broadstuff

Interesting article from Fortune magazine re where the latest crops of MBA's are going:

Last year, Google hired hundreds of new MBAs, though thousands applied. MBAs are attracted to Google because they "really get a lot of responsibility right at the outset," said Yvonne Agyei, Google's director of global university programs. "MBAs are looking for the opportunity to make an impact."

In second and third places are management consultant McKinsey & Co., appearing on 15.84% of students' wish lists, and investment bank Goldman Sachs (GS, Fortune 500), selected by 14.98%.

The last time ambitious MBA's were more keen on technology than consulting or banking was in the latter days of the dotcom boom - another sign today of the Crash 2.0 zeitgeist?

From Ars Tech - looks like Alton Towers (UK fun park) is going to ban "PDA"s (aka Crackberrys, Smartphones etc):

The apparent reason is to stop hyperconnected people ruining a family day out for the rest of the family by mainlining on their crackberry. This trend is also ceen in Cinemas in the UK, where Orange sponsors high production value "don't let the phone ruin your movie" ads. And in the US, as Ars Tech notes:

There seems to be a new interest in some parts of the world to set a few boundaries around how and where technology is used in public. Movie theaters in the US, for example, have kept up with the times by displaying pre-film warnings about silencing phones and conversations. Some carriers like AT&T have begun sponsoring new "silence your phone" promos with high production values.

The airlines, sadly, are going counter-trend and hope to add money by opening up mobile conversations in 'planes, though even there it looks like most people are appalled by the idea.

Its interesting how new social norms emerge - rather than a consensus among a "social network" of users, it requires some form of authority to drive rules that people by and large agrees with. I wonder if there will ever be a backlash against the corporate "always on" culture?

And from now on, take your laptop to Alton Towers - that's not banned yet

It's interesting how a zeitgeist emerges...no sooner have we heard that Social Media is not all its cracked up to be, then up pops the FT to note that Web 2.0 companies have produced very little revenue so far:

The shortage of revenue among social networks, blogs and other “social media” sites that put user-generated content and communications at their core has persisted despite more than four years of experimentation aimed at turning such sites into money-makers. Together with the US economic downturn and a shortage of initial public offerings, the failure has damped the mood in internet start-up circles.

“There is going to be a shake-out here in the next year or two” as many Web 2.0 companies disappear, said Roger Lee, a partner at Battery Ventures.

“These are challenging macro-economic conditions,” said Shawn Hardin, chief executive of Flock, a browser maker that raised $15m in venture capital last week.

Yet that has not stopped a continuing round of venture capital fundraising and acquisition activity at high valuations as investors and corporate acquirers hunt for businesses capable of rising above a crowded field.

“If you look at some of the valuations, you wonder what fantasy of revenues they’re based on,” said Mitchell Kertzman, a partner at Silicon Valley venture capital firm Hummer Winblad.

Bubble 2.0 is running on similar tracks to Bubble 1.0 then, complete with pumping hype up to the clouds till the end-of-days, despite the storm warnngs. But of course, just as after Bubble 1.0 in the dotcom crash, many thought the Web was dead, it just kept on going. As the FT notes, the same pattern is probably happening in Bubble 2.0:

Despite the slow start to money-making by Web 2.0 companies, the trend towards more social online behaviour that it embodies is widely claimed by insiders to be of lasting significance.

“The capabilities that are coming with Web 2.0 are very profound,” said Devin Wenig, head of the markets division of Thomson Reuters. “The Valley is usually right, and it’s usually early.”

Just remember that in 6 months when we are in the middle of Crash 2.0

Another twist in the YouTube - Viacom copyright issue - from the BBC:

In court documents Google's lawyers say the action "threatens the way hundreds of millions of people legitimately exchange information" over the web.

The search giant's legal team also maintained that YouTube had been faithful to the requirements of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act and that they responded properly to claims of infringement.

