Has Googzilla Captured You?

By Mark Evans in Google 1 Comment

godzillaIt has been a fascinating and, in some respects troubling, week for Google in the wake of a several announcements.

These include:

- the decision to offer a service that lets people see an archive of their search results even if they haven’t logged into Google – a move that has alarmed privacy advocates
- the launch of Google Public DNS, which could give Google all kinds of information about what do on the Web.
- the acquisition of AppJet, which was seen as a rival to Google’s much-hyped Google Wave service. Critics suggests the deal is just another way Google snuffs out competitive threats before they gain any traction.

While there are obvious benefits in using Google personalized search and Google Public DNS, they bolster the growing reality that Google’s goal to deliver the right information at the right time is going to come at a cost to the people using its services. There’s no such thing as a free lunch, and there’s no such thing as free Google services even if you don’t actually pay to use them.

The question is whether we should be afraid of Google, or “Googzilla” as the Globe & Mail’s Margaret Wente wrote in a column in which she described Google as “a scary monster that leaves devastation in its wake.”

Even if you are concerned about Google’s growing stranglehold on the Web, the problem facing many people is they’re happily and regularly using many Google services. My own Google portfolio includes: Web and blog search, GMail, Images, Calendar, Docs, Maps and YouTube.

The reason we use so many Google services is they work well, meet specific needs and, of course, they’re free. That said, there are other online services that are just as good or better but Google continues to grab more market share. And when it runs into a market in which it has no or a low presence, Google buys something.

Given Google’s blatant quest for global domination, maybe it’s starting to make more sense to use competitive services. Rather than Google Search, use Microsoft’s Bing; rather than Google Finance, use Yahoo Finance; rather than YouTube, use Vimeo.

While Google offers high-quality online services, there’s a risk in it being the entity that offers all things to all people. Without vibrant competition, innovation could suffer and you’ll have a business with the power to do just about anything it wants – even evil things.

Gary Vaynerchuk’s World Tour Lands in T.O.

By Mark Evans in Social Media 1 Comment Tags: , , , ,

IMG_1438Wine entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk and his beloved New York Jets were both in Toronto yesterday – two high-profile U.S. entities looking to spread the word: Vaynerchuk about wine and entrepreneurial-ism, and the Jets as part of the world’s most lucrative sports league, the NFL. Vaynerchuk lived up to the hype with an insightful and entertaining presentation at DemoCamp 24, while the Jets and Buffalo Bills put on a lackluster game before a less-than-packed Rogers Centre.

Vaynerchuk, who’s in the midst of a 40-city tour to promote his book “Crush It”, clearly has the gift for the gab, and has been speaking enough over the past couple of years to make it look fairly effortless. His rough around the edges style makes helps him come across as sincere, forthright and someone who most entrepreneurs can probably relate to. Keep in mind, Gary V. is also a consummate salesman, who’s always selling something – be it his new book, social media consulting services, online wine store, and, of course, his personal brand.

While Vaynerchuk has emerged as a social media “superstar” in the past couple of years, he’s far from an overnight success story. He’s been doing business on the Internet since 1997, and grown his family’s wine business, WineLibrary.com, by 20-fold into a $60-million entity.

One thing that Vaynerchuk has going for him in spades is confidence. The guy believes he’s not only the best but that he will not be outworked. “I’m very comfortable in my skin and massively comfortable in my effort,” he said, adding that “I honestly believe no one is better than me, although I don’t try to be a dick about it”. It’s an approach that Vaynerchuk gets away with, although you do have to wonder if more fame will overshadow his everyman persona that seems to keep his cockiness in check.

A particularly interesting comment was that Vaynerchuk’s emergence as a social media star didn’t materialize until online video emerged as a platform that anyone could capitalize on. This let Vaynerchuk launch his video wine reviews, which took the market like a storm. “You have to find your platform to tell your story. I had to let blogging go, which was very frustrating,” he said.

In addition to a 10-book deal with HarperCollins and his daily wine reviews, Vaynerchuk has become a social media consultant whose clients include the National Hockey League. As for what’s next, Vaynerchuk’s dream is buying the New York Jets – a lofty goal but one you wouldn’t want to dismiss as a pipe-dream given Vaynerchuk’s drive.

Can You Scale Social Media?

By Mark Evans in Social Media No Comments Tags: , , , ,

Note: This post appeared on the Sysomos blog last week but I thought it was interesting enough to share with MET readers. I recently ran into the head of social media for a consumer-facing company, and asked about the challenges of scale and whether there were ways to do it other than adding more people. It seems the answer has yet to be determined.

As more companies embrace social media, a reality is the amount of time and effort required to nurture, support and expand activity begins to expand.

Blog posts need to be written, external blogs need to be monitored and commented on, and shared; Twitter has to be updated, conversations need to happen (often in real-time, 24×7) and followers/friends need to be managed and monitored; content and updates for Facebook have to happen and be managed; and videos need to be created and uploaded; and the list goes on.

The question is: how you support all of this activity? If the answer is simply adding more people, then social media programs become increasingly more expensive, making it more difficult to achieve ROI. In the short-term, this is a strategy adopted by many companies because they’re scrambling to keep up. As a result, they don’t have the resources or time to create new, more efficient ways to manage their social media activities.

So, what’s the solution? How do you scale your social media programs without scaling your expenses?

There are two reasonable and feasible answers.

First, you leverage technology as much as possible without creating an automated social media machine that spits out content with no personality or people behind it. This happens by using social media monitoring and measurement services, as well as tools that let you update multiple social media platforms at the same time such as Ping.fm. This lets you stay real and have conversations led by a small group of employees, while technology powers much of the behind-the-scenes work.

