Social Media » Dave Jenkins

One Ring to Rule The Mall

ecommerce, mobile, Social Media 2 Responses »

Apr 112011

Loosely translated as: Bring this ring to Mordor's Chevrolet for big savings and free hot dogs!

I just signed up for Shopkick, a micro-couponing site that gives out 2-3 “kicks” every time I view a coupon on their app. The coupons are from stores within 500 meters of where I am right now, along with the promise of 30-50 kicks if I actually cross the threshold of any of these stores, then even more if I take a photo of the lifestyle poster on the back wall of the store… you get the idea.

This comes on the heels of Groupon which was offering deals to get me to sign up, or LivingSocial to introduce new hip stores in the mall with frozen yogurt and yoga classes before we go antiquing over at Pottery Barn. Two steps behind all of them is Facebook, which keeps hinting at offering some sort of viable credit/coupon mechanism, but somehow fails to achieve any penetration beyond Foramville credits to the addicts. Shopkick, Groupon, LivingSocial and the rest all jump into Facebook’s lap for user registration, and jump right back out again. Let’s face it: in terms of shopping, Facebook is little more than identity verification and an address-book virus with permissions turned on.

All these sites/apps/gimmicks are trying for the same thing: peeling away some of the huge dollars that companies will spend to get you to start on the journey that will eventually end up with you opening your wallet. For those who don’t want to remember MBA school, it goes something like this:

Brand Awareness -> Consideration -> Product Shopping -> Purchase -> Support

Groupon and LivingSocial are doing pretty well on that first step, but as I’ve discussed before, they may be giving away too much for the retailer to maintain any margin, and might actually attract the wrong demographic with massive discounts. But then again, as my friend Patrick Evans points out, Groupon does ask for the purchase right there (up front), so any margins may be recovered on the breakage.

Shopkick’s approach looks to be different: micro-rewards for micro-steps. Look at the coupon, 2 points. Walk by the store in the mall, 2 more points. Walk into the store, 30 points. Take a photo of a product, 30 more points. Actually talk to a sales person, 50 points! It’s more game-like, and doesn’t require any up-front purchase. It’s a soft-sell. What remains to be seen is if people will run around the mall haranguing the sales people all day just to collect points with zero intent of actually buying anything. But then again, what else is new?

It’s still a race– no single coupon dealer network has been able to run the table yet. There is no magic key to unlock all doors; retailers are barely catching on to mobile phones still, let alone really being able to exploit (nicely) a path to get the right coupons to the right customers. The ring, I think, is still out there somewhere.

Quakebook

Japan, Social Media 1 Response »

Mar 292011

See the quakebook at http://quakebook.blogspot.com

Okay, it’s been two and a half weeks since the earthquake and tsunami, and I’ve been slack in not writing something here. First and foremost, Yumiko and I are fine. Her family is fine. All our friends that we’ve contacted (including Yumi’s friends in Sendai) are safe. We were in St Louis when it hit– and for that, I feel guilty.

I feel guilty for not being there, for not being able to help. I feel guilty for not “sticking it out” with all my friends in Tokyo and Chiba that are somehow putting one foot in front of the other and trying to make a normal life again. We didn’t evacuate Tokyo, we had left two weeks before it hit (as scheduled). I would like to think that we wouldn’t have evacuated, but then again, I see my friends who have moved their wives and children down to Western Japan or back to the US, and I honestly can’t say what I would have done.

Living in Japan, one cannot help but confront the older generation that put up with incredible hardships to make the modern miracle. These people endured starvation, bombings, privation, and said nothing, but simply picked up the pieces and worked harder to make an economic powerhouse out of ashes. My own father-in-law tells the story of when he was 8 years old in 1945, and he had to scour the woods near his house for grasses and edible roots to boil over an open pot. He ate grass. For several weeks. This same man went on to work incredible hours at a construction company and ended up retiring just a few years ago in relative comfort. He reminds us of this occasionally, and it pretty much shuts me up for any complaints I may have been entertaining in the back of my head.

