“As much as people want to connect through the Internet, the practice also can have the opposite effect: Social Networking Fatigue,” so says the article Social Sites Becoming Too Much of a Good Thing (via: SteinBlog). It’s been noted in Compete Inc’s paper on Social Commerce that marketers are facing the challenge of Social Saturation:

“While social networking sites continue to grow, online socialites are reaching the limit of how many online communities they want to participate in. The average online socialite currently frequents three social networking sites; when polled, these same socialites stated they would consider participation in up to four communities.”

I’ve often thought that it would be a great if people could port their digital persona from network to network; then the burnout rate would be lower. Wouldn’t you love to go over to a new social network and be able to have the basics of your digital identity and related network contacts added without much work on your end?

In a Knowledge at Wharton Podcast earlier this year, on the topic of portable reputation and identity across communities Julie Herendeen, vice president of Network Products at Yahoo, said:

“Openness is the direction that the web is moving. Identity does belong to the user and we really want to be as open as possible with identify while protecting users privacy. What can syndicate in identity? And what things remain unique to the site?”

But is openness the direction of Social Networks?

Ever since I blogged about ID+ last year - which would have reproduced inter-personal networks on digital accounts that were connected in an open peer-to-peer network, enabling new and more effective ways of working - I’ve been waiting with baited breath (well not quite “baited breath” but you get the point) for the day when an online persona could be taken across platforms. Alas, the ID+ site seems to have disappeared; and if Jay Stevens, vice president of sales and operations with MySpace, comments about Bebo, Facebook and MySpace being “unlikely to ever offer an open platform for users to integrate the services offered by these sites” at a recent Marketing conference are any indication, openness is not the direction that Social Networks are moving.

Yesterday I had a conversation with Alf Watt of iStumbler on the train ride home about the very topic of Social Network burnout. Alf, who also works at the Social Networking site imeem (which combines Social Networking with Instant messaging) burst my bubble on the whole idea by pointing out the privacy issues. I guess we can still dare to dream.

The What Have I Been Reading Reading List:

• Online Marketing Ranks Second to In-Person for B2B in 2008 - “Business to Business marketing, in order to be competitive in the Web 2.0 environment, has to be ahead of the trends. According to the Direct Marketing Association, says the report, by 2008 online marketing efforts will be the dominant media for business-to-business initiatives. Traditional direct mail, industry print, and events and promotions will take a back seat to more efficient and sophisticated online efforts.” (Download PDF). See also: Marketing 2.0 : Omniture to Unveil “Plug and Play” Online Marketing Technology
• Plugging In: Can E-Commerce Leverage Social Networks? (via: Media 2.0) “Across the rest of the Internet, meanwhile, including the Web 2.0 realm of social networking, eBay is extending its reach thanks to the work of some of its 1,000 third-party developers. The developers program, now in its sixth year, has created scores of plug-ins and other tools to help people sell, with 25 percent of all eBay listings now being generated through third-party tools.” See also: Can’t Find That Dress on the Rack? Retailers Are Pushing More Shoppers to the Web “Daniel Corsten, a former visiting professor at Wharton who now teaches at the London Business School, says he’s not convinced the new strategy of pushing in-store customers to the Internet will work. ‘What happens is the store turns an impulse buy into rational buying. You come into the store and you want to buy something, but it is not there. You realize you were intrigued about buying [the item], but now you have to rationalize it. This breaks the purchasing process. All of a sudden you think twice.’” While I would general argue that it is a great idea for retailers to push low-selling merchandise and special orders via the web, I can’t help but agree with the quote above.
• A Role for Time and Query Quality in Search Results – “I’ve had people ask me if it was worth keeping older articles and documents on their web sites, especially when information in those documents might become outdated. My response has been that as long as the pages clearly indicate what time periods they are relevant to, and that if the site owners include updated information, it’s easy for people to know that, and find that new information, it can be helpful to them to keep those pages.” Measuring the Quality of Queries, Adding Time to the Determination of Quality and Yahoo Temporal Relevance, oh my. It is posts like this that make Bill’s Blog a must read.

The I Also Glanced Over Reading List:

• Second-Life Makes the (Virtual) Travel Section of the New York Times. See also: Drawing Up a Virtual Marketing Plan (via: Managing the Gray)
• Yahoo! Search Crawler (Yahoo! Slurp) - Supporting wildcards in robots.txt
• SEO Salaries - How Much Should You Make
• Landing Pages for SEO

The Too Cool: goes to Timeline. The Ajax Widget for Visualizing Time-based Data. From the site, “Timeline is a DHTML-based AJAXy widget for visualizing time-based events. It is like Google Maps for time-based information.” (via: http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/11/timeline_ajax_w.html)

“I hope you’re eating something that will fill your soul and mind – I Know - Raphael Saadiq

Posted by: Natasha “That Girl From Marketing” Robinson

Last night I read Yet Another Press Release (YAPR) about a major brand’s launch into Second Life, and thought to myself, “Gosh, what’s the purpose at this point, especially if you aren’t offering anything to the community other than a virtual replication of your big corporate brand.” Then I read Sense.PSFK’s piece: There’s Gold In Them There Virtual Hills?. 

