Girl Disrupted...Local Pick Opportunity

I’m all for the Local Picks application on Facebook. I thought it fit in 2007 and I still think it fits today.

However, being a bit of a media snob, I did feel a little let down by a recent notification in my profile. Local Picks had a great opportunity to gain some interaction and I think they blew it.

It’s important in any media initiative to show consistency in messaging and give audiences what you’ve promised in your call to action.

So clicking on the notification to see the new restaurant in my area should bring me to the new listing no?


What a great opportunity to ask me if I’ve been there and liked it. Heck, I might have been motivated to rate it as well.

Instead, I was sent to a generic landing page that has done two things:

1. Disrupted my Facebook user experience as I wasn't really looking for a place to go (I was interested in seeing what new place in my area was listed).
2. Not delivered on it's media message.
   

Users are fickle and competing applications are anything but scarce (especially in the local search category). This was a great example of an opportunity to stand out from the crowd AND get user interaction that was not fully realized.

Maybe the next notification will be more fulfilling for both the user and the directory.

Just a follow up note... Here's the message on my profile telling all my friends what I've (allegedly) been up to :

Micro Thoughts on Yahoo...

Softened version...

Having received considerable flack from a demanding reader for refusing to fall into the abyss of commentary on yesterday's Yahoo announcement, I’ve been pressured to write something, anything about the company…

In light of the pending Microsoft deal, here are some brief, random and gratuitous thoughts:

• Yahoo managed to established a strong social graph framework through its user base:
• Yahoo’s communication utilities were early to the game and the consumer switch cost (abandoning for competitor) is still relatively high.

• Yahoo pioneered some of today’s trends and arguably has close to best in class services:
• music, customization of home pages and rich messaging (not voice, I’m talking about the IMvironments, games and nifty tools)

• Yahoo’s focus on acquiring market share and creating an ad-supported model since its birth helped slow the industry’s ability to monetize consumer services online:
• The “everything free” mentality was born out of the need to compete with subscription based ISP providers in the mid nineties. Yahoo was wooing CompuServe users (and the like) into their fluffy ad supported environments. This has backfired on themselves and the industry as a whole. They were not alone. Other competing brands were employing the same strategies. I single out Yahoo only because of their brand's power and visibility.

As Dr. Li Song, Chairman of China based SinoFriends Inc., shared revenue numbers driven through the monetization of music backgrounds and avatar building in his presentation yesterday, he was shocked when I told him that Yahoo had been offering this for free for years.

Tencent, a Chinese based instant messaging service and largest IM based social network has 250 million accounts (some people have multiple accounts) and generates between $400 and $500 million US per year by selling avatars and background music. The company has a $12 million US market cap.While I understand that there are cultural differences influencing North America's ad supported media, the mature online advertising industry (12 years later) knows that this is not a reliable business model.

Today, we're much better equipped to handle micro-payments and technology has matured to a level where consumers are seeing true value for services. The virtual economy on Second Life (while it's future is hazy), indicates that users are willing to pay for digital assets that enhance their "personas" online.

Don’t get me wrong. I am after all, a consumer and a loyal fan of the cool products that the company has afforded me through its strategy. But I feel that it missed a few opportunities along the way that could have changed the game.

Google's entire success (to date) has been directly driven through its understanding that utility is king and transactions have value. While they've managed to swing payment towards the advertisers, every service it provides is touched with this understanding.

• Yahoo fails at integration
• Yahoo has proven repeatedly, its inability to integrate with anything see: Broadcast.com, HotJobs, Overture (we're still waiting for the ability to target Canada properly using Yahoo search!!) and Kelkoo.

If the deal goes through, while Google walks on the moon, plays with DNA and ends world hunger, it'll be an uphill battle to get the two companies integrated.

"The Year of the Phone"...SinoFriends

One of the more intriguing presentations delivered at the Social Networking Conference in Miami was from Dr. Song Li, Chairman of SinoFriends Inc. in China.

While the content was 100% focused on the Chinese market, because of the sheer size of the market, there was some excellent insight shared on emerging trends within social networking and how mobile will come into play.

Dr. Li quit his job on Wall Street in 2003 and co-founded MemeStar, the largest Chinese mobile SMS-based social networking service in China. MemeStar acquired 2.2 million paying members within two years of its creation.

