Jeremiah Owyang (Forrester Research), Hooman Radfar (Clearspring Technologies, Inc.), Walker Fenton (NewsGator), Pam Webber (Widgetbox), Ben Pashman (Gigya) discussed widgets strategies.

Jeremiah walked through the challenges facing developers as it relates to monetizing apps and walked the panel through how they view these challenges.

One word description of the business models of the panelists:

Forrestor – library, Clearspring – connector, newsGator -Kitchen, Widgetbox – Color Me Mine, Gigya – Spine for Social Media

Measurements and ROI
Not well developed today. How do we measure in a distributed world? Technically we can collect the data, but real communication gap in connecting web data and ROI. Do we get sales bump? Can we measure that like we can with coupons? Need to start with monetization strategy to decide how to measure so that we can structure data collection and measurement correctly.

Brand protection
How can we make sure Pepsi ad does not put next to Coke ad? You can’t. Consumers own the brands and they decide what’s relevant. Give consumers tools to market and evangelize on your behalf.

Distribution
How do we get widget distribution? Well known brands will get picked up, but problem for the remaining 99.9%. One option is to put the widget into ad units, but that might not have contextual relevancy. Getting close to the community may be the best option.

Monetization
How to make money? Everything that’s new, is not so new. There’s the social apps that are view/impression based. Starts with CPI (cost per install) basis. From a publisher prospective, extension of your content. This gets into revenue sharing deals that need to be worked out. The challenge is to get both parties to agree on the split. For advertisers, they want distribution they can pay.

We will learn a lot from the entrepreneurs out there about how to monetize.

Widget Strategy
How do we build a widget strategy? Need to understand full scope of process. need to define end to end success: conceptualization up front, distribution, measuring success on the back end. Start with objectives, for example, awareness=distribution, insight=installations. Take the top one or two things they come to you for and let them take it away with them. If its search, let them take your search with them. Really identify with your audience. Respect them. If it’s not popular on your site, it won’t be popular as a widget. Think of a widget as an extension of your website. Link it to your web monetization strategy.

Mistakes
What are the biggest misconceptions? Assuming it will be viral. eBay created a Facebook widget that doesn’t get used as compared to a third party widget that gets used on websites. The eBay widget doesn’t get used because Facebook is not about shopping, but the website widget gets used because it can be used to drive traffic to auctions.

Confusing information like a news feed with being social. To be social, it needs to be interactive, engaging and make my day. Really social apps that deliver value get lots of clicks.

Questions:
Can revenue be derived from utility as opposed to advertising? Look at Widgetbox – they make money. Lead gen applications like credit apps can be very profitable.

How do you work with a client to budget for widgets and media distribution? Costs can be anywhere from $5,000 to $150,000 for development. For distribution, look at online marketing campaign for examples.

[tags]gspwest08, graphing social, widgets[/tags]

Facebook has Platform. Google has OpenSocial. Many social networks are choosing to also roll out their own application platform offering.

Oren Michels (Mashery), Seth Sternberg (meebo), Jessica Alter (Bebo), Jeff Roberto (Friendster), Chris Damsen (Netvibes) discussed some of the different social networking platforms.

To add to the competition, Chris, from Netvibes, announced that Netvibes was releasing its platform. Code name Ginger.

We have a lot of competing platforms beyond Facebook and OpenSocial. If you look globally, different platforms have very different penetrations of different geographies. It presents challenges for application developers who must publish on different platforms and opportunities for other developers to make their versions of popular apps for other platforms.

It’s still really early as we are only 8 months into this platform API proliferation, so there is still time to get involved and innovate.

Every platform wants to embrace every application, but also wants to differentiate their APIs to expose unique features of their networks. This makes it tough for developers to really scale across different platforms. Seth, from meebo, talked about how the IM networks have competing standards and how it would be “way” better to have a write once standard for developers and users. The issue is who sets the standard and what risks does this pose for the others.

Jessica, from Bebo, points out that each of these companies would like to have healthy and well developed ecosystem, and that they have different functionality so one standard may not fit across all the networks. Bebo which has embraced the Facebook standard as part of it’s API, and it takes a few hours to port a Facebook app to Bebo. To port to Friendster, it could take hours to days.

Question: Most surprising group to join network:

Meebo – Librarians
Bebo – US community very engaged and younger
Friendster – expats moving around the world
Netvibes – well distributed user base

[tags]gspwest08, graphing social, platform wars[/tags]

Sean Ammirati (mSpoke / ReadWriteWeb), Ian Kennedy (Yahoo!), Bret Taylor (FriendFeed), Kevin Marks (Google),and David Recordon (Six Apart) spoke on a panel about feeds.

What’s social about feeds? Feeds help you keep track of what you friends/family are doing and can also be used a social filter for new content discovery.

