Alpha Mind Blog

In the FIR FriendFeed room, Dan York asks:

Surprised to not yet see a thread about Facebook aquiring Friendfeed… Anyone care about it?

Most of the comments in reply to Dan’s question focus on what we as social media users might do given the uncertainty about the future of the two channels. In reply Andrea Vascellari (in the 9th comment on his own blog post) takes note of the engineering-heavy team at FriendFeed, but other than that this conversation hasn’t dealt much with the strategic implications of the purchase and the long-range possibilities they suggest.

I”m trying to tease out those implications.

I haven’t tried to study the issue in depth, but I’ll put forward some tentative conclusions anyway.

First, I don’t think facebook’s management are likely to merge the two channels into a single hybrid. In fact, I believe part of the strategy may be to let them live on as quite different tools.

Second, I do believe that the heavy hitters on FriendFeed’s development team may have been a juicy temptation to the acquirer, but I don’t believe this means any great change in the development paths of the two.

Why do I believe these things?

Mostly, my thinking focuses on key differences in the paradigms of the two channels. Facebook is a walled garden. Google does not crawl it and cannot deliver its pages. In response to the growth of Twitter, facebook’s management has taken some steps to make the channel more Twitter-like, but these steps haven’t generally been well received. For example, there’s been considerable annoyance expressed over the change that made the fully public profile the default. The purchase of FriendFeed may well arise out of an understanding on facebook’s part that the walls of the garden may be desirable. And not just because so many users say so, but, more importantly, because the walls, coupled with facebook’s phenomenal growth, mean that there’s an increasingly important part of the web which Google can’t reach, read, deliver, or monetize.

So, while Twitter with its openness threatens facebook with its walls, and while those walls themselves are valuable, what’s their owner to do? I think the correct answer is: Build its own open property, so that its closed property may safely be kept fenced. Only by keeping the walled and unwalled paradigms separate can facebook hope to take on Twitter while also claiming territory from Google.

Another clue to this is the APIs of facebook versus FriendFeed. I myself don’t know much about APIs, having given up coding years ago (beyond fairly simple Perl scripts). But I trust Dave Winer’s judgment on these things. Winer said, in the August 17th episode of Rebooting the News, that the FriendFeed API is far more approachable and usable than that of facebook. My thinking is that while this may in part be an accident of FriendFeed’s having a superior development team, it’s very likely that the difference falls out from the open versus closed paradigms that have been architected into the two tools from the beginning. Like Twitter, FriendFeed has established itself as a platform, while facebook is a closed channel. In keeping with these paradigms, the API for Twitter and FriendFeed will have been built with an eye toward application to be built around the platform, while that for facebook looks for applications to be built within the channel. The first sort of API has to be far more structured, robust, and flexible than the second, which can afford to be something of an afterthought.

So, like Meghan Keane, I believe the greatest value of FriendFeed to facebook is in search: but I go farther in believing that this value can’t be delivered unless the two tools are kept separate and different. This means that each must be faithful to its own paradigm.

Here is a first cut at a table of some features of the two paradigms.

This post expresses an opinion loosely held. I put it forward because I believe FriendFeed and facebook are both important tools (or channels, as I’ve called them here), and that their future matters. I believe strategic use of them in marketing and PR will depend on the user’s theory of their future, and I offer this as the beginnings of a framework for building such a theory.

I’d love to hear what others think.

Twitter hashtag chats are wonderful. A little overstimulating, but hey.

Problem is, when a chat is really lively and brisk, serious untruths can fly by and not get corrected.

Example: in Beth Harte’s #pr20chat of August 5, @brandingexpert inserted this tweet:

Don’t EVER forget that branding is purely about generating more revenue, no matter what any “guru” preaches.

I’m not a guru, much less a “guru,” so I suppose I could have avoided getting on this guy’s wrong side just by keeping quiet.

But he’s wrong.Very emphatic, he is. And wrong.

Branding is about effectiveness.

Branding is about effectiveness. No matter what any “expert” preaches.

