Solariat Founder and CEO Jeffrey Davitz has a message for anyone trying to leverage social network data to make money: “The fundamental problem with social is yes, it’s big data, but it’s mostly big, sucky data.”
What he means, he explained during a recent interview, is that life isn’t too easy for social platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, where deciphering what users actually want means poring through a lot of extraneous information. Google is able to earn so much advertising revenue because its search users are expressly seeking information on a specific topic. They’re relatively likely to click on a sponsored link if it will answer their questions or connect them with the products they’re seeking.
The challenge on those other platforms — for both the platform providers trying to create targeted advertising models, and brands trying to engage with consumers on the platforms — is getting messages in front of users in a manner that’s “congruent” with what they’re already doing. Take Facebook and its advertising revenue woes, for example. If users are generally on Facebook with the intention of interacting with their peers, they might not notice or care about the display ads lining the page, no matter how much data they share via profiles, posts, Likes and other interactions with the platform.
Engage when and how consumers expect it
During a panel at last week’s Data Science Summit (in which Davitz also participated), Dan Neely from Networked Insights described this challenge as figuring out “how to he part of the distraction.” If a company is just guessing when and how to approach customers, the company is just another entity — along with instant messages, wall posts, other brands, etc. — competing for that users’ attention. And if users are there to do social networking, corporate messages are probably going to lose that fight.
Davitz thinks there’s a way for social platforms to overcome this problem by using techniques such as natural-language processing and machine learning to identify those instances where users really are expressing “query-like intent.” It will never be as clear as entering “best hiking shoes” into a search engine, but, for example, someone certainly might note in a wall post or a tweet that he’s going hiking and needs new shoes. He might specifically ask friends which shoes they prefer. If you sell hiking shoes, there’s your signal. Rather than simply peppering someone’s page with ads about hiking because he listed it as an interest, now he’s actually in the market for gear and might pay attention.
Davitz claims proof that this approach works. His company, Solariat, is experimenting with a publishing industry partner to place content in front of Twitter users when they express interest in areas on which the publisher has an existing body of information (Solariat has done the same thing with companies that task a community manager with monitoring social media). Clickthrough rates are “astonishingly high,” he said — over 20 percent — and even users who don’t click aren’t marking the tweets as spam. Because the users getting replies are actively seeking information on a topic, even if they’ve only implicitly acknowledged as much, a pointer to that information is either welcome or, at least, seems natural.
Balancing effectiveness and creepiness
As with many big data efforts, though, the obvious concern with this approach is perceived privacy violations. “People might find it a little creepy if you had an overactive agent that was responding every time you say something,” Davitz acknowledged. In that case, companies might be better off gathering signals about users and targeting them with messages only at ideal times, which likely will vary based on the types of platforms and content involved.
For example, Davitz, an artificial intelligence expert, first got interested in social media engagement while working on a closed network within the U.S. military. In that case, personnel were ordered to sign up and had very low privacy expectations, which meant they expected to be monitored and regularly presented with additional information. That type of situation certainly had its advantages in the dynamic Iraq theatre of war, Davitz said, because soldiers posting about heading to a particular region, for example, would automatically receive the latest information on what was going on there and what to look out for.
Davitz thinks public platforms such as Facebook or Twitter, as well as ecosystem players such as Buddy Media and Vitrue, could learn a thing or two from how the military used social media as a channel for conveying information. If revenue is the goal, social networks have to be more than passive places where people just meet and interact relatively free from any corporate messaging, he said. They also need to look past ads as the only way of reaching consumers and perhaps find more natural and appealing ways to provide information.
A military-level of interaction might never be welcome on public platform, Davitz said, but “the thinking [on public networks] is really quite primitive compared to the thinking I saw in the military.”
Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user FuzzBones.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro: Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial. 