The panel discussed what’s public and what should be private. A concern was raised about how the norm with a feed is sharing, unlike email where there is somewhat of an understanding that it is not something that should be public. In reaction, it was important that there should not be surprises. The user should have control over what information gets shared and with whom. Facebook doesn’t allow user activity to be shared via a feed and the panel felt it should be open.(applause)

The very public is easy, the very private is easy. It’s the middle ground that’s hard. The balance is where the focus needs to be.

The other factor is to be a good partner with the content providers. For aggregators of feeds, sending traffic back to the site that generated the content is really important. The challenge is to drive enough value back to the source to make sharing worthwhile for everyone.

When focused discussions happen within a friend based network the discussion can be much higher quality than a wide open public conversation like those on YouTube. It was observed that as more and more content flows onto the social networks and into feeds, we will see an increase in the need and value of filtering.

Clearly feeds are valuable, but there are some real business model issues to be resolved as more and more mashups integrate content from across the web.

[tags]gspwest08, graphing social, feeds, lifecasting[/tags]

Rodney Rumford, Editor & Publisher of FaceReviews.com, speaks about how use Facebook for branding. The audience is large with 66 million people and 16,000 applications. People are spending 20 minutes on site.

Rodney views it s frictionless WOMA, facilitates customer acquisition and drive low cost customer acquisition with specific demographic targeted marketing.

He describes how Facebook can be used for Lead Generation, brand extension, exposure and loyalty.

Suggests that marketers start experimenting.

8 ways to market on Facebook: Apps, groups, paid groups, tarted ads, newsfeed ad buys pages, beacon, and guerilla.

Scrabolous is the new golf – a new way to micro-touch and communicate. Where I’ve Been – good example of how a brand can sponsor an app and is aligned with Orbitz. Firefox group is an example of sponsored group. Facebook Ads is a self service ad solution that allows you to target demographics networks Social Ads with personal relevancy. CTR is low(my experience with CTR is 0.02%). Pages are another way to market. What’s the difference between groups and pages. News feed $100k to buy the banner. 1 ad per page. Third party ad networks like Cubics and Zynga (game network) have emerged to advertise on applications.

Rodney describes steps to success that include a clarity about end goals and a willingness to experiment.

Questions:

What about forced invite numbers? Tested forced invites with greeting card application – forced invites worked, but now growth remains.

[tags]gspwest08, graphing social, facebook marketing[/tags]

BJ Fogg presented about how the student’s of BJ’s Facebook class developed 50+ amazing apps, 10 million installs, and 1 million daily users.

They start by running through the background to the class and the founders of the class. They call it the Stanford Facebook Class and describe how they were making it up as they went. They thought they were going to have each student make 3 apps each, which may have been over ambitious.

Thought they would get 20 students, and 120 showed up for the class. They ended up with 80 students. BJ, Dave McClure and the TA’s aught 2 classes per week.

Four or five applications were really successful, such as KissMe. They got lots of press coverage, some of which was good, some not so good.

Students independently set up a Sunday group meeting that is still going on. The final was an open expo with over 500 people attending to see demo’s of the applications. You can find the student presentations at bayCHI

$500,000-$1,000,000 revenue generated by class, three companies formed, 2 companies acquired, lots of job offers and a few drop outs.

Phase 2 – 2 month experience to try again eg Oregon Trail (sp?)

Takeaways:

• Never too late to build new app
• Simple apps won
• Speed and iteration matter
• Community cooperation leads to success – more sharing, more success
• Individual opinions are worthless, need the crowd to judge
• Copying success is cheap/fast way to succeed
• Metrics matter, but today’s tools are weak – had to build their own
• This is a learnable skill
• Success comes from chaos/control cycle
• Mass interpersonal persuasion is finaly here

[tags]gspwest08, graphing social, Stanford Facebook Class[/tags]

Ben Ling, director of Platform Product Marketing at Facebook, speaks about Facebook’s platform. Ben starts by telling a story about a dinner with folks from Flixter talking about changes in Facebook platform.

The focus is on creating long term value. He says their strategy has three parts: frictionless platform, leverage social graph, and world class applications.

Frictionless Platform

What they want in terms of making the platform frictionless for users

• Helping users communicate
• Meaningful activity
• Valuable information
• User trust

He describes the changes on the site’s experience an enhanced wall, profiles profile boxs, profile action links that increase application uses.

He says they also want to make it frictionless for developers. Shared reusable technology, core infrastructure, and viral distribution of applications are all parts of this strategy. They are licensing the technology to others like Bebo. They are also have a marketplace for developer resources that connect marketers to developers.

Ben discusses how they had users suggest translations and vote on results which resulted in a very scalable translation/localization process. He says that this can be used by developers to localize their applications.