First, not every entity which (or who) might develop a brand is a for-profit entity. While it’s true that Amnesty International is very effective at fund-raising because of its brand equity, funds are only a part of what it gathers in order to be effective. AI can collect thousands of signatures on a petition in very short order because of its brand. The persons saved from disappearance and torture are the measure of AI’s effectiveness, and its brand leads to that effectiveness.

Ralph Nader is a brand. He developed his brand equity by doing exactly what he wanted to do and doing it well. Like AI, he can mobilize vast support for a cause. That he’s done pretty well financially is perhaps a side effect; it’s not his primary aim. If he made it his primary aim, his brand equity would help him achieve it. In short, his brand can help him be effective at anything that doesn’t contradict his positioning.

Of course, most participants in #pr20chat do most of their work for for-profit companies, so the above might seem a minor quibble. But @brandingexpert’s dictum is untrue for those companies as well.

Choking on revenue.

I believe the following is true although it’s seldom talked about:

When Congress set out in the early 70s to restrict cigarette advertising, the tobacco companies protested. On the principle that they needed to protest anything that challenged their freedom of action. But the legislation was passed that forbade TV advertising. Big tobacco lost that battle. And on that day, in the privacy of their boardrooms and C-suites, they were all grins.

Why? Because they’d been engaged in rent-dissipating advertising wars. Rent dissipation: that’s the economists’ schmancy term for throwing away profits. And all those squandered profits had been lost because the players had been brand-building in pursuit of revenues. And they kept doing it despite the huge portions of those revenues that were required to keep them on the brand-war treadmill.

They were in a bind. With little real product differentiation, their branding was driven and defined by advertising, and with lots of competitors, they had to pour major resources into branding. But they weren’t really happy about it. Not nearly as happy as they’d be after their hands were tied and their profits soared.

Other companies aren’t necessarily in the same bind. They can squander profit not because they’re forced to, but simply because they’re naive enough to believe “experts” who tell them branding is about revenue. They can take their eyes off profit long enough to lose a good deal of it.

How to correct while agreeing

Two people retweeted @brandingexpert’s tweet. I assume that means they agreed. Most interesting, though, was a tweet from Kathy Moore (@kathy_moore), to whom @brandingexpert had directed his wisdom. She corrected him even while seeming to agree:

@brandingexpert righto! good branding should ultimately deliver bottom line results

So [scratches head], does Kathy actually think that revenue and bottom-line-results are the same thing? Or was she correcting brandingexpert, knowingly and slyly?

Life is full of enigmas. In the twitterverse, they fly by so fast one might not even notice they’re enigmas. It takes a pretty fat fast canary to catch them.

So I resisted Twitter for as long as I could. Then after I got through resisting, I still didn’t use Twitter because I was too busy to use social media at all. Just when I thought I was ready to launch my podcast in earnest, I discovered my house needed massive rework in order to provide me with a usable office. I had a recording studio, but the office was more important.

Well, the house is redone. The office is pretty usable. And I’ve almost mastered using my iPhone as a PDA, and I’m reasonably productive again. I have enough client work to keep me fed and not enough to break my back. So, no further excuse exists not to use Twitter.

Except that Twitter drives me mad.

But now I’ve used it enough to love it, so I need to do something with my madness other than avoid Twitter.

Solution: CCCHHHIIIIRRRRPPPP!

Given that what drives me mad is the infernal terseness of it all, I’m reserving to myself the right, starting today, to make enormous tweets here on my blog, and then use Twitter to point to them.

Actually, the concept is a little more refined than that. My hope is that, about once a week, I’ll take a single tweet of someone else’s, and riff on it here in a way that 140 characters wouldn’t permit.

My next post will demonstrate.

Some good weekly Twitter chats have arisen that draw public relations pros. I want to take part in them when I can.

I’ve found that looking up their starting times takes a little longer than I think it should.

To resolve that problem, I’ve made a simple list of PR-related hashtag chats, showing nothing but the hashtag, the day, and the time (Eastern Time).

Please let me know if there’s anything I should add or correct.

Shel Israel, discussing how BuzzLogic Calculates Influence, says:

What I liked was that this was a simple, straightforward measurement designed to see a monetary return on a hard dollar investment.