from GigaOM http://gigaom.com/cloud/monetizing-social-media-means-navigating-big-sucky-da...
Online video accounted for more than half of all Internet traffic in 2011, and it’s only going to grow: Cisco estimates that we will consume three trillion Internet video minutes worldwide per month by 2016. That means that the world will watch the equivalent of 833 days of video every single second!
The number of people using online video services will also grow dramatically. Worldwide, 792 million people used online video last year. By 2016, that number will roughly double, to 1.5 billion users.
Cisco released these projections Wednesday as part of its annual Visual Networking Index forecast, which also concluded that the world’s data consumption will reach 1.3 zettabytes by 2016 (for more details on that staggering number, check out Stacey Higginbotham’s write-up). But most intriguing about all that data, and the role video is playing, are the devices that are causing it.
TVs and game consoles make us watch longer
There are two major factors for online video’s huge growth potential: Online video is finding its way to the living room TV set, and people are watching more videos on tablets. Cisco’s forecast shows that especially those HD streams to the TV will have a huge impact going forward. The amount of Internet video delivered to TVs already doubled in 2011, and its expected to grow sixfold by 2016. By 2016, online video delivered to TVs will make up for six percent of all worldwide consumer Internet traffic.
Some additional data released by Ooyala today explains quite nicely why TV traffic is growing that much: Once online video reaches the TV, viewers start to stick around much longer. Completion rates for videos longer than 6 minutes are over 50 percent on connected TVs, but only around 25 percent on PCs.

Even more astonishing: 88 percent of all content consumed on connected TVs is longer than 10 minutes.

More devices will cause more traffic
At the same time, we are going to watch a lot more video on mobile phones and tablets. Mobile video traffic will grow 18-fold from 2011 to 2016, and the number of worldwide mobile users will reach 1.6 billion, a six-fold increase over 2011 levels. Altogether, nearly a third of all Internet traffic will come from devices other than the PC in 2016.
Of course, all of that wouldn’t be possible if we all didn’t have more and more devices to watch all those videos. Cisco estimates that the number of connected devices per U.S. household is going to grow from 5.5 connected devices (excluding cell phones and anything accessing mobile phone networks) to 8.5 devices by 2016.
Disclosure: GigaOM has a commercial relationship with Ooyala for the delivery of its video content.
Image courtesy of Flickr user Phillie Casablanca.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro: Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial. 

from GigaOM http://gigaom.com/video/tablets-connected-tvs-video-consumption-data/?utm_sou...
Simple.tv began taking limited preorders of its DVR on Kickstarter Wednesday morning and also announced that it would start shipments and regular sales of the device in August. Simple.tv is a DVR geared towards the cord-cutting crowd, enabling users to record over-the-air shows and then stream them within their home network and beyond. It is just one of many hardware startups that has flocked to Kickstarter in recent months.
Simple.tv is a bare-bones DVR that can be hooked into one’s home network and connected to a regular over-the-air antenna. Users have to attach their own external hard drive and can then stream recorded programming to up to five devices. Simple.tv will have apps for the Roku, the iPad and a web app to watch TV via web browsers available at launch, and is working on extending the service to connected devices like the Boxee Box and Google TV.
Check out Simple.tv’s Kickstarter promo video, or continue reading below:
The company will sell their DVR device for around $150 when it goes on sale in August, which is slightly more than the current pricing on Kickstarter. Sales will initially be facilitated through Simple.tv’s website as well as Amazon.com. Simple.tv CEO Mark Ely told me during a phone conversation Thursday that he hopes to be in retail stores in time for the holiday season. People who buy the device will have the option to subscribe to a programming guide that brings TiVo-like recording functionality to Simple.tv for $5 a month, or schedule their programming manually for free.
Kickstarter: Great for CE startups
A number of consumer electronics startups have taken their wares to Kickstarter recently; one breakout example has been the Pebble smart watch, which booked more than 85,000 preorders and $10 million in revenue by the end of its Kickstarter campaign (for more on this, also read Om’s interview with Kickstarter co-founder Perry Chen).
Ely said that his company didn’t initially plan to take its product to Kickstarter, but was swayed by some of these success stories. “There is a marketing aspect to Kickstarter,” he admitted. But he also argued that Kickstarter is about more than generating buzz and securing preorders. “For us, a way to quickly gather the level of sales we are going to get,” he told me.
That kind of data can be instrumental in ordering the right amount of devices, which can both bring down the production costs and help to avoid large quantities of unsold inventory. And a company can get feedback from its consumers before it has even shipped a product. “It gives us some additional insight into the audience,” said Ely.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro: Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial. 

