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facebook_vs_google-300x225-150x150 Google Buzz May Save The Web From Facebook

There’s a lot of disagreement concerning the relevance of Google Buzz to us as individuals (privacy) and as business people (connections).

You have the nay sayers who roast it for it’s infant stumbles: Google Buzz – just another bee-grade social app?

And the Google fans who refuse to believe they can fall: http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/ptech/02/11/cashmore.google.buzz/index.html

Google Buzz is timely though.  This seems to be the watershed moment when entrepreneurs, small businesses and large corporations alike realize that content publishing and conversational networking are marketing gold.

Google rose to power on Adsense, they practically built a fanbase around the rewards of search engine optimization.  That loyalty translated to financial support in advertising dollars and evangelism on the part of businesses and ordinary people alike.

Buzz will eventually eclipse Facebook if it can solve two problems for us all..buzzonphone Google Buzz May Save The Web From Facebook

1. Universal Identity – Facebook connect has the lead here, but they’ve done a poor job of explaining it to members and have made the development interface powerful but cryptically confusing, it needs to seriously evolve before it can be said that Facebook’s dominance is cemented.  I’ve recently received notification from YouTube that my account is being integrated with my Google ID, about time!  Google will probably do a better job of courting developers to use their ID authentication.

2. Publish From Anywhere – While Facebook made their content submission grandma-proof very early on, the intelligence in their interface is easy enough to replicate and I think for the most part Google Buzz has done just that.. but Buzz already has an edge in this arena, mobile publishing!  Facebook apps are designed for passive viewing and content critique.  Google Buzz has made it so if you find something worth sharing with your following of customers or partners you can post it from your mobile browser!  This may be the killer feature that decides the fate of these two services.

While these two problems are probably the critical issues that will make or break the debate (and the spending of copious ad dollars) there’s an another issue that is more important that puts the halo squarely on Google.

facebook1-150x150 Google Buzz May Save The Web From Facebook

Facebook (perhaps benignly) cloisters content within its walls.  They host pictures,  video, notes, and blog posts on their own servers rather than link to our own resources all over the web. Now they are trying to make those walls transparent by default, and lowering the privacy barriers that drew us away from MySpace, but they have enormous censorship power over our content and discussions as they draw our participation deeper within their servers.

Google indexes the wild wild west publishing culture on the greater Interwebs, Facebook with their grandma-easy interface encourages all of us to abandon all that and just stay within the confines of our gated community.  Facebook is perhaps ’safer’ in these fear oriented times, but ultimately more dangerous in the long term.

I foresee myself spending a great deal of time on Facebook for the foreseeable future, but we shouldn’t get too comfortable with it. There’s a big difference between letting Google look what’s in your basket and putting all your eggs within the basket that Facebook owns.

LuluThe Lulu.com IPO filing underscores that the digital and on demand book revolution (and most online commerce) needs to learn from the digital music revolution, it’s not about distribution, it’s marketing.

The process of automating on demand publishing gets cheaper every year. You can spend $40 million on a system today, and someone will do it for $40,000 tomorrow. The key problem we all learned with mp3’s and the digital music revolution is that the distribution doesn’t matter nearly as much as the discovery.

From http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/453321-Lulu_Looks_to_Raise_Over_50_Million_in_IPO.php

According to the prospectus, Lulu has invested $40 million to develop what it called “a robust, scalable and highly-automated open publishing platform.” And although the company has yet to make money, it has increased the number of people who use its services with 1.1 million registered creators as of the end of 2009. The number of units sold rose to 2.6 million in 2009, up from 2.3 million in 2008 and 1.7 million in 2007.

Authors much like musicians don’t know how to market themselves. That’s why MySpace boomed so rapidly, it provided a system for musicians to labor at their own marketing (unfortunately for fans it did not evolve very much). Lulu should get a cash infusion from the market if it can prove that it can enable and assist Author’s to market themselves. What’s the point of collecting inventory, even if it is digital, if it is never gonna move through the online shopping carts?

Now I should probably give Lulu.com a break, many of their sister online media companies were already acquired, sometimes by companies that really didn’t care about revenue, but traffic growth.  Always a bridesmaid but never a bride.  That said, even YouTube is expected to post a profit this year having labored and lobbied advertisers and content owners to play on its massive network.

I think Lulu.com was hoping for a Harry Potter series or a Davinci Code to break on it’s service, but frankly any author that starts generating those kind of numbers through their own marketing and distribution is likely to have the business sense to publish in bulk.  Lulu needs to arm their authors with knowledge of fan building and provide them with real tools to build and retain a base of readers.  If they can do that, it’s money well invested.