This is probably one of the best pieces I’ve read about the corporate Second Life land grab. It includes the author recounting a less than stellar encounter with some “virtual” employees of global ad agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty (who had a We’re in Second Life Press release a short time ago).  As well as this choice observation:

“Both media and business need to understand the motivations of individuals within Second Life to glean any useful answers from it. Basically there are two lenses you can examine Second Life through, two viewpoints if you will: as an Immersionist, or as an Augmentationist. So far, mainstream reporting of Second Life has tended to blur the two to great confusion. The Immersionists want Second Life to be a world in itself that should be a complete escape from ‘Real Life’.The Augmentationists view Second Life as just another online interaction tool. Though, that isn’t to say that the two viewpoints can’t co-exist. It’s just that the subtleties of the two viewpoints are not explained to the reader. So is it any wonder some people just don’t GET Second Life?”

If you are interested in the virtual world marketing I recommend reading Iiya Vedrashko’s (80 page Thesis - PDF) Advertising in Computer Games.  And if any of you marketers out there are considering seeing what this whole “virtual world” thing is about, you may want to book a virtual tour guide for travel (What will they think of next) (via: ConversationBlog).
 

The What Have I Been Reading Reading List:

• Advertising in Second Life: My favorite rules on advertising in second life: 1.  Don’t think your cute little dorky guy that you have as a logo or mascot in RL is going to fit in the virtual world just because it’s cute and dorky. 7. Avoid having your employees look like these MOU dudes who look like they’re serving 5-10 upstate.  8. Don’t build a big-ass pretentious build and have a hugely hyped media event with a one-hit-wonder and then leave the build out to moulder on an empty sim for weeks later.  9. Every avatar has a t-shirt — some of them put it on and never take it off because it needs no washing! Make sure it’s your company’s logo!.  See also his response to The Second Life Optimization article: Do’s and Don’ts for Big Business Marketers
  
• I commented yesterday on ThreadWatch that as online marketers we should take a holistic view of online marketing.  If you are in the consumer electronics space - especially for high end goods – new research shows  this is all the more important.
  

From: Affluent Consumers Buy Electronics Online (via: WebProNews) 
 - 93% of US affluent consumers research upcoming consumer electronics purchases
 - 62% used both product Web sites and search engines to do so
 - 27.5% used e-mail newsletters as part of their research process.
more than half of US affluent consumers plan to make computer purchases online.

From: Online Research Drives Electronic Studies
 - 77% of consumer electronics purchases are influenced by internet research  
 - 45 percent of those who research online and purchase offline use a search engine during the information-gathering process.
 - ‘Searchers’ defined as those who use search to research CE goods, represent 47 percent of the offline and online purchasers surveyed…. are likely to advocate brands by word-of-mouth and are 114 percent more likely to consider internet display advertising in their research process.

• 30% of MySpace Users Create Most Content – Research from Kelvin Beecroft, head of Mashable Labs. “MySpace gets lots of criticism for flaunting the 100 million+ registered users they have. While that most likely is an accurate number of accounts, those generating the actual content on MySpace are likely far fewer.  I took it to task to find out just how many of those users are truly building MySpace with user-generated content. In applying the ranking formula we eliminated over two-thirds of those user accounts, leaving 362,824 user accounts in which to test for the presence of video links.  Thus we narrowed the sample down to 30.19% of the original sample by eliminating inactive and marginally active users. The interesting thing we discovered is that 84.22% of all the video links found in the original, larger sample was in this small group of active users.” Much like the comments in this post,  I’m confused too.  Guess it will all make sense when they publish the full study. See also: The oldie but goodie, Top 100 Digg Users Control 56% of Digg’s HomePage Content
  

The I Also Glanced Over Reading List:

• ‘Swarm-Based’ Collaborative Filmmaking -  ”The first truly collaborative instance of indie filmmaking and online distribution using the Creative Commons copyright model, thus encouraging free download and fan ‘remixes’.”
• Tutorial: Automatic Sitemap in WordPress
• How-To: Earn Brand Loyalty in Social Networks 

“I never ran from adversity, instead I ran to it / Fear ain’t in the heart of me I learned just do it” – The Good Life – T.I.

Posted by: Natasha “That Girl From Marketing” Robinson