But today’s presentation was focused on his current SinoFriends properties. SinoFriends launched four years ago and is the leading (and oldest) online dating service in China that charges its users $275US per year. There was an unconfirmed claim that the network has been acquiring about 1 million new users per DAY.

Aside from sharing a great deal of statistics about the Chinese market (too many to blog about), Dr. Song Li laid out some interesting facts about how carriers in North America make it extremely difficult to match the same revenue generating opportunities that exist in China.

After showing some current numbers on PC based revenue vs. mobile, it was clear that mobile was driving substantially higher revenue. In china 90% of phones are bought from mobile phone vendors. In fact carriers only sell about 10% of the mobiles. This provides two channels for entrepreneurs to work with.

Dr. Li went on to explain that 70% of the mobile phones were imported from Europe. The top four phones included Nokia, Motorola, Samsung and Sony Ericsson. Nokia leads with 30% market share.

In China, it seems that phones truly are fashion accessories. In 2007, about 150 million mobile phones were reportedly sold in China but Dr. Li spoke of a Taiwanese company that provides a platform to Chinese domestic mobile phone designers called MTK most of the Chinese domestic vendors license MTK and manufacture phones on its platform. Factoring in MTK, there were another 120 million units sold (on top of the 150 million).

Dr. Li described a fascinating Second Life type economy that appears to have emerged in his market. One particularly popular application among females under 25, is the purchase and customization of avatars for their profiles. Applications allow consumers to change hairstyles and buy clothes. The stroke of brilliance here is that the clothes expire. They get dirty and have to be virtually washed, they get damaged, and need to be replaced, they wear out and girls shop for more.

Another revenue generating virtual experience is the community living concept. Boys and girls start a life together online. They buy an apartment and spend real money to furnish their virtual lives. In China, this is a well-established business model.

Dr. Li ended the ‘revenue model” discussion with some insight on Instant Messaging and it’s potential to drive enormous revenue through micro-transactions.

With all the hype about distributed applications these days, it’s no surprise that Dr. Li is starting to place more focus on “SinoFriends Mobile”. This company is a newer venture providing mobile social networking and entertainment services that are embedded in over 15 million phones in China. He feels that this is an area that has incredible growth potential over the next few years. Interestingly, he reminded listeners that there is still a conversion rate to contend with. Currently, the company is seeing a 15% conversion on user activity of the applications that are embedded into the phones.

So, as expected, the final note here was that the challenge is to build true value in the form of entertainment or utility and then leverage the existing social graph.

The company generates $15 million US. They’ve got to be doing something right.

A Chat about Facebook's Strategy - FriendVox

I spent some time looking at FriendVox today. FriendVox is Facebook’s integrated Instant Messenger application that has been in Alpha for some time now.

There has been some recent chatter about why its even necessary for Facebook to have a separate system built upon its platform when the network already allows you to search for friends across your existing external instant messaging platforms.

I guess the difference here is that the tool is proprietary to Facebook and that the data may be used in the future for contextual advertising purposes or other. This combined with Facebook’s foray into the mobile world where instant messaging has already been nestling quite comfortably make the move a logical one.

The tool is integrated with an application called "Socialistics". Socialistics is a tool that tracks your friends’ activities with pretty charts and graphs. The application streams current profiles and delivers notifications on the fly. So, not only are all member contacts (even the unwanted ones) in one central location, but now they're super-accessible. The fact that it's built to be ensconced in one’s social graph will go a long way to building a loyal user base.

Chatting is a natural fit to the environment. Currently there are over 700 topical chats in the form of old school posts ranging in topics from “I Never” to “Addicted to That 70’s Show".

It's the mobile aspect that intrigues me though. Facebook has just launched its mobile application so that the network's main functions are now available on the go across most if not all mobile devices. Linking an instant messaging service would compliment the user-experience nicely. It is after all, big business. Frost & Sullivan projected the global market for all mobile messaging services—SMS, MMS, mobile IM and mobile e-mail—to exceed $100 billion by 2010. $15 billion (for IM) is not bad in the grand scheme of things...


With all the mini applications lurking around the Facebook platform today, it will be interesting to see what kinds of mash-ups will be developed across the messaging platform once it has been deployed and adopted.

Look out Skype…