From comScore:

The study found that 30.8 percent of smartphone users accessed social networking sites via their mobile browser in January 2010, up 8.3 points from 22.5 percent one year ago. Access to Facebook via mobile browser grew 112 percent in the past year, while Twitter experienced a 347-percent jump.

“Social networking remains one of the most popular and fastest-growing behaviors on both the PC-based Internet and the mobile Web,” said Mark Donovan, comScore senior vice president of mobile. “Social media is a natural sweet spot for mobile since mobile devices are at the center of how people communicate with their circle of friends, whether by phone, text, email, or, increasingly, accessing social networking sites via a mobile browser.”

All channels, all devices, baby.

• 30% of smartphone users accessed social networks via mobile browsers — this was up from 22.5% in 2009.
• Total social networking access via mobile browsers on all mobile phones rose to 11.1% — this was up from 6.5% in 2009. Most of this growth was in the uptick in smartphone usage.

How does MySpace survive if their mobile-centric audience uses their mobile site less?

All of the opinions below are mine, and only mine.

On top of everything else happening in the social space (Google Buzz, everyone leaving MySpace, Facebook changes), this happens: Facebook Patents The Newsfeed. You can read the full copy of the patent here.

Now before we all have a “What the hell moment,” here’s a few things to remember:

Some patents are virtually unenforceable

Various companies have patented the shopping cart, the GIF image, the one-click purchase, and the affiliate program. The one-click purchase made Jeff Bezos look like a fool for a while, especially after they went after Barnes and Noble.

If you’ve noticed, none are really enforced, except for the GIF image patent, which there’s “sometimes” a $5,000 licensing fee. Unisys at one point threatened to go after every website that had a GIF image somewhere on the site.

That was popular.

A few patents, like the one-click purchase and the affiliate program, have given rise to protests and eventual defeat of a lot of the claims Amazon had over the business process. Most of those patents are violated every second of the day because they are ubiquitous and so mainstream there’s no way to enforce them.

Some patents are more for defense against large competitors

While it doesn’t make sense for Facebook to sue everyone, I’m sure they’re thinking about what they can bring up against Google, MySpace and a few other large properties with a newsfeed.

Other places are probably thinking about how to rearchitect their solutions now to avoid any patent infringement.

That said, if you’re running a site that isn’t one of the top 1,000, I don’t think Facebook is going to be sending a lawyer your way anytime soon.

Some patents are for getting money out of people and for increasing market value

One of the few points people forget about Google is that the concept of AdWords wasn’t invented by them — it was patented by GoTo.com. I’ll admit that Google does it much better than GoTo/Overture ever did, but it was enough of a threat that Google eventually settled with Yahoo!, who had purchased Overture.

The lawsuit against Google related to its AdWords service. In February 2002, Google introduced a service called AdWords Select that allowed marketers to bid for higher placement in marked sections – a tactic that had some similarities to Overture’s search-listing auctions.

Following Yahoo!’s acquisition of Overture, the lawsuit was settled with Google agreeing to issue 2.7 million shares of common stock to Yahoo! in exchange for a perpetual license.

That patent was probably one of the reasons why Yahoo purchased Overture.

There are holding companies whose purpose is to hold patents. However, they are selective about who they sue because lawyers are expensive. It’s an ROI equation, and there’s no point going after someone without money, right?

GigaOM says:

Friendster, which was recently bought by a Malaysian company, made much of the fact that had obtained five U.S. social networking patents, at times using the patents to scare off the competition, at least in the press.

Scary.

Some patents are declared invalid

The U.S. Patent Office grants a lot of patents — it doesn’t necessarily mean they will stand up in court. Gibson Guitars has been on a tear, suing anyone that produces music simulation software like Guitar Hero. Read more here.

They have yet to win.

What would happen if Facebook went after MySpace in court, and the patent was declared invalid?