Now, we’ve got a whole new generation of Japanese that will 頑張る (“gambaru” – to stick it out, hold on, endure) through their own phoenix-like period. The country is broke. The economy was already wobbly after years of stagnation. The population is in decline. Japanese efficiency is gradually being eclipsed by their Korean neighbors and the cheaper Chinese/Vietnamese/Indians. The government was never really that transparent nor reassuring, aside from Secretary Edano (who finally got some sleep). It will be a tough slog.

I am hopeful however. This is the first large-scale disaster that we’re really seeing unfold in real-time first-hand. My twitter feed has been both a curse and a blessing: a curse because I am not there and can do little but donate to the Japan Red Cross; a blessing because I’ve been witnessing my friends move through various stages of recovery:

In those early hours, it really was all about contacting each other. That’s it. The phone lines were jammed, cell phones turned off. If twitter or Facebook ever proved their worth, this was it. We couldn’t reach our parents for almost a full day, but ultimately, my father logged into Skype, and we were able to talk for 30 minutes (free!). I got twitter updates from all my friends, and the initial panic subsided.
The next few days was a scramble of aftershocks, sleepless anxiety, and the creeping uncertainty of the Fukushima nuclear plant. Here again, social networks proved their value if anything but to keep small bits of information rolling amongst my friends. The most fascinating bit was to see the first-person reactions against the western media– who were getting the situation completely wrong or couldn’t even be bothered to leave their hotel rooms. One more strike against old media, methinks.
Prayforjapan.jp showed a stream of tweets, several of which had me in tears at several points throughout the last three weeks. The selflessness and gratitude of survivors has been covered elsewhere, so I won’t list them out here again, except to say that it’s a shame that many of the best stories were never translated into English.
The adrenaline started to wear down, and my friends began to update the most inane little bits of update on twitter and facebook: “Leaving work, headed to the station now” followed 30 minutes later with “at the train station, walking home now”. It dawned on me that these updates served a couple of roles: it reassured us (friends and family) that these people were still alive, and it probably reassured the writer in some sort of Bill Murrayish baby steps baby steps one-foot-at-a-time way to get through the rolling blackouts and hoarded food.
After a few days, the lightness started to come back. The Kiwis and Aussies in Tokyo started sending twitpics of the pints they were drinking, the Japanese friends started to trade black humor about what the yakuza would do with no pachinko parlours. The rebirth was beginning.

Now, we’re actually starting to see something constructive come together. the Libyan revolt has since eclipsed the western news, and Japan still sweats the Fukushima plant, but these networks are starting to put things together themselves. I still cannot figure out where the money to rebuild will come from, but I know that Japan will be alright. This is an incredibly resilient place, an incredibly warm and resilient people. 日本は回復する！頑張ろ！

If you’d like to help, please donate to the Japan Red Cross. If you’d like to see these stories and find out more about the real time unfolding of this whole thing, check out the #Quakebook at http://quakebook.blogspot.com

Facebook Comments Plugin: Sanity Now?

Network, Social Media No Responses »

Mar 032011

Facebook has announced major improvements and export agreements for its comment plugin and overall conversation tracking mechanisms. This may spell very bad news for software providers specializing in reviews and comment threads, such as Bazaarvoice, Disqus, or Pluck. However, it may actually be beneficial for the mainstream content providers such as newspapers, magazines, and other “wide audience” publications. If you’ve ever tried to sort through the comments on something like Newsweek or Time or (FSM help you) USAToday or CNN, you’ll realize why: the current comment thread mechanisms aren’t worth a damn thing.

As I’ve discussed previously, when a topic is “too broad” or “too common”, the comment threads or other discussion mechanisms quickly break down into partisan hackery and senseless name-calling flamewars. Godwin’s Law is in full effect here, but is preceded with an endless stream of poor grammar, juvenile goofs, and spambots. This is especially true where any subjective topic is in play (which covers most news topics, and anything close to the entertainment industry).

So how might Facebook’s comment regime change things? Well, for the simple fact that these people’s comments will (should or must, IMHO) be viewed by all of their friends on Facebook. Would you write that screed against the [republicans/democrats/two party system] if you knew that all your friends would read your poorly worded rantings? Would you still use all those cuss words? For most of us, I hope not. Sure, for some of the giftedly-miscreant juveniles, the ability to post a rant against shoegazers on MTV.com and Facebook simultaneously will only encourage such poor commenting behaviour, but we already know where those places are, and they get what they deserve.

