So it’s 2010 and according to the 80′s movies I was obsessed with as a kid we should have hoverboards, flying cars, sexy robots, and violent but thrilling reality tv gameshows.

I can forgive scientists for failing to deliver on the important stuff, but at the very least, they should’ve come up with a really easy way for me to stay up to date on the music I love.

Here’s my problem: I love music, but downloading it is a pain in the ass.  Many times:

• It’s not the right version (terrible sounding live album or kung-fu panda in croatian)
• The quality sucks (camcorder rip)
• It’s not tagged properly
• It’s not what you are looking for (self-promoting rappers, porn or just plain weird)
• It’s super slow (maybe that’s just cause I’m in India)
• It’s “illegal”

So in order to satisfy my cravings for new music without the hassle, I buy albums on iTunes. The issue is most of the time I have no idea what to buy.  The only way for me to stay up to date is to manually browsing the iTunes store, explicitly ask my friends for recommendations, listen to internet radio and write down the tracks I like or browsing hype machine, pandora and other music sites and just sampling music.  That’s is a lot of work and I’m really lazy (which is why I don’t buy a lot of music).

I don’t want to go out and look for music, movies, games, books and apps I want stuff I like to find me.

Here’s what I’m thinking: create a service that lets you “follow” your favorite digital content: music, movies, games, apps, and books and receive notifications any time new related content is released:

• Phase 1 – Music over Twitter:
  • Put in your favorite artist, band or genre (similar to iLike or Pandora)
  • Decide how and how often you’d like to receive notifications (as soon as it happens, daily, weekly) and how (tweets, @mentions, direct message)
  • Link to a summary page which shows an activity feed (new tracks, alubms, remixes, videos, etc…) for the music you have decided you like
  • Link to iTunes for affiliate sales
• Phase 2 – Other content: Movies (Actor, Director, Genre), Games (Game, Genre, Studio), Books (Author, Publisher, Genre) and Apps
• Phase 3 – Recommendations: Tie up with services like Netflix and Pandora to start making recommendations on content you may like
• Phase 4 – Other Notifications: Email, SMS, Facebook, etc…
• Phase 5 – Incentivize users to repost content, by sharing revenue

Great Scott! Music Hack Day is coming to SF in a few weeks.  Someone please build this, I’d use it.

Related posts:

1. Steal this Product Idea: Sign.al
2. Steal this Product Idea #3: Get Together

We are overloaded with information.  During the course of my day I email, tweet, comment, post, chat, message, buzz, check in, call, sms, mms, bbm and sometimes (if I’m really lucky) actually talk to people.  We are moving towards an ever increasing flood of content (much of it automated) and it’s only gettin’ worse.  One day soon everything will tweet.

It’s not the the sheer quantity of information that’s the problem (faster flow of information will only help people achieve more), it’s how we send and receive it:

• Sending: How do I send out information so that it reaches it’s intended audience only.  In the upcoming era of persistent, public online identity, how do I can still share my green-beer, toga party pictures with my friends and make sure potential clients don’t see it?  Additionally, I want to publicize my boring social media posts without spamming my friends who I know really, really don’t care.
• Receiving: With all this content around how do I make sure that that important stuff gets to me FAST, while the stuff that matters stays buried (until I get really bored or have lots of time to look through it).

The idea that’s been bouncin’ around my head tries to address the second point… enter: sign.al.

I have a dream… that one day my phone will ring when my buddy is callin’ me up to go grab a beer, while calls from vodafone bill collectors stay silent.  That my blackberry will only flash in meetings only when really really important stuff happens (like the Mets scoring a winning run).  That one day, we’ll be able to ignore the tens, hundereds or thousands of messages that don’t matter, and focus our attentions on the ones that do. Here’s how sign.al would work

• You give it all your account information (gmail, facebook, twitter, etc…)
• It starts off like any aggregator (Seesmic for instance), showing you a timeline of emails, facebook messages, tweets, yadda yadda:

