Welcome Back, Mr. Portal, Your Chair Is Still Warm

Twitter has about worn me out. Trying to keep up with the 270 people I am following is almost impossible. I check my iPhone app twice a day, each time with over 200 tweets to read. Its relevancy is quickly slipping away...

Twitter is great at aggregating and collecting content, but terrible at delivering it. There are probably a bunch of people who I would be interested in reading. It just takes too much effort to stay involved.

Which brings me to the topic of Portals. For those Dotcom 1.0-ers, Portals are the butt of all Internet jokes. They originally were created as collection points for "stuff" on the Interweb (think early Yahoo and AOL). A good place to ground yourself as web content expanded beyond comprehension. It quickly went downhill from there.

Want some fast VC $$? Call your site a Portal. Got a bunch of separate sites that you need to somehow stitch together without really exerting much effort? Build a Portal site to house them.

As I predicted last month, Porn is always first to recognize a great online idea. The "legit" business always the fast followers. Pornstar Tweet launched awhile ago as a Twitter Portal for following Porn Stars. They aggregate porn tweets so you have one-click access to their daily lives. 

Sports is another huge affinity group online. It didn't take long for someone to apply the same strategy to athlete celebrities. Please welcome Athlete Tweets!



Same strategy, different topic.

It may take awhile for these celebrities to figure out they are providing mass amounts of content for others to make money from. You can't license public communication. Perhaps at some point their agents will wise up, aggregate their own collection of celebrity talent, and bring them en masse to the highest bidder. Who will then charge a monthly fee for accessing the private public lives of the rich and famous.

Sounds like a revenue sharing opportunity in the making.

The Oceania Webcams Are Now Live

From Techweb:

Google Maps Now Show Views From Webcams

The latest layer to be turned on in Google Maps is one for webcams. Just click on the “More” button on the top right of each map right next to the “Traffic” button. When you do that, it shows you thumbnails from different public Webcams around the world as tracked by Webcams.travel.

You don’t see an actual video, just the most recent still image captured by the Webcam. But this can come in handy when you want to actually see the traffic on a major highway yourself, or how the waves look like at the beach. While you are at it, you can also click on the other layers, such as Wikipedia entries, photos Youtube videos, and public transit.

From George Orwell:

Behind Winston's back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away about pig-iron and the overfulfilment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment.

How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live -- did live, from habit that became instinct -- in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

At Least @WhiteHouse Isn't a Porn Account

So someone finally figured out how to make money on Twitter the old fashioned way: Extort It.

Here is the brief synopsis courtesy of TechCrunch:

1. Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk 956,186 followers) challenges CNN (@CNNbrk 968,489 followers) to a race to 1 million followers on Twitter


2. Larry King gets involved and takes the battle public on YouTube


3. EA gets involved and turns it into a marketing promotion


4. It is revealed that the CNN doesn't even own the Twitter account/name that has all these followers

That's right. Some average guy set up the account, programmed it to publish CNN's RSS news feeds, and quietly amassed almost 1 million followers. Not sure how that compares to CNN.com's RSS subscribers, but on Twitter it is fairly impressive.

Silly? Yes. Juvenile? Yes. Worth CNN spending money to save face and claim ownership of the Twitter name? No. Er, I mean, Yes!

Apparently CNN "bought" the Twitter account (or maybe just rents it, fairly unclear) in order to lay claim to the user base. Which is a bit mindblowing considering the events that provoked it. Even more so since CNN basically bought ownership of their own content, on a site that is still a relative blip in the webosphere.

It also signals the cybersquatting goldrush for branded usernames on Twitter. Better hurry up and register yours, even if you don't plan on using it. Fake celebrity accounts have already demonstrated how confusing things can get for consumers. Soon even @seriouslywearetherealcompanythatsellsfriedchicken will have a price tag.

In the Future, Brand Identity Guidelines Will Require Rate Cards

Even though online advertising projections continue to rise, most media sales reps will confess that everyone is still very nervous about 2009 marketing budgets.

How nervous? Well, it is a well know fact in the advertising world that a company's logo is its most cherished asset. Creative Director Rule #1 = Don't @#&! With the Logo!

Online that means no animating, spinning, reversing or, God forbid, altering. True, Google has messed around with theirs for years. But that is in the spirit of their brand.

These days it seems anything is for sale. Desperate times call for desperate rate cards. Are you a left-behind web portal trying to maintain relevancy and fighting for every declining CPM dollar? Then maybeeee jusssst once...