I sincerely hope that more mainstream content sites will adopt the Facebook comment plugin, but only if they absolutely enforce the rule that all comments MUST also appear on the contributor’s facebook wall. Let the peer-shaming begin! (After all, tomorrow is National Grammar Day; so sharpen your knives and gerund phrases.)

Facebook’s Sakura Spring in Japan?

Japan, Network, Social Media, United States 1 Response »

Feb 222011

The highlight of Springtime for Japanese is “Sakura-mi“, where everyone takes an afternoon off, meanders to the local park with their co-workers, spreads out some blankets, and starts singing ballads while drinking sake and enjoying the pink cherry blossoms that cover every tree in sight. It’s a great time.

Facebook is rapidly approaching its Sakura-mi in Japan. Until now it was the dark horse behind the dominant Mixi.jp, and really only used by Japanese students and employees who had spent time in the U.S. or E.U. But now, with the movie The Social Network hitting it big in Tokyo, and Mixi dying a slow death from no new functionality and a poor user interface, the network effect that accelerates Facebook adoption is taking off. However, it’s not all sweet rice wine and kara-age. There are some snags.

Facebook has the following going for it in Japan:

The movie is pretty much like a 90-minute tutorial on how Facebook works, and that it’s okay (necessary) to use your real ID and not a fake alias. Japanese are finally getting used to that point.
Mixi always accepted and centered on people making aliases, which seems like a protection of privacy (a big point for Japanese), but ultimately prevented people from connecting with their real-world set of friends. Everyone had their real friends, and their Mixi avatar strange connection friends.
Facebook has its marketing act together: it’s a viable advertising channel which means that companies are looking at it seriously (which they never really did with Mixi).
Facebook has a workable API for others to utilize (e.g. Facebook login). Mixi never got that far in their product roadmap.

However, Facebook may run into some bumps:

When we all signed up for Facebook 3-4 years ago, the Facebook viruses and scams weren’t as advanced as they are now. I see my Japanese friends signing into Facebook for the first time, but many of them are falling victim to the same scams and dupes that tricked my young nieces when she first joined up. In short, Japanese users are still a bit naive.
The “real identity” thing is a big lump for Japanese users to swallow. If they use their real ID, that means that all those people from High School and old jobs and college can now really find them. Americans went through that phase, but admit it– if you could do it over again, would you really “friend” all those random people that you happened to graduate at the same time from some school 15 years ago?
On-gaeshi. I’ve described this before as a benefit for short texting like twitter, but I still see it as a small hindrance for Japanese. Friending one person in a group obligates them to friend all people in that group, and anytime they get a friend request, they feel they MUST return the favor. It almost puts a compulsory feel to the network effect, and it creates a slight anxiety for users.
Lack of shopping benefits: there’s no deal at Starbucks or Takashimaya or Mitsukoshi for participating in a given Facebook promotion, because those large companies are still way behind on the Social Media thing.
Work environment: Japanese office workers are pretty much sitting shoulder to shoulder on long bench tables, with the section chief at the end of each row, and the bucho sitting behind him (furthest from the front door, of course). There are no cubicles, no offices, no privacy. There’s no way office workers can screw off on Facebook during work time.

I’m sure Facebook will eventually roll through the country. I am also relatively confident in predicting that penetration will never be as high as it is here in the US.

Groupon’s Army of Bottomfeeders

ecommerce, Good or Bad, mobile, Network, Social Media 7 Responses »

Feb 102011

Marge needs a smart phone first...

Groupon, the group discount site that has spread rapidly thanks to social networks, has seen explosive growth over the last few months. the company has run extensive TV campaigns in Japan and Europe, as well as even buying some tasteless Super Bowl time last week. Many of my friends are Groupon users, some are Groupon junkies (I can tell by their constant Facebook bragging/recruiting). But what about the retailers that are offering these Groupon discounts? Is it catnip to build buzz, or carrion that invites the vultures?

A common understanding in merchandising is that offering discount products brings in the discount buyers. Unless your business is All-A-Dollar or Try-N-Save, these are not necessarily the customers you want: discount goods by their very nature have little or no margin, and discount buyers will complain, require service, and generally gum up the fulfillment chain just as much as any other customer (if not more so in some cases). The business slang for them is ‘bottomfeeders’. Insinuate whatever you want to from that. (Please note that I am not calling my good friends ‘bottomfeeders’, they are wonderful people with a savvy sense of finding deals. I am just relaying the merchandising term.)