Leveraging the social graph

Ben describes the power of Facebook as an asynchronous conversation with your friends. You update everyone efficiently about what’s going on. He describes the example of the Causes application and their Photo application, which is the largest photo application in the world.

For developers, we want social applications for Collaborative authoring and design, multi-player games, sharing experiences

World class applications

They see applications progressing to other industries and to productivity. Sports, health, religion are all attractive segments. He also describes how they will be providing commerce functionality with developer APIs, secure purchasing and new types of application monetization models.

Ben discusses how they want to increase user control. He describes the problem of having to invite 15 friends to get the results. They are now adding ability for users to complain. He says that they want to support applications that users support. He is looking for positive user value loops. He describes Bookshelf, Dogbook, and Quizer as positive examples.

Questions:

How do you see social driving ecommerce? A variety of experiences are inherently social and that will lead to new applications. Who’s going to do something, join them. (Sounds like MatchActivity.com)

What is timeframe for ecommerce? Later this year will take credit cards.

Who else has licensed the Facebook platform? Involved in a number of discussions – no announcements

Why limit number of invites? Want invites to be quality invites. Need to balance quantity with relevance.

[tags]gspwest08, Graphing Social, Facebook, Ben LIng[/tags]

Amit Kapur from MySpace speaks about MySpace as a platform. He is talking about how MySpace looks at it’s developer platform and how it fits into their business model.

Starts by focusing on how they think about the internet. Internet becoming more personal, more portable, and more collaborative.

Myspace core business is driven by two key engines and enablement platform( tools to create your own experience as a user and developer tools) and a connectivity platform (the MySpace social graph). MySpace wants to use these core engines to drive change in the internet.

Launched a developer platform on February 5. Phase 1 is developer only (30 day head start). Phase 2 will go live to users and launch an application directory. Phase 3 layer in an additional services for developers.

What it to be a democratic process to give developers a voice and level playing field.

The platform will be based on open standards, eg, Open Social.

Amit states that there is a commitment to keeping MySpace safe and a commitment to monetization.

Five surfaces for an application

• directory listing
• profile
• canvas pages
• embeds on profiles
• embeds on home pages

API to public profile data
authenticate user
access friends list
public information
photos
videos
status mood

Amit focuses on the business of social platforms
Its been hard to monetize because traditional approaches don’t work. He says they are “laser focused” on solving this problem.

• 300 people in sales class 1 branded sales, class 2 perfromance sales, class 3 network ads
• 150 engineers and product managers focused on monetization technology
• all inventory runs off of one ad server and we can yield optimize every single impression

The philosophy – sell people not pages. Need to go beyond keywords to learn about what images, blog posts and unstructured data to create hyper targeted interest groups.

He shows an example of Brad – the sports and music fan. He then goes on to do a comparison of hypertargeting vs traditional web proxies. He shows the range of data that MySpace knows about it’s users and examples of how detailed they can get with people’s interest data. Southern Girl example is a marathon runner with a count down to the next marathon – imagine what you can do with that information.

He says they are seeing 300% improvement in click through for 150 initial advertisers using hyper-targeting.

He says they have developed a self-serve advertising system for MySpace that will open up the advertising possibilities for small business marketers.

He sees this as just the beginning of scratching the surface. They will continue to focus on smart monetization technology to unlock value in social media.

Questions

How much does hyper-targeting pull in? – Pulls in a lot of un-structured data. Uses smart machine learning technology – points to 300% improvement as evidence.

How will developers make money? Help facilitate with marketing. They will be developing their own ad network to help monetize this.

Where do you see engagement going? A few things that are important to consider, what are the metrics of a advertising system, what works at scale for advertisers, tie ins to new applications people are developing. Things will become more customized in terms of user/advertiser engagement

When will third party apps go live? Very soon, over the next few weeks.

[tags]gspwest08, graphing social, Graphing Social Patterns, Amit Kapur, MySpace[/tags]

Charlene Li of Forrester presents on the Future of Social Networking. Charlene speaks about her kids and how they are setting up online playdates. Meet at such and such a site at this time etc. I know this too. My son does exactly this on Runescape.

Social networks will be like air, she says. It will no longer be a list of destinations and multiple identities, but will be universal id. What will it be. My email, my phone number etc. The ID will be federated like OpenID, with a few major players serving as focal points.

The big guys are beginnig to talk – Data Portability Group.

She encourages us to think about the Bill of Rights for the Social Web.

We publicly assert that all users of the social web are entitled to certain fundamental rights, specifically:

* Ownership of their own personal information, including:
o their own profile data
o the list of people they are connected to
o the activity stream of content they create;
* Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others; and
* Freedom to grant persistent access to their personal information to trusted external sites.

