Why Isn’t there a Google Version of MobileMe for the iPhone?
By charles | August 6, 2008
As a very proud and happy iPhone 3G owner, I’ve been surprised how much I like the device, especially after owning a Blackberry for 6 years. When I first heard about MobileMe, I was intrigued by the service. I passed at launch, not because I thought there would be tons of hiccups (which there were) but because I don’t use Apple as my primary mail or calendar store and I wasn’t willing to sign up for a service that doesn’t support my main email address and usage patterns. Like a lot of tech folks I know, I live on Gmail and Google Calendar for my personal life and I have found some simple ways to use the Google Sync for Blackberry agent to get it working with my Zimbra work calendar as well.
As a former Googler, I’m perplexed by Google’s absence on the iPhone platform as it pertains to core PIM services. The core requirements for a great iPhone sync app are pretty easy to identify - I’ve taken a stab at doing so below:
-The ability to silently sync PIM data in the background (they’ve demonstrated they can do this with the Google Sync tool for Blackberry - if you’re a Blackberry user who also uses Google Calendar you should download and install it immediately)
-A good web / desktop calendar product (Google Calendar qualifies here)
-A great mail application on the web / desktop (I love Gmail and can’t imagine life without it)
-A great address book management tool
Ah, that’s it I suppose - Google has yet to release a really strong (or even basic) address book tool. That’s the missing piece of the puzzle, in my opinion. If they had one of those, I think combining all of the services into a neat, simple package would be a no-brainer for the company. I’d happily pay MobileMe like prices for this bundle. The funny thing is that managing Gmail on the iPhone using IMAP with the native Mail app is really great - it’s like having a near real-time synchronized version of your inbox in your pocket at all times. I would only hope the Google version of this service would include a strong search component as well.
Reading down that list it’s pretty clear that there’s another company with all of the core components you’d need to pull this off - Yahoo. I don’t use many of their products, but they too could do this.
At any rate, I hope someone fulfills the “Exchange for the Rest of Us” promise that MobileMe fumbled. And I hope that someone is Google.
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What Will We Do When Growth is No Longer the “In Thing” Anymore? (Web Startups)
By charles | July 22, 2008
I was reading Scoble’s post and another post in Hank Williams’ blog, both of which touch (in different ways) on what’s happening in the world of technology startups. Scoble focuses on the shift in talking more about business and less about tech innovation. Hank talks about why we don’t have any IPOs. As is the case with many posts I write, reading those two posts helped me connect the dots with some of the things I’ve been thinking about lately.
I get this sense that we’re nearing the end of the growth-at-any-cost phase of the most recent epoch of the consumer Internet and some real changes are afoot. It’s part of the symbiotic relationship between investors and companies:
Companies and investors are symbiotic organisms. When investors reward growth, companies want to show growth to get attention and funding. When something else (revenue, profits, etc) becomes what gets rewarded, companies will focus on driving the metric that matters most to investors.
I’ve been wondering whether we’re entering the tail end of the “growth at any cost” or “growth for growth’s sake” period of what’s known as the web 2.0 consumer Internet epoch. Some stats show that the Internet stalwarts (Facebook, Google, MySpace, etc) are seeing a deceleration in growth rates (not to be confused with a decline in usage or reach). So, if the reach and growth battle is coming to an end, does it make sense for us to focus on growth as the metric to track obsessively? Should we spend as much time looking at ComScore, Quantcast, Compete, etc to look at uniques and traffic if that’s not going to be what matters going forward?
The more I think about it, the more I think the “pay for growth” era is coming to a close. Whether it takes 12 months or 24, I have no idea. And I think it has very little to do with the macroeconomy and a lot to do with the fact that a lot of the “interesting” land (top app position on Facebook, top web 2.0 application mindshare for the moment, top 500 traffic rankings) has been claimed and it’s getting harder by the day to unseat those who occupy said land. If bumping off the incumbents continues to get harder, the case for land-grab or growth-oriented investments must get tougher.