from GigaOM http://gigaom.com/video/simple-tv-kickstarter-preorders/?utm_source=feedburne...
Last week, I had dinner with my friend who has a talent for branding and summarizing complex ideas into very simple terms. I was talking with him about my ongoing problem having difficulty explaining my multifaceted experience and work I do in terms people not familiar with my craft can understand. People who know me call me “the operations guy”, but this term does not mean much to the general public. This is a marketing problem so I turned to my friend to help me solve it.
In a stroke of his usual genius he exclaimed: “Apollo, you are a business hacker! You are the unholy union of a chief of staff and Mr. Wolf.” Since I am not a big of a fan of politics, I would replace chief of staff with Roy Disney, who turned Walt’s vision into a well-executed reality. And Winston Wolf from Pulp Fiction definitely resonates with me, since I often have to help resolve and clean up some inevitably bad mistakes. Want to find out more about what a Business Hacker does? Follow to this post. 
from The Chief Business Hacker - Apolinaras "Apollo" Sinkevicius http://theoperationsguy.com/how-i-became-business-hacker?utm_source=feedburne...
New submitter nicoles writes with this quote from an AP report:
"The Romney and Obama campaigns are spending heavily on television ads and other traditional tools to convey their messages. But strategists say the most important breakthrough this year is the campaigns' use of online data to raise money, share information and persuade supporters to vote. The practice, known as 'microtargeting,' has been a staple of product marketing. Now it's facing the greatest test of its political impact in the race for the White House. ... The Romney team spent nearly $1 million on digital consulting in April and Obama at least $300,000. ... Campaigns use microtargeting to identify potential supporters or donors using data gleaned from a range of sources, especially their Internet browsing history. A digital profile of each person is then created, allowing the campaigns to find them online and solicit them for money and support." Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
from Slashdot http://politics.slashdot.org/story/12/05/29/2254229/political-campaigns-minin...

One of the fears about the explosion of information online is that users might become more narrow in their interests — either because they are overwhelmed by the amount of content choices facing them, or because personalization filters will wind up catering to their existing preconceptions. In a recent post on the topic, Cornell University communications professor Tarleton Gillespie makes exactly that kind of criticism about Twitter’s algorithms, and specifically its “trending topic” filters. Handing over more of our information consumption to companies like Twitter may make our lives easier, but does it also make them narrower as well — and if so, what do we do about it?
Gillespie’s argument starts off with a discussion of how various “Occupy Wall Street” topics failed to trend on Twitter despite the frenzy of activity around those subjects during the demonstrations in New York and elsewhere. There were repeated accusations and conspiracy theories that said Twitter was somehow censoring the topic of Occupy Wall Street and any related hashtags, even after the company described its trending-topic algorithm — and how it looks not at volume of a specific term, but the volume of activity around that term over time (in other words, a sustained level of high activity won’t necessarily trip the filters).
Like Google’s search algorithm, Twitter is a black box
Despite this defence of its practices, however, Gillespie says it’s not surprising that some might be suspicious of Twitter’s approach, since so little is known about how it actually works. Just like Google and its search algorithm — which has also come under a lot of fire from critics for favoring certain things — Twitter can’t say too much about its system for competitive reasons, and because it could theoretically help those who want to use it for their own purposes:
Everyone from spammers to marketers to activists to 4chan tricksters to narcissists might want to optimize their tweets and hashtags so as to Trend. This opacity makes the Trends results, and their criteria, deeply and fundamentally open to interpretation and suspicion.
Gillespie also notes that Twitter’s trending topics are more than just an attempt to show users relevant information — they are one of the keys to the company’s commercial success as well, as it tries to promote its value to advertisers. I raised a similar point when Twitter first launched its “promoted trends” feature, which adds a commercial message to the trending topics. The company says that once added, these branded topics are governed by the same criteria as any other trending topic, but Gillespie’s point is that users have no way of actually knowing that.
The idea of a “filter bubble” comes from a book of the same name by author Eli Pariser, who argues that the rise of personalization algorithms developed by providers such as Google and Amazon is a double-edged sword, While these tools — including new variations such as Google’s “Search Plus Your World” — can save time and makes information consumption more manageable, Pariser says it can also wind up trapping users in a bubble where their prejudices and preconceptions are reinforced instead of being challenged. That is not only bad for individuals, the author argues, but for society as well.
Is it Twitter’s duty to broaden our world view?

