FriendFeed is the current hype. Some bloggers compare it with Twitter frenzy happened last year. It is a simple (at least today) social message aggregator and definitely it's not the first one (Mashable listed 8 aggregators). I have FriendFeed installed on Facebook and quite enjoy "spying" what my friends are doing, specially I love to follow my sociologist friend's new posts and book reading updates for my research purpose before I become a big fan of Twitter.
So, why FriendFeed is hot?
FriendFeed is a continental beacon
Facebook beacon and news feed are most compelling social messaging mechanism. The passive messaging makes social utilities evolved into the third generation of social networks - behavior centric. However, Facebook is an Internet island (note that the island is not a walled garden as Facebook is an open social platform). FriendFeed breaks the island effect through message aggregation. Hence, it is a continental beacon.
As Facebook demonstrated the business model that social messaging will be the key for social ads, which envisioned by many insiders that will potentially surpass Google in the future, FriendFeed indeed raised the attention on how far the social messaging can be reached. Yet another land grabbing!
Showing posts with label social ad. Show all posts
Showing posts with label social ad. Show all posts
Friday, March 28, 2008
Thursday, March 13, 2008
Category of roles and relations on social networks
Users in social network will typically assume one or many of social roles and relations under the communicative paradigm:
1) family member in family relationship
2) dating relationship and love relationship
3) close buddies with strong trust relationship
4) common friends bonded by physical connections (e.g. classmates)
5) playmates sharing common interests, can be virtual relations (e.g. "friends" at online forum or chatroom)
6) co-workers in job related relationship
7) consumers related to business entities (e.g. online stores, dentist, lawyer, consumer brands, publishers, music labels, movie producers, pop stars, etc.)
The first 3 are quite strong relations in daily social life and help to maintain a healthy personal psychological conditions. Ironically, since the bonding is so strong and natural in family and close buddies, we tend to invest least effort in social networks. The perceived social distance in online world can never compete with the close natural relations. In contrast, the top investment regarding networking efforts is the dating relation. Seeking such relation is the primary objective for most single people.
Depending on the user's role and personality, typically there's a "hub", or "anchor", or "lead" person in a small and closed personal network. The anchor person could be wife in family, mother for children in natural relations. As just stated, family relations are not most active in social networks. Among friends circles, people having hypersocial type of personality will assume the role of organizer for conversation flow, virtual events, and the glue to connect other friends, including introducing new friends. Interestingly, hypersocial personality may not necessarily consistent between physical world and virtual world. A shy person could be hypersocial and becomes a hub in social networks.
Second to dating relation, common friends relation (category 4) is quite rewarding for relation investment and there is less risk involved. A social skillful person could easily leverage regular friends base for both personal life and career. Good social apps or social utilities will enhance relations and help to overcome social skill shortage. Common friends relation is the twilight zone between 2, 3, 5 and 6 because "friend" here has very broad range of definition.
Working relation (category 6) is the key for career success and also could be high risk relation. People carefully invest and mitigate the risk by following social codes or social norms more strictly. Given the risk factor, enterprise or corporate social networks is less popular than social networks for other relations.
Relation 5 and 7 are important in leisure life. Since there's no risk involved in the relations, usually users are also least responsible in the virtual world, specially with disguised identities.
Relation 7 is the key to generate advertising revenue when the social network can be used as a powerful marketing tool. Social network operators' core business is to bridge all other relations with consumers. The difficulty remains in intent vs. interest. Consumers searching Google for product info is taking consumer role and the relation has shortest distance to business entities. Dating and friend roles distance from consumer role by orthogonal relations. Social ads attempt to fill the gap. However, the only possible success is the transmedia approach, i.e. ads become a part of social message and remix with normal social messages in order to enhance non-consumer type of relations.
1) family member in family relationship
2) dating relationship and love relationship
3) close buddies with strong trust relationship
4) common friends bonded by physical connections (e.g. classmates)
5) playmates sharing common interests, can be virtual relations (e.g. "friends" at online forum or chatroom)
6) co-workers in job related relationship
7) consumers related to business entities (e.g. online stores, dentist, lawyer, consumer brands, publishers, music labels, movie producers, pop stars, etc.)