If we do transition from a growth orientation to something else, a few things are likely to happen:
1. We will have to rethink our expectations for growth and the metrics we track
Things like uniques, pageviews, visitors, etc will still be important but they won’t constitute success in and of themselves. They’ll have to be other things that matter - revenue? profits? paying customers? paying advertisers or sponsors? There are lots of things we’ve stopped talking about that are going to become important again.
2. Companies will likely appear to grow slower because the new metrics we’re tracking grow more slowly.
Paying customers, revenue, profits, or any other performance metric that involves the transfer of money from a customer or advertiser to the company are things that grow slower than the “growth” oriented metrics we’re used to tracking (pageviews, uniques, etc).
3. Some companies that succeeded during the growth land grab won’t make the transition to life after growth.
The sad truth is that some companies will find themselves having made it to the top of the heap for the given market in which they operate and unable to turn that traffic / usage leadership position into a revenue / business leadership advantage. Scale is never a business model in and of itself but it can certainly make a business model work better if there are economies of scale or other advantages of scale and girth. Some companies will find that there aren’t any real advantages to scale in their markets or they’ll fail to convert their leadership position into business leadership.
The land they grabbed might not turn out to be that valuable after all.
4. Companies will worry less about the threat of free “ankle biters” who don’t business plans
Right now there are a lot of companies who are competing against other competitors who are offering free-to-the-user offerings without an ancillary business model. In today’s environment, there appears to be plenty of cash available for companies who are showing (or have shown) growth without revenue and profits. As long as those companies can continue to raise money and continue operations, it muddies the market. If funding for growth-only companies begins to dry up, companies interested in building businesses will face fewer competitors and have the opportunity (and I hope the conviction) to look at alternative business models to “free now, business model later” approach.
5. Silver lining - some of the stickiest problems on the “prosumer” web might finally get addressed with some real effort and muscle.
If we have companies whose bias is more toward getting it right in a sustainable way and less about getting it done as quickly as humanly possible, we might finally see some breakthrough solutions in services where people have shown a willingness to pay and where there is customer demand for better solutions. Companies can take some of the revenue they generate and invest it into building better products - they won’t be wholly reliant on capital markets to fund R&D and operations. A few opportunities jump out at me as being good candidates to tackle:
-Data synchronization between mobile devices and the web - MobileMe is just the first attempt. Barring a duplicate service from Google (and that sure could happen), there is a willing market of folks who want to keep data (calendar, contacts, to-do, important files) in sync and accessible when they’re away from their main PC. People will pay for a solution in this market if it works well
-Groupware for distributed teams - I think we’ve seen that people will consume this stuff (WebEx, GoToMeeting, etc) and we’ve barely scratched the surface here. Most of the products in this space are a bit long in the tooth and if you’ve used them you know there is room to improve them.
-Consumer storage and backup - There are a few solutions out here that work well, but I do think there’s room for new innovation and new services that make it even easier to manage the data backup and management process.
I can think of a few others as well but I won’t list them here. Maybe I’ll save those for a future post.
Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.
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The Tech Generalist Dilemma - Are You a New or a True Generalist?
By charles | June 25, 2008
Image details: Thinkstock Single Image Set served by picapp.com
With MBA graduation upon us and a number of other folks I know looking to make career / industry transitions, I’ve had a few folks ask my thoughts on how to approach new jobs in the tech industry. Many of my friends come from a generalist background. What makes someone a generalist? Well, the simple answer is that you’re not a specialist. In technology, I think there are a lot of people who fall into the generalist category - if you don’t write code, aren’t a finance expert, or don’t do sales, you are probably in the generalist pool. Most generalists I know are interested in a mix of business development, product management, and marketing in their ideal job. They also want some “general management experience”, which I take to be a euphemism for figuring out how to work with others to get stuff done.
At the end of the day, I don’t think all generalists are created equal. In fact, I think there are two distinct types. I’ll outline the basics below:
“True” generalist - Someone who has both the experience base and the personality type that lends itself to wearing many hats. This type of person has done a stint in most of the major non-engineering functions in technology companies (marketing, business development, product management, and perhaps finance) and has some grasp for how all of these functions fit together. The “true” generalist has probably had the opportunity to go deep in one of these fields but prefers the joy of being able to wear many hats and seeks out situations where they can exercise that tendency.