Yesterday (Tax Day) AOL.com altered their logo to support TurboTax's online campaign, creating a hybrid halfbreed that only a cash-strapped mother could love:

Art Directors cringed. Media planners updated their Q3 RFPs. Sales reps hit their Excel spreadsheets trying to uncover the valuation for that stunt. What is the value of your site's brand compared to your advertisers? Even if it is only surrendered for one day? Or, worse yet, was it provided as Added Value to seal the media deal?

Publishers are constantly scrapping for untapped areas of their site to assign CPMs. Their corporate identity shouldn't be one of them.

What's Your RSS CPC ROI?

Twitter users must come to terms with a unique outcome of their 140 character text blasts = they are completely disposable. That's my assessment after spending the last month in the tweetosphere.

I'm "following" 240 people. About 20% of them tweet throughout the day, 50% tweet maybe one or two times daily, the final 30% rarely. I log on to Twitter twice a day, each time greeted with over 200 posts to view. It's akin to self-induced bite-size spam. Yeah, I'm talkin' to you IamDiddy!

Unlike Facebook status posts --which are less frequent and encourage dialogue via attached Comments -- most Twitter users tweet and rarely look back. You might get a response from someone using the "@username" feature, but it is difficult to track them or build any kind of conversation.

The fact that Twitter is now being lauded as the Google Killer says it all. Google is about finding and accessing mass amounts of information. Requiring a search engine to sort through social content betrays Twitter's limited 1:1 communication value.

So how do brands capitalize on microblogging? You can push out custom online discounts like Dell or create brand ambassadors like Sharpie. But at some point your tweets are going to get buried faster than a Monday morning email newsletter.

Kudos to Intuit Turbotax for being the first to identify Twitter as a content generator, not a communication channel. They just announced that they will distribute their tweets via Google Adsense search buys:

The search giant has started offering marketers ad units that stream their five most recent "tweets" across the Google AdSense network. Intuit used several of the measures available for any AdSense campaign to target the ads, which are running on sites such as Bebo, Facebook, Hi5, MySpace and Alltop.

This provides a much broader audience and overcomes the tweet overload blindspots. The only part I don't understand is their campaign objective:

"We could have used this as an acquisition vehicle, but we're looking at it more like a conversational vehicle," Mr. Greenberg said. We're measuring this [in part by] how many followers can we get. Can we get to 100,000 by allowing people to know we're a resource?" When a user clicks on an ad it takes them not to TurboTax.com but to twitter.com/turbotax.

Hmmm. Can you prove the value of those future Twitter followers (or the current 1,270)? Especially if the CPA is a 50 cent search link click? An email opt-in, er I mean Twitter follow, does not necessarily count as a conversation. Although it is the next CMO conversation waiting to happen, right after you explain why those 4,500 Facebook Fans are so important.

Got Doubts About the Future of Advertising?

Here's the top 5 most-read articles on AdAge.com today:

Which shows where the average ad industry exec is focused.

However, if their online marketing strategies are driven by AdAge, then they need additional learning aides. Haven't we all agreed that you can't make something go viral?

One Of These Things Is Not Like The Other

Makes you think those lessons learned from Bud.TV didn't quite sink in...

@stephenstrong Got That CyberDejaVu.com Feeling Again

I find it fascinating when an online technology/trend achieves what I call the Doppler Hype Effect = the average American knows everything about it before they actually experience it. This usually occurs when the mass media mentions, refers, and explains it so often that even my parents can discuss it in conversation (and they are still on a dial-up modem).

This trend dates back to the beginning of the WWW. From 1995-96 you started hearing more and more about these websites that people accessed with a web browser. Being an AOL user wasn't exactly the end game. Apparently there was another Internet out there that AOL's browser couldn't even see. But over time everyone started feeling the itch to get a website of their own, even if their computer didn't have a modem. And you started feeling really awkward when everyone traded AOL email addresses -- except you.

This mass hype is an important part of consumer acceptance. It is easier to accept something when you assume everyone else is already doing it.

Internet history is ripe with examples of emerging technologies that were so hyped by the media that even a 10 year old could explain them before they went mainstream = email, chat rooms, instant messaging, search engines, e-commerce, personal web pages, webcams. Things we now take for granted were the untamed Wild West just 10 years ago.

Sending a complete stranger money based on a digital photo found on eBay sounds risky. But perhaps less so if 60 Minutes was just talking about the new craze of "Internet cyberBazaars."

Mobile phone carriers should thank American Idol every night for bringing SMS texting to the masses.

