Facebook Moving to Answer the Quora Question

Facebook is beta-testing a product in the same space that so many giants have attacked and fallen short-a curated question-answer, which has stumped the biggest of bigs. Has it been about social scale all along?

I just clicked on an innocent-looking Facebook ad asking for beta testers. What followed was a page explaining how Facebook is launching a new product that involves getting users to ask and answer questions that will be published to Facebook as a whole.

Note: I've copied and pasted the beta user offer from Facebook at the bottom of this post. Decide for yourself if I'm reading this right.

For those with only a moderate level of tech obsession, the service I'm talking about is one in which users interact with one other, posing and answering questions that are available to all users. Sort of what user forums are for software.

Google has tried it, Yahoo has tried it, and Quora, a tech darling of the moment-which just happens to be run by former Facebook CTO Adam D'Angelo, with guidance from original Facebooker Matt Cohler-is trying it. I'm a beta tester for Quora, and have used several ask-answer type services online. A weakness has always been the scale of the user community.

We've all heard the "if Facebook were a country" statistics-or, if you haven't, here's a handy infographic, which is already two months old (click to enlarge).

I include the table above only to illustrate that if Facebook has anything, it has scale. Even considering the recent privacy hullabaloo, 80 percent of Facebook users who couldn't care less still add up to a ferociously huge user population for an ask-answer service.

Okay, okay. Yes. Google (GOOG) has scale. Yahoo (YHOO)-well, it once had scale. But both sites boast core services based on moving freely in and out of their pages. Nothing keeps users in like a walled garden.

Additionally, there is something inherently social about asking questions that early ask-answer crowd seems to have missed.

Yes, I want an expert to answer my question about how a catalytic converter works (or Wikipedia), but if I want to know how to throw the best dinner party, I am just as likely to take notes on an answer from a friend of mine who throws great parties as I am from Paula Dean. Maybe more so.

Quora realizes this. It has built out a whole social networking component to its service, and encourages you to connect the other networks you are already a part of.

But what's harder? Getting people to know one another or getting wannabe pundits to pontificate about something they are interested in-on the Internet? I know I'm an easy sell on the latter. Just ask me

Below is the copy and pasted text from Facebook's "so you wanna be a beta tester" questionnaire. Decide for yourself what it's up to.

Help us build the future of Facebook.

We at Facebook are preparing to launch a brand new product to the world. We think it will be as exciting as Facebook Photos and Facebook Events, but we need your help to make it great.

As a beta tester, your job will be to ask great questions and provide great answers about your favorite topics. Economics? Skydiving? Relationships? Mexican Restaurants? It's up to you. You'll be the first person outside of Facebook to use this product. Your expert writing will be seen by tens of millions of people-including job recruiters. And we'll bring our best beta testers out to California to tour Facebook headquarters and meet the team.

Ready to get started?
Before we can give you exclusive beta access, we'd like you to submit three great sample questions and answers. We're looking for evidence that you can write clearly and authoritatively on familiar subject matter.

Here are some guidelines to follow when submitting your questions and answers:

Choose provocative questions. Write about things you know. Some examples:
How can I get over my fear of flying?
What are some fun family activities to do with two small children on the weekend?
What caused the U.S. stock market to crash in 2009?
What's the secret to throwing a great housewarming party?
What are the main differences between Google Chrome and Internet Explorer?
What are women looking for in a relationship?
What methods has BP tried to clean up the oil spill?
What should I do to prepare for the Bar exam?
How did The Beatles find success?
Write detailed, articulate answers.
Where relevant, cite and link to third-party sources such as Wikipedia.
Your answer must be original. Plagiarism is unacceptable.

Infographic of the Day: We're Drowning in Green Label Glut

BY Suzanne LaBarreTue May 4, 2010

The Washington Post has an infographic on the incredible number of green labels flooding the marketplace in recent years. Fair Trade, Certified Naturally Grown, Energy Star, FSC, LEED, OTCO, EPEAT.... How do you keep it all straight?

You don't. Based on a survey by the World Resources Institute, Duke University and the green analyst Big Room Inc., 600 labels worldwide dispatch some sort of eco -benchmark; 80 of those are in the United States. As the chart shows, topping the list are food (90); retail (74); buildings (64); and miscellaneous industry (79), including things like pest control. This has spawned all sorts of turf wars between environmentalists about whose label reigns supreme.