Hmmm....this can be more accurately stated as threatening the way hundreds of millions of people exchange media illegally on YouTube Also, YouTube adheres to the DMCA in the sense that when there is a takedown notice it takes down that infringement, content in the knowledge that someone else will soon repost the content back up.

The real news here is that Google is going to use its considerable resources to hold up any attempt to clamp down on YouTube for as long as it can:

Google's vice president of content partnerships David Eun has said: "We're going all the way to the Supreme Court. We've been very clear about it."

In other words, this will still take some years to resolve, and in the meantime YouTube can continue to make hay - no doubt in the hope that in the interim either:

(i) Copyright Law changes to reflect the new realities

(ii) Google / YouTube find an alternative business model.

(iii) The media industry won't find a way to block the copying of content

This is - in my opinion - a rather interesting bit of game theory now. The cost of going to court to either party is not a major cost in their worlds, so both will continue on this path. The outcome has massive impact of course, but is several years off, so both sides will be thinking about how to mitigate worst case outcomes. They will thus be looking at conflict as well as collaboration in their strategies.

The best mitigation for both, however - the lowest total risk outcome - is probably to move towards some form of compromise position over time. Google knows that it will probably eventually lose with its position as things are, Viacom knows that it can't re-bolt the stable door.

So, expect lots of posturing, but the slow hammering out of a New Accord for copyright.

Update - Ars Tech has an interesting summary here, but I don't agree that Ars Tech is in the same boat - I think there is a huge difference between them and YouTube.

Whisper who dares....that sacred cow of the Social Media play, the Wisdom of Crowds, is actually being questioned by those who have benefited most hugely from it so far - Read Write Web realises that (referring to the gaming of Digg):

SitePoint's experience is an example of herd behavior or groupthink, where the Digg group acted blindly on poor information, without rationally thinking it through. This is a problem with the wisdom of crowds concept: if unchecked, rather than coming to the best conclusion based on the wisdom of the group, a crowd can come to the worst conclusion based on dumbness that spreads from a single bad node.

This is exactly the problem with Social Media and Wisdom of Crowds stuff - it can be swayed by flashes of Mob Rule. (The madness of crowds)

It's also not necessarily that accurate. In the UK, before Pandora was stopped, I far preferred it to Last.fm because it actually gave me the music I like via its Music Genome database, whereas Last.fm gives me the music tastes of other people who like what I like - not the same thing at all. We both may like A, but I love B and you detest them. With a social media selection, you are going to get B!

Now, RWW lays out 4 rules to mitigate this:

Last year, we laid out a set of rules to get the most out of a crowd. It might be a good idea to revisit those here:

1. Crowds should operate within constraints. To harness the collective intelligence of crowds, there need to be rules in place to maintain order.
2. Not everything can be democratic. Sometimes a decision needs to be made, and having a core team (or single person) make the ultimate decision can provide the guidance necessary to get things done and prevent crazy ideas and groupthink from wreaking havoc on your product.
3. Crowds must retain their individuality. Encourage your group to disagree, and try not to let any members of the group disproportionately influence the rest.
4. Crowds are better at vetting content than creating it. It is important to note that in most of the above projects, the group merely votes on the final product; they do not actually create it.

But in a Social Network, delivering user mediated decisions, point 3 is a tough gig - everybody can see everybody else's reaction, so keeping individual decisions going is hard.

Many people are exercised on how today's free "Web 2.0" services will actually make money, especially as it finally dawns on people that Advertising won't save the day for everyone, and may just not work for social networks.

There's an interesting discussion on GigaOm today - Om Malik postulated something that a number of people have thought of before, ie make a service Freemium - and he thought about how it may work for Twitter:

This massive database of followers is what Twitter should turn into a business. Twitter should charge Scoble, Leo, Me, Michael Arrington and anyone else who has more than 100 friends & followers. How about something simple: $10 a month for 1000 subscribers. 25,000 subscribers means someone like Scoble should be pay them around $250 a month.