What if a single social network invented before Facebook had the same implementation, and Facebook were in violation of the intellectual property of that website? Would that company win $500 million like when Microsoft was sued over the browser plug-in?

GigaOM points out:

The patent is particularly valuable because news-feed style communication has become pervasive since it was launched on Facebook. However, it’s not clear that there aren’t precedents for the technology; for instance, the social network Multiply.com had a similar interface for keeping track of friends’ actions before Facebook launched its own.

Mutliply.com suing Facebook? That would be fun.

What next?

As big as a deal as this may seem, it isn’t until they do something with it. For now, it’s just another asset they have in the universe of Social Media.

Google guesses who your friends are, including your mistress that your wife doesn’t know about (and then shows everyone this).

This is such an inexact science, because anyone can figure out your email address. We receive so much spam and other garbage through email account (is a shopping site really my friend?) and there are conversations you want private. Those connections are now public by default, as Gizmodo points out:

• A girl you slept with in college sends you a message on Gchat, to tell you she has five beautiful children now, and that she doesn’t ever think about you, ever. Ok!
• You exchange some messages and a couple emails to be polite. You defuse the situation. You don’t mention it to your current girlfriend, because that would be weird.
• Coincidentally, you enable Google Buzz, which adds both your current girlfriend and this lady who you politely deflected.
• Your girlfriend checks out your Google profile, sees your friends list, and asks you who that lady is.
• You clumsily try to explain, “Oh, it just adds people you talk to automatically,” which only makes things worse.
• Fight!
• You break up, which was probably a good thing anyway, because your relationship sounded really unhealthy. But you get the point, right?

The situation is so bad, some sites (like Lifehacker) are showing ways to turn off the contact list. Think about it — do you want every telemarketer to be your friend? Facebook has one important filter: you can deny friend requests.

It’s never, ever a good idea to create a social graph the way Google did. That’s why most of the IM clients do the double opt-in approach (and the follower model is killing Twutter).

Google Buzz reinforces the power law online, which means you’ll get to see 100 photos of Jason Calacanis’ dog, or promoting how he pays more than some services, but less than About.com for content

The people you want to talk to automatically become long tail, yet the people who are endlessly self promoting always bubble to the top because they have 11,000 followers, and someone’s always going to make a comment.

Social Customer points out buzz does two things that will simply make it unusable.

1. It shows threaded conversations and strongly highlights the initiator of those conversations, and makes the comments subservient to the initial post.
2. It takes posts that have “new” comments and immediately bumps those posts to the topmost position of the viewing window.

This interface will greatly reinforce the existing power law relationships online, and have the effect of greatly reducing the serendipity and interestingness in things like the current Twitter and Facebook interfaces.

Not that many people use Gmail, and most who do are the digirati.

From twittercism:

This is also the first time I’ve noticed how few of my friends actually use Gmail. I loveGmail, and recommend it to everybody, but people are often quite set in their ways, and prefer to stay with Hotmail or Yahoo, irrespective of the lack of features. Looking at my address book, I’m guessing probably less than 20% of my friends have a Gmail address, or even a Google account, for that matter.

Yeah, it’s mad, but it also means Buzz is already limiting my network.

Social networking is an all or nothing game, and if you only have 20 percent of your friends, do you really think the other 50 percent or so are going to create a Gmail account to see Google Buzz?

I think not.

What’s the take away? Not ready for primetime.

I agree with twittercism:

My gut feeling? Unless they make some major changes and improvements to Buzz, and soon, and that includes addressing those privacy issues, it’s never going to be a threat to Twitter or Facebook. It’s just another aggregator. And a bad one, at that.

Everyone sees Facebook as the center of their social graph. They also see Google as the place that wants your information, which is why people won’t trust them with their social graph.

What do you think?

The running joke is that you know something has jumped the shark once Corporate America has grabbed a hold of it.

Church of the Customer predicts that this is the year Social Media really starts becoming part of Corporate America. Boring isn’t necessarily bad, because it means it’s profitable.

