Daniel Bachhuber's weblog

Plug one: There’s a report making its way around the internet that says the youth are spending less time blogging. Specifically, “28% of the two groups studied — teens 12 to 17 and young adults 18 to 29 — actively blogged.” For 2009, this percentage has dropped off to only 14% of teens and 15% of young adults. The author attributes this drop to a rise in the use of Facebook.

Plug two: Marshall Kirkpatrick floated a related idea the other day that Facebook is now the world’s leading news reader. There are at least a few reasons: Facebook has the largest, most active user base on the planet, Facebook gives you control over who has access to your content which leads to a greater willingness to share, and Facebook wraps the whole creation/consumption experience into a nice, easy to use interface.

That last point is the most critical, in my opinion. As average Joe, it’s much, much easier to publish with Facebook (or Twitter) because there is tremendous attention paid to the experience of how content is consumed on a regular basis. Both Facebook and Twitter have dedicated dashboards for your subscriptions where you get visual reinforcement that other people are coming across your content. With my blog, I have a home page which my dad or mom might read occasionally, and X number of faceless RSS subscribers who may or may not “Mark All As Read” on a daily basis. Figuring out how to use Google Reader to read other blogs almost requires the scientific method, which could be a good thing if you consider yourself a geek but is almost certainly a bad thing if you’re a Normal just wanting to read the national news and your friends’ writing.

Moral of the story: Always take studies with a grain of salt. I suspect The Youth are publishing more than ever, but it’s coming in the form of Facebooking and Tumblring instead of maintaining a blog because the proprietary tools, unfortunately, have better readers right now than the open source ones.

Related to this, I’m hoping to take Ryan Sholin’s lead and write more on my original home space. It’s a muscle I think I need to exercise. I’m also going to take Gruber’s lead and turn off comments because I get way too many comment notifications like, “Hi, cool blog, just curious what spam system you use for cleaning up comments because I am getting so many spammers on my blog.”

?!

Huge observation from Stowe Boyd:

What is happening is the superimposition of publicy on top of, and partly obscuring, privacy. Those raised in this brave new world are already living in a cultural context based on publicy, and therefore they are running afoul of social conventions based on privacy. That’s why young people find job offers rescinded when pictures of drunken or naked pictures are discovered on their Facebook pages. Their prospective employers are judging their actions from a privacy-based attitude, in which the facets of an online self are averaged, instead of being considered as a constellation of selves. Publicy says that each self exists in a particular social context, and all such contracts are independent.

[...]

Some will dismiss my theorizing as a simple reprise of cultural relativism, making the case that all cultures can only be understood in their own cultural terms. I am making part of that case, in essence, by saying that the mores inherent in online social contracts are self-defined, and any individual’s participation in a specific online public does not have to be justified in a global way, any more than the cultural mores of the Berber Tuaregs need to be justified from the perspective of modern Western norms.

What strikes me as slightly off-kilter about this future is that these new publics are defined by tools like Twitter, Facebook, and Gowalla, and those tools are the bedrock for the most active social spaces.

The administration of Whitman College, the school I went to for my freshman year, has decided to cut funding to its Varsity Alpine and Nordic ski teams. The community is in uproar about this decision; if you aren’t on one of the teams, then you have a friend who is. Andrew Spittle, the Web Manager at the Whitman Pioneer, saw the controversy as an excellent time to experiment with their new website. In a post published on the CoPress Blog today, he goes into detail about the different tools they used to get the word out (Twitter, list serv, Facebook, and banner ads), and reveals how effective each medium was for driving traffic to their stories.

Twitter wasn’t effective at all, as it only sent less than 1% of their overall numbers. In the comments, I mention that his assessment is almost there. Twitter is a really valuable tool, but that value only applies if you can reach your community on it. The Whitman campus isn’t there yet in terms of adoption, and might never be, but there is the possibility that it will become more effective for discussion in the near future. The Pioneer leading the charge, pardon the pun, by actively advertising discussion like this might be one way to increase the number of users, or that number might grow once the campus learns the value of Twitter via SMS for finding the best parties on Friday night. I wouldn’t discount entirely, it’s just a matter of engaging in conversation where your community is.

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ColaLife is a “campaign to try and leverage the distribution muscle of a multi-national corporate institution to get life saving medicines to children in developing countries.” In short, to convince the Coca-Cola Corporation that it is worthwhile to distribute rehydration salts through their robust and well-developed delivery network, apparently a weakness of most non-governmental organizations. Those spearheading the ColaLife campaign, to my understanding, have focused their advocacy efforts largely online, using a Flickr Group, a Facebook Group, and a Twitter account to raise awareness, organize people, and spread the word. Coverage in traditional media is also a goal, obviously, but it’s interesting for me to watch, among with other reasons, because I think this “social internet” now has the critical mass necessary to be used as catalyst for a singular goal. ColaLife, in my opinion, could be a ground breaking test case.

As a plus, I’ve finally found a good cause for a random series of images I took while in Peru last summer. Sweet, huh?