So, when would a merchant want to deploy a Groupon strategy? Here are some points to consider:

Groupon or other clearance discounting is a GOOD IDEA if:

You have a perishable or seasonable product that otherwise will be worthless in a matter of weeks (but not too perishable– a gift food company in Japan is getting sued for using Groupon to send out rancid meats and fish to hundreds of subscribers).
You can run the math, and assuming that Groupon clears out all product, you still cover enough margin to support fulfillment
Margin doesn’t matter on this one, because the word-of-mouth provides a great marketing opportunity.

Aha! That last one is the siren song for many merchants that decide to go with Groupon. They figure that if they give away 400 teddy bears or free cocktails or back massages or whatever, the word will spread and their marketing campaign will be off to a running start. I have no doubt the Groupon salespeople only reinforce this belief. I would submit that it’s based on some faulty assumptions and likely to get many small businesses in trouble. Here’s my take on the dangers.

Groupon is NOT A GOOD IDEA for any combinantion of the following factors:

Your business requires the same fulfillment costs no matter who the customer is or how much they pay. Restaurants fit in this category: a dinner for two requires the same amount of cooking, serving, and cleanup for a couple baying the full $60 as it does for the people using the $25 Groupon. Unless your restaurant is 80% empty, this is a bad idea. And if it is 80% empty, I would guess the problems are somewhere else…
The word-of-mouth factor that Groupon supposedly provides is not sustainable or exploitable. Groupon will bring in a flash mob of a couple hundred customers, and a decent fraction of those customers will brag about the deal on Facebook. However, unless the merchant has a way to exploit and continue that buzz, the flash mob is exactly that: a flash (and gone).
The flash mob is usually trying to recruit others to participate in the deal– they’re actively telling other bottomfeeders that there is a low-margin item/service for sale at your business. This will result in bringing in more bottomfeeders as well as possibly damaging your brand.

Discounting is a hard drug to kick. Groupon is a strong one: used carefully, it can be a kick of adrenaline; used indiscriminately, it’s a quick dose of crack.

Moral Hazard? The Goldman Sachs Valuation of Facebook

Social Media 4 Responses »

Jan 112011

Most of us have heard about the Goldman Sachs investment into Facebook that puts the valuation at $50B. Not all of us have divined the subtleties about which part of Goldman Sachs did the investing: their brokerage arm, not their private equity arm. In other words, Goldman did this deal with the express purpose of selling those shares forward, presumably in the ‘greater chump’ model.

Most of us have also recently seen the movie The Social Network, and however it portrays Zuckerberg as a true geek, just wanting to put together something cool. If you’ve flown on a plane recently, you might also have seen Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. However it portrays Gordon Gecko, the movie does a pretty good (if not pedantic) job of teaching the principal of “moral hazard“: someone is making a decision about money where they have no moral consequences (financial risk) on the outcome.

Q: Is the Goldman Sachs a form of Moral Hazard, where they are making money and valuing Facebook at a level with the only purpose of “selling” that value to the potential future investors?

Q: By doing these transactions in the pre-IPO private share environment, where prices are arbitrary (artificially set?), somewhate inflexible, and based on insufficient information, is Goldman (and Facebook) creating their own bubble?

Q: My twitter feed from @mashable and others are becoming more and more common with “_____ receives $XX.XM in angel investment” announcements. Congratulations, but how many of these investments are actually sympathetically tuned to the Facebook bubble-of-one?

Q: What happens when Facebook finally does go public, and the share price sinks after 5 months?

I don’t want to be an alarmist, nor do I want to be that snide person that says “I told you so”, I really am asking these questions. Something seems off here…

Layering Graphs as Strata

Social Media 4 Responses »

Jan 042011

Sandstone Strata at Lake Powell

I discussed Quora yesterday, and how it may or may not build itself into something very interesting. Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch seems to think that Quora will take off this year, having it’s “twitter moment”. I wouldn’t disagree with that assessment, but Erick pointed out something that I think provides an interesting model to contemplate. He describes Quora as “layering of an interest graph on top of people’s social graph.” I suggest that “layering” is the essence of a good mash-up, and that we might start thinking of these graphs as “strata“.