My prediction for 2010: social gets integrated into business functions. That means: social media policies, aligning social media strategies and tactics with overall business objectives and revenue goals, and realigning functional teams. Yeah, not as exciting as another viral video but those are as reliable as a Vegas roulette table. Social media process is hard work, so it’s time for social media to get boring! For process geeks like me, that’s pretty exciting.

One of the friends runs an online marketing education conference. Social Media is the new hot thing (I think a couple of years ago, it was search engine optimization, and please don’t ask about my opinion on that), so their blog network is teeming with posts about Social Media, and the top request for education is that new fangled “Twitter thing” and tips about “Facebook”.

I met one of the characters at one of their events (which I thought was the coolest thing), but the mass market in indifferent, and still doesn’t get the whole CNN call for tweets.

Whatever.

Nobody cares.

Right?

I like posting on Facebook as much as the next social media geek (I think last Monday, I talked about my new haircut), but I recognize that posting about what I’m going to eat on Twitter doesn’t make me some kind of expert.

It just means I use it. I don’t charge an arm and a leg for my advice, and I’m still amazed at the impact of Social Media on sites even though some of my friends consider me ahead of the curve. Myself and some of my friends have been lucky to work in some Social Media environments (MySpace, for example), and even we don’t consider ourselves experts.

Social Media (and even User Experience) experts shouldn’t be able to call themselves that if they’ve been on one or two panels and read a book. They should have some successes (and failures) behind them, and grown to tell the story. But the truly great experts not only know how to leverage their personal brand, but point out the obvious while doing it, for free.

Here are some ways to tell if your Social Media Expert is full of crap:

Your Social Media Expert spends more time blogging than working

Self promotion can be high art on the web (Tila Tequila? Dane Cook? I mean, who really laughs at Dane Cook’s jokes?). My friends talk about all the Ringo Starrs out there — you know them, they were with one company as someone inconsequential. The company made it big, and found a way to parlay it into selling several books and evangelizing ideas. They are their own personal brand.

That said, there’s a really bad sign if your Social Media Expert spends more time blogging than working.

Think about this — one post of this length takes about an hour of write. It’s like the cook with the great cookies: the last thing they are going to do is tell everyone the recipe right?

If they are spending all their time writing blog posts about how much they know about Social Media, they aren’t helping your company do Social Media.

Your Social Media Expert thinks social media started with Facebook and Twitter

The reality is that the core foundation of social media has been around since two people talked around the campfire about inventing the wheel. It’s just moved to a different medium, and that medium as we know it, the internet, started on October 29, 1969. A lot of us older people (you know, the one’s that had jobs before an email address) remember bulletin board systems, and technically my first social media message that I sent to a friend of mine on Usenet was in 1987. Seriously, that’s longer ago than the age some of the experts I’ve seen.

It took four days to get there.

The distance traveled was from Irvine, California to Claremont, California.

Real Social Media Experts understand conversations, and how those conversations interact on whatever medium they are on. That could mean a letter to the editor sent via a mail carrier in the 1950’s, or a page established on Facebook in 2009. It’s the conversation that’s important.

Your Social Media Expert thinks that Twitter is the start of your brand

One of the great aspects of Social Media is that if you do it right, your customers have the conversation for you, promote your business, and make you lots of money, all for the cost of good service. One of the biggest mistakes we all make is where brand starts.

What is brand? Is your your name, and the experiences tied to your name. It’s not a twitter post, or a blog entry, or the color you have, or the logo you are designing. It’s the name of your company, and how every representative of your company is associated with it.

That said, if a stupid Twitter post goes out about how Memphis sucks, or 15,000 people complain on Facebook that your company uses slave labor, that hurts your brand. Social Media conversations shouldn’t be measured in just metrics, but also in quality of the conversation because that relates back to your brand. That article is a good example, because it talks about the success of Comcast — ask any of their customers.