Lets take it a step further. Twitter should limit people to 500 free messages a month. Any more should come in a bucket of say 1000 messages for $10. Businesses like Comcast who want to use the service for commercial reasons should pay for the service, and so should start-ups like Summize who want to build their businesses based on Twitter API.

The game theory of this proposition is absolutely fascinating - who should pay, the follower or the followed. Who exactly is deriving more value from these services? That is who will be most prepared to pay. Initially it seems odd that the followed should pay. The reaction from those with many followers (see the comments) was predictable - Mike Arrington encapsulates the argument:

How do you deal with the fact that the number of “followers” is determined solely by everyone except the person you propose to pay?

Except, as other commentators note, they are getting a significant free benefit right now - the ability to broadcast, for free, to a large number of followers - to grab the attention of many people daily. They probably also know that the minute these followers were asked to pay, many would go away.

Think about the outcome for the average user - they will join a social network like Twitter, and lets say there is a free allocation of 100 "friends". Initially they will plug in to the "A List" broadcast channels, but then they start to add real friends. So what happens as the limit is approached - do they cull the friends, or those broadcasters whom they don't really know?

At this point the Broadcaster hits the "Small God" problem - ie status is defined by number of followers - if you are at all trying to derive a benefit from your followers, losing them has a real cost.

Now think about the Broadcaster's economics - for Mike Arrington to have a user base of say 20,000 people daily hanging on his word has a real financial value, in any marketing speak these are highly engaged people wanting to have a conversation with you - Cluetrain Nirvana. Only $200 pm to reach them all 500 times a month with a CPM equivalent of $0.02 - a complete bargain in current economic terms. Even better, those Aspirants who don't / can't pay up will fall away, leaving the spoils to the standing.

Thus I can easily see the more commercial players stumping up this and more - in effect making their feeds free to user. Of course they will wail and gnash teeth that its no longer free, but the benefits are huge.

I also suspect that the actual free number may be critical - if its 100, then its probably mainly people in their own social network so to add extra people will want to be bribed, not pay. By 200, I suspect most people have already connected to their network with spare (The Dunbar number is 150 remember) so there is ample space left for connecting to the broadcast channels, and thus little incentive for them to to pay.

But for this to work, Twitter cannot unilaterally start charging as everyone will migrate....there is another game in town. What happens if one doesn't need to charge (Jaiku for e.g. bought by Google, could easily be subsidised).

Thus, our suspicion is that the others cannot charge so long as Google, or Microsoft or whoever, can threaten free (ie subsidised) services, so this model probably is not strategically viable unless the one player can drive such value that no one wants to leave it. And I haven't seen a mass market social net yet thats driven that sort of loyalty.

Very interesting ideas nonetheless though.

Marvellous - watching a whole set of spats about the Brave New World of PR 2.0. On Techcrunch I read Brian Solis talking about the Secret Rules of PR (12 eh - hmmm - not a Prime thing then .

Anyway, in the comments section some wag weighed in with a response largely rebutting them:

Secret #1
Understand You Probably Have Nothing

Your startup is probably a whole lot less special than you think and will probably fail. This is obvious to most journalists and bloggers.

Secret #2
Pick a Friend to Lead PR

If you have funding and have a friend that works at a PR agency, retain their firm. Spreading your funding around to friends and family is a crucial part of getting the most out of the startup process.

Secret #3
Don’t Participate

Most technology journalists and bloggers are idiots who wouldn’t know an interesting story even if it hit them in the face. Therefore, don’t waste your time trying to befriend them. Not only are they likely to ignore you anyway, but you’ll have to put up with their egos and stupidity.

Secret #4
The Blogosphere Is Not Your Audience

Bloggers and first adopters are not mainstream and if you want to achieve success, don’t believe the hype - appeal to mainstream journalists and most importantly, mainstream users.

Secret #5
Launch Anytime You Want

If you have something truly interesting, people will notice. If you have something that isn’t interesting, it doesn’t matter what time you launch - nobody will care.