Every new Internet trend (fad?) launches in mass media with the initial How The Hell Does This Thing Work? articles. Then come the Look How Many People Are Doing This reports. Followed by Can You Believe People Are Making Money Off This? At which point it becomes part of our culture and common vernacular or quickly fades away, overrun by the next big hype.

This trend took a 5 year hiatus after the Dotcom crash in 2001. Web 1.0 faded away and new hypes were quickly dismissed in a flurry of VC-tainted catcalls.

Then came Web 2.0.

Remember all the reports about blogging and user generated content? New crazy sites like Flickr, YouTube, Second Life, Myspace, Facebook? Most of which the average American could discuss at great length, despite never having visited any of them. The hype wheel made one big loop and is spinning faster than ever.


Which brings me to Twitter. The current King of Hype. Get ready, your mom will soon have lots of questions about it.

The Wall Street Journal recently explained how the hell it works. Everyone is talking about how popular it is getting. It hasn't quite reached the third stage of making money, but Twitter is now receiving more shout outs than a high school hip hop concert.

Yesterday the Sunday Chicago Tribune published an article on page 3 promoting comedian Michael Ian Black's Twitter-driven Fuck It list [follow him]. And this morning NPR ran a story on a Los Angeles Korean taco truck's popularity, thanks to its use of Twitter [follow that truck].

Earlier this month the Daily Show served up a hilarious overview of Congress Twitts:




The other talk shows quickly followed. Leno asking Whoopi if she Twitters [nope]. Jimmy Fallon challenging his viewers to follow this guy on Twitter [follow Jimmy]. Ellen explaining how Diddy and Martha Stewart compelled her to start tweeting [follow her and him and her].

Expect this self-feeding hype to continue growing, thus reinforcing that it must be the Next Big Thing.

Twitter is the cool club kid, jockeying to crash the big party that is our nation's consciousness. Skype, Digg, and Yelp are still hanging out in the parking lot waiting for their turn. Mobile Web has been there so long that he set up an RV camper. But Twitter is right at the club entrance, working the bouncers and pleading that they keep searching for his name on the list.

Hmmmm, your name ain't here. But everyone in line seems to know you. So maybe...

Damn, Hulu just bribed the other bouncer with a big Superbowl TV ad. You might need to wait until tomorrow night when you can get their attention again. So it goes. Maybe you can hit up Good Morning America or Time for a backstage pass. Because hanging with celebrities is the fastest way to the top.

Facebook: Freeware Going Nowhere

Well, at least Facebook is consistent. Consistently pissing off its users with design and functionality overhauls again.

The recent changes are no exception. Big ones like rearranging the homepage out of a knee-jerk panic attack to be more like Twitter. And smaller ones like reformatting Fan Pages to look like standard user profiles.

Current users hate it. The mass amounts of new users signing up daily won't even notice. Training your eyes to reuse the site is one thing. Training your brain is another:


This is the user experience equivalent of a product recall letter. Their Head of IA needs to be publicly flogged via webcam.

The Fan Page reformatting actually has me the most worried, since this is where brand marketers have placed their bets. A few months ago Fbook screwed around with the location of widgets, moving them off a user's main profile page and burying them under a subtab. Branded widget impressions/interactions instantly plunged. Now they are taking the same liberties with the branded pages themselves.

Reformatting them to match user profiles has resulted in a loss of uniqueness. They just don't feel special anymore. Worse -- from what I heard -- Fbook didn't even notify the owners (brand managers, ad agencies, interns) until a few days before the pages were scheduled to change. Resulting in mad scrambling to assess them and relearn how to maintain the pages.

In general, Internet change is good. Sites that continue to innovate are the ones that survive and grow. Those that don't lose visitors and money to the pesky start ups with nothing to lose.

Hence the problem with Fbook. They got nuthin' to lose. Not revenue, not users. No matter what changes they make, people are not going to leave. They have too much time and emotion invested in their Fbook doppelganger. And brands/marketers? Hard to complain when you ain't paying a dime.

Fbook is the ultimate Freeware. No one gets charged for using it, not even marketers. Unlike Myspace, who charges wayyyyy to much for a branded "mascot page"; any brand can create a fan page for free. Distribute their widgets on the site for free. Send messages to their 50,000 "fans" for free.

Wikipedia defines Freeware as a free for all free-for-all:

The only criterion for being classified as freeware is that the software must be fully functional for an unlimited time with no cost, monetary or otherwise. The software license may impose restrictions on the type of use including personal use, individual use, non-profit use, non-commercial use, academic use, commercial use or any combination of these.