Your Social Media Expert always has a clown in the pocket

This a famous phrase I’m going to attribute to a friend of mine. Whenever a company was going down the drain, especially during the late 1990’s, there was always a skunkworks project that was shown off in front of the venture capitalists. This was to distract them from the fact that the company was burning $15 million a month, they were surrounded by $1,000 Herman Miller Aeron chairs, and the core product still hadn’t launched, and the CEO was doing coke.

Look, online video! We can put that on our Geocities pages!

Real consultants offer some kind of roadmap of these are what the deliverables are, this is what they are going to do, and this should be the result. Hopefully. It doesn’t always have to succeed, and sometimes you can’t always measure it (even the biggest agencies have a hard time generating good numbers around social media). At the end of the day, if sales go up, it’s a good campaign.

It’s about the strategy kids. Plan. Plan. Plan, again. It’s not rocket science, and it doesn’t take a 25-year-old to tell you otherwise.

Your Social Media Expert speaks in 140 character sentences

If the only way they promote themselves is through Twitter, fire them.

Yesterday.

Why?

Twitter is the Apple of the Internet, without the cool products. Their market reach is under two percent, which is interesting, because MySpace is still in the 30’s and Facebook is way, way over that in the 50’s. I look at it as the mom test — if my mom has heard about it, it’s gone mainstream. We had dinner a few weeks ago, and the conversation started something like, “They wanted me to get on Facebook, but I don’t see time for it. I wish they would have called me up.”

Twitter never entered the conversation.

The truth is that Twitter has some great uses, most of it around it being the new RSS feed, and a great way to watch conversations around specific topics or events.

Your Social Media Expert recommends Delicious and Stumble Upon for an audience of seniors

It’s all about the audience, right? If your consultant doesn’t know who to talk to, then how can they have a conversation.

That’s what blow my mind about some of the people that recommend Twitter for everyone. The first question asked should be, “Where can I have a conversation with this audience?” For example, Email is still relevant (46 percent of all embedded links are still through email), yet the Social Media Expert wants you to use hashtags.

Figure out where your audience is, and talk to it. For some, it’s Foursquare. For others, it’s Facebook. For even other people, it’s Etsy.

For every audience  there’s a proper venue, and your Social Media Expert should know to look there.

What to do? What to do?

If you really need a Social Media Expert that is one, email me. Even if they don’t call themselves one.

From Social Media Today:

The most influential people on Twitter are either already celebrities, create their own content, or both. Who do you see most often retweeted? Major news outlets like CNN, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. Mashable. Guy Kawasaki. Robert Scoble. Of course there are many reasons these people are influential, but a very basic reason is that they are creating original content somewhere other than Twitter. They are most often using Twitter as a super-news-feed, and as a way to drive people back to their blog, web site, etc. (Scoble is an exception. He converses everywhere.)

There are a lot of wonderful reasons to have a Twitter account (mostly to promote your blog), but I think the main relevant point is that I can’t think of anyone that is taken seriously only because they have a Twitter account. Twitter is used to promote something else, and it can’t really stand on it’s own.

One of the reasons I love the web is because it repeats the same story lines, over and over again. For example, here’s a story that came out, and I’m removing references to the social network in question for your own humor:

Today, [insert your favorite social media network here] changed the terms of service, much to the protests of the users who use the service for free. The revision grants [insert your favorite social media network here] complete, perpetual ownership of content uploaded or added to [insert your favorite social media network here] — including the rights to sublicense said content.

[insert your favorite social media network here] Terms of Use previously stated that material uploaded onto the site falls under the license of the company. Prior to the update, however, users that removed their content from [insert your favorite social media network here] legally forfeited its license to their material, though the socnet reserved the right to maintain archives.

The users invaded the blogosphere, stating their disagreement to the new policy.

[insert mad blogger here who uses said social network] said, “Yo, this sucks. I’m not paying for the service, but they shouldn’t be able to do that with my content stored on their servers. I’m going to cancel my account and blog about it. They suck.”