Here’s the problem: I, like many people I know, drive too many places all alone in my car.  One person in a three ton metal vehicle that could easily transport five.  To move all of that mass around, with such unused, waste internal space, is an inefficient use of energy.

Money is made by identifying and capitalizing on inefficiency.  Inefficiency in the market, inefficiency in a business, and inefficiency in moving humans to where they want to go.

Here’s one solution: ad-hoc transportation.  Capitalizing on the triple convergence between location-aware devices (iPhone 2 on June 9th, anyone?), social networking (Facebook, Twitter, et al), and an absurd number of nearly empty cars on the road (suburban America), the goal should be to connect people with people who are pointed in the same destination.

We’ll call it Me Drive We for the time being.  It’s the most creative, available domain I could find in 30 seconds of searching.

Say, for instance, I have a ‘99 Subaru Outback Legacy, Forest Green, and want to go out to Hood River for the day to photograph a windsurfing competition.  To get directions and a forecasted drive time on the day of the event, I’d most likely use my GPS-enabled device to search up the destination.  After I’ve decided on a route, Me Drive We could give me a wee little pop-up asking if I would like to publish my trip to the public.  Me Drive We would then send me a text message with the names and numbers of people either in my area or along the way who are interested in making a similar trip.  Or it could send my contact information to them, it doesn’t matter how the connection is made so long as it is made and made effortlessly.

It shouldn’t need to be limited to one platform, either.  If I had rock-solid information on what the wind conditions were going to be the week before (and we’re speaking a lot of hypotheticals here), I would be able to use a website to report where I’m going and when.  The value in having at least one mobile tentacle, however, is that I’ve never seen something like this done, and I read a lot of tech news, and you can make it brain-dead simple with one device: the cellphone.

Apple’s new iPhone is highly likely to be released in the next month with these features:

• 3G high-speed internet
• An official SDK (Software Development Kit) with first-round applications
• GPS

It’s always going to know where I am, and I might just want it to also know where I’m going.

Wait, what if I don’t want to drive or ride with complete strangers who might axe me to steal my wallet?

This is where the social networking should poke its head.  Leveraging a social graph already created with Facebook or, heaven forbid, MySpace, I could choose to ride or drive with people I already know who have shared where they want to go too.  The service (ideally) would only reveal my location and travel plans to the circle of friends I’ve already identified.  If someone I didn’t know wanted to get a ride with me, I could again capitalize on the social graph to see if we know anyone in common.  

If I ended up riding with some I didn’t know, Me Drive We could even give me suggestions for ice-breakers, based on data culled from other social networks.  For instance, 90 percent of the music I listen to is scrobbled to Last.fm, and leads to very interesting charts.  This week, my top artist seems to be Gangstagrass, who released a stellar hip-hop/bluegrass album I would highly recommend downloading if you haven’t already.  Me Drive We could take this information, or knowledge of the recent books I’ve enjoyed from Good Reads, and give me and my passenger quality cultural artifacts to discuss. 

The most obvious constraints are usability and critical mass.  By riding on the shoulders of two giants moving through the forest at the moment, Facebook, or Facebonk as I call it affectionately, and Apple’s iPhone, I think Me Drive We could easily overcome them.  Integration with existing devices and sites would super necessary for successful adoption.

You build it for us lonely drivers and I will use it.  It’s time to be more efficient with our energy.

At the ad:tech conference this year in New York City, the most widely anticipated news came from a company less than three years old. This is hardly a surprise to those who follow the tech industry; Facebook, currently valued at over 15 billion dollars, is the hottest thing since Google or MySpace. It has been on the radar along with Apple’s iPhone as one of the biggest stories of the year. Accordingly, the first announcement of how the social network is going to monetize its service, a problem plaguing every Web 2.0 startup, set the blogosphere aflame. Facebook’s name for its new ad marketing platform: Beacon.

The origin

Targeted advertising isn’t anything new. It’s only natural a business would want to pitch its product to the audience most likely to buy it. Time spent on a consumer who isn’t going to be a buyer is simply a wasted effort. Selling the merits of a men’s cologne to pre-teen girls isn’t effective just like pitching hearing aids to twenty-somethings with perfect hearing is a waste.  It pays to focus advertising as directly as possible; in financial terms, it minimizes the dollars spent selling to each consumer while maximizing the company’s overall profits.

In 1932, Young and Rubicam became the first firm to advertise based on statistics. Twenty years later, the A.C. Nielsen Market Research Company, realizing the extraordinary potential of television to reach a mass audience, began tracking which prime-time shows were being watched in what types of households. As technology progressed, so did the sophistication of the ability to track viewers and their habits; by the 1970’s, tracking services could report many more details about audiences including race, gender, age, and educational background. Personalized advertising started crawling on its hands and feet.

Jump forward another twenty years to the commercial advent of the Internet. Its digital nature allows for inherently easier tracking. While transferring data back and forth, the web requires unique electronic addresses to ensure the bits requested make it to the correct recipient. This characteristic also means a digital “paper trail” is left in every transaction. Capitalizing on this technology, web metrics have advanced to a point where a nearly infinite amount of consumer information can be aggregated and analyzed. The current difficulty, if it can be summarized, lies in determining which information is most important and how it should be interpreted.