Pariser says that while users and information consumers have a duty to try and break out of these bubbles, companies like Google and Facebook also have a duty to help expose us to different viewpoints. He says that they should explicitly code into their algorithms “a sense of the public life [and] a sense of civic responsibility,” and should give users the ability to control what gets through the filter and what doesn’t. Gillespie, meanwhile, says that Twitter’s choice of what makes a trending topic essentially reinforces the public’s obsession with what is new rather than what is important:
Perhaps we could again make the case that this choice fosters a public more attuned to the “new” than to the discussion of persistent problems, to viral memes more than to slow-building political movements.
Gillespie’s argument, and Pariser’s as well, are similar to criticisms of Google’s approach to Google News, which some believe should make more of an effort to suggest or display “important” stories instead of just whatever is popular. When this concern was mentioned at the Zeitgeist forum last year, Google founder Larry Page said that he sympathized with this view, and had thought about tweaking Google News in order to make the news “better.” But is this what we want? Do we really want companies like Google or Facebook to give us the information they think we need to see?
Newspapers are sometimes seen as “serendipity engines” because they contain information that readers might not normally come across — but they too have suffered in the past from an echo-chamber type of mentality, where editors choose the stories that suit their prejudices. In extreme cases, relying on a single outlet like the New York Times has arguably had devastating effects on society as a whole, as in the case of Judith Miller’s unbalanced reporting in the lead up to the Iraq war. Is the filter bubble really so much worse now than it used to be when people read a single paper or watched one TV news channel?
In the end, the only cure for the ailment that Gillespie and Pariser have described is for users to take more control over their own information consumption habits, and to consciously subject themselves to contrary opinions or viewpoints. One interesting attempt to make this happen is a browser plugin called Rbutr (short for “rebutter”), which is a finalist in the Knight News Challenge for journalism applications, and allows users to click and see webpages that disagree with the one they are currently reading. But will enough people want to do this, or will they be content to live inside their bubbles?
Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Photo Clinique and See-ming Lee
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro: Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial. 

from GigaOM http://gigaom.com/2012/05/29/is-twitter-popping-the-filter-bubble-or-inflatin...
China’s top microblogging site, Sino Weibo, has introduced a points-based system for its Twitter-style service — one that penalizes users for posting controversial content.
It’s part of a continuing effort to keep anti-government sentiment on the platform to a minimum.
Users will initially be granted 80 points. Their score will waver depending on their activity and the type of content they post, according to The Next Web.
Points are gained by taking part in community-based activities, while users lose points for various breaches of conduct, including “harming the unity, sovereignty or territorial integrity of the nation.” A low score can be revived by avoiding violations for two months.
Should a user lose all of his or her points, his or her account will be banned.
The full list of point-costing violations, as translated by a team of volunteers:
Article 13) Users have the right to publish information, but may not publish any information that:
1. Opposes the basic principles established by the constitution
2. Harms the unity, sovereignty, or territorial integrity of the nation
3. Reveals national secrets, endangers national security, or threatens the the honor or interests of the nation
4. Incites ethnic hatred or ethnic discrimination, undermines ethnic unity, or harms ethnic traditions and customs
5. Promotes evil teachings and superstitions
6. Spreads rumors, disrupts social order and destroys societal stability
7. Promotes illicit activity, gambling, violence or calls for the committing of crimes
8. Calls for disruption of social order through illegal gatherings, formation of organizations, protests, demonstrations, mass gatherings and assemblies
9. Has other content which is forbidden by laws, administrative regulations and national regulations
Article 14) Users may not publish untrue information. For information about what untrue information is, please see “Sina Weibo Community Management Regulations (Trial Phase).”
To enforce the new user contract, content will be moderated by a “community committee” made up of average Weibo users as well as “expert members,” tasked with weeding out “untrue information” — an ambiguous phrase in a country well known for censoring unwelcome content on the web.
SEE ALSO: China Cracks Down on Online Code Words for Blind Human Rights Activist
Weibo, which has more than 300 million registered users, has previously complied with the Chinese government’s censorship demands. Last month, messages about blind human rights activist Chen Guangcheng were censored on the service, likely due to the work of state censors.
Why do you think the Chinese government finds it so important to keep a close eye on social media and Internet discussion in the country? Share with us your opinion in the comments below.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, visual7
More About: censorship, china, sina weibo, Social Media, weibo, World



from Mashable! http://mashable.com/2012/05/29/sina-weibo-points/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_m...
|