• Aright, now’s where it starts getting cool… after a little while, it moves away from a timeline view, to a priority view.  It starts guessing knowing what you are most likely gonna want to read and respond to and starts moving those to the top.  This shift is already happening (FB news feed vs time line, Mozilla Raindrop, Xobni for Bberry)
• Sign.al can know what’s important by:
  • Frequency – How regularly you read and respond to individuals
  • Speed – Of your read/response
  • Popularity – The number of comments, retweets, likes, and mentions
  • Proximity – Number of shared connections
  • Medium – @mentions more weightage the email cc’s?
  • Geolocation – Are messages from Mumbai and NYC more important to me?
  • Time of day – Are certain types of messages more important at a certain time?
  • Content – Am I more likely to be interested in content about the Jets regardless of where, when, how it’s getting to me? (yes)
  • Recency – Moving away from this but still a factor
• Phase 2 – Phone app
  • Incorporating voice and SMS into the mix of content to prioritize
  • Different types of notifications instead of timeline: ring for an important sms, vibrate for a somewhat important @mention, silent for a newsletter.
• Phase 3 – Setting status (implicitly?): In a meeting, driving, out to lunch, available – Based on this reduce/amplify notification methods.  If I’m sitting at the airport bored and normally my phone vibrates for an important tweet, now ring.
• Phase 4 – Anticipate – Based on where I am, the type of message, who I’m connecting with, the medium, the format etc… start anticipating how I may respond to them (in a totally not creepy big brotherish way)

Ideas are a dime a dozen, execution’s what matters.  Take this idea, build it, I’ll use it and be happy (just be forewarned you need to legal operations in Albania to actually register the sign.al domain name :p ).

quick update: my buddy Aditya actually wants to make this happen… check out his blog for more info.

Related posts:

1. Steal this Product Idea #2
2. Steal this Product Idea #3: Get Together
3. An Intro to Social Data Portability

• Why/How do B2B companies engage in social media?
• What should companies listen to on the social web and how?
• What type of content should your company be generating?
• What is social search and how does it effect marketing?
• What are first steps businesses can take to start participating in the social web?

My main points are as follows:

• Social media can be used to achieve many of your business objectives (generating awareness, capturing leads, sales, recruitment, etc…).
• The main opportunity for social media in B2B organizations is establishing yourself as a thought leader.
• Create content that appeals to a wider audience then just your current customers.
• Become a destination for anyone looking to learn more about the industry.
• We’re moving away from static search toward recommendations.
• It is critical to have conversations going on about your company.

Video and Slides below:

Related posts:

1. Eating our own Dogfood in Marketing 2.0 Class
2. Intro to Social Media Videos
3. Slides from Social Media Training Sessions

Google still dominates the most lucrative percentage of marketing dollars spent on the web:

But recently they seem scared. Google is a one trick pony, with the Adwords serving as their main source of revenue. They’ve tried over and over to replicat it’s success but have failed miserably with Youtube, Dodgeball, Jaiku, Lively, Orkut and Wave. I visited Google’s New York offices in Jan 2007. The most memorable moment (besides the organic salmon burgers in the cafeteria) was when one of the engineers said that Google was the only site in the world, whose goal was to minimize time spent on it. At the time I was blown away – “Give the people what they want.”

Fast forward to today – for most searches related to products, services or experiential recommendations – Google fails:

People no longer trust the anonymous, SEO optimized, affiliate marketing driven, possibly automated, blog post. The next web is built on relationship driven, public, recommendations. Google’s biggest threat is not another search engine, but a change to the underlying way that people search. Enter Facebook and Twitter. I no longer search for news, it finds me (goodbye RSS).  It’s no surprise Google has made numerous plays at Twitter and FB has changed it’s whole strategy because of Twitter. They are all fighting for the same role, to be the underlying real-time, social operating system on the web.

Eyeballs and CPM ads are finally being replaced by microtransactions and quantified actions. Subscriptions are the new black. G used to be the gateway to the web.  Now, more sites are reporting an increasing trend of quality traffic from Twitter and FB.  The top brass at Google knows that social is critical.

Purchasing Aardvark is a brilliant (third or fourth) play into the social arena. With Buzz just released, Google now has a captive audience of 176mil (in Gmail) to test, position and improve social search (before it’s too late).  People don’t want to be sold to, but will gladly buy products based on recommendations by people they trust.  The line between advertising and content is blurring.  The key is being able to monitize recommendations (companies would gladly pay 2% of a product’s price for a sale).

What will be interesting to see is if either Facebook, Twitter or Google is able to do it alone (doubtful – but maybe FB), whether some big-time M&A will happen (Goog buys Twitter), or whether they will be forced to open up to each other, each find their respective niches, and continue to compete on the fringe (likely).   What do you think, with Buzz + Aardvark will they be able to achieve monetizable, real-time, social search before FB and Twitter?

Related posts:

1. Google’s Biggest Competitor isn’t another Search Engine
2. Slides from Social Media Training Sessions
3. Why Would Anyone Advertise Online Without Google/Facebook?