Secret #6
Most Bloggers are Not Journalists

Focus on real journalists, not bloggers.

Secret #7
Don’t Measure

If you actually get any coverage, it will probably be short-lived so don’t place too much weight on any measurements you take after your PR launches. Instead, come back a couple of months later and see if the people who found you through your PR are still around and still talking about you.

Secret #8
You Don’t Need to Customize the News

If you’ve written a good pitch, it will appeal to people. Period. Customizing a PR is about as useful as customizing your toilet seat.

Secret #9
Don’t Get a Spokesperson, or Do

You probably won’t need one and if you can’t be a good representative for your company, you’re probably not going anywhere.

If you have lots of money, on the other hand, consider hiring a highly-attractive female who is willing to wear skimpy outfits. This probably won’t do much but you’ll get the satisfaction of having an attractive woman talk to you for once in your life.

Secret #10
Your Company Blog is Less Powerful Than You May Think

Unless you’re a high-profile Fortune 500 company, the number of people who will read your company blog is so small as to be meaningless to your company’s prospects for success.

Secret #11
Blogger Relations Are Worthless

Even a review on TechCrunch is unlikely to give you lasting results, so don’t give yourself a hernia trying to reach bloggers.

Secret #12
Follow the Conversations But Don’t Join In

If people like your product, they’ll talk nicely about it. If they don’t, try to take their feedback into consideration but recognize that you usually only get one chance to make a good first impression and if the response to your startup is poor, you’re probably doomed and trying to talk to people to convince them otherwise will be useless.

I am available for PR consulting. $5,000 per month retainer.

I must admit to having a certain sympathy with this chap, the original was - in my opinion anyway - maybe useful if you are already a Silicon Valley Superconnector and funded, but of limited use to the average small company. I later noted PR Natural Loic Le Meur calling Mr Solis's stuff Bullsh*t and coming up with his own 7 points (7 of course is Prime)

I then noted Mr Scoble weighing in with his own 7 points.

Now watching an A list blogwar is all very entertaining, but the conclusion to take from this is that no one really knows what the heck "PR 2.0" is or is going to evolve into. But, having worked in the last year or so with a few PR companies, In fact, I think these chaps are in danger of all looking under the lampost of the existing industry luminaries to find the future of PR.

I don't think that's where it will be - I think PR 2.0 will be run far more by physicists than publicists, because the killer fact about online interaction - whether website, social network, advertising or whatever is that it is very, very measurable and thus lends itself to serious data crunching.

The future wll be less Arcane and more ArcTan methinks.

This was brought out well in a session I attended early this week at the Convergence Congress, where one of the speakers showed how various "experts" in the company (PR, marketing, UE) - armed with opinions about what the customer would do, combined with executives (with sales targets) to pervert the web experience design that the customer research said they wanted. However, it is of course possible to test various website designs live, and that quickly tells you what customers really, really want despite all the fluffy theories.

To an extent this use of heavy maths has already started to attack the Marketing / Ad industry with Google, and in fact metrics are the major issue that - in my view - the smarter blades in this space are really focussed on now, so I suspect that we will see a lot more long equations rather than long lunches in future.....

(Shameless Plug - Last year we had to write some material to get a few PR agencies up to speed with this New New World, and even gave a few workshops - I was giving a session to an Agency last Friday in fact - we are available for consulting on PR 2.0 at our standard very reasonable rates )

Two interesting observations re Twitter this weekend:

Firstly, last night during the Eurovision song contest a number of people on my network were chatting to each other about it, and having a grand old time. I wasn't watching it, but it was fun interacting with some of them every so often. But what is more interesting is that this was the premise of what watching Joost and the other Web TV plays was going to be all about - you watched Joost TV and used their own IM system to chat to your friends.

The concept was right, but the execution followed a Real Life path of least resistance - what we call "good enoughs" - to execute.

