Simon Collister, PhD

Strategy + Consulting

social networking

Sermo: the revenue model for Facebook?

by simoncollister Leave a Comment

Interesting point made on email today through Edelman‘s Me2 Revolution list.

Steve Rubel (for it was he) drew our attention to the US social network for health professionals, Sermo, which has just signed a deal with the pharmaceutical firm Pfizer.

In case you weren’t aware(!), Sermo is "the largest U.S. networking site for doctors. It launched in
September 2006, counts 30,000 physicians as members, and is adding
2,000 a week."

Although it’s not clear exactly what Pfizer’s involvement with the network will be it’s possible that the drug company will be able to tap into and benefit from the novel income stream that Sermo already offers. According to Daily Brief:

"Instead of selling ads, Sermo makes its money by letting service
companies, financial services firms, and the government become flies on
the wall of the biggest physicians’ roundtable out there. It packages
and sells the data it holds on the medical community, allowing those
parties to get insight into how to better serve them, and to anticipate
what’s on the horizon."

Now it’s highly possible that someone has already written about the parallels between Sermo’s revenue model and the potential for Facebook to go the same way – but I haven’t read it yet.

Packaging and flogging user data aside, what’s stopping Facebook from selling focus-group sessions with its member-base to corporates? Isn’t it only one, logical step away from the daily poll you get in the side-bar.

It’s also an interesting model. No-one wants advertising anymore (and you can block it anyway) and those sponsored links in the news feed are laughable. If it came down to unannounced listening or unobtrusive focus group invitations, I think that might not be a too unpleasent way for Facebook to make some cash and stay useful.

Technorati tags: Sermo, Pfizer, Facebook, revenue

Want to build your own social network?

by simoncollister Leave a Comment

White_label
Personally I’m not a techy type or web developer – I’m fascinated by what
technology is doing to society and vice versa. As Richard Bailey pointed out
recently: technology determinism is wrong’.

However, I also like to think I can spot a very useful list when I see
one. As such it’s definitely worth posting a link to Jeremiah Owyang’s extremely comprehensive list of ‘white label’
social networks software. If you want a full customisable social network with
your company’s brand on it there must be a network here for you.

Technorati tags: white label software, social networks, Jeremiah Owyang

*UPDATED* Twitter is about people, not technology… how many times?

by simoncollister 2 Comments

Twitter_full_2

*UPDATED*Further to my previous thoughts on online identity, Doc SearlsDave Winer has a nifty little post about how we engage with social networks (including Twitter) differently.

"When people get together to discuss Twitter, and perhaps other social
networks (and Twitter is that, a bare-bones social network), they often
discuss as if there were a common user experience, but this is a
misperception, there are many different experiences …

On Twitter I try to keep a ten percent ratio of people I follow over
people who follow me. For other people, maybe most, the ratio is
1-to-1, they follow approximately the same number of people as follow
them. Scoble follows thousands
of people. For him Twitter is like a very fast chatroom. For me it’s
like weblogs.com on a busy day in 2002. I’ve seen people who follow 0
people, for them Twitter is a publishing environment. Very different
experiences. To each of them Twitter is a different product."

Very astute point (obviously)… and something PR and marketing people should take into account when thinking about measurement.

We are dealing with social tools being put to social uses. It’s not simply a case of measuring Twitter as Twitter. It’s about measuring Twitter as totally diverse group of Twitterers each using the tool for different purposes

That’s the difficulty (impossiblility?). And the usual metrics suspects probably aren’t the right people to be doing the measuring.

Technorati tags: social networks, Twitter, Dave Winer, measurement, metrics

What if you can’t measure it OR manage it?

by simoncollister 3 Comments

I’ve written a couple of posts recently about ways to measure  social or participatory media online and concluded that we can’t measure it. Or more specifically, we can’t measure it unless we change the way we do business/communicate with the public. (although David Phillips believes we can’t measure it at all – see his comment in my first post)

So it was nice to see Neville Hobson blogging about measurement guru, Katie Paine‘s views in the latest edition of the IABC’s magazine, Communication World.