There are a number of questions which Google fails to answer:

• “where’s the best bagel in new york?”
• “what’s a cheap, clean, centrally located hotel in bangkok”
• “which DSLR camera should I buy?”

In the cases above, you’re most likely to get SEO-optimized aggregator/review site whose primary motivation is affiliate sales.  And forget about finding anything usable to:

• “what’s everyone up to this weekend?”
• “should I get a tattoo?”
• “is business school right for me”

Increasingly, I turn to Twitter and Facebook for these types of questions:

Aardvark is another really nice product that tries to answer these experiential/recommendation type of questions.  It’s easy to use (via a chat bot) and gets quick and solid responses.  The same question got me three responses within 10 min (here’s two):

• (From Rakesh R./24/M/Arlington,US, Re: **cameras**
  go for canon 50D with a kit lens to start with . Your body is excellent but lens is OK types. u can always improve on ur lens whne u know what u needhttp://vark.com/z/b41bf (Amazon: Canon EOS 50D)
• (From Sam A./M/Dubai,UnitedArabEmirates, Re: **cameras**
  Well the best bet would be to start looking at the more popular brands:
  Canon and Nikon. Some people also swear by Olympus and Leica (the latter
  being seriously expensive), and even Sony. I’d stay away from Sony because
  cameras is not their real bread and butter (though I have read some good
  reviews regarding their Alpha series). Now I wouldn’t recommend sticking to
  the popular brands because they’re better or provide the best value for
  money, but rather for things beyond that: availability of accessories,
  lenses, repair options, etc. I personally just purchased a Canon D7 and it’s
  a really great camera. Though a little on the pricey side, it provides great
  value for money. Things like high continuous shooting rate, HD video, etc.
  This site helps you actually buy one: http://reviews.cnet.com/dslr-buying-guide/

  This website will be really helpful in doing some comparisons: http://snapsort.com/
  Enjoy!

Imagine if I could aggregate this data, slice and dice according to my tastes (i.e. 2nd degree relationships within NYC who have bought a camera in the last 6 weeks), compare prices and actually buy this thing from a single application?  This is a game changer that could be a devastating blow to Google SEM and forever change the way we buy products and services (though Google’s smart and they’re workin’ on it) . Facebook ::nudge nudge wink wink:: I’m lookin’ at you…

My favorite quote from the excellent video by @equalman (posted below) is:

We no longer search for the news, the news finds us…
In the near future we will no longer search for products and services they will find us

Increasingly though, it’s not just individuals who will be turning to social tools to answer tough questions:

There’s a new tool that can help companies predict sales for the coming weeks, or decide whether to increase inventories or put items on sale in certain stores.

It’s Twitter.

~ MIT Sloan

Social data from Facebook, Twitter and the like combined with traditional CRMs will allow you to keep track of buzz, transactions and brand loyalty/sentiment, letting you answer questions like:

• What are people saying about my product right now?
• How has the perception of my brand changed recently and in what direction is it trending?
• Geographically where is my biggest, rapidly emerging and diminishing customers?
• Who are my biggest evangelists, in what demographic do they fall in, where are they located?
• Who are my biggest naysayers, how can I change their perception?
• What is the perception of my product vs. my competitors?
• What product features do my (potential) customers want?
• Where is my next potential biggest growth market?
• What are the trending (in both directions) topics in my industry?

Social CRM is totally hot right now and an important trend to watch this year:

Everyone’s talking… are you listening?

Related posts:

1. Advertising Is Not a Sustainable Business Model for the Web (unless you are a Search Engine)
2. The Transition to Real-Time, Social Search
3. Game Changer: Why Google bought Aardvark for $50 million

• We have a fairly active Google Wave which covers the course goals and meeting notes.  Students are free to edit the course outline, ask questions and suggest topics for future classes (please note you must be logged in to Google for this to work… the embed API is also fairly new – i.e. buggy):

• We have a few really awesome guest speakers including:
  • Maneesh Madambath – Founder of Smursh reviewing current trends in Social Media
  • Guarav Mishra – CEO 2020 Social discussing using social advertising to recruit members into brand communities
  • Vaibhav Arya – CTO of Skezno giving an overview of paid online advertising
  • Brian Burns – Founder of SpeakWell Communications discussing copywriting for the web
  • Adam Sachs – Co-founder of Ignightr talkin’ ’bout creating an investor pitch
  • Ninad Raval – UX Lead at Directi discussing Web Analytics and A/B Testing
  • Lauren Vargas – Community Manager at Radian6 discussing social media monitoring
  • What’s Web 2.0ey about this is that half the speakers are based in the US and will be conducting their sessions via skype/video conferencing.
• Rather then a preassigned reading list, the students are being asked to share a few links weekly with each other via Twitter and Wave.
• Students can ask questions/make suggestions/provide their own examples (via twitter and wave) during the class.
• The students will be partnering with a local NGO to raise awareness or solicit donations for a social cause using social media and an SEM campaign (hopefully Yahoo! and Google will come through and donate some ad credits).  These projects will be posted publicly.