More importantly, we no longer have any easy way to tell between honest intent and greenwashing. Most certification systems aren't regulated at all, so unless you have a lot of time on your hands, it's impossible to determine which are best. Coffee that's USDA Organic or Fair Trade? Wood certified by the Forest Stewardship Council or the Sustainable Forestry Initiative? Even if something has a green cert, how do you know it actually meets the standard? And with so many different labels on the books, how could you possibly keep track? Systems that were supposed to make it easier for us to consume responsibly have actually made it harder. And while rating groups like the Good Guide cut through all the B.S., there's still no obvious solution for the store shelf, where decisions are actually being made.

More on green-rating problems here and here.

The concept of Q&A (questions and answers) on the web is nothing new. Although it probably started on IRC - one of the first 'chat' concepts, it quickly evolved into a more specialized concept, molding into forums, and evolving towards the still relatively new Question and Answer sites.

Websites like Yahoo! Answers and Blurtit have filled a market niche, where the clueless are paired with amateur professionals.

But the creators of Blurtit believed the potential of Q&A was still being underestimated. Rather than just a single niche - the mainstream audience targeted by Answers and Blurtit - they saw a need for more specialized groups. Especially the most wayward and atypical communities could make use of such a Q&A platform.

Qhub

Qhub, developed by the Blurtit guys, is such a platform. It can be used by anyone to create their own highly customized Q&A sites to handle visitor questions and answers. Even you can, and in a matter of minutes. Right now, those sites are still hosted locally by Qhub, but even so, they can be easily integrated with other, existing sites.

In general, Qhub looks a lot like the mainstream Q&A sites, with a few remarkable differences. For starters, Qhub lets you choose between a public, or private community. For the more tech-savvy amongst us, Qhub also features a developer API.

How To Create Your Own Q&A Site

So how do you create a Q&A site like that? It's very easy, and hardly takes longer than creating an email address. We'll walk you through the process.

On the Qhub site, start by naming your hub, and picking a suitable URL. You'll be redirected to the page pictured above. If necessary, you can change the name, but also supply relevant tags and a tagline.

Remember we talked about a private option? Here you'll be able to choose between community- or personal Q&A. The latter one ensures that you can only answer questions yourself. Next, you can make your hub public or private, where only invited people can join in.

These hubs are highly customizable, and it isn't too hard to make them fit in with an existing site or brand identity. There are four main themes, and you can specify the color scheme of each. More importantly, you can also upload custom background and header pictures.

Adding questions at this stage is optional, but it gets your site running and looks a lot better than lorem ipsum. With the tags specified at the start, Qhub will look for matching existing questions, which you can add with a flick of the mouse. Adjust the tags to look for better matching questions. Surprisingly, I was even able to find a number of questions for my dummy Q&A concept.

The last step, also optional, allows you to invite people from your email address book, and pair your hub with Facebook and Twitter.

You can proceed by adding more questions, aggregate an audience, or work on your website integration.

During the days when most people were not as active on the Internet, magazines and books were the main source. READ MORE.

LivingSocial Takes Top Spot Among Facebook Apps

After months of being the top Facebook application, Causes, which lets individuals and tiny groups raise money for charities and non-profits, has been bumped to the No. 2 spot.

if ( show_doubleclick_ad && ( adTemplate & SKY_LEFT ) == SKY_LEFT ) { placeAd('ARTICLE',commercialNode,3,'',true) ; }

Building Complementary Services: A Powerful Long-Term Social Media Marketing Strategy

A fundamental aspect of marketing is to gain the attention of a target audience and engage or redirect it in a way which fulfills specific objectives, such as a positive increase in reputation, legitimacy, mindshare, exposure (visitor traffic), sales and captured leads (subscribers, users, clients etc).

In terms of online marketing, social media channels offer many opportunities. Some webmasters focus on setting up profiles with self-serving user generated content only for backlinks and traffic. Other savvy brands or individuals actively interact with online communities while moderating the impulse to 'spam', in order to build legitimacy, authority and a better reputation in the specific field.

And then there are a few that adopt a particularly powerful social media marketing strategy that consistently extracts attention with ease. A way that reaches out to every new and future member of a social community automatically with minimal effort. A tactic that markets continuously as long as the social channel exists and grows, without end or interruption.

Introducing the Method

Image Credit: Mick Ø

You might have heard about Dell earning $1 million in revenue from posting product offers on their Twitter account. So they're using Twitter like email, as a sales alert system. Not a big deal really. But they've also recently started posting exclusive 'Twitter-only' discount offers on their Twitter profile (Over 100K followers!). Exclusive to Twitter. Those are the magic words. Exclusive to Myspace users. Exclusive to Bebo users. Exclusives, exclusives.

