The real test of a smart business plan is: what is the value proposition for the user. When it comes to blogging, what is the value being offered? You can try to provide breaking news, try to provide insight or try to provide actual research findings which you then resell to companies (Forrester’s model of business). Each model requires a different strategy and each model has its own way of generating revenue.

The most recent discussion taking place among a number of blogs is what does the user ultimately want? As a publisher, I know that I would like all users to visit my site and post comments for each of my articles. Unfortunately, people post comments on my wall in Facebook, they send me messages on email and Facebook, send me replies on Twitter and once in a while post a comment on FriendFeed. Once in a while they post a comment on my blog but most of those comments come from people that found me via some news aggregator.

Duncan Riley has effectively summed up the challenge:

If blogging 1.0 was about enabling the conversation on each blog, blogging 2.0 is about enabling the conversation across many blogs and supporting sites and services.

If we have suddenly all simply become part of the conversation then perhaps blogging is simply about producing more focused content throughout various channels than other people currently provide. For instance, if this site is focused on social technology, perhaps I should notify people on Twitter of all sites that I bookmark on del.icio.us related to social technology. Also, go post comments on anybody’s FriendFeed that has content surrounding my subject.

The reality is simply that blogging isn’t dead but the conversation is going to take place elsewhere and not just on your site. While we would like most of the conversation to take place in an environment branded by us, it just simply won’t happen. I think that I need to most definitely update my own strategy to adapt to the changing environment.

Rather than just posting content in the confines of my blog (which is what I’d really prefer to do), it’s time to take it to take the dialog elsewhere. Do you think blogging in itself provides enough value or have the times truly changed?

PaidContent is reporting that the AOL acquisition of Bebo is now complete. The news also comes with reports that Yahoo! will end up losing their ad deal as AOL’s Platform A becomes integrated into a new combined entity. The combined entity includes AIM and ICQ, Bebo and other community platforms which will be called the “People Networks.”

Ultimately what just took place is that AOL’s people channel fell in popularity and they simply acquired a growing company to rebuild their community division. As Adam Ostrow points out, this could be five years too late. Why didn’t AOL turn AIM into a social network years ago? I’ve been writing about this since I started blogging over a year and a half ago. Instant messaging is still one of my primary social networks.

It’s as though AOL is spending a ton of money to try and rebuild what once used to be a booming community. This is a classic problem facing the large companies which have large attention shifts away from their properties to external sites. As large attention shifts take place, online media entities need to try to monetize while continuing to expand their attention portfolio.

We love to hate AOL though. AOL does have one of the most diversified set of assets which represent some of the most visited websites. While I’m somewhat skeptical of how a combined entity will end up working out, it makes some sense. Combine chat, social networking and user profiles, tracking of activities throughout the network and you end up with something eerily similar to Facebook. It will be interesting to see if AOL can make these distinct entities somehow work together.

This weekend has been a weekend of data portability discussion among a number of blogs. It has become a hot button topic for a few of us. On Saturday, I even turned against some of the data portability evangelists. I still stand by a lot of what I said including the fact that data portability evangelists cannot articulate themselves effectively. Sometimes I can’t articulate myself as well though. We aren’t perfect!

What I’ve come to realize over the past weekend is a number of things:

Data Portability is Inevitable
I am a strong believer in free market economies. They are highly efficient systems and in the end, the consumer usually gets what they want. Currently most users don’t realize that they are supporters of data portability but over the coming months they soon will be. Mike Arrington and the crew on Friday’s Gillmore Gang podcast will not suddenly stop talking about this topic. I won’t either.

Data Portability is Complex
Data portability is not a simple issue. If it was, everybody would be talking about it (well at least more people would be) and we would be further along in the process. Unfortunately the issues are not simple and once you start breaking down the nearly limitless ways that our data can interact, you finally begin to realize the scope of the project.