Screensavers, limited games, basic software applications. Freeware is as old as the WWW.


You download them, use them, and if you don't like them? Screw you, it was free! What more do you want?

Fbook carte blanche to do whatever they want with marketers. It's their site. Don't like it? Go ahead and leave. There isn't a media sales rep sitting in a cube sweating his ass off because you might.

This is their largest weakness -- acting like a freeware distributor. Offering tons of free stuff, hoping to sell a few ads on the side. Not really concerned if you delete the app 15 minutes after downloading it.

They are stuck in a loop of rapid prototypes, see if it sticks to the wall additions, and general controlled chaos. Which is fine if you are a 15 person shop trying to take down the big guys. But when you are the big guy, then you have to start acting like it.

Usability studies on new changes would be a good first start. Listening to marketers, the ones who will eventually support you financially (as soon as you get a rate card put together), is a necessity. At some point we will stop tolerating this 500 lb gorilla baby.

[Thanks to the guys at Colossal Squid for pointing out Fbook's similarity to the software industry]

@stephenstrong Got Twittered by a Porn Star: That's in our relationship safe-zone, right honey?

The porn industry always takes advantage of new online technologies first. Often identifying and defining new trends before anyone other industry.

Bootleg file sharing? Check. Webcams live chats? Check. Pre-broadband video streaming-on-demand? Check. Affiliate marketing banners? Check. Pop-up ads, digital-rights management, social networking? Check, check, check. Porn was practicing the Long Tail before most marketers even understood the short one.

It isn't important that porn always seems to be a first mover online. It is important that it always seems to be the first industry making money from it. The only reason porn grabs hold of an emerging trend is because it generates revenue. And there are a lot of people trying to get rich off online porn. Think of it as the world's largest startup, constantly testing/prototyping/enhancing/evolving. Only the successful survive. Which makes porn the perfect litmus test for any alleged Web 2.0 business model.

Which is where Twitter comes in -- probably the only website more desperate for a revenue model than Facebook. If porn can't figure out how to make money from it, then kiss it goodbye.

So as an experiment (let me reinforce experiment) I "followed" a variety of porn stars over the weekend on Twitter. Most of them have a couple hundred followers. A few number in the low thousands. Nothing compared to Diddy (173K), Ashton Kuchter (368K), or Shaq (323K), but probably more than you.

The online version of the Red Light District flag down is widely practiced. Some of you might call it lead generation:

E-commerce CTAs appear as well. If you want to drive traffic to your online peep show Friday night, then targeting guys who are bored enough to follow porn tweets is a pretty good start:

It may end up that Twitter cannot monetize any of this, leaving the revenue models to the companies that support its users.

When eBay first started there were a variety of feeder sites that provided added-value services for users -- photo hosting, credit card processing, last-second bid topping. Twitter is no different.

Tinyurl converts web links into condensed URLs, saving precious character counts. Twitpict provides image sharing/instant tweets. Qik mobile video sharing is getting free word-of-mouth thanks to Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore posts. None of them are charging for these offerings yet.

There's even a Porn Tweet Portal that aggregates porn star posts, capitalizing on Twitter's open source content search.

Cursebird.com may actually be more risque. Sure you get the typical posts that would make a truck diver blush. But pornstars are people too. They can be just as boring as everyone else you are following:

Looking for hot photos? You are as likely to download a picture of their cute puppies or new car. Although it can be a bit surreal reading laundry day posts interspersed with on location blow-by-blows. Can being too normal online hurt a pornstar's street cred?

In the end, I decided to go straight to the source. Spamming a variety of them (oh, the irony) to uncover how they plan to leverage Twitter.

Which, based on their replies, shows we may have a long way to go:

Porn is everywhere online. What gives Twitter an advantage? First of all, it has an anonymous intimacy to it. You get an insider's view of the other 98% of a porn star's life, with some smut thrown in. Second, follow enough of them and you catch glimpses of intra-porn communication (if a retweet threesome is your kind of thing).

Lastly, it is a publicly-acceptable porn channel. Besides Twitter.com, you can read tweets and view links on your iPhone, Facebook widget, RSS reader, and eventually any web-connected device (hurry up color Kindle!) Those of you with Internet fridges can hold off bidding for those Jenna Jamson magnets on eBay.

My free advice to the stars? Start with micropayments. As soon as Twitter (or Twitpict) launches their own Paypal billing system, then you should be able to charge followers 10 cents for every naked photo click (charge 50 cents on weekends and after 10 pm). Exclusive coupon codes for discounted video content would help build a new customer base.