When a social media channel (like Twitter) becomes large enough, it's time to think about devoting serious attention to leveraging the size and reach of the userbase. Marketing doesn't need to only target the lucky demographic you manage to data-mine and filter out from the online crowd. Sure, its more 'targeted' but why limit yourself to just that? Why not reach everyone and let the interested few fall through the net themselves? Move the masses. Not just the few. No market segmentation needed. No need to selectively pitch and sell.

Exclusive product or service offers for users of a specific social website are only the beginning. There are a lot more ways to deeply tap into and gain the favor of large social communities. But first of all you'll need to understand the mentality of social media users. People will consciously or subconsciously self-identify as members of a particular online social tribe. "I'm a Digg user. I'm a Facebook junkie. I love being a Youtuber."

Put aside your demographic notions of gender, age and location for a moment. People are more than all that when they are online. They create identities, behavioral patterns and personas based on the community they most frequently use. This constructed online identity is a proxy that can be used to not only engage these users but develop a favorable impression of your brand. Tap into their love or hate for the service and reach from there.

Image Credit: myspace is for losers

A powerful social media marketing strategy is to create a service, tool, system which perfectly complements, faciliates and improves each individual users experience of the specific social website. Think of the features that unite them and the problems that frustrate them. This creation must be almost indispensable and extremely useful to a very broad audience. They must be able to pick it up easily and integrate it into their daily routine.

It must be highly customizable and relevant to the different ways one can participate in the social community. A powerful long-term strategy would be to invest time and money on creating free complementary services for large and growing online social communities. Each new or future user is drawn towards to your tools naturally because they help them to better enjoy the social channel. They will gravitate towards you and pull other users along.

The Twitter Example

I'll use Twitter to illustrate my point again but note that what is said here applies to most social media communities. Twitter is not exceptional in this regard. All large social media communities online operate in a similar manner: they all have devoted users who love ways to improve their experience of the community or service.

Many popular blogs (like Mashable) and other websites have a huge Twitter fetish. Whenever a new and interesting app/service is released, they'll write about it immediately. Twitter users will often tweet and retweet a new app because its relevant or interesting to them. So what's the end result when you create an exceptional tool for Twitter users?

A large influx of traffic and links that'll flow towards your service's webpage, which can easily to funneled to your Twitter profile, other websites and business. The large influx of new users is continually exposed to your brand (indirectly via the service). You're essentially appealing to a guaranteed audience that'll always be there.

If your tool/service appeals to a broad enough market, it'll develop a userbase. Work at it and soon enough it'll grow itself. People will recommend it to friends, new users and the general public even withou any direct incentives from your end. Why? Because it is genuinely helpful. There is minimal trace of self-serving marketing and little effort or cost at your end to continually leverage a community that is all too willing to promote you.

Reaching the Peak of this Marketing Strategy

When someone asks for a good non-mobile way of using Twitter, the names of popular desktop clients like Tweetdeck and Twhirl often come up. They are considered essential tools for a better user experience. They are near the peak of our social media marketing strategy.

The pinnacle is reached when your service achieves great recognition and mindshare within the community. At this point you can easily expect an endless flow of user recommendations, backlinks, referral traffic and support from a community interested in evangelizing their favorite social media channel and inadvertently, the value of your brand.

This may even lead to the specific social media channel directly recommending your service as a worthy addon to what they offer. For instance, Twitter is very explicit about what third-party tools it endorses: the Apps page feature Twhirl/Tweetdeck amongst other tools and its one of the first few pages that is pushed to a new user when he/she signs up.

Even if you do not reach this level of achievement for a single service, you can create many diverse services to fulfill different needs. Don't release them all at once. Spread them out and launch over a certain timespan so links and traffic can stream in consistently from blogs that monitor news about the social website. Be sure to interlink and promote your previous tools/services. This is another way of gaining attention and building influence over time.

Alternatively, you can sponsor and fund creative web developers who have a knack for creating addons for the specific social community. You don't always have to build them yourself, you just need to strongly associate them with your brand.

Publicity is Giving Someone a Reason to Talk about You

Image Credit: speech bubble

Why would a popular tech industry blog like Techcrunch write about an unknown web designer in Toronto? Or a freelance writer in Tokyo? Because these two people did something interesting. Something relevant to Techcrunch's blog and topic focus. Publicity is easy to get when your target is content-hungry publishers in a news cycle that loves novelty.