Terrestrial TV is already here, Twitter is already here and - importantly - probably already has a critical mass of people who know each other. The users mashed them together to produce a service they wanted, and did it manually themselves - via laptop. And I suspect that laptop on the lap watching TV is going to be a strong "good enough" for quite awhile - especially if, as we suspect, web TV will go the MyPCTV direction. This I think is going to be a major usage of multicast IM systems such as Twitter (you need the group to make it fun) going forward.

(Update - I note Darren Waters at the BBC also noticed this)

Secondly, I noticed Twitter treated their latest overcapacity issue very cleverly, by keeping the real time chat function going while cutting back on the second order network link-based messaging such as replies etc. This meant the system didn't keel over. I think this is a smart plan, as the 80/20 value of Twitter I suspect is in the live chat (Live chat has been the killer app in most sites that had it 'till now, can't see why it wouldn't be on Twitter). This to my mind draws most of the venom out of the critics of their currently non 5x9 reliability service (stops the feeding frenzy of the Friendfeed sharks ) . In fact, I'm not sure it needs to become a full 5x9 service in the short term if they can keep chat going. (In fact, I see some wag has suggested they could even monetise the downtime )

This article on the BBC from Jakob Nielson re Web page usability struck 2 chords with me - firstly:

Instead, many are "hot potato" driven and just want to get a specific task completed.

Now, when people go online they know what they want and how to do it, he said.

"Web users have always been ruthless and now are even more so," said Dr Nielsen.

"People want sites to get to the point, they have very little patience," he said.

This is impacting the CPM rates of pages, so rates on pages where people do very specific tasks (like social network pages for example) tend to be valued at lower rates than more generic pages. Jakob notes that:

"I do not think sites appreciate that yet," he added. "They still feel that their site is interesting and special and people will be happy about what they are throwing at them."

I think this is true of some sites, but other smart sites are doing a lot of work in testing varying site design configurations to see what works - one of the benefits of the internet is that you can try lots of options and see what works best - and get the feedback fast.

The second thing that resonated with me, though, was this:

Web users were also getting very frustrated with all the extras, such as widgets and applications, being added to sites to make them more friendly.

Such extras are only serving to make pages take longer to load, said Dr Nielsen.

I resemble that remark! I am increasingly frustrated not just with the impact of loading widget-filled sites, but once they load they have a noticeable effect on my computer's performance, and I'm thinking increasingly that widgets are at risk of being the new popups - I think sites are going to have to be fairly moderate in widget usage until bandwidth is quite a lot higher for the average user.

There have been a number of cases in the last few days that have started to ask "Web 2.0" style social media businesses an interesting question - are they a community service or are they a communication platform - in other words are they responsible if some members of the community are beastly to each other., in this case on Twitter*

Nonetheless, it is an interesting question - is Twitter a Comms platform or a community? Is Facebook? Is there a difference?

If its a pure Comms platform, then its job is to deliver 5 x 9 and allow the members to fully exercise their freedom of speech.

If its a Community, then there is usually some form of moderation and control exercised.

By its actions, Facebook clearly sees itself as a community. Twitter has clarified its position that sees itself as a Comms platform. Both have every right to do so, their risk is commercial, there is no universal service obligation here.

In the paid-service world, even comms players moderate network user behaviour, however. The point that will now be battled out is what powers and rights users who are essentially consuming a free service have. The cost of moderating a service are higher than not doing so, and no service provider wansts to be dragged into higher costs - especially for a free service - so it will be an interesting case study.

If previous history is any guide, the service providers are most likely to gauge the temperature of the user base as a whole before making any decision that deviates far from "do nothing, just follow the policy" - though as Facebook found when it kicked well known bloggers off for infringement, the PR damage soon persuaded them to let those people back on (they still kicked off lessser known people for the same sins of course)

(* Old hands will recognise the above case as a Good Olde Flame War, now blog flavoured, and know that once the C word has been used and The Moderator involved, Godwin's Law is not far from being invoked