That’s why you can build the best retail site on the planet, fine tune it for search engines, and still not make a dime.  You need to go out into the conversational wilderness.  You need to join communities, study their needs, jump in on conversation, and invite them to discover you.

The initial novelty of MySpace was creating a community of fans who could connect based on similar interests.  That was the missing factor with MP3.com.  We had similar streaming and retailing available for musicians, but no social rewards for fans to stay on the site and discover new artists.  MySpace created a community that essentially made fans sitting ducks just waiting for musicians to hunt them.  It was a great success for a while, they just got so lost in their acquisition that they never protected that community from being overwhelmed and spammed.  The musicians essentially annoyed all of us away.  That is why Facebook rose so quickly on the idea of privacy and yet why they are also so quickly dropping the walls between users.

Communication is a delicate balance of listening and speaking, you have to master it if you want to facilitate the discovery and sales of your products.

The goal of you are trying to accomplish with all of your internal meetings, rounds of press release drafts, and pitching to media outlets is positive exposure to your customers, partners and competitors.  Ideally you want to have your message conveyed in your own words and tone so why wouldn’t you just say it yourself?

Video is rapidly becoming the most popular media type online.  The immense success of YouTube and Hulu is a testament to our preference for the passive consumption of information, just sit back and let the pixels and sound stream into your brain.  It has a tendency to make us pause and stay on a page far longer than mere text and pictures. That’s why most of the top blogs and all of newspapers, magazines, and of course television outlets have expanded their repertoire to online video.

While video does take more work and a few more resources to produce than a text and photo press release, without it you are denying journalists a critical asset that could make their story more successful.  What better way to end a piece than to embed a video interview?  From their perspective it could be the difference between their story being viewed by tens of thousands of readers.  Considering many blog networks pay their writers based on the amount of traffic their posts receive, they really, really want your video!

However, when most companies and agencies invest in video assets they have a tendency to execute very poorly.  They are as precious about their media as a record label trying to prevent a new music single from being discovered on a peer-2-peer network.  Why?  Don’t you want coverage?  Don’t you want your story to get the most attention?

Andy Sernovitz posted a handy and convincing argument why you should just upload your video to YouTube:

http://www.damniwish.com/2010/03/how-to-instantly-get-more-press-coverage-a-cut-and-paste-memo-to-your-pr-team.html

Suggestion: Take every video the company has ever produced and get it on YouTube tomorrow. Link to the YouTube video from our sites instead of using our own player. If we do that:

  • Every prospect who watches a video will be able to share it with colleagues, increasing leads and sales
  • We’ll get more leads for free, because YouTube is the second largest search engine (bigger than Bing and Yahoo!)
  • We’ll get a ton of free coverage and a ton of web traffic
  • Our fans’ blog posts about us will be more interesting and accurate if they use our video instead of making up their own stuff
  • Our web hosting costs would go down…

Rivera PR, a boutique agency that services restaurants local to the San Francisco Bay area executes this strategy well.  They have a few self hosted videos on their own website, but they have a great YouTube channel full of their client’s assets, just ready for a reviewer to plug into an article.

http://newteevee.com/2010/03/02/no-moment-of-zen-viacom-takes-daily-show-off-hulu/

from newteevee:

Coming next week, Daily Show fans won’t be able to watch Jon Stewart’s show on Hulu anymore, according to a report from the New York Times Media Decoder blog. Comedy Central parent Viacom apparently wasn’t happy with the revenue Hulu was able to bring in for them, and it decided to exclusively distribute the show through its own web properties. Also affected by the move is The Colbert Report.

Hulu has brilliant intelligence in the design and user experience, but nothing that can’t be replicated by video hosting companies such as The Platform which enable sites like ComedyCentral.com to enable dynamic clip generation, autoplay, and quality streaming.. Hulu will see a mass exodus as networks reclaim content for their own website, but if their shows aren’t already popular, the removal from Hulu could injure their discovery.

Networks have longed for high traffic numbers that match popular Net sites like Hulu, but it remains to be seen if they can bring the audiences to their own home pages.  Historically they have not been very successful.

Much like “Did You Know? 4.0″  Jesse Thomas designed and animated this short, fun motion graphic infoporn video for stats junkies..

http://vimeo.com/9641036

JESS3 / The State of The Internet from Jesse Thomas on Vimeo.

related:

Did You Know 3.0 or Shift Happens 3.0

Did You Know 4.0