Many people encounter problems marketing online. You can't get mentioned in a popular blog that sends a lot of visitors. Because you're not relevant. So the solution is simple: make yourself compatible via an action, association or proxy. Build/do something that people in a specific field will talk about. The social media marketing strategy we are talking about is a publicity funnel. It gives you attention you can redirect to grow your core business or brand.

In the long run, you always should aim to build excellent authority services that grab a big chunk of user mindshare but should you fail in that aspect, there are short term advantages to using this marketing strategy. It can be a cyclical tactic to leverage news publishers for free traffic. Build a system, launch and promote. Grow users. Update with new features, send out news alerts. Build another service, launch and promote. Interlink systems, cross-promote. Grow users. Update features. It's a way to get free traffic and links over and over again.

It's kinda like linkbait on a mullet page but this is a lot more effective. You don't just become a flavor of the day on Digg but an actual service with registered users. Attention isn't given to you for the duration of a funny article but everyday when someone returns to re-use your service. Over time, user loyalty can develop into hardcore evangelism.

Monetization Won't Be a Problem When You Command Attention

In general, monetization comes easy if you're willing to work hard to develop your service's reputation and value amongst the community of social media users. Remember Ashley Qualls? She's a 18 year old high school dropout who created a website for Myspace layouts early on.

Most new Myspace users want to customize their layouts so layout providers were in hot demand. Her popular website was widely embraced by the community and it made $70K and more in revenue every month (back in 2007). While Facebook's popularity has eclipsed MySpace, there's still a guaranteed user audience for established providers like Ashley.

There's always a way to make money when you have people flowing into your site on a daily basis via the proxy that you've set up for a particular social media channel. In the end, what you've created is another notch in your resume and can be used in many ways to demonstrate competence or expertise. Apart from monetizing via display ads or premium service plans, you can heavily promote your core business or offer B2B consultancy programs.

But don't spend all your money and time only creating hit-or-miss services. When it comes down to it, a strategy like this must only be an add-on to your core business model or income system. Until it becomes a massive success, never mistake the means for the end.

What Social Media Sites Should You Target?

This particular method works best with very large and well known social media communities because you're relying on their popularity and the size of the userbase to get attention. If you're unfamiliar with what's hot nowadays, the Alexa Top 500 gives a rough listing of the heavily trafficked social media sites both globally and in each country.

Focus on them but always keep an eye on other growing social communities. Read sites that report on new startups and be in the loop for news about specific social sites, especially the ones that appear to be growing fast. The key is to look out for problems faced by users, while enhancing features which are the main draw of the specific social service.

Keep trust-worthy programmers/coders and designers close by so you can materialize ideas as fast as possible. It also helps to be an active user in the specific social media community so you can develop an instinctive understanding of its architecture, usability and possibilities.

Sounds like a Lot of Effort Doesn't it? But it Works.

If you're feeling tired just by reading this article, this tactic is probably not for you. If you're really excited (with wheels turning in your head), you're on the right track to success. There has to be some enthusiasm for you to see this method through. And one last important tip: always build relationships with key influencers, way before you begin to pitch. Trust me, it helps a lot.

To get new tips on social media and marketing, subscribe to dosh dosh today (It's free!).

Live Poker for iPhone: Time Wasters Are Rising!

13 11 2008

Local review site Yelp is not going to sit around and let competitor CitySearch have even a day to celebrate their new beta launch.

CEO Jeremy Stopellman, noticing our Comscore comparison of the services - "According to comScore, Citysearch brought in 14.6 million unique visitors in the U.S in October, compared to 143 million uniques across its ad network. (Yelp, by the way, did 6 million uniques)" - emailed us with some of their internal traffic numbers and stats.

Yelp's Google Analytics stats for the past thirty days show 15.8 million unique visitors, way above the six million Comscore records. And Yelp also shows other interesting stats in the chart below: 4 million reviews, with 34% restaurants, 23% shopping, 8% beauty and fitness, etc. Users are 51% male and 49% female, and 65% have a college degree.

Not bad for a company that was born just four years ago.

http://plays2run.com/table/index.php

An interesting approach to griding out strategy for business.

This is from Jason's e-mail list. I find his approach cutting edge. Just going for it is a breath of fresh air. Mahalo could be the sleeper site of 2009, if he pulls off the vision... See notes below on a great approach by a CEO. I need to have coffee with Jason in the coming weeks to discuss a little TV | Internet start up, Jason and Danny Sullivan would be an interesting combination to work with... Jason you up for it, I'm between Santa Monica, and Burbank now...
__________________

In one of the first emails to this list I asked folks for feedback on
how to make Mahalo better. The winner would get a free DASH GPS unit
(no, not getting paid by them, just love their product so they gave me
a few to give away).