Use your public Twitter account for daily posts and new video teasers. Charge followers to access a private account for the real hot talk and behind the scenes details. Sorry, twatter.com is already being squatted and titter.com really is for kids.

Eventually porn will find the Twitter money shot. It always does. How many marketers are too embarrassed to lurk its progress and leverage the learnings when the time is right?

For the record, I avoided taking advantage of tasteless innuendo and bad puns throughout this blog post. I count at least 9 that come close [there's 1! --ed.] But be warned, it's realllly hard to find them! [2! --ed.]

Just Posted Photos From Nutella's High School Prom

Always looking for someone to piss off, Facebook recently redesigned their Fan Pages. These are primarily used by brand marketers to rope off their social homestead. Weird thing is that they basically just turned them into standard user pages, complete with tabbed sections and status posts.

Kinda lazy if you ask me.

From a user experience standpoint, it can be a bit confusing since the only thing differentiating it from a human page is the user name and profile photo. Go one step further, and you can create a fan page that looks/feels like an actual user.

Hello Brian Nash, advertising guy who refuses to join Facebook. We just did it for you:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Brian-Nash/54737649557
(Fbook users only, sorry)

And you have 60 friends, er I mean fans. Who actually are his friends in real life. So that's even more confusing. But if you didn't pay close attention, then you really would think it was Mr. Nash's personal page.

The other brand/human blur affects status posts. Brands with fan pages can now send them, which show up in your status scroll along with all your friends' statuses (stati?). So whoever created the Mr. Nash fan page can send status posts to the fans, which show up as coming from Mr. Nash.

The other side effect is that this actually opens up brand posts for users to comment on. Every fan can then view all the consumer feedback, I mean replies to that post.

This may seem like a great way to get consumers engaged with your brand. Only problem is Facebook is large enough now to mirror the general Internet population. There are a lot of idiots out there. You are protected from ever coming into contact with them unless they are your Fbook Friend (in which case you already know they are idiots and have accepted it). Opening up the status comments to any "fan" will turn Facebook into an AOL chat room circa 1998. Or MySpace circa two days ago.

It's been less than a week and I've already seen it in action. Check out the Herbal Essences page:
http://www.facebook.com/herbalessences
(anyone can view this one, even you Mr. Nash)

They have 59,000 fans and their brand status posts are harmless self promotion. Each one gathers between 40 - 100 user comments, more than a few that must be causing the brand managers to sweat bullets and keep their PR agency on red alert. Take a peek at this one.

A few negative user comments isn't the death of branded social media. But the other 58,900 consumers who are reading them? That is something to worry about. In the old Brand Fan Page Dimension, user comments were restricted to wall posts and were not broadcast across the site. Plus those were user-initiated, whereas now brands are almost baiting bored dumbasses to respond.

The good news is that the community usually self-polices itself, even when the topic is shampoo that smells nice. Unfortunately now it is being done publicly on one of the most popular sites of the Interweb.

I Call Dibs On Dot-Stupid

This is officially the week for ranting about brand websites.

This one centers around custom website domain names that are only limited by your thesaurus.

A proposed expansion of domains means that by the end of the year there could be hundreds. Coca-Cola and Pepsi could request .soda or .softdrinks; Procter & Gamble and Unilever could sign up for .laundry or .soap; and McDonald's and Wendy's could get .burger or .fries. The potential for names and online branding would be limited only by the imagination of the creative marketing industry.

But what if you had to pay for every one of the new domains that relates to your brand? The initial cost estimated by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the nonprofit agency that oversees the distribution and policy of domain names, is $185,000 for registration plus anywhere from $25,000 to $75,000 in annual fees.

Which violates sooo many of my online marketing principles:

1. Your brand site is increasingly irrelevant. See my previous posts (1, 2). The last thing you need to worry about is creating a .com strategy
2. Consumers are more lazy online than in the real world. This has been the key to Google's success. Typing www.dietcoke.com in the browser takes too much effort. Just type "diet coke" in the Google bar next to it and then click the search results link
   
3. Google could care less what dots your com
   
4. Consumers are not only lazy, they have really crappy long term memory. Think they have a hard enough time remembering your product name? Imagine if they have to remember whether your web address is .soda, .softdrinks, .pop, or .coke. You might as well register all of them just to be safe (that will be $740,000 please)
   
5. It worked out so well for those .tv guys...
   

Do yourself a favor and save your cash for the next .mobi mobile URL firesale.