If you are working on launching a product/service to get into the web2.0/social media space and you’re looking at digg, tech-crunch, techmeme, technorati, and even myspace and facebook etc. as successful models, you might miss your target market. Those are tools for geeks (and kids), and geeks are not by any stretch of the imagination the mass market. (I still think facebook is hard to use and i’ve only been working on the web since 1996)
Someone pointed out the other day a social networking site for grandparents (launching in the fall) the other day and made a “social networks have jumped the shark” kind of comment. I totally disagreed, you capture the 50+ market on a social network there is gold in them thar hills, at least a lot more disposable income than most people on myspace. Also launched recently Minti.com - a social network for parents to share tips, advice, network etc. now parenting is a hobby that some people spend a shit load on.
(I just heard about minti from a video scoble had put on Kyte.tv, which is sort of like youtube but much more orientated to creation and distribution of video on mobile)
Ok, same thing goes for advertising, I just went to minti and saw an ad for “crutial memory” (that’s RAM for the computer not some kind of baby einstein video), are they kidding, that’s some advertising pissing in the wind right there.
another crazy name, but a great speaker lineup. It’s in San Francisco, September 11th and 12th. Strangely you have to request an invite to the summit before you can pay them the $695 to register? It’s like the gmail of conferences…. except gmail’s free of course.
Here’s the speakers:
- Jay Adelson; CEO, Digg.com
- Barak Berkowitz; CEO, Six Apart
- Matt Cohler; VP Strategy, Facebook
- Laura Desmond; CEO, Starcom MediaVest Group/The Americas
- Scott Donaton; Publisher, AdAge
- Sarah Fay; Group President, Isobar
- Shawn Gold; SVP Marketing & Content, MySpace.com
- David Grubb; Worldwide Media Director; Microsoft
- Curt Hecht; EVP, Chief Digital Officer, Starcom MediaVest Group
- Carla Hendra; Co-CEO, Ogilvy North America
- Casey Jones; VP Marketing, Dell
- Patrick Keane; EVP, CMO, CBS Interactive
- Ross Levinsohn; Former President, Fox Interactive Media
- Daina Middleton; Dir, Global Interactive Marketing, Imaging and Printing Group, HP
- Jon Miller; Former Chairman & CEO, AOL Inc
- Kent Nichols; Co-Creator of Ask A Ninja, Beatbox Giant Productions
- Greg Ott; VP, Global Marketing, Ask.com
- Randall Rothenberg; President & CEO, Interactive Advertising Bureau
- Suzie Reider; Head of Advertising Sales, YouTube
- Douglas Sarine; Co-Creator of Ask A Ninja, Beatbox Giant Productions
- Tina Sharkey; CEO, BabyCenter
- Rishad Tobaccowala; CEO, Denuo
- Johnny Vulcan; Founder, Anomaly
- Jeff Weiner; EVP, Audience, Yahoo!
It seems that SAP, one of the biggest suppliers of software that help run big businesses is working on a research report to help understand what’s really happening in the world around social media. They have got Shel Israel (co-author with Robert Scoble of Naked Conversations) to help in this and Shel is taking a similar research approach as well, talking to people. one of the great things about Shel’s research is he’s publishing interviews as he goes on his blog, here’s his conversation with Doc Searls, and again with Robert Scoble.
The point is here 1. there’s some great stuff in these interviews, and 2. big companies, no, scratch that huge companies are paying much closer attention to social media.
What’s your facebook strategy?
Couple of quotes i like:
Scoble
9. What social media tools are on the rise and which are sinking? Is this the same or different worldwide as far as you know?
Hot: Facebook.
Hot: iPhone.
Hot: Twitter/Pownce/Jaiku (Pownce is hottest this week).
Cooling: blogging (Twitter is taking a lot of attention away from it).
Hot: Photosharing services and Scrapblogging stuff.
Steady but not sexy: Wikis.
Cooling: Second Life.
Doc Searls
5. How has business fundamentally changed because of social media? How will it change in the coming years?
The walls of business will come down. That’s the main effect of the Net itself. Companies are people and are learning to adapt to a world where everybody is connected, everybody contributes, and everybody is zero distance (or close enough) from everybody else. This is the “flat world” Tom Friedman wrote “The World is Flat” about, and he’s right. Business on the whole has still not fully noticed this, however.
Doc Searls
1. You are one of the founding fathers of whatever it is that is going on now…
And what is that? If it’s Web 2.0, I demand a paternity test, and I am sure it will reveal, in the immortal words of Michael Jackson, “the kid is not my son. ” If what’s going on now is the Live Web, and I think it is, we shall get to it shortly.
Thanks Hugh
The extraordinary net radio service Pandora has made an announcement called “Pandora Everywhere”, has partnered with Sprint to deliver a mobile version of Pandora. So Pandora Everywhere is only available in the US and only on sprint phones? That sucks balls. Theoretically Pandora is just a flash app so there is no reason that it shouldn’t just work using the regular n95 browser, except when I go there I get a nice message saying come back with a sprint phone. I wonder if Pandora is going to squander a some of the amazing goodwill it’s built up over the last year by making it’s service available free on the web. My question is why would such a universally appealing application tie itself to a US carrier with such limited reach?
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