The first 3 are quite strong relations in daily social life and help to maintain a healthy personal psychological conditions. Ironically, since the bonding is so strong and natural in family and close buddies, we tend to invest least effort in social networks. The perceived social distance in online world can never compete with the close natural relations. In contrast, the top investment regarding networking efforts is the dating relation. Seeking such relation is the primary objective for most single people.
Depending on the user's role and personality, typically there's a "hub", or "anchor", or "lead" person in a small and closed personal network. The anchor person could be wife in family, mother for children in natural relations. As just stated, family relations are not most active in social networks. Among friends circles, people having hypersocial type of personality will assume the role of organizer for conversation flow, virtual events, and the glue to connect other friends, including introducing new friends. Interestingly, hypersocial personality may not necessarily consistent between physical world and virtual world. A shy person could be hypersocial and becomes a hub in social networks.
Second to dating relation, common friends relation (category 4) is quite rewarding for relation investment and there is less risk involved. A social skillful person could easily leverage regular friends base for both personal life and career. Good social apps or social utilities will enhance relations and help to overcome social skill shortage. Common friends relation is the twilight zone between 2, 3, 5 and 6 because "friend" here has very broad range of definition.
Working relation (category 6) is the key for career success and also could be high risk relation. People carefully invest and mitigate the risk by following social codes or social norms more strictly. Given the risk factor, enterprise or corporate social networks is less popular than social networks for other relations.
Relation 5 and 7 are important in leisure life. Since there's no risk involved in the relations, usually users are also least responsible in the virtual world, specially with disguised identities.
Relation 7 is the key to generate advertising revenue when the social network can be used as a powerful marketing tool. Social network operators' core business is to bridge all other relations with consumers. The difficulty remains in intent vs. interest. Consumers searching Google for product info is taking consumer role and the relation has shortest distance to business entities. Dating and friend roles distance from consumer role by orthogonal relations. Social ads attempt to fill the gap. However, the only possible success is the transmedia approach, i.e. ads become a part of social message and remix with normal social messages in order to enhance non-consumer type of relations.
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
When social ads missing semantics
"Leaving Yahoo?" ad placed at facebook by First Round Capital made a news: facebook social engine mistakenly mashed up a profile photo of a Yahoo employee to the ad. Read the fact.
The advertiser First Round Capital cannot see the actual ad at Yahoo network on facebook. What happened is that the Yahoo employee also belongs to FRC group:
Anyhow, I've now been informed (loudly) that my ad which said "Leaving Yahoo?" was accompanied by a picture of a current Yahoo employee. Most of those employees joined the FRC group before the ad campaign -- and (obviously and justifiably) were not too pleased by any implications that they were leaving their employer. And while I've apologized in person to those that contacted me, here's a very public apology to those who haven't.
This interesting social ad experiment generated totally unexpected results for the advertiser. The missing link is the semantics processed by facebook social engine. Even human can make mistakes during social engagement with misaligned social context, as of the machine, why not?
The simple machine model doesn't work for human. If the ad is going thru viral channel, human social ability would mostly place it in appropriate social context. However, this natural human model seems not working for facebook's eager revenue objective.
Anyway, it's funny to see actual people being placed by ad engine in the way of AdSense which is often non-sense. This story could be a perfect sample of first generation social ads.
The advertiser First Round Capital cannot see the actual ad at Yahoo network on facebook. What happened is that the Yahoo employee also belongs to FRC group:
Anyhow, I've now been informed (loudly) that my ad which said "Leaving Yahoo?" was accompanied by a picture of a current Yahoo employee. Most of those employees joined the FRC group before the ad campaign -- and (obviously and justifiably) were not too pleased by any implications that they were leaving their employer. And while I've apologized in person to those that contacted me, here's a very public apology to those who haven't.
This interesting social ad experiment generated totally unexpected results for the advertiser. The missing link is the semantics processed by facebook social engine. Even human can make mistakes during social engagement with misaligned social context, as of the machine, why not?
The simple machine model doesn't work for human. If the ad is going thru viral channel, human social ability would mostly place it in appropriate social context. However, this natural human model seems not working for facebook's eager revenue objective.
Anyway, it's funny to see actual people being placed by ad engine in the way of AdSense which is often non-sense. This story could be a perfect sample of first generation social ads.
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