Blah blah blah, blah blah, blah.

Back to the real world, folks.

A lot of this terms of service is realistically about as enforceable as a non-compete agreement in California (and for those of you that don’t know, non-competes in California are so limited, you’re better off setting it on fire than trying to enforce it). Lawyers are supposed to overreach, it’s in their blood. That’s how they compromise. Until this document is challenged, it doesn’t mean much, anyways.

I would have loved to be in the office of those lawyers:

“Hey, I think we missed a few things in that terms of service,” said Facebook lawyer one. “Should we add a couple of lines?”

“How about we own them forever? What do you think? How much will page views go up?” Said Facebook lawyer two.

It’s kind of like driving down the highway: there are tons of laws that could be invoked if you are even doing the speed limit, but common sense says the cops can’t pull over everyone, and even if they do pull you over, there’s a good chance the case will get thrown out of court because most courts operate on some level of common sense.

Lawyers do all kinds of things that bend the law as far as it will before it breaks, from working at a company to constructing terms of service. Their job is to always protect their client. Facebook’s lawyers are protecting theirs.

I’ve been doing this for too long to realize what they are doing, and I’m like a lot of other bloggers (Greg Bussmann, Wet Asphalt, Art Fag City, TechCrunch): not really that worried. This seems more to be a few blogs looking to get some traffic (and I’ll take all the traffic I can get).

In fact, I see this as more of an attempt for Consumerist to justify it’s Alexa Ranking than real news. How about looking into the data collection issues of retailers in the United States, yo.

Here’s a few truths about social networks and their terms of service:

Facebook would be crazy to license the materials

Hypothetical: let’s say Andy Warhol rises from the dead and posts one of his famous Campbell Soup prints to Facebook. Do you really think they would sell the print on eBay? Hell, no. That part is virtually unenforceable from both a legal and a realistic standpoint. There’s a story over at the New York Times where the artist that designed the Obama artwork is getting sued by Associated Press. No matter what companies think, there are laws protecting people’s copyrights.

Companies put all kinds of crazy statements in the terms of service — stuff up unto giving up rights to your first born — but it doesn’t mean it’s some kind of legal document that’s going to stand up in court. If there’s a lawsuit, judges and juries tend to side with the law or common sense, which ever comes first. What it really means is that all aggregate data Facebook puts together they can sell as market research, but they aren’t going to sell your photos.

Your supermarket and credit card companies probably collect more information on you when you use your card than Facebook can. And the reality is that Facebook and MySpace collect so much information, there’s physically no way to digest it all at the level that it would endanger your privacy (I’ve even been told as much by some of the network engineers that work at the companies).

And for public relations purposes, Facebook would go out of it’s way to contact and/or compensate you, to avoid backlash. Even if they did use your likeness in an advertisements, they would probably contact you first. There’s case law around this. Please, be informed.

Removing content damages the landscape of any social network

I used to run a message board ages ago (ages being early 2000, but consider internet dog years and the grey hair in my goatee), and the most difficult issue was dealing with users we had to ban (and we had to ban a few of them). They would stand upon their soapbox and say nasty stuff, and then I would get a phone call at 3 a.m. along the lines of, “This person said this, you have to take it off the board. Waaa!!!!”

No matter where you are at, stuff you put on the web is up there forever, as Chris Brogan points out.

Social networks are a functioning ecosystem akin to weather’s butterfly effect: what happens in one place on the system and it’s resulting effects tends to magnify across the entire network. There were particular people that, looking back, I wish we hadn’t banned. even if they were horrible people and killed cats, because the outrage wasn’t worth the trouble. The reality is that sometimes responding to the issue is worse than the issue itself. Seriously, in a message board, how do you delete replies to a nasty post? Some of those threads went on for over 100 replies.

