Marc Andreessen, We Need Your Help

I'm not Marc Andreeson, but I'm a regular reader with a pretty good memory.

Here's a Boston Globe business article from December 2003 titled Six Degrees Co. subtitled: "Social networking sites are attracting users and investors. But will anybody make money?"

So it certainly was on the radar then, just not BW's.

Your question: why did social networks gestate all these years and just bloom in 2007 when Facebook crunched 'em all? How does that correspond to the "rise of the blogs?"

Well, my theory from The New Gatekeepers series of 2005 is that Internet subcultures didn't hit it big until *somebodies* came aboard. Usenet was full of average folks for years. But it never was a place for somebodies to show up and build their brand (one person who did *become* a minor somebody in the Hollywood gossip sphere through Usenet-- Matthew Drudge.)

Friendster was long past boring when I noticed a mini-star in my professional universal extol the virtues of Facebook. I trusted her judgment, and joined. Obviously, people joined to be connected to someone else, but quite often they joined to do social reaching.

And Facebook *works* because of its highly articulate data structure. Consider if you want to identify what books or movies you like-- the apps are there, and are accessible to any user. Blogging had pinned its hops on StructuredBlogging, and that will never catch on like Flixster or Visual Bookshelf-- bloggers have been left to begging Facebook to open up their data model.

Many blogs are implementing tools, that like social networks, enable a more vibrant and viral discussion to take place. Social networks like Facebook thrive because the newsfeed allows you to see what others are doing each day (Twitter is taking full advantage of this). When you see a newsfeed link from a network friend, that he/she did a new blog post for instance, you're likely to click on it, maybe leave a comment, and then tell others to check it out (perhaps via Twitter).

Some blogs and web articles are using Sphere to show links to other blogs that are linking back and talking about the same thing, or same post. I think many of the Old School media outfits are afraid to do this, to enable people to link to something outside their walled garden. Keep all traffic here is the mentality. That's suicide. The more you open up and let the conversation spread out like a web (via the Web), think Techmeme for instance, your traffic will accelerate, the conversation will deepen, and revenues will follow.

Interesting that you should bring up Andreessen. I've been playing around experimenting with a private network on his latest venture: Ning.

Personally, I am not a big fan of Facebook, but then social networking isn't a one size-fits all concept. For me, the News Feed feature may have a sort of weird poetry to it, but I now know all kinds of banal details about people that I so wish I didn't. I am also a little nervous about all those nifty apps that require allowing whoever posted the app to mine your data. Who are these app producers? But beyond such personal preferences, there is something disturbingly off about how different types of content are equalized. Not all social interactions are of identical significance or enduring value. And yet even the most trivial social interaction on Facebook can become a headline on a newsfeed and achieve cyber-immortality (fossilization?) in an archive. Likewise, I also find it disconcerting to see "friends" piled together, past, present, important, fleeting and the occasional "how did *he* get on my list?"

The problem isn't the idea of web-based social networking but the fact that, at least as defined by Facebook, it doesn't always match real life social networking.

So...the Ning experiment: I set up a private, invite only, temporary network to use as a follow up to a conference seminar. I don't know how well this will work, but I think it could be good. Ning's templates are lovely. Nice quiet graphics, muted colors, easy to drop, drag and edit. Since less really can be more, and simplicity is always a worthy grail, I jettisoned a lot of features, including, of course, the news feed (or, as I've taken to calling it, the "newsless" feed...). I pared it down to a section for an opening welcome note, recapping seminar highlights and listing follow up assignments, and a forum where "homework" can be posted and discussed (informal reports about how some of the ideas covered in the seminar were applied in the field). I also added a section for slide shows and photo albums to accommodate visual examples. And that was it. Four weeks after the event, the network will be shut down. A "best of" analysis of forum posts will be condensed into a short article and posted on a website, illustrated with photos.

This is social networking that is mission specific, with a limited number of participants who have a genuine connection to one another and a common purpose. It also has an end point. Like the original seminar -- and everything else in real life -- it has a beginning, middle and an end. That's good.

Clearly, Facebook is a big hit with a lot of people. And I can understand why it struck such a chord with college kids. But after a while (a short while), the apps about sharing book lists and movie favorites and travel histories lose their fizz. They're 21st century parlor games.

Max Kalehoff wrote an interesting column recently noting that email is still the most successful example of social networking. Not a whole lot of bells and whistles there, but rather directed, targeted, meaningful (non-spam....) communication: "Email Blows Away All Other Social Networks" http://blogs.mediapost.com/spin/?p=1201

And then there are blogs such as this one. A limited, focused -- dare I say it? -- conversation...

cheers...

I'm not Marc either. I am CEO of Compendium Blogware a SaaS company focused on corporate blogging. To me the biggest trend in organizational blogging is measuring ROI Based on SEO.

Corporate Blogging has been a somewhat of a muddled fringe activity since the beginning of blogging itself. What is it? What’s it for? How do I measure it?

These are the questions that have been asked of top executives and small businesses a lot. For the most part, traditional bloggers have tried to focus on the journalistic aspects of blogging with no real appreciation that businesses have no time for tools that don’t provide a measurable benefit.

As a result, Corporate Blogging has been slow to show adoption in the business marketing arsenal. Where blogging has been adopted it’s been mostly as a top executive-down endeavor more focused on goodwill than any truly measurable results.

This will all change in 2008 as a dramatic light-bulb is going off in the heads of Marketers everywhere…..Blogging is for Search!

The reality is that as organizations feed billions into Pay Per Click advertising trying to target wide ranging and specific keywords current website SEO only helps on a few narrow searches.

The very nature of blogging is to write about what you are passionate about. There is some myth that people in organizations can't be passionate about their products, their customers or there jobs. Blogs give you the ability as an organization to express what you love about your job and how you help customers. Additionally, the more people in an organization blogging, the more content created to be indexed by the search engines and the more likely to hit the large numbers of keywords one might target with PPC.

There are several specific factors that allows a corporate blogging strategy to be the ideal antidote to SEO challenges:

• Titles. Page & URL titles are really important to search success. The closer to an exact match to the keyword phrase the searcher has entered, the more likely a page is rank highly. With easy to use blogging software it’s possible to have as many titles as there are keyword phrases you might target with a PPC strategy.

• Keyword density. The challenge of writing a normal webpage is to have enough of the right keywords in your content for the search engines while still making sense to the reader, and compelling them to take the desired action.

Blogs don’t have this problem. By definition, you have an unlimited palate. Blogs keep all content on the page in reverse chronological order. Therefore, it’s a natural characteristic of a blog to have an almost unlimited capacity for content and therefore an unlimited capacity for the targeted keywords.

• Recency & Frequency. Search engines like to see that you are paying attention to your pages. They love to see frequently and recently updated pages. Again, this is blogging by definition. Blogs are updated at a lot more frequency than would ever be possible on a corporate site.

I’ve heard that 80% of all web visits begin with a search. People don’t enter URL’s anymore..they type keyword phrases into a search box. The job of the marketer is to show up….to be present at that point. Until now the focus has been on PPC strategies alone. The rub is that depending on who you talk to, anywhere from 75% to 95% of all clicks on a Google page happens in the organic results. 2008 will be the year that Corporate Blogging plays a big role righting this imbalance.

Good feedback, J A, on the limitations of social networking, newsfeeds, blogs, etc. I really appreciate your comments about social networking with a beginning, middle, and end...I'd be curious to see how your start-it-up, run-it, shut-it-down approach works.