Got over 100 emails almost instantly and I read these while playing
poker (I'm getting crushed right now for the record. Was up 6,200 for
the year and now up only 1,000--lost $5,200 over three games in a
row--brutal). While playing poker I read these on my Blackberry as
they came in (wait, is that why I lost?!?). The result was a non-stop
stream of consciousness about how people view the product. The top
three asks were:

a) A cleaner homepage
b) A customizable homepage
c) A mobile (specifically iPhone) version of Mahalo.

A sample of the suggestions follows below, and for my money the best
suggestion is to clean up the homepage. The first person to send in
that suggestion was Marques Stewart, who works in IT (
http://www.linkedin.com/in/marquesstewart ).

Thanks Marques. You're also invited to the TechCrunch50 event as my
guest ($2,995 ticket otherwise!) if you can make it to San Francisco
on Sept 8-10th.


Mahalo Suggestion Box: Selected Comments
------------------------------

Adam P. from Australia suggested a mobile version of Mahalo for the
iPhone. Brandon S. and Keith C. had this idea as well.

Matt C. suggested a digg spy service where you could watch searches on
Mahalo. There are some major privacy issues with that (think someone
searching for their own name + keyword), but we do already have a
dashboard to watch other user activity on Mahalo. It includes links
suggested, guide note edits, and message board posts. You can find it
here: http://tinyurl.com/mahaloua

Cody suggested letting good contributors make pages about themselves.
Actually, anyone can create a page about themselves on Mahalo right
now--notable or not. To create a page just visit:
http://mahalo.com/Special:Createpage

Henry B. suggests a bi-weekly or monthly podcast "about Mahalo's
challenges, struggles, ideas and also solicit ideas from the community
to better Mahalo." That's a good idea, I think we'll get on that.

Adam M. suggested starting a twitter feed "and post once a day with
the Mahalo page of the day." Good idea Adam!

Marques S. suggested cleaning up the homepage she explains: "People
like to have a good majority of their news/search in the upper area of
the browser and Mahalo should try to capitalize on that. I believe
that having to scroll down to see alot of the features that Mahalo has
to offer isn't a good UI choice." I agree, great suggestions, and we
are working on a new homepage.

Brad McCarty suggests we integrate tighters with FriendFeed: "Let's
say that you create a Mahalo page - once you're done editing, you can
choose to have that page auto-linked into your FriendFeed stream. The
same idea could hold true for major page updates, etc." We're in touch
with FriendFeed on this one already. It's clearly a great idea.

Max D. suggests a random key on Mahalo, saying a "Stubleupon
type of button to get a random Mahalo page" would be killer. We have
one, perhaps we should market it? http://www.mahalo.com/Special:Random

David S. has a great idea along the lines of our "show us your Mahalo"
project: "give away something very cool... to the person who gets full
camera time during either; the All Star Game, or one of the
Conventions coming up. Camera time being: A sign, painted body,
banner, etc... that has Mahalo loud and clear, and has something about
the event that can draw the cameras attention long enough to give you
free advertising that could be ultimately priceless." That's an
interesting idea.

Paul L. says "I think it would be nice to see the rankings of # clicks
per link for each Mahalo page." I agree, this is something we have on
our list. It's groovy to see which page is clicked the most by users.

Steve H. smacks us down about the homepage as well: "My recommendation
is to unclutter the main home page. Make it streamlined and something
you don't have to page down to start your topic search. The
'featured' list is way to long and distracting." I agree. It's my
fault and we're fixing it. Kieran H. and Matt B. also say clean up the
homepage!

Daniel R. has suggestions about the homepage as well: "the main
suggestion I would have would be to be able to personalize the mahalo
front page once you are logged into your profile. Nothing fancy, but
there are some sections I like to see, but others I don't care at
all." Agreed. Personalization of the homepage might only appeal to the
top 2% of the audience, but we want that 2%! Charles M. M., Russell
E., Bobby E. and Steve K. also suggested we make a personalized
homepage.

Kevin W. had a lot of suggestions, among his best was "* To help drive
traffic, how about a referral program where you earn a couple of
points for everyone you get to visit the site. You can then redeem
your points for cash, music downloads, Mahalo merchandise, or
whatever." I love this idea. In fact, we've been thinking about doing
this since day one, but we've focused like a laser on the core
product. Maybe next year on this one.