What Facebook is really trying to do is this: let’s say they put part of the service behind a subscription wall. With this new agreement, they can charge subscriptions and not have to worry about paying customers for their content. Imagine if customers decided, “Yo, I don’t want my content anymore?” What an awful mess that would be, programatically. And again, one of the undecided issues of the digital era is, who does own that content?

You aren’t paying for the service, Facebook, or better yet, their advertisers are

Rule number one about online services: they aren’t charities. They’re there to make money, and if you forget that nothing is really for free, it’s all about the library, the candlestick, and the butler. Get a clue.

On a few of the social networks I’m on, when something happens that the users don’t like, the users stand upon the mountains with their ten commandments, shouting at how awful the service is, even though they aren’t footing the bill. “The moderators are Hilteresque,” they rant. “Something should be done,” they howl.

I’ve footed the bill for some awful users that bordered on needing psychiatric treatment. I’m going to challenge every single blogger to do this: if you don’t like it, start your own damn service.

Whomever the founders are, whether it be the MySpace gang or Mark Zuckerberg, or your mom, they’re the one’s that put in their own sweat to start something that has millions of users. Sometimes, they have to make unpopular decisions, knowing some blogger somewhere (like me, for example) is going to say something about it. If they make too many unpopular decisions, they lose customers (read, Friendster). But they are running a business, and sometimes forcing a new set of requirements, whether it be new user experience or a reworded terms of service.

Millions of people might gripe a bit, but move on with their lives.

Some people start groups. Others blog about it. Very few actually do anything about it of any note.

It’s good business to lose a particular set of customers

The realities of business is that some policies (like bandwidth throttling by Comcast, for example) may not be popular with a particular set of users, but a) those users are not only a pain in the ass but are also unprofitable, and b) those users compromise less than one percent of the user base, yet probably eat up about 10 to 20 percent of the resources.

The same is true of marketers that use MySpace and Facebook, considering that most of the people that make money off the services aren’t employed by the services: they eat a considerable amount of resources, and of course Facebook would want to limit them.

Businesses do this all the time: they make changes to their business model or the groups they employ so they feel they can be more profitable. This includes from changing of policies to laying off workers. It doesn’t mean it’s right, but it’s just part of business.

This is a rant, pretty much, but will be a continuing discussion about how the social media platforms are evolving, and the key differences.

This is a pretty new blog, so I don’t get a lot of comments, other than, “hey, I agree with you!” My writing style doesn’t lend itself well to controversy — I usually come off as very matter of fact — so I get readers, but not discussion.

That’s really true for the vast majority of websites.

A very small minority of people control the content on sites like Digg (Social Blade tracks it), and Coding Horror has an article about how less than 1000 people contribute the content on Wikipedia. I ran a message board back in the day, and less than 100 people contributed to a message area that was getting close to two million page views a month. Just under .2 percent of You Tube visitors actually put up videos, and the trend goes on and on.

It’s really about being an active contributors: very few of us are in the world are truly active, and the majority of traffic on MySpace isn’t people posting to their profiles, but users who have joined to have a really basic account there browsing through photo after photo. The user may comment occasionally, but for the most part, it’s really just about seeing what other people have done.

The perception of passive versus active is very important in User Generated Content: for sites like Yelp.com and MySpace, they don’t exist if there isn’t an active community, but the distribution of contribution for all these sites has a definate long tail result in graphs (a few people generate most of the content).

Some of the sites, like Yelp, have turned a lot of views into contributors in a way that other sites haven’t by essentially creating hundreds of Yelps, all locally based. Yelp events happen all over the country, and they have generated a sense of community among it’s users that Facebook has to a certain extent, but MySpace hasn’t except for music and entertainment event.You can go to Yelp events, and meet the people behind the reviews. Locally, there is a certain set of people that contributes much more than the rest of the audience, so they are essentially the super connectors, the people for whom if they didn’t contribute, the community didn’t exist.

With Facebook, you tend to stay within your own social circle, so the same effect happens, even if you don’t meet the other people on a regular basis. There are events, but more often than not, there’s a disconnect between the virtual and the physical world because the status messages are from people in other parts in the country versus someone reviewing the dry cleaner down the street.