Data Portability Means Money
There will be an entire industry based around data portability. We have already seen some companies start to pop-up but we have only witnessed the beginning. Companies will race to acquire partnerships with large business to help them leverage their user base and embrace data portability. In turn, those companies will leverage those partnership agreements as assets during future negotiations.

There is still the whole question of how do we monetize the attention economy most effectively? This is something that Facebook is battling on a daily basis as well as other leading websites. While nobody has figured it out yet, somebody will soon figure out the answer to this billion dollar question. It’s at this point that the insane valuations being placed on attention rich websites will suddenly be justified.

Social Networks Have Value but It’s Not the Data
While there is a substantial amount of value in building up a user base, what’s more important is user attention. Creating systems that effectively drive user attention is critical in being successful on the web. The reality is that no effective monetization system has been designed so far that helps monetize attention. Social network sites are extremely efficient at driving attention.

For now though, social network sites will remain to be the emperor’s new clothes until someone can come up with the monetization solution.

There is A Lot of Work to Do
We are still in the very early stages of social networks and data portability. This is a space which continues to evolve and new thought leaders join the space everyday. What we don’t need is a small group of individuals plotting out how data portability should function. We need a group that can articulate available options effectively without getting in a mud slinging fight with each other.

I believe that this is the point of the Data Portability Workgroup. The changes won’t take place overnight but the changes can’t happen without the involvement of the people. While there are still a lot of problems to be resolved, the discussion is becoming louder and soon enough I think more people will take note.

Over the past 24 to 48 hours I have been watching the discussion manifest over the ongoing battle between Facebook, Google and MySpace over each of their new data portability initiatives. Much of the discussion climaxed on the Gilmor Gang podcast which included Mike Arrington, Robert Scoble, Marc Canter, Chris Saad and Dana Gardner. I would call the majority of the people on the show “data portability evangelists.”

Data portability evangelists have one goal: to control their own data. It makes a lot of sense when you get into the discussion but the logistics behind it are highly complex. So complex that not even the data portability evangelists were able to figure much out during their almost hour and a half long discussion (on the podcast).

Robert Scoble was left all in a tizzy and Mike Arrington proclaimed himself victorious when he was able to convince everybody that he was right without providing much substance for his argument. The podcast clearly illustrated each of the participants’ personalities but little more. After pondering the ongoing discussion for the past 48 hours, I’ve come up with the following thoughts:

True Data Portability Kills Social Network Sites
While I am a fan of data portability, the reality is that true data portability kills social network sites. If we take data portability to the extreme and I was able to export all of my data and contacts from Facebook, Facebook would be nothing more than a well designed communications platform. Perhaps in the end that’s all they will be but for now, their valuations have been based on their skyrocketing user base.

There is no way in hell that Facebook is going to shoot themselves in the foot and completely make our data exportable. It just won’t happen. At least not anytime soon. The data portability evangelists saw the largest players move one step closer to true data portability and now they are crying that Facebook should just take it all the way.

Data Portability Evangelists Can’t Speak Clearly
This is the biggest challenge facing the future of data portability. I listened to the Gillmore Gang podcast last night and read Steve Gillmore’s techcrunch post this morning and it would take at least an hour for me to decode both of them for you. The best way to get your point across is by making a clear argument that anybody can understand. None of the participants do this. Mike Arrington comes close when he says “I am right, you are wrong.”

That’s classic elementary debate tactics but unfortunately he doesn’t back up his argument aside from the fact that he is more than just passionate about owning his data.

We Are Moving Forward
While I want complete control of my data, most people don’t even know what that means. The moves being made by Facebook, MySpace and Google are a huge step forward and it’s perfectly fine to acknowledge that. At the same time the data portability evangelists should continue to ask for more because that’s what’s required of them.

While the debate over data portability is far from over, it’s a good thing that the large players are even listening and making changes. Am I a sucker for being partially satisfied? Mike Arrington would say yes but then again his argument is simply that he’s right, not much more substance there. Also, is it really that surprising that there are only 10 or 20 people that are participating in the discussion on data portability?

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?