beyond. I’ve already been discussing with others the implications of having an analytics tool that takes advantage of the new Facebook Connect platform and the competing services being launched by Google and MySpace. Currently Google Analytics, the leading analytics program, doesn’t provide demographic data as it applies to gender and age.

Sometrics and some of their competitors are now able to make this possible even on external websites. There is still a substantial opportunity for improving analytics programs. From one tool to another, the numbers continue to deviate which means that nobody has been able to solve the analytics problem even today. Facebook is currently the only platform to provide analytical tools to developer however limited they may be.

The social analytics space now has multiple players and it will be exciting to see how this component of social networks grows over the coming months and years.

eMarketer has revised US social network ad spending projections previously made to $1.4 billion this year down from and estimated $1.6 billion. They also project ad spending on social networks in 2011 to be $2.36 billion. That’s somewhat discouraging for those that are investors in this space. While it represents substantial growth, there are some definite downsides.

As eMarketer states, “The challenge is that all of these new forms of advertising are more difficult to plan, measure and quantify than what advertisers are used to, and that has impacted spending growth.” In other news, the Social Times is now projecting revenues of $500 million for SocialTimes.com and related sites for the year 2011. I’m looking forward to it!

News of reductions in ad spending circulated throughout the blogosphere today. This appears to be a result of some of that news. This year ad expenditures for social networks is expected to grow 55 percent in comparison to 163 percent growth seen last year. That may have something to do with the domestic recession. eMarketer projects social network ad spending to be 5 to 6 percent of the total online ad spending. Where is the rest going? The majority goes to Google.

If you didn’t notice from my projections related to Social Times, I don’t take most of these statistics seriously. Everybody in the industry knows the horrendous CPMs that social networks currently provide. What we are all waiting for (and some people are working on) is a way to dramatically increase revenues for these sites. MySpace claims that their HyperTargeting initiative has been successful at increasing CPMs. There are currently no statistics to show recent improvements in Facebook’s SocialAds.

I’d suggest that the real opportunity for SocialAds (and other ad networks) comes through extending their platforms outside the walled gardens as has been announced in the past week. I would expect Facebook SocialAds to extend beyond their own website within the next 12-18 months. For now, the large social networks are still focusing on building highly scalable platforms. It’s about time that the companies start making serious money.

There is an interesting dynamic taking place in the social web space: developers are being pushed to their limits thanks to the countless platforms that have launched. Only a few large players have been able to adapt. Companies like Slide, RockYou and iLike have enough development power to extend across multiple social platforms and while even their limits are being tested, they continue to emerge victorious with the launch of each new platform.

It isn’t as “smooth sailing” for the majority though. Smaller development companies are opting out of beta programs with Facebook Connect, MySpace Data Availability and Google Friend Connect because they are already stretched thin. It’s the fine balance between building your properties or acquiring new territory. It is a very challenging dynamic and since this space is so quick moving, even the largest players don’t have an amazingly strong foundation because they are too busy keeping up with the latest and greatest technology.

The bottom line is that there is now more opportunity in this space than there are developers to take advantage of it. This can be seen as both a good and bad thing. It’s great for those that are looking to enter this space, it’s bad from those trying to make money. When there’s so much opportunity to grab peoples’ attention, advertising (the primary revenue source for developers) becomes commoditized.

This does not mean doom and gloom even though this high speed industry leaves a virtual wasteland behind it as it tries to keep on the bleeding edge. Within this vast wasteland is the opportunity to build valuable communities that users feel strong affiliations to. Rather than just plowing through the virtual landscape to create wide reaching distribution channels, it’s time for the companies and developers to start building valuable content.

After all this time content is still king. The developers that continue to chase after the hot new thing that comes out every 6 weeks will lose. The main reason is that for the purpose of business, the internet is infinite and you can never adapt to all of the new tools and platforms. So set up that shop and start building valuable content, let the cowboys take care of the rest!