Other things I could be/should be doing:

• Posting the course outline (as a wave) and inviting everyone whose registered for the ISB course to make their edits/suggestions (for topics or speakers)/questions/modifications prior to the start of the course.
• Reaching out to students in these universities ahead of time (via Twitter) to build some hype and make sure the class is filled up.

Anyone else have any ideas on how to make the course better?  Let me know…

Related posts:

1. B2B Social Media Marketing
2. Slides from Social Media Training Sessions
3. The Transition to Real-Time, Social Search

Related posts:

1. B2B Social Media Marketing
2. Slides from Social Media Training Sessions
3. An Intro to Social Data Portability

Business models on the web are undergoing a massive transformation. Originally mimicking the print industry (advertising revenues based on circulation numbers), we are now only beginning to explore real value adding, revenue generating opportunities which leverage the real-time, social, location-aware, collaborative nature of the web. While there are companies who are strategically concerned with building a profitable enterprise from the getgo (like 37signals, Zynga), there are many others who are concerned with building great products, attracting a huge user base and figuring out the home-run revenue streams later (most notably: Google, FB, Twitter).

There’s a ton of factors that come into play when choosing which route to take (do you have money? can you take the risk? are there obvious monetization opportunities now? by forgoing these are you putting yourself in a better position to capitalize on larger opportunities down the road?), but let’s assume for a sec you are in the user base game. How many user’s do you need to actually make some money. Here’s some back of the envelope stats (please take these with a grain of salt, some numbers here are estimates):

Some Observations:

• There’s a big difference between market cap, investment round valuation and acquisition price, for the purposes of this exercise I combined them. There’s also a difference between registered users, active users, monthly unique visitors, etc… I needed someway to make comparisons, I’m smushing stuff up to draw comparisons.
• I should probably add a few more companies like Skype, Paypal, eBay, Amazon, etc… to make this less search and social network focused.
• Google crushes it $12/user/year damn dude…
• YouTube founders are extremely lucky to get that kind of exit
• Valuations and revenues don’t seem to be related (surprise)
• Across all these companies the average revenue per user is: $2.87 and average valuation per user is: $35.62. Want to be a billion dollar company? You’ll need approximately 28mil users (I’m kidding… sort of)

What do you think? Is it better to play the userbase game or find ways to monetize immediately? Any way to make the above numbers more accurate? Any other conclusions you can draw from this data? Would love to hear from you…

Resources used:

http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2008/10/Top_50_US_Internet_Sites
http://yhoo.client.shareholder.com/annuals.cfm
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/15/boom-twitter-more-than-doubles-unique-visitors-to-93-million-in-march/
http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics
http://investor.google.com/fin_data.html
http://www.investorplace.com/experts/douglas_mcintyre/articles/twitter-facebook-myspace-value.html
http://blogs.zdnet.com/micro-markets/?p=283
http://mashable.com/2008/01/16/snap-interactive/
http://247wallst.com/2007/02/16/googles_revenue/

Related posts:

1. Billion Dollar Business Idea
2. Advertising Is Not a Sustainable Business Model for the Web (unless you are a Search Engine)
3. Game Changer: Why Google bought Aardvark for $50 million

• The number of sources indexed – Twitter, Technorati, Youtube, etc…
• The number of results
• The quality of results – How many are actually about my search term vs. spam
• Sentiment Analysis – Are the mentions positive?  Do people hate me?  I wanna know…
• Trend Analysis – Can I see spikes and ebbs in mentions?  What about by locations?
• RSS – Can I get an RSS feed of this (this is critical for real use)
• Email Alerts – Can I get a weekly report emailed?  Can I get an email of mentions a day increase above a certain threshold (or dip)?
• Widgets – Can I display all public mentions on my site?