“New” generalist - The “new” generalist is in a different boat. Most “new” generalists are generalists because they haven’t had the kinds of experiences that would enable them to present themselves as a “true” generalist. If you’re new to the world of technology and aren’t in danger of writing code, it’s likely that you’ll get steered towards entering the industry in business development, marketing, or product management (only under certain circumstances, though). The “new” generalist might not end up being a generalist for long - they might end up becoming a specialist in one of the generalist functions above or they might find that they prefer life as a generalist.
The reason this distinction matters to me is that my observation is that “new” and “true” generalists seem to be happy in very different kinds of companies.
Most “true” generalists I know tend to gravitate toward small (and I mean really small) companies - something on the order of 20 people or fewer. These are the kinds of environments where a true generalist can shine - there’s enough work to be done across all of the generalist functions to keep someone of this background and temperament engaged. However, as companies grow, most jobs get smaller and become more functional. That’s not a good thing for a generalist interested in breadth unless he/she is the generalist CEO.
I’ve talked to a handful of really successful “serial generalists” in the last few weeks and most of them seem to agree that what interests them most is being able to do a little bit of a lot of different things during the founding or embryonic stage of a company. Most also admit that they’re not the best at any one specific thing, but they are great utility folks. Also, they’re not the same as the “inexperienced but can figure out how to get stuff done quickly and efficiently” crowd - that’s the domain of the new generalist. Most true generalists I’ve spoken to seem to have a pretty clear sense as to what they’re good at doing and why - many of them are also the non-technical co-founder in most of the ventures in which they get involved.
Life is a lot different for the “new generalist” in my view. I think the new generalist has a much more challenging task.
-0 to 20 employees - This is a tough place for a new generalist unless you really know the folks with whom you’re working. Companies of this size generally tend to look for folks who have “done it before” as generalists and can wear many hats.
-20 to 50 employees - At somewhere around 20-30 employees, specialization often starts to set in. In lieu of generalists, it’s often the case that companies add experienced folks who can carry the water already. For example, your first marketing hire at 20-30 people is more likely to be someone who’s done marketing before and can grow with the company than it is someone who can learn on the job. This is no accident - if you’ve reached this size you probably have raised some venture capital and have a plan that calls for becoming a much more substantive entity in short order.
-50 to 200 employees - I’m at a loss here. I’ve seen new generalists find great homes at companies of this size and I’ve seen it end terribly. This is an awkward size for any company. You’re too big to be small and too small to be big. Often times I’ve seen companies that can digest a small number of new generalists at this size, provided that they’re not concentrated in any one function / department and that you have strong leadership at the top.
-200 to 1,000 employees - I happen to think this is a great place for the “new generalist” to join. There’s enough management structure and momentum in place that a new person will have mentors from whom he / she can learn. Also, jobs are usually big enough to be meaningful and interesting to a new person. As the company grows, the new generalist can grow with them.
-1,000+ employees - Big companies are hard for “new generalists” to crack. By the time you get to this size, jobs tend to get more functional and it’s harder to operate in generalist fashion. The only real way a generalist can really grow in this kind of environment is by functional rotation - doing short stints within a company in a number of different functional roles.
This is my first blog post in a long time so I hope it’s coherent. I also know a lot of you have thoughts on these topics, so feel free to comment below.
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Three Blog Posts In Progress - Advice for Generalists, Why Marketplaces Rule, and Why Video is Tough
By charles | June 3, 2008
I’ve been really busy and sadly derelict in my blogging. I’m working on 3 posts that I’ll preview - if you have thoughts or info to contribute, let me know. Hope to get all three of them out in the next week or so:
1. Are you a “true” or a “new” tech generalist? It’s MBA recruiting season (for those with a more entrepreneurial bent, at least) and a bunch of folks have been pinging me with questions about the right entry-point (role, size of company, etc) for new MBA grads. I’ve done some new thinking about this and have been giving out slightly different answers if you’re a “new generalist” (new to a tech operating role in general) or a “true generalist” (someone who has excelled in generalist roles in tech in the past).