Mark Zuckerberg defined a graph is any set of relationships. Facebook is really just a website that relies on that social graph between people. It’s been trying very hard to build additional graphs, but in the end, it always comes down to that social graph. Gowalla, Foursquare, and to some extent Google Maps have taken up the geographical graph (redundant?), while Quora is building out the interest graph– where your relationship is on common interests and not really the people involved. LinkedIn might be thought of as an ‘experience graph’, but those experiences are so very closely linked to people, that it’s really just Facebook’s more serious older brother. Flickr is a photo graph. Other graphs might include color graphs, fashion graphs, meme graphs, and fact graphs.

If we start thinking of these different graphs as strata (the geological term for layers of rocks or soil), then we can start to see mash-ups as the successful layering of two or more graphs. Layer the social graph with the geographical graph, and we get Google Latitude. Photo+ geographical = MS Photsynth. Geographical + interest = Yelp. If we get past the term “mash-up”, with it’s connotations of random happenstance or car crash (like the Reeses Peanut Butter Cup commercial where we are to believe that one of the greatest candies was really the serendipitous result of hippies with early Sony Walkmans), then we might be able to see new start-ups in terms of the strata that they are layering together to bring us something smarter, something more useful, something synthesized to a higher level.

What other strata are out there? What companies are exploiting these strata?

Quora, the proto-wikipedia

Good or Bad, Social Media, wiki 1 Response »

Jan 042011

Is this question on Quora.com yet?

Have you tried Quora.com yet? It’s essentially an open question & answer board, divided out by topics. The usual social media rules apply: you can follow threads, follow people, like answers, vote answers up and down, upload your profile, etc. It’s also growing very quickly, going from zero to thousands of users and tens of thousands of questions in just under a year. For me, the fascinating part is the meta-sociology that is still developing. Quora is the proto-wikipedia, where information is still raw, subjective, and disjointed.

Early on, the site was populated by the early adopters, who by their very nature were authorities in the areas on the site and probably more attuned to the social media scene. They were insiders. Questions tended to be straightforward inquiries as to why an Internet business was doing something or pricing was structured or how many servers are available, and the answer usually came from a VP at that business.

Now, however, the site is full of honest inquiries that are really requests for recommendations, as well as completely subjective chit-chat questions where a “real answer” would be impossible. For example, just from today we see “Which is the Best song by The Cure?” and “Why should I see Tron?” These questions have no answers, they’re the aimless chit-chat (and they don’t even qualify for hipster-idiotication status like “which is more environmentally friendly, disposable razors or electric razors?“). None of these issues would be allowed over at Wikipedia. And they would start a fight on any single-threaded blog or news discussion site like HuffPo or BoingBoing or Fark. How long will that last? Is it only a matter of time (and popularity) before Quora gets swamped with subjectiveness and drivel? Or are there structural elements in place that will contain the slosh-over?

Here’s what I see that’s good so far:

Quora is severely limited down to a question with several answers that get voted up or down. This may keep the crap and joke answers under control, but voting only works to a certain point.
Users can follow specific topics in their feed, so supposedly it may be self-editing where I don’t need to see questions about celebrity diets or snotty book reviews.
Quora prompts you to invite your friends from Facebook and twitter– which is more than likely your real set of peers and friends, so you’re less likely to act like a goof with your answers.

Here’s what I see that’s not so good so far:

Quora is severely limited down to a question with several answers. There’s no real easy way to build up knowledge incrementally by adding into an existing text (like there was with Wikipedia before the reference zealots took over). Yes, one can edit a previous answer, but the site is geared toward people merely tacking on another answer. In the end, it answers the question, but it doesn’t build up a knowledge-base (yet).
Users can follow specific topics in their feed, but this limits down the user’s exposure to topics where he/she is likely already an expert. This may increase the quality overall, but it also may encourage showing-off in front of your peers.
Quora prompts you to invite your friends from Facebook and twitter– which is more than likely your real set of peers and friends, so you’re much more likely to act like a goof with your answers.