Below is a brief comparison and analysis on my findings of the free services (a post on paid services will be coming soon)

Yahoo! Pipes

My initial plan was to use Yahoo! Pipes to create an RSS feed of mentions across the major sites (Twitter, Google Alerts, Google Blogsearch, Technorati and Youtube). I was pleasantly surprised to find many people had the same idea and extended it far beyond the major sites to include: Backtype, Techmeme, Boardtracker, WordPress and many others. Sweet! I ran the seemingly most popular version for the term “codechef” (one of the projects I work on) and was quite disappointed with the results. Only 33 results? Where are the tweets? Aright, time to investigate. I fired up the Yahoo! Pipes editor and was immediately regretting it:

Er… Ok.  While in theory Yahoo! Pipes looked like the perfect tool for this, trying to extend or modify a pipe isn’t very easy. Also you are passing query parameters dynamically in the URL, if they underlying site makes a change, you won’t get results and might never know.  Rather then trying to develop and maintain this myself, I realized there must be a lot of other people who want to do this.

SocialMention

SocialMeniton is the best tool I came across.  It indexed all the sources I expected (plus some I didn’t), gave the best results (in terms of both quality and quantity), provided tools for aggregation and analysis and had a really cool widget:

You can filter based on source (blogs, photos, videos, forums, etc…), sentiment (view only negative mentions), keywords, users, etc…  Super cool.  Also the analytics, number of retweets, authors, last mention, average time between mentions is awesome.  It’d be nice if the photos were shown as thumbnails in the full list of results (they are when you click on photos), but that’s a small thing.

Here’s a embed of their real-time widget for everyone’s favorite rapper (mesmerizing):

Collecta

Collecta was better then most but still lacking critical features to be considered seriously. It displays search results in a Twitter style stream (and also shows thumbnails of images). Also gives a nice preview of blog posts and articles:

Though without an RSS feed of results or tools for aggregation and analysis, this isn’t likely to be useful.

WhosTalkin

The last app I came across worth mentioning is WhosTalkin. Although this tool is also lacking RSS feeds and analysis, the site is fast and friendly. It’s easy to filter across results and is nice for a one-time search:

Conclusion

Currently it seems like SocialMention is far ahead of it’s competitors though this field is rapidly evolving and new players come in daily. Here is a summary of the tools described above:

	Yahoo! Pipes	SocialMention	Collecta	Whostalkin
Sources Indexed	As many as you want to configure (most popular “firehouse” has 40)	80+	Not mentioned, though I saw all the big guns	50+
Number of Results	33	124	45	130
Quality of Results	No spam	No spam	No spam	10% Spam
Sentiment Analysis	No	Yes	No	No
Trend Anlysis	No	Not really	No	No
RSS Feeds	Yes	Yes	No	Coming Soon
Email Alerts	Real-time and daily	Daily	Nope	Nope
Widgets	No	Yes	No	No

Next week I have demo’s of a few of the paid tools, to see what they can do, that we can’t do on our own. Know of any tools I missed? Have a different opinion? Let me know…

Related posts:

1. Measuring the Success of Social Media Campaigns
2. Slides from Social Media Training Sessions
3. B2B Social Media Marketing

In the past few months I’ve found that my newsfeed has less relevant information, mostly from people I don’t care about.  I’m big on Twitter, the updates I get are personal, social and professional.  I’m able to learn new stuff about the web world, keep up with my favorite artists and (to a lesser degree) connect with friends.  The updates in my Facebook feed are largely spammy quiz results from girls I went to middle school with (Sorry Laura, I don’t care what Twilight character you most resemble).   Maybe I should only accept real friend requests, maybe not.

Now it seems like FB is trying to compete with Twitter head on, by making status updates public and adding real-time search.  Personally I think this is a terrible idea.  I use Facebook and Twitter for different reasons.  Facebook can differentiate itself by being the place I go to stay up with my “real” friends, plan events and share photos.  Create more useful communication applications (like video and group chat), give me better ways to share my photos and videos (like embedding slideshows) and cut down spam by 90%.  There are huge opportunities for Facebook in location based services as well.

I understand that Facebook needs to make money, and sees real-time as a huge opportunity, but they should focus on Facebook connect (already 10k+ sites using it).  Want profit?  Spread your tendrils across the web, become the universal ID then the defacto payment system for the web.  Create an app store (I’d pay 99 cents for Mafia Wars) and allow microtransactions (25 cents for some more poker chips).

Don’t be Twitter, that’s not why we came to you in the first place…

Related posts:

1. Why Would Anyone Advertise Online Without Google/Facebook?
2. An Intro to Social Data Portability
3. Steal this Product Idea: Sign.al