2. Why aren’t more people bemoaning the prospects for online video? If the largest video site on the Internet isn’t projected to do more than $100 million or so in revenue in 2008 with dominant traffic and leadership, shouldn’t we all be really concerned? Check out this brief article on how the head of monetization at YouTube just stepped down.
3. The marketplace is the best business model for the Internet. If you can become a marketplace, you should. Most of the biggest Internet companies out there are marketplaces (Google is an ad marketplace masquerading as a search engine. It’s also like a yellow pages company that can re-auction its inventory every time someone opens up the book). I have a few other ideas as to why this is THE (yes, I will say THE) business to be in if you’re on the web.
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Solving the Twitter Business Model Problem - Your Guess is Probably Better than Mine
By charles | May 24, 2008
I’ve been fascinated by the blogosphere’s musings on Twitter’s downtime. I, for one, am relatively sympathetic toward their plight - there’s nothing tougher than trying to scale a system that’s growing quickly and has a very unpredictable, bursty traffic profile. And as much as I like and enjoy Twitter, it’s not a life-or-death kind of service for me.
While most people seem to be making off-hand remarks along the lines of “aside from uptime, they need to figure out the whole business model thing” I think it’s more complex than that.
*Twitter users have an expectation that the service will be free. My favorite article on this point is this one from Dan Farber at CNet.
*According to most estimates, a large volume of Twitter traffic comes from 3rd party services (I’ve heard estimates as high as 90%)
Combining these two points, I think the real challenge for Twitter will be that whatever business model they look to deploy will have to accept these two realities. Once you’ve set a service expectation with users, it’s hard to change it. For a non-technology example, look at the hue and cry over American Airlines assessing a baggage fee to fliers who want to check a bag. People who travel view the ability to check a bag as part of the service. Regardless of whether the $15 fee is fair, it feels like a violation of the contract between fliers and airlines. Similarly, I think Twitter can’t do too much to impoverish the free service. I can think of a laundry list of possible business models for Twitter and I’ve listed them below:
Freemium / Paid Subscriptions - I’m not sure what premium services Twitter could provide. I don’t believe that you can make guaranteed uptime or higher uptime a premium service until the free service has acceptable levels of uptime. This isn’t web hosting, where there is a willingness to pay for more uptime. If you’re going to provide a service, free or paid, users have some expectation about regular uptime. Also, having a service where “free” users don’t get good quality service doesn’t help Twitter grow.
Advertising - The challenge here is that people Tweet from all places - mobile phones, IM clients, 3rd party clients, browser plug-ins, etc. If the stats on the amount of twitter traffic that happens off the core website, a real revenue opportunity around advertising would require that the ads live with the tweets. I’m not sure how you would accomplish such a thing. Perhaps Twitter will come up with some clever way to attach an ad to the end of each tweet and 3rd party services will be required to serve / show those ads to continue getting access to the API. There are a million difficulties with this approach, so I’m not sure how they’d actually make such a thing work.
“Tweetmining” - For lack of a better term, I’ll lump all approaches that focus on evaluating the content found in tweets to provide some kind of intelligence (market research, trends, brand feedback, etc) into a meta-term that I’ll call tweetmining. I don’t think there’s much of a business model here because the very same data that Twitter would want to mine is generally available to anyone else who’d want to search it. There are already Twitter search engines and other Twitter analysis services that take advantage of this information to give people insight into what’s happening on Twitter. Unless Twitter has access to relevant and valuable information that the general Internet does not, I’m not sure there’s much of a business here.
Licensing - I could see a model where Twitter partners with other companies, social networks in particular, to provide the ability for those services to have some kind of mobile update capability. They already have a plug-in that works for Facebook. But with most of the major social networks opening up their platforms, that negates the opportunity to do a revenue-producing licensing deal for the most part. This would also boost the need for increased attention to uptime.
Those are, as far as I can tell, the major business model opportunities. And, as far as I can tell, none of them are terribly attractive if Twitter’s goal is to build a large, revenue generating service. What do you think?