Sites supporting these rights shall:

* Allow their users to syndicate their own profile data, their friends list, and the data that’s shared with them via the service, using a persistent URL or API token and open data formats;
* Allow their users to syndicate their own stream of activity outside the site;
* Allow their users to link from their profile pages to external identifiers in a public way; and
* Allow their users to discover who else they know is also on their site, using the same external identifiers made available for lookup within the service.

The graphic flat graph does not work, but is really much more complex and multi-dimensional. There a lots of places and lots of invites. This is a real problem.

Charlene thinks there will be some real opportunities here. The Portal players, Yahoo, Google, AOL are well positioned for this.

What people are doing on social networks. It’s about social, friends, games, movie sharing. She says what’s missing is shopping. Charlene takes us through an example of how Amazon could connect to friends’ reviews of books. Connect via the universal ID to bring in the content to where the user is.

She goes on to describe an example of how yahoo could incorporate my friends input into search, stories, stock portfolios, who has bought what’s being advertised, etc.

The under-rated value of networks should be recognized. It depends on the authority your networks interest and their authority on the topic, and the trust level among your network.

Charlene focus on the value of what Digital Podcast calls Super Fans. She says that marketers will pay to reach and influence valuable influentials, that each person will have their own personal CPM, and social networks will compete to have the best experience for high-influence individuals. Think of the power of Super Fans.

She projects 2008-2009 to be the era data portability and 2013 to be the timing of the ubiquitous social networks. Technology will not be the barrier, trust will be the barrier.

Her recommendations:

• Create linkages between services based on individually controlled identity federation.
• Compete on creating the most compelling social experience, not social graph lock in.
• Develop social applications that have meaning.
• Integrate social networks into existing activities
• Design business models that reflect the value created by people’s social networks

Questions:

What about the average Joe – will they have influence? Yes, depends on Joe’s social graph. Within it he will have influence.

What should people not on social web do to build network? Look to your email contact list. It will become automatic at some point.

UPDATE: Slides

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[tags]gspwest08, Graphing Social Patterns, Charlene Li, Forrester[/tags]

I’m here at Graphing Social West in San Diego. The guys from O’Reilly were kind enough to extend me a press pass so I get to see/hear what’s going on. The agenda looks good with presentations from analysts and company executives.

Charlene Li, from Forester, kicks things off with a presentation on the future of social networks, then Amit Kapur from MySpace speaks about MySpace as a platform. After that, there’s lots more on the agenda.

The event focuses on social networking with a heavy dose of MySpace and Facebook. I will do my best to pick up the high points of the show and report them throughout the day on my CinchCast, where I call in to Blog Talk Radio’s Cinch service and record a short audio about what’s going on.

[tags]Graphing Social, gspwest08, social networking[/tags]

It’s good to see brand marketers are working to produce some interesting work that ties TV together with online social communities. This post from Dave Deal titled Listening through communities shows off efforts by Levi and Kraft Crystal Light.

It’s great to see marketers start to understand why community matters, and it’s why we’re seeing investment in sites like these. Both are nicely designed sites that offer the promise of community.

The problem is that huge brands like these need to be attracting the attention of large audiences to make their marketing efficient, and trying to create large, new communities from scratch is both high cost and high risk.

In the physical world, you don’t try to create another shopping mall so people can come to your store, you take your store to the existing shopping mall so you can tap into an existing community. The mall shoppers are not going to go to a remote store in large numbers because it’s too much hassle.

By that logic, brands should not expect people to leave where they are now to travel to these new spaces. If the people are hanging out in MySpace and Facebook, why not build community there, or at least make that a major part of the your community building effort?

I looked, but could not find ways these sites link into MySpace/Facebook. If they are not built to connect to these huge social networks then they are making a mistake. Perhaps they are, but I couldn’t find out how. It would be interesting to find out if they have plans to connect into these communities.

I looked to see what others thought about the build versus join question. The question has been asked and debated in some depth. While there seems to be a strong leaning towards “it depends”, I think you have to go with the economics of community building.

Building large communities from scratch is hard, costly and risky. Anything you can do to lower the cost (hassle, time, etc) of connection and participation is incredibly important to building community. A well thought out strategy that makes it easy for people to connect to these new spaces from their existing hang outs will reduce the cost and risk of community building.

The social web is a distributed community with people in lots of places and increasingly they expect the content to come to them. RSS, embeddable players, and Facebook apps are training people that they can get what they want, wherever they want it. And that place is where they hang out now. Start there, and then give them a good reason to come visit your place.

If brand marketers don’t start getting this, they will spend lots of money and end up with lots of disappointments.

[tags]brands, community, social marketing, Levi, Krystal Light, Razor Fish[/tags]