There will be more thoughts on this. Please stay tuned.

I’ll be honest.

I’m not an early adopter.

I don’t buy any Mac product on the first revision. It takes me a while to get excited about anything, and so I generally wait, and wait, and wait until jumping on any kind of bandwagon. I know Social Media’s been around for a while, but I’m not too hip on it being the encompassing need for any company’s customer service program. I don’t have to live on MacRumors and talk about all the latest cool stuff — I’d rather be in Vancouver eating and drinking.

Customers are generally divided into three groups:

• Those that like your product (active users)
• Those that have some kind of complaint (active, angry users)
• Those that are ambivalent because they see your product as a tool to achieve a certain goal and not much else (passive users).

Certain customers move from one group to another, but the vast majority are are in those later two groups. Part of the reason they may complain about your product is that they don’t understand how to use it, or there’s something wrong with it, but that still makes them passive because once their issue has been resolved, they’ll stop complaining. They’re much different than the active users, who use the product even if it cuts off their hand or causes ear damage (read: iPod).

I’m not going to quote any study because I don’t have any to refer to, and I also believe sometimes there are lies, lies, and damn statistics. I would reckon the number of users that actually care to interact with a company using social media is much lower than the numbers quoted from Cone at Church of the Customer Blog are much lower than some marketing wonk getting on the phone calling up people and asking, “So, wouldn’t it be cool if?”

And let me point this out: if you truly believe every survey out there, I’m going to point to the 2000 election exit polls — they had Gore winning by 10 percentage points.

(For disclosure purposes, Cone is a strategy and communications agency with over 25 years experience building and maintaining trusted relationships between clients and stakeholders.)

Seriously, 25 percent of internet users interact with companies through social networks at least once a week? I can’t even keep up with my Facebook email, and I use the internet everyday.

Most of us just don’t have time to interact on 20 product sites because we have an iPod, a Sony Plasma TV, a Volkswagen Jetta, and use Titleist golf clubs. Very few are so enthusiastic about a product that we search out places to talk about it, and more often than not, when we do that search, it’s because we’re angry, really angry. 

Sure, it makes for a great story if you’re consulting for a Fortune 500 firm, especially when spinning damn statistics, but it’s not necessarily the real picture.

I’ll do my own survey, and you can comment here:

1. How many of you have an iPod?
2. How many of you have found a message board or a comment area where you can talk about all these neat features the iPod should have, giving Apple feedback?

When I was a product manager, I researched these sites thoroughly, and found that the users were either: a) so excited about the service and suggested a bunch of useless features, or b) had a complaint. For every 10 ideas, there was a gem in there worth further explanation, but it’s not to be all end all of user research. And some of the best ideas came from users I had to reach out to.

Sometimes it’s what the users aren’t telling you that gives you the real picture.

One of the joys of the Interwebs is that we can measure everything, from page views to visitors to purchases. It’s not as exact as some of the “experts” say it is (what really is a visitor, anyways, and are cookies really that reliable?), measuring the impact of social media and consequently attaching dollars to it has been a tricky proposition.

How do you measure the impact of a blinking, ugly MySpace page with 38 ads, 23,143 friends, and photos of themselves using a cell phone and a mirror? Is advertising effective there?

Webwalker, a blog in Canada (that explains it!) has come up with a first cut metrics list for social media. They linked off to this white paper about social media, which is a great read.

1. Generate awareness.
2. Drive Trial.
3. Product Launch.
4. Establish Need/Want
5. Product/Service Comparison.
6. Positive Association.
7. Form/Change Opinion.
8. Influence the Influencers.
9. Drive Action/Traffic.
10. Establish/Regain Trust. 

It’s a bit rough, I don’t totally agree with some of the classifications, and maybe this be condensed a bit, but it’s a start in the right direction. Comments?