I’ve answered questions. I haven’t asked any yet. I’ve seen astroturfing (companies asking straw-man questions), I’ve seen shameless self-promotion (people asking themselves questions), and I’ve seen some solid answers. We’ll see how this one plays out.

Quality Website Comments: The balance between reach, volume, and passion

ecommerce, Social Media 4 Responses »

Dec 122010

The I-Ching for comment threads - balance your reach, volume, and passion. (image source: chinesefooddiy.com)

Do you read the comments thread at the bottom of a news article? Do you ever get anything of value from it? Websites have wrestled with the ‘comments’ section for over 14 years now (since the beginning of the web, really). How to guide a comments section along to where it actually provides useful and helpful content, and not just random people throwing out grammatically-challenged non sequitur? We’ve seen sites try various methods: rating the comments, rating the raters, completely open forums, targeted censorship, random censorship, oligarchies, democracies, and anarchies.

Here are some basic generalizations that I’ve seen:

There is an inverse relationship between the breadth of topics (reach) for a given website and the cohesiveness of its audience. The greater the breadth of topics, the lower the cohesiveness of the readers. Said in reverse, the more targeted the topics of discussion, the tighter the demographic for the group of responders. For example: both USAToday.com and ForeignPolicy.com can cover the exact same issue (i.e. Wikileaks), but USAToday.com will be all over the map for comments, while foreignpolicy.com will be pretty tight. This is because the demographics for USAToday are pretty much 20M+ Americans who stayed in a hotel last night or are stuck at the airport, while ForeignPolicy.com is limited to those eggheads at Foggy Bottom and college kids wanting to sounding erudite at a local bar. We can call this ‘reach’.
There is a positive correlation up to a certain point between breadth of topic (reach) and the volume of respondents/commentators (volume). The more topics covered on a given website, the more channels of bringing in audiences for readership, and thus the more chances that people will respond. This is true to a certain point, until a website becomes so generalized in nature that the passion drops off, and ends up becoming a limiting factor on comments.
There is a positive correlation up to a certain point between passion of topic and the volume of respondents/commentators (volume), in that passion requires responses, and that requires a certain amount of volume. Overall, a wider audience means a greater stage for performance, and invokes a greater passion among commentators, up to a point.
After a certain point, volume begins to harm passion, and the discussion threads will either:
1. bifurcate into smaller groups where volume is reduced but passion continues,
2. devolve into a flame-war with eventually someone invoking Nazis, or
3. dissolve away with someone posting a bunny with a pancake on it’s head.
There is an inverse correlation between breadth of topic (reach) and passion of topic. This is likely a general sociological point, in that experts can only show their expertise among learned peers. People won’t argue the finer points of civil war reenactment accuracies on usatoday.com, but they will on history.com, and watch out if you ever find yourself at reenactmenthq.com
Quality is likely a balance between reach, volume, and passion.

Quality is a very tricky thing to define, let alone quantify. The rules laid out above all build to that last one: quality. Quality online discussion threads bring a lot of benefits to a website– they generate return visitors, they provide great Google-food, they inform the product, reduce returns, build brand value, and inform both the reader/user and the website owners about their demographics.

How to build quality online threads? Evaluate your website carefully:

How is your reach? Is it broad or narrow, or somewhere in between? You can tell by the rate of responders to other posts: too broad and you’ll see random comments without responses. Too narrow and you’ll see great passion but little cross-over and probably some flame-wars.
How is your volume? Do you get not enough comments or too many? For most of us the answer is usually ‘not enough’, and in the rare cases of ‘too many’, there are mechanisms/technologies available to guide the threads to maintain passion and thus build quality.
How is your passion? Do your commentators have insufficient passion or too much? We’ve all heard the 90-9-1 rule: 90 people will view a website, 9 will read comments, and 1 will actually write something. That makes a good guide: are you getting comments from 1% of your traffic? If not, you’re lacking passion. If you have too much passion, you’ll know it pretty clearly (see the indicators for flame-wars above).

We can see many different ways to build quality. In general, the comment thread technology out there really only kicks into gear once a certain reach, volume, and passion are already in place. There’s no default order on which one to do first, but know you have to build all three to get to “quality”: extend your reach, build your volume through incentives or questions, and then invoke that passion by personally connecting your readers/customers/users to each other and to your products.

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