That Girl From Marketing Live Feed
Online Marketing in B2B, Plugins Help E-tailers on Social Networks, Time, Query Quality and Search Results & Social Network Fatigue (aka: Social Saturation)
“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
Natasha,
Nice posting. Social Saturation - in the bigger and more general idea - was bound to happen as with any new marketing medium.
I’ve touched on this sometime in July:
http://www.emergence-media.com/2006/07/social-media-saturation/
Looks like a shameless plug, I know
Comment by Daniel R — November 8, 2006 @ 2:13 am
“I’ve been waiting with baited breath… for the day when an online persona could be taken across platforms.”
I felt the same way but then realized that I don’t exactly want my flickr/myspace/friendster/insertsociallaidbacknetwork to be connected to or somehow linked to my linkedIn network or other professional information. It’s nice to be able to plausibly deny that the mike oliver on myspace isn’t the same one you find on linkedIn.
Not sure where I come down on this. I do want some portability, online social networks really do fracture your identity into a million pieces. But at the same time, I am not sure I want all of my identities mixed into one portable persona.
Comment by mike oliver — November 8, 2006 @ 12:45 pm
While I’m impressed with your articles and find a lot of great info on your blog, I must say that yours is the most visually painful blog to endure. I think my eyes are actually sweating, due to your choice of razor sharp blue on white (which seems like an attempt at subtlety gone horribly wrong). And the super thin-assed font for headlines? What is that anyway? Century Gothic? Where’s the space between the words? And what’s with the bullet points that look like radio buttons which stick out over the left of the margin? Please, end the pain now, and download any one of the thousands of nice, readable CSS templates available online for the great price of $0.00
Thank you.
Comment by Dino — November 13, 2006 @ 12:17 pm
Many Moons later, Natasha gets her computer fixed: First I dropped my PowerBook (nothing new there, I have dents to prove it) except this time my powercord broke off in it and was told that it would be 1,000 to fix it (yes,that hurt). Then my Thinkpad revolted with a constant Blue Screen. Yeah!
Now your message Dino! LOL.
Thanks for reading and leaving the funny type of comment that has made my day. Unfortunately I am not a designer and found this free design which I like. Guess you can’t please everyone. But if my design is killing your pupils, please feel free to turn off the stylesheet. If you have the firefox web developer extension installed, you can use this shortcut to turn on/off styles: CTRL+SHIFT+S. BTW: If you could recommend a template that I haven’t seen a million times, please let me know. Thanks for the laugh; “Eyballs sweating” you are hilarious!
Daniel,
Thanks for the link. and no it is not shameless promotion: It’s pointing me to info I would want to read, which is what a good URL drop does. thanks.
Mike,
Thanks for dropping by the comment. I get what you are saying. maybe what I’m looking for is a browser plugin that would make it easier for me to join networks and say who I know / who I would like to know that has joined/is in the network. I can only fill out so many of these things and find my friends, etc. I did read (on Adrants coverage of Adtech) last week about a tool called called Minggl (http://www.minggl.com/) which “provides a browser toolbar that allows people to bring together their multiple social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, edit them, share them and basically take the headache out of dealing with more than one social media site.” I contacted the owner and will keep you up to date.
Comment by Natasha Robinson — November 13, 2006 @ 12:37 pm
sorry to hear about the computer. would love to hear more about minggl (this effed up spelling to get a domain name thing has got to stop! hahahaha).
Look forward to reading more here (soon?)
Comment by mike oliver — November 27, 2006 @ 7:24 am
LOL.
Yes, look forward to reading more soon. Soon after the revolt of the computers, my body revolted and - was out sick for about a week and a half. So sick that I didn’t even feel like reading… Now for me, that’s sick!
Yeah, that domain name thing is funny at this point a co-worker pointed out that this site may be pronounced like “Mingle”, who knows… As I haven’t heard back from the owner.
But here’s some news you can file under rumor and scandal: I had a conversation with a Mac developer who helped design the iPod and I asked him as what he saw as the next big thing. Well he told me that Google may be buying Yahoo - yeah that pretty much shocked the crap out of me. And if happens then, you read it here first. He told me that the iPhone will blow everyone’s mind and then we started talking about some social networking tools being ahead of their time particularly Google’s DodgeBall (which I love but never took off with my friends). The funny thing about this conversation is that he wouldn’t tell he where he worked. So Secret Squirrel if you a reading this, holla back! Lol!
Comment by Natasha Robinson — November 27, 2006 @ 7:58 am
oh wow. that would be something I didn’t see coming.
I love dodgeball and no one… and I mean not a single person i know will use it. Damn shame. It has a pretty decent following here in NY with Dens being here, but still, I can’t use it for real unless I get some new friends.
hope you are feeling better. I have had a 2 week cold/fever/cough that I can’t shake. it’s for the birds.
Comment by mike oliver — November 28, 2006 @ 11:35 am
Checking out CoComment again. When it first launched, I thought the bookmarklet was too much. I couldn’t remember to click it before commenting. It totally busted up my commenting flow. Now with the firefox extension it is seamless…. the opportunity here is endless.
Comment by mike — November 29, 2006 @ 1:55 pm
Funny that you just left that comment, I was actually just composing an email to Muri. Remember him? Well he got in contact with me through MySpace (through Bobby Mason’s page). Well I was actually writing him to tell him about your blog and your brother’s blog (which is one of my favorite blogs, I’ve bought just about every record that he has put up there!).
Ok, here’s your quick Amherst college update:
Muri is finishing up his residency in neurosurgery @ UCLA. Tibs is a managing director of Global diversement @ Royal Bank of Canada and Gill finished his residency in Pediatrics and currently is doing a fellowship in Pediatric Gastroenterology @ Yale.
Anyway - he’s on my myspace page if you want to get in contact with him: Http://www.myspace.com/natasharobinson
…
Re: dodgeball: I need some new friends to if I want to use it - lol
Re: Cocomment: Dude, I’m about to take the firefox plugin off, it slows up page loading time. I do like that it alerts me to new comments… but … maybe it would be cool if there was a way to get a feed of the comments, is there? And do you know of a feed reader for Blackberry… Whoo Hoo the Pearls come to Cingular today.
Now I must get to work… thanks for the comment - I needed a mental break from work
Comment by Natasha Robinson — November 29, 2006 @ 2:16 pm
I couldn’t find a good feedreader for blackberry. I just use the browser and go to my bloglines account. Upside is that it is streamlined for a mobile browser. downside is that I can’t read feeds offline and then sync. You have to have an internet connection. I am still researching and will let you know.
thanks for the updates. glad you like jon’s site. he is really dropping some knowledge with those music recs isn’t he?
Comment by mike oliver — December 3, 2006 @ 1:04 pm