Katie writes:

"The standard maxim in the communication world is: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” The problem is not so much how to measure blogs, but rather that “managing” them is impossible: You simply can’t manage what 10 million independent-minded, opinionated people are saying."

Which is pretty much what I’ve been saying.

My concern is that all attempts to find ways of measuring social tools are being developed using existing measurement techniques and ideas which simply won’t cut it in a bottom-up socially active world.

What we need are new ways of approaching measurement which involve setting measurement parameters after carrying out communications/community activity, or perhaps as Katie suggests in her CW article:

"Forget reach and frequency. Success in today’s marketplace is measured not by how broad your reach is but how deep your network is."

The only problem is… there is a whole industry built around traditional ways of measuring media and it’s likely the less enlightened firms may resist attempts to go down that route.

As I wrote on EIS’s Interactive blog in July:

"the current obsession with media measurement is very much driven by companies deeply in-depted – both financially and ideologically – to traditional business models."

As usual, getting past financial barriers may kick-start people into changing the way they think – and ultimately – behave towards measuring social activities online.

Woah! There’s social… and then *social*

by simoncollister Leave a Comment

I’ve just read about an astounding Facebook app that probably takes ‘sociality’ to a new, possibly unwelcome level.

The One Minute Friend app works thus:

“you add this application to your Facebook account, give it your phone number (just US and Canada for now), provide some selection criteria, and wait for your phone to ring. You’ll be connected, for free, to another person on Facebook who made matching selections. You talk for a minute and it disconnects. You see their first name and their photo, but no other information, such as your phone number or profile, is revealed. At the end of the call, if both of you so agree, the application will re-connect you for a more extended conversation. Otherwise you can move on to the next person”

I’m not sure I like the sound of that personally. Never does David Weinberger it seems, who admits “I haven’t tried it. I’m not that social.”

[Via  David Weinberger]

Technorati tags: Facebook apps; One Minute Friend

Why politicians still don’t get the real power of social networks

by simoncollister 5 Comments

Did anyone read yesterday’s article in the London edition of the Financial Times about the use of social networks in the US presidential election?

I only ask because I did, and found it to be pretty un-insightful. OK, if I want up-to-the-minute commentary on social networking and politics I might turn to David Weinberger rather than the newspaper, but from the lumpen headline: “Battle for blogosphere ballot box heats up” to the closing para, little light was shed on what US candidates were actually doing with social networks.

First up the piece told us how many Facebook and MySpace friends the top Democrat and Republican candidates have. Then we got this insight from strategist, Thomas Gensemer, managing director of Blue State Digital:

“You can be putting a message out there in far more powerful ways than just e-mailing or on your own website … Instead of pressing ‘send’ to half a million people today, it’s activating a message that will be active for days thereafter”

Hmm. Enlightening.

Maybe Peter Daou, head of Hilary Clinton’s online campaign team can offer us a better explanation:

“More and more the internet is becoming essential to the political process”

Maybe not.

The most interesting questions are raised by the article’s critical voice of reason, Colin Nagy, director of Source Communications.

His argument is that:

“Collecting friends is superficial and doesn’t require any real effort on behalf of the friend …Would you rather have 20,000 friends who do nothing, donate nothing, or 10 friends who are active, crazy fundraisers?”

And he has hit the nail on the head. The real question is how do you get your 20,000 friends to become “active, crazy, fundraisers”.

The answer is: you change the way you do politics. I’ve said time and again that simply pushing out the same, tired, two-faced political crap that most 12 year-olds can see through but doing so via exciting new tools like social networks won’t work.

What politicians and their campaign teams need to grasp is the change in power dynamics within social networks. It’s a flat structure rather than a top down or even slightly hierarchical network. Rather than the network being there for them, they are there for the network.

People, like Colin Nagy don’t get it. He expects his 20,000 friends to do something for him or his candidate, when in reality they want him to do something for them. And isn’t that what politics is all about?

XP: edemocracy Update

Technorati tags: US Presidential elections, social networking, Financial Times, Hilary Clinton, Peter Daou, Colin Nagy, Thomas Gensemer