Social Cache.
A Nemo blog. Dealing with uncommon cents.

Although Jeremiah Owyang, senior analyst at Forrester Research, posted his 5 Phases Of Social Experience article a month ago, it’s worth considering those 5 phases again. Having read them when he first posted them and now having had time to distill my thoughts, the first thing to strike me is how linear Owyang’s phases are and how he seems so sure that the unfolding of these phases will follow this trajectory; the greatest minds on earth still do not understand our own universe so it’s hard to see how one person can unravel the ever-changing world of the Social Web, although I will admit that he has exceptional skills at divining social media. I like his optimism but as we have been through phases 1 – 3 and are slowly entering phase 4, his phase 5. Era Of Social Commerce feels like a stretch – without phase 5 he would have only had to write about phase 4 if you get my drift. [Owyang's report 'The Future Of The Social Web can be found here].

My current interest is in Owyang’s third phase where OpenID and Facebook Connect come in to play, giving Social Web users the ability to share easily with their friends all of their web experiences. As Owyang says, it’s like taking your social connections along for the ride. Phase 4, Social Context, is unfolding right now. One company using Facebook to qualify visitors’ preferences, behaviors, and friends to help you get answers to questions from your peer group, is Aardvark who I wrote about just yesterday. I think Owyang is very optimistic though when he says “Consumers will opt in to share this information—about friends, preferences, demographics, and history—with online communities and other sites in exchange for a more-relevant Web experience.” That sounds like the wishful thinking of social media marketers – the wild card has always been social web users and what information they are willing to share. Facebook is almost a second internet with its millions of members yet Facebook doesn’t currently share that user data.

Phase 5 is problematic; I agree with Owyang’s premise but only time will tell if this theory pans out.
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Jeremiah Owyang’s 5 Phases Of Social Experience

1. Era of Social Relationships: We’ve already reached maturity with this stage. It took off in the 1990s with people connected to each other using simple profiles and “friending” features to share information, discussions, and media. It is the foundation of the changes to come.

2. Era of Social Functionality: Although not yet mature, we entered this phase in 2007. Today’s social networks have evolved into platforms that support social interactive applications and provide new meaning and utility to communities. Most of these applications appear to be disposable, and we’ve yet to tap into the true business functionality of applications such as e-commerce and workplace productivity. Even when maturity arises with this era, consumers will share their experiences but won’t connect them across networks. Among U.S. consumers who visit MySpace, Facebook, or LinkedIn at least monthly, 42 percent juggle at least two social network IDs. And 63 percent are also in discussion forums with yet another ID. This creates friction for consumers who must manage multiplying personal information and username/password combinations. It’s hard to keep track of connections when your contacts may be in Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Ning, Twitter, or a hundred other places.

3. Era of Social Colonization: Technologies like OpenID will let individuals traverse the Internet with their social connections along for the ride. The boundaries of social networks and traditional sites will blur, making every site a social experience—even if they don’t choose to participate. New browsers and identity technologies will let consumers choose to surf the Web and see what sites their friends have visited—and what they thought of the information there. Because they trust friends more than they trust companies, they’ll lean on their network to make decisions about what they’re reading and buying. To add value, social networks will aggregate members’ activities and those of their network, collected on the members’ profile pages, merging these into messaging systems and newsfeeds. Users will not only control their communications with other sites, but also see what their friends are doing on the open Web.

4. Era of Social Context: As sites begin to recognize people’s personal identities and their social relationships, they will customize experiences based on visitors’ preferences, behaviors, and friends. This stage will enable more-intense social applications, allowing social networks to absorb features of email and to become a base of operations for everyone’s online experiences. Consumers will opt in to share this information—about friends, preferences, demographics, and history—with online communities and other sites in exchange for a more-relevant Web experience. This will build bridges between social networks, sites, and any other medium that can connect with these identification tools.

5. Era of Social Commerce: As social networks become the repository for identities and relationships, they’ll become more powerful than corporate Web sites and CRM systems. Communities will be the driving force for innovation. Because of this, brands will cater to communities, resulting in a power shift toward the connected customer. Versatile IDs will blend social sites and the Web into a single common experience. Users will control their identities and what they choose to expose. They’ll use collaboration tools to define how they want brands to serve them, and a suite of community tools to manage companies.

I’m not sure that this is quite the news we’ve been waiting for but News Corp, owners of MySpace, have announced that users on MySpaceTV can now directly upload their videos, or rather upload a video of themselves in front of the web cam, by hitting a record button. It’s as simple as going to the ‘Upload a Video’ link, fill out the video description and then hit ‘Record a Video.’ The world will now be a better place.

Happy Prescriptions “Thought it’d lead us..”

Getting it right, getting exposed. A comment on the Girl Talk post, left by a user named ‘Natron’ led me to a web site for Happy Prescriptions, no doubt the web site for said ‘Natron’ who it turns out is a Portland musician. Another click of a hand [you have to visit the site to get that] led me to Happy Prescriptions MySpace where I found the video above. There’s also a free MP3 ep there. Circle complete.

This is serious news when it comes to business networking and social media, I see a serious win-win here for both parties. There has been some debate recently about Facebook and how seriously it can be taken when it comes to businesses using the Facebook network to extend their social media ambitions as well as advertise across it. I would argue that the LinkedIn/NYT partnership steps up the ante for both Facebook and MySpace; the NYT, one of the world’s great media institutions that has seriously embraced the internet to further its business, may be on a path to shaking off its “Grey Lady” image and LinkedIn, which, although having only 25 million registered users making it small by social network standards, is by far the doyen of social sites for serious business users. We’ll see how this one unfolds.

Kudos, once again to Marshall Kirkpatrick for breaking the story.

In an article in the Wall Street Journal today [subscription req.] a report says that YouTube will will fall short of revenue expectations. The twist to this chatter is that Google has found that 80% to 90% of video watchers hate to watch pre-roll advertising and they leave the video the minute they see any hint of a pre-roll. The story goes that Google intends to ignore its own research and go ahead with pre-roll anyway.

And the reason that most pages on YouTube are ad free? Because Google is fearful of showing that it is profiting from copyright infringement. They already in the middle of a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by Viacom. That apparently leaves Google with only 4% of the videos being legally a-ok to advertise around as they have been approved by the copyright owners.

Bottom line for Google and the lawsuit they face, is that it is very unlikely they will receive a ruling in their favor to make money from copyright-violating content. It also will be a barrier to entry for anyone trying to launch a social media advertising program around these big content sites. Even Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation doesn’t own the copyright to hundreds of thousands of songs on its MySpace site.

In the many years that I have had a MySpace page I have never once clicked through on any of the ads pushed to me. Here’s an example in the clip I took from the home page above. I never read Spin Magazine and I can’t stand Coldplay. Even the tag line from Chris Martin – “Our album will probably save the world” fails to entice me as the comment is so shallow. The good news though is that the digital issue of Spin is free. Now they’re thinking.