Problems to some are opportunities to others. One burgeoning market is online advertising, with has had over 150% growth in revenues since 2000. Success in this arena is defined by the businesses who achieve the highest conversion rates; it’s what has made Google the 5th largest company in the United States in less than a decade.

There are now a few common ways of using consumer metrics to target advertisements online.  One method, borrowed from the print media, is selling advertising space based on the perceived reader demographics of a website. Grist, an environmental news nonprofit, and The Economist, a business and political analysis publication, both do this for placements on their websites. Making the deals in-house, albeit a significant amount of work, does have some added benefits. The most significant include being able to target to a specific demographic and using richer media (e.g. images and video) in advertisements. Google’s AdSense, on the other hand, is an example of a newer, content-based approach to delivering advertisements.  Known abstractly as “contextual advertising,” it optimizes ad placement by analyzing the content of the website and listing the only most relevant promotions. Doing this by looking at topics, keywords, and phrases pretty well guarantees that the text-based advertisement will be on line with the focus of the site. Yet, at the same time, those ads lose efficacy when readers learn how to ignore them.

So begins the cat and mouse game.

Facebook, by capitalizing on the social graph between its users, is making advertising “social.” Originally exclusive to college students, this social network hasn’t been without its controversial business decisions. One such event, the launch of a tool called the “News Feed” which is designed to aggregate friends’ activities on the site, caused users to go up in virtual arms about privacy concerns. A mass exodus was only averted after the founder, Mark Zuckerberg, published an open letter promising to alleviate those worries. He might have to do this again.

Unlike Google’s AdSense, which advertises based off contextual data, Facebook now has two advertising platforms which exploits the social data its users provide: Social Ads and Beacon. Social Ads places advertisements for sponsored businesses and products in the sidebar and previously controversial News Feed. These placements are targeted based on information from a user’s profile; for instance, having “photography” listed as interest in the personal section will incur a higher than normal number of ads for photo contests or camera equipment. The other system, Beacon, works by through a hybridization of “viral marketing.” When a user buys a product on an affiliated site, the information gets sent back to Facebook and is placed in the News Feed of another user. The idea, or at least in theory, is that the advertisers gain traction through a “forced word-of-mouth.” Facebook hopes to make this possible with their platform, although users haven’t been so happy about it.

Personalization is in the future of advertising. AdSense, Beacon and others are only the forerunners in a continual evolution of marketing directly to a consumer. Take, for instance, a product such as Google Maps. In the past year, Google has introduced sponsored, location-based results when a user types in a query like, “pizza portland oregon.” With the launch of Google’s Android Mobile OS in the next year, Google Maps will be available on a number more handheld devices. Add a GPS-enabled wireless device into the mix and the user will no longer have to type in the “portland oregon.” Google will know, thanks to technology. Thanks to technology, advertising too will become more targeted in every way; based on location through GPS, based on past purchases with online retailers, and based the personal interests listed on social profiles.

Or at least that’s the current trend of thinking.

Some implications

Privacy. A world where information about an individual’s actions flow freely to businesses leave little maneuvering room for a personal life. Transparency should be a two-way street. Consumers need to critically assess how much privacy they are willing to give up, and to whom they want to give it to. In the case of Beacon, the platform has become so disputed that is has attracted the attention of MoveOn.org, a civic action organization normally focused on politics. As part of a multi-pronged approach, the nonprofit created a Facebook Group titled, “Petition: Facebook, stop invading my privacy!” and draws upon members to be activists. Their intent is to call upon the company for a public response to an issue which has created headlines such as, “Does Facebook Hate Christmas?,” “Is Facebook a Privacy Nightmare?” and “Are Facebook’s Social Ads Illegal?” With enough voices, and media publicity, the tactic is sure to be successful; Facebook, unless interested in committing financial suicide, has no interest in causing the entire core of its business model to migrate to another social network. What the long-term loss, or gain, to user privacy is, however, has yet to be decided.

Integrity. The effect advertising has on content is also a very important question. In a world where it is becoming the easier choice to monetize a business with paid advertising, one must ask what sort of effect such as decision has on independence. Take journalism, for instance. Although this model is not yet entirely true of major papers, many blogs write journalistically, are supported by advertisers, and have become primary sources for niche news. Without an established and transparent code of ethics, it is impossible to guess at the editorial integrity of a website. Some naive audiences assume their authority, but every reader must be a critical reader and look at the policies behind their business practices. Grist and The Economist, for instance, have advertising policy links on top of clearly defined ads. Some sites running Google AdSense, conversely, embed their advertisements in the content of the page or in faux navigation bars. An uneducated visitor, subsequently, does not know the different between what is real and what is advertisement. For the integrity of journalism, and of all media, there needs to be a clear line between independent content and advertising.

In an economy increasingly dependent on universal participation, it doesn’t pay to exploit user data. Using those same crowds to deduce such a decision, however, is a smart choice to make.

Written for the final paper in J 201 Mass Media and Society. Also available to download in PDF