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Why the Enterprise Won’t Solve the Web 2.0 Revenue Problem
By charles | May 13, 2008
I’ve seen a growing number of posts touting the enterprise as the next frontier for web 2.0. Heck, when I was at the Web 2.0 Expo in SF a few weeks back, the vast majority of the companies I saw listed as major sponsors for the event were those whose principal business was enterprise software.
I’m having a hard time buying this argument that most social media tools are primed to take the enterprise by storm. There are three observations that lead me to believe this is the case today:
-Many of the web 2.0 technologies that would be appropriate for the enterprise (wikis, social bookmarking, tagging, web-based productivity suites, microblogging, etc) have relatively small followings in the general internet community. They are still largely the domain of early adopters.
-Most large enterprises are not populated by early adopters.
-Most people who work are interested in finding ways to get their work done faster so they can be done with work sooner and do other things. Learning to do new things is costly in the short term but can payoff in the long term (think about the decision to learn to type, for example).
If these observations are broadly true, I don’t see how the enterprise is going to prove to be a more fertile place for these technologies to take root. If they are to follow the more classic IT route, you’d expect to see productivity-seeking or otherwise curious employees bringing them into the enterprise without support from IT.
Historically there are a lot of technologies that have made their way into the internet via what I’ll call “workgroup initiative” - a small group of employees manage to get the technology into the enterprise by keeping the purchase below some key threshold that attracts attention. Over time, the success of the workgroup implementation spreads and next thing you know someone has an enterprise-wide deployment.
Worse than the fact that these technologies aren’t yet mainstream is the fact that the traditional “workgroup initiative” is not likely to succeed in this market. The reason is simple - most of the good collaborative web 2.0 tools are offered for free and the very small groups and companies who would normally form the bedrock of a larger enterprise sale are opting for the free versions of these products. And you know what? The free versions are pretty good. They’re so good in fact that I don’t think there are a lot of “freemium” or upgrade opportunities available at the moment. For the people who really want these products, they’re finding a way to make them work as is. They’re not waiting for IT to get involved. In some cases, the organizations are so small as to not need the two things that have typically been core drivers for the decision to move to the “enterprise version” of the offering.
-Support and integration to legacy systems. Ironically, there are a number of “web native” companies who are adopting these new tools and technologies and they don’t have a legacy backend with which to integrate. In other cases, these new technologies do not actually need to touch older systems - they’re designed specifically to avoid these kinds of interfaces.
-Security and authentication. Whether it’s due to more open authentication systems or a diminished perception for the need of security, this doesn’t seem to be a big sticking point hampering usage and adoption. Aside from people getting more comfortable with web-based authentication in general, I think the lack of ties into legacy situations also makes security concerns feel secondary.
So what’s in it for a company or workgroup to buy a more full-featured version of the offering, assuming it’s available? We’ve seen some early answers in web-based productivity suites, but that seems like an isolated case.
I’m stumped as to how most of these social media tools have a meaningful impact on the enterprise (from a revenue standpoint) in the short term.
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Women 2.0 - Beyond the Spark (May 10th)
By charles | May 8, 2008
The team at Women 2.0 is putting on a great event this Saturday. More details are available below, including a discount code:
Women 2.0 Presents: “Beyond the Spark” Conference
May 10, 2008 at the Stanford Grill
Meet entrepreneurs changing the world, investors supporting them AND the 5 finalists from the Women 2.0 Business Plan Competition. Interactive discussions and LIVE Pitches to top-shelf judges — join the fun and vote for your top choice via mobile phone.
Check out the Finalists here: http://www.women2.org
Get your ticket: http://beyondthespark.eventbrite.com
Save 30% for entrepreneurs. Coupon code w2sfbeta
Check out who you can have lunch with: http://women2SWIB.wikispaces.com
Limited tickets due to venue constraints. Tickets ARE going fast. Student pricing is available.
Can’t make it for the entire conference but want to come in the afternoon to check out the pitches? Yes we have a ticket priced just for that too!
Have yourself an interactive lunch on Saturday
Arrive a little earlier to the conference this Saturday and reserve your seat with one of our Lunch Leads. Meet Silicon Valley movers and