The second approach is engaging people within the organization beyond your social media team. The social media team acts as a quarterback, while encouraging employees to create a healthy amount of the content needed to maintain a vibrant social media presence.

For example, blog posts can be written by a variety of people willing to share their insight and domain expertise. IBM, for example, has more than 13,000 internal bloggers, who operate using 12 straightforward rules. Employees can also be involved in support Twitter, Facebook and other social media activity. This can be done by participating within corporate-run tools or their personal accounts.

In a sense, companies can outsource social media to employees rather than having a large social media team that tries to do everything.

So, the answer to the question of whether social media can scale is “yes” – although it does require an embrace of technology and internal resources.

What Does 350M Facebook Users Mean?

By Mark Evans in Social Media No Comments Tags: , ,

numbersThere’s lot of buzz today about the fact Facebook now has more than 350 million registered users – more than double in the past year.

It is staggering, ultra-impressive growth but I have a few of questions:

1. Why is all this growth happening? What is it about Facebook now has compelled armies of people from around the world to join? As humans, we want to connect and share but it seems extraordinary that Facebook has emerged as the platform to do it.

2. What does 350 million registered users mean? For Facebook, what does it mean other than having to add a lot more servers on a regular basis? What does it mean in terms of business? Does 350 million registered users suggest Facebook is now a large, lucrative business because having bigger audience makes it even more compelling to advertisers?

As well, what does having 350 million users mean from a bigger picture perspective given all the content being shared, communications happening and applications being used. Is Facebook becoming another Internet or a parallel digital universe.

3. What’s next? With 350 million users and a platform for developers and advertisers/marketers to reach consumers, where does Facebook go from here? When you’ve got 500 million or 1 billion users, what does that let you do?

Nokia’s Smartphone Aspirations

By Mark Evans in Apple/iPod, Wireless 1 Comment Tags: , , , ,

Om Malik had an interesting blog post yesterday about an interview he did with Tero Ojanperä, Nokia executive vice-president of services. What caught my eye was how Om set up the interview by making outlining his criticisms of Nokia, “including its denial of competition from Apple’s iPhone, its hardware, and a botched launch of its Ovi store”.

It’s an interesting taken given Nokia’s bullishness during a conference last month in Helsinki about its progress in markets around the world, and how it’s put more emphasis of data services to drive sales. What went missing over the day-and-a-half event was any discussion about North America, and how Nokia’s smartphone efforts are lagging behind Apple and Research in Motion.

It was also a little curious that Nokia quietly announced at the conference that its much-anticipated N900 smartphone had started shipping, and then quickly moved on without providing more details or, at least, showing the N900 to the 140 reporters, bloggers and analysts.

To get a better sense of Nokia’s smartphone efforts, I managed to get an interview with Ian Laing, VP, marketing with Nokia in North America. While conceding Nokia isn’t as strong as Apple or RIM in North America, Laing contends Nokia has huge smartphone potential as its two OSs – Symbian and Maemo – are deployed in a variety of market segments.

“The perspective I have is the rising tide raises all ships and we are one of those ships raising the tide as the education of the consumers continues to happen in North America,” he said, adding that Nokia is seeing encouraging growth in other markets around the world for its smartphones.

Here’s an excerpt from the interview.


Q: What’s your take on the smartphone market’s growth around the world?
I would say that globally we are continuing to see the growth of the smartphone category, and it is starting defy definition. It is starting to get broad. It used to be phones with open OSs, phones with QWERTY keyboards, phones with smart screens. As we look at penetration around the world, more people are into their third, fourth and fifth generation device, and as is naturally the case in consumer electronics, they are moving up the food chain. More consumers are buying more feature-rich devices.

Q: What about Nokia’s presence in the North American smart phone market where the iPhone and Blackberry dominate?
In North America, the strength we see here with Apple and RIM is not quite the same in other markets around the world. When we launched the 5800 in Hong Kong a year ago, it was huge. We saw the kinds of lines going into stores that we saw her in the U.S. with Apple customers going into the AT&T stores. The world is not the same as New York, Toronto or San Francisco. In North America, we are seeing a really strong growth in the smartphone category thanks to all the work done by people such as Apple who are spending money on advertising, and talking to he consumer. The work Apple has done with AT& has helped the entire industry talk to consumer what these devices can do.

Q: There’s a lot of excitement about Nokia’s newest smartphone, the N900? Is this a game-changer for Nokia?
Let’s put the N900 into historical perspective. For some time, Nokia has been working on Internet devices – devices that have as its main purpose, making Internet access as powerful, easy and user-friendly as access on its PC. In previous years, we introduced the Nokia Internet tablet, the 800. These devices at first, they didn’t even have cellular phone capability – they were Wi-Fi devices to surf the Internet in a PC like way. I give you that context that Maemo comes from the PC world, version of Linux, open source OS; is the kind of OS that we believe belongs in very high-end internet friendly devices. From a strategic standpoint, what is the Nokia plan; Symbian is our bread and butter OS. Symbian is coming down the price curve from very highest end devices, now firmly ensconced mid-tier. Maemo, we anticipate deploying at the very top of the device range – the geekiest of the geek, who want the absolutely ultimate in mobile telephone.

While we are not the household name in North America like Apple or RIM, but we can bring smartphones into the mid-tier. Symbian will play in those parts of that portfolio; the very top of the portfolio is where you will have Maemo. The N900 is not the be all and end all; it is a nice device with multiple screens. But frankly that is just the beginning. You will see more devices running on Maemo.

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