Nathan P. suggests coming up with an incentive program for folks who
make the site better. We've been thinking about this from the start.
However, it's very complicated and we're going to focus on it after we
have the core functionality of the site completed (i.e. new homepage,
perfect Guide Pages).

Josh Rappoport asks "how about Mahalo Follow for Safari?" I love this
suggestion and we did a massive search for Safari developers. Turns
out there is no plugin structure for Safari, so we would have to hack
it and that would be cost prohibitive. I'm bummed too.

Alan J. suggests "using the API from Dash to incorporate Mahalo.com
into the DASH unit itself." Brilliant! We've put it on the list.

Benjamin T. suggests focusing on mobile and supporting OpenID. I can't
believe we don't support OpenID already... we should. I gotta figure
out how that one slipped through the cracks!

Russell N. suggest "A simple rating system for each article. 1-5
stars or something like that. Simple, quick and easy." Not a bad idea
at all.

Jonathan R. says "make the Top 7 and Guide Notes bigger and stand out
from the rest of the page." Good point.

Patrick C. suggest we add polls to Mahalo. I like this idea a lot.

May 12, 2008 - By Jon Swartz -- SAN FRANCISCO -- As the Internet's Next Big Thing, social networks are drawing inevitable comparisons to TV networks.

The Elevator Pitch Is Dead. Introducing The Twitpitch

May. 6, 2008 at 6:35pm Eastern by Muhammad Saleem

The landscape of corporate public relations is changing fast. First the press release died and we told you how to write a press release for the social media audience. Now the elevator pitch is dead and here's how to adapt.

Corporate pitches are usually unnecessarily long, filled with useless buzzwords, and an unfortunate lack of transparency (in favor of overstatement). An elevator pitch is supposed to solve that problem by forcing the person making the pitch to do it in 30 seconds or 150 words (the time it would take you going from the lobby to your floor in an elevator). The time restriction ensures that all formalities and verboseness are dispensed with and only the most important and relevant information is shared between an entrepreneur and a venture capitalist.

The Essential Elevator Pitch

With no more than 30 seconds to convince someone to give you a couple million dollars, what do you focus your pitch on?

1. What is the core idea and what problem does it solve?
2. Has it been done before (is there competition?) and is there a viable market for your core idea?
3. Why are you best suited to solve the problem and what is your business model?

These are some of the most important basic elements that you have to cover in 150 words or less. But what if you only had 140 characters to make an impression, what would you do?

Enter The Twitpitch

Stowe Boyd, an information technology consultant, recently decided that elevator pitch is way too long and that the only way he will accept pitches is through his idea of Twitpitching.

A twitpitch takes the following from:

1. A twitter message of the form "@stoweboyd [pitch goes here without the brackets] #twitpitch". (Note the #hashtag means that these will be accessible at www.hashtags.org/tag/twitpitch.)
2. A second, optional twitter of the form "@stoweboyd [single URL goes here without the brackets] #twitpitch". Just one URL, please.
3. A third, optional twitter of the form "@stoweboyd [proposed time(s) to meet or call go here without the brackets] #twitpitch".

That's it.

What's more, anyone who doesn't conform to that method will be automatically marked as spam after three strikes.

To be fair, you have three Twitter messages (therefore 420 characters) to make your point. The first one allows you to succinctly describe your service, the second lets you link directly to the product or service you're pitching and the third allows you to set a time and place to meet. What intrigued me about the idea is that it isn't a whole new way to pitch, it's another way to make the same pitch without adding any noise to the conversation. For example, here's what a successful Twitpitch looks like [via @thoughtfarmer]:

@jeffdachis #twitpitch For your new venture: ThoughtFarmer is social software for enterprise intranets. ReadWriteWeb: http://snurl.com/26hmn

The reason why the press release is dying is because these releases are usually boring, susceptible to hyperbole, and have a singular focus on the company. Similarly, no one is interested in your pitch of a product because no one finds value in your one-sided, obviously biased look at the product. The Twitpitch forces you to talk only facts (because you have only 140 characters for the first message) and then link to one (and only one) URL related to your product. If you want to make the biggest impact, this link won't be a link to your press release or even a link to your product, it will be a link to the best or most prominent coverage that your product has gotten (much like the link above for ThoughtFarmer). As you can see, this process is incredibly similar to the decisions you make when you submit an article to or vote on an article on a social news site. Essentially, all you have to go on is a title and description from the article and some things that you can infer about each submission from certain trigger points.