But, much of social media’s goals is less tangible.

(emphasis mine)

What he’s referring to at the start of the quote is Kami Huyse’s wonderful work calculating the ROI of the Sea World San Antonio campaign that launched their new roller coaster. It was a great case study by a fast-rising star of social PR.

But I’m struck by that last sentence of Shel’s quote (and not only by the grammatical gaffe.) When I heard Shel Holtz discussing Kami’s work on For Immediate Release, as soon as he mentioned measurement of ROI, and before he got into the meat of the segment, I remember thinking “Who measures the ROI of having a desk or wearing decent clothes?”

Yes, when you launch a social media campaign, you ought to think about how you’ll define and measure success. But if you’re still on the fence about using social media at all, I believe it’s time you started thinking about having a presence (on Twitter and a blog at minimum) in much the same way you think about basic office equipment and your business wardrobe. No, a social media presence isn’t a minimum requirement of doing business, not just yet, but that corner will be turned so soon, so suddenly, and so quietly, that you’re safest–by far–turning the corner yourself as soon as you can.

Chris Carfi would have gotten a write-up here on The Alpha Mind in December except that my blog was so badly beaten up by hackers it took me well into the new year to get it cleaned up.

If I’d written about Chris, it would have been because he was in a tie for Best Conversationalist at a geek dinner in San Francisco. (No mean distinction, considering the tie was with Shel Israel.)

But the man doesn’t need me to help make him a star… cuz Chris Carfi was featured in some footage on CNN yesterday.

Congrats, Chris. Alas, the clip says nothing about Cerado and what it does. But hey, any publicity is good publicity, right?

And yet… and yet…

if you had just acted psychotic, you could have gotten a million views on YouTube, where that seems to be what passes for funny.

Mike Masnick asks: Is Copyright Law Killing The Documentary? The answer is in this video on YouTube. Titled “Eyes On the Fair Use of the Prize,” it tells how an outstanding documentary from the 1980s has been effectively disappeared by copyright burdens:

So, to stay with the same topic for a while:

Bryan Person  blogs about Comcast’s efforts to use Twitter to improve customer service.

He makes the point that Comcast is paying attention to everyone, not only to A-list bloggers.

Apparently that is a real, rather hot issue. Note the number of comments on Scoble’s post suggesting that, because he’s an A-list blogger, Robert is trying to bully Facebook.

I’m pretty sure companies take a blogger’s Technorati influence score into consideration when they think about how to respond to a blogger. It’s good to know other are treating the social media more democratically.

And I salute Bryan for pointing it out. Companies that behave this way deserve as much love as we little people can send them.

A bit more about Rodrigo Sepulveda’s little problem with Facebook:

Last week, through PRobecast, I learned about the 2-word pitch. Very simply, it’s a pitch consisting of “‘Google’ + [one other word]“. Of course, you can only use it if you ensure that the second word is a search term which, when entered into Google, will bring up your site.

It may be a solution for over-zealous scanning algorithms on over-yenta social media sites that don’t want you ever to send one of their users out to another domain. Rodrigo is probably right that Facebook, like YouTube, scans messages and disallows URLs (although YouTube practices prior restraint–it scans as soon as you hit the “post” button, and disallows the comment if it contains a URL).

The solution, of course, is not to use the URL, but to tell your friends what to Google. And of course, it doesn’t have to be a single word. If your site contains a unique combination of terms (remember GoogleWhacking?), Google will bring folks to your site. And YT and FB will probably let you do it without whinging.

Scoble says Facebook still sucks. His evidence: The eviction of Rodrigo A. Sepúlveda from the social site’s hallowed halls.

Herewith a continuation of what will surely be a series about how and why technology doesn’t work. Why so SO SO much of technology doesn’t work.

Soon, I hope, I’ll start writing about why everything’s busted. For this post, though, in addition to the above links, I’ll only note that after Lee Hopkins asked his readers how to manage personal information, and the comments ran 3 to 0 in favor of low-tech, he has gone with the new flow and shopped for the proper configuration of pen and paper.