The Twitpitch streamlines the same process for Twitter. The title and summary are condensed into one tweet and the link in another. And assuming the link takes you to coverage of the product on another site, you bypass the corporate speak and get the facts from a human voice (and you are already getting social proof). Compare that to getting an email from someone you don't know (and probably can't get additional information on - sorry no about pages for PR companies), with no text in the email body, and a 2-3 page (if you're lucky) document attached that you are supposed to read and respond to. A Twitpitch is open and transparent, delivers on social proof, creates value without adding noise, and is somewhat personalized. The final great thing about the Twitpitch is that even when it is personalized, it isn't limited to the person it is directed at. You can simply send a message on Twitter, tag it with #twitpitch and anyone can track all the pitches being made at anytime by simply going to: http://www.hashtags.org/tag/twitpitch. That way, even if you forget to direct a pitch at someone, chances are it will find its way to the right people.

Muhammad Saleem is a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news sites. The Let's Get Social column appears Tuesdays at Search Engine Land.

Online Shoppers Trust Each Other

New research out from eMarketer again, argues that shoppers are increasingly trusting each other when it comes to finding credible information advice about products or companies:

The fact is that knowledgeable and trusted peers provide valuable advice and insight to people trying to find the right products to buy and gain the advice and information they need. In fact, JupiterResearch reckons that online social network users were three time more likely to trust their peers' opinions over advertising when making purchase decisions:

So, what does this really mean… Well, I think that people are actually getting more savvy in how they find and absorb information and that people are now looking to credible expert sources and trusted peers compared to just lists and lists of anonymous or not-related reviews. Ultimately no-one wants to be fooled by advertising or biased reviews, and having trusted sources from experts, opinion leaders, peers, and friends - can really help people feel more confident in their product research.

Social Graph + Research + Shopping -> 2008 is the year..

ThisNext Takes $5 Million Series B

Social shopping service ThisNext has taken $5 million Series B in a round that included previous investors Anthem Venture Partners and Clearstone Venture Partners.

ThisNext launched in 2006 with a product that offers shopping combined with comments, tagging, social recommendations, comment ratings and a wishlist. Users can also create a website widget to show products they like to others via any website.

The company has close links to Jason Calacanis, with Calacanis sitting on the board, and CEO Gordon Gould was previously with Blogsmith (the platform behind Weblogs Inc) and Silicon Alley Reporter.

See Michael's 2006 review of ThisNext here.

Call it World of Worldcraft. Amazon's Questville, set for a late 2008 release, is a spinoff of the company's Askville, a user-driven crowdsourcing question-and-answer service on topics ranging from everything from cars to electronics to relationships to science.

With Askville, users who provide helpful answers are given virtual gold as they rise in status (called "levels") - two metrics familiar to anyone who's ever played massively multiplayer online role-playing games like World of Warcraft. Questville will take this to its logical conclusion, offering adventures and Quest Coins to helpful Askville users. With a game like WoW, you become more powerful by killing monsters and completing fantastic tasks; with Questville, you'll get virtual rewards for providing helpful real-world information.

Though it may seem strange that Amazon is adding role-playing game elements to its services, it's really the most prominent example of an idea that's been bubbling for years, put forward by people like venture capitalist/Internet guru Joi Ito: Harness all that time, ability and creativity that users are investing in online fantasy worlds and leverage it for real-world, practical uses. Indeed, if Questville is successful, it could prompt other Internet companies to add MMO-style features to their own systems.

Hat tip to Alice Taylor of the essential game blog Wonderland, who notes: "We humans are such reward-oriented critters, aren't we!" Yes, and big Internet companies are beginning to learn what game developers have known for decades.

Image credit: www.questville.com.

Apple is in the early stages of developing a new hybrid display, according to recent rumblings.

This new display is supposedly capable of two different methods of inputs; electronic and physical. The displays will be unlike traditional offerings where the screen only shows what the keyboard and mouse tell it, but will also be interactive, like Apple's iPhone. Users will be able to 'touch' the screen to input and control information on the display.

No additional information other than 'the displays will have built-in iSight cameras' was given. We will keep you posted on any further developments.

The Wealth of Networks:
How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
by Yochai Benkler, Yale University Press

© Copyright 2006, Yochai Benkler. http://www.congo-education.net/wealth-of-networks/ch-04.htm

Chapter 4
The Economics of Social Production

This online version has been created under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial ShareAlike license - see www.benkler.org - and has been reformatted and designated as recommended reading - with an accompanying Moodle course - for the NGO Committee on Education of CONGO - the Conference Of Non-Governmental Organizations in Consultative Relationship with the United Nations - in conjunction with the Committee's commitment to the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development, the International Decade for a Culture of Peace and Non-violence for the Children of the World and related international Decades, agreements, conventions and treaties.

Epigraph

"Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing."

"Such are the differences among human beings in their sources of pleasure, their susceptibilities of pain, and the operation on them of different physical and moral agencies, that unless there is a corresponding diversity in their modes of life, they neither obtain their fair share of happiness, nor grow up to the mental, moral, and aesthetic stature of which their nature is capable."

John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859)

Chapter 4
The Economics of Social Production

The increasing salience of nonmarket production in general, and peer production in particular, raises three puzzles from an economics perspective.

Webs.com Bets on Social Gaming Across Facebook

Written by Jane Pinckard, Friday, December 7, 2007

The User-Generated Content Myth

by Scott Karp

A whole mythology is emerging around the idea of "users" - consumers, fans, regular average folk - creating content that media companies and brands can leverage. It's a compelling idea - but it's a myth.

The reality is that "average people" don't create a lot of content - at least not the commercially viable kind. Most people are too busy. Those that do "create content" - and who do it well - are those who are predisposed to being content creators. The have some relevant skills, training, raw talent, motivation, something.

"User-generated content" sites like YouTube are much less a platform for armies of average people to create mountains of content and much more a platform for real talent to be discovered.

The latest story in the UGC mythology is a "fan" of the Apple iTouch - a college student in England - who created a commercial for the iTouch, posted in on YouTube, got discovered by Apple marketing execs, and got shipped off to Apple's ad agency to collaborate on a "professional" version of the ad.

Here's the original version by Nick Haley, an 18-year-old freshman at the University of Leeds, England.

Pretty slick, huh? Is it just me, or does something about this smack of LonelyGirl15 - just a bit too "authentic" to be believable? Nick got "discovered" by Apple execs after the video had only be viewed a couple thousand time - hardly a viral hit by YouTube standards.

Even if it is legitimate, Nick is clearly a talented guy. This is not the work of your average fan - and I have a hard time believing that Nick created the commercial and posted it to YouTube out of pure "passion" for Apple products. Might it not have cross his mind that he could get discovered?

New York Times advertising columnist Stuart Elliott happily plays along with Apple and their ad agency in establishing the new user-generated content mythology:

Consumers creating commercials "is part of this brave new world we live in," said Lee Clow, chairman and chief creative officer at TBWA Worldwide, based in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Playa del Rey.

"It's an exciting new format for brands to communicate with their audiences," Mr. Clow said. "People's relationship with a brand is becoming a dialog, not a monolog."

To be clear, I love the idea of YouTube and other user-generated content sites as platforms for talent to be discovered - especially talent that might never have been discovered before the web made it possible for anyone to publish their work.

I can also understand why media companies and advertisers want to propagate the myth of average user generating all this cool content.

But I think describing the phenomenon in honest terms is just as compelling - if not more so - than the myth.

Abstract: Social roles in online discussion forums can be described by patterned characteristics of communication between network members which we conceive of as 'structural signatures.' This paper uses visualization methods to reveal these structural signatures and regression analysis to confirm the relationship between these signatures and their associated roles in Usenet newsgroups. Our analysis focuses on distinguishing the signatures of one role from others, the role of "answer people." Answer people are individuals whose dominant behavior is to respond to questions posed by other users.

ThisNext Raises Round Of Venture Debt

Santa Monica-based ThisNext, an online shopping discovery and community web site, has raised a round of venture debt, the firm told socalTECH Friday. The firm's CEO, Gordon Gould, said that ThisNext raised a round from Western Technology Inc., which will go towards giving the firm runway extension prior to the company's Series B funding in the fall. Gould said that the funding should give the firm a strong position and help boosts the firm's valuation in advance of its venture capital efforts. The funding will go towards operations at the company.

Read this PDF. Online World As Important to Internet Users as Real World? USC-Annenberg Digital Future Project Finds Major Shifts in Social Communication and Personal Connections on the Internet Is the online world as important to Internet users as the real world? Large numbers of Internet users hold such strong views about their online communities that they compare the value of their online world to their real-world communities, according to the sixth annual survey of the impact of the Internet conducted by the USC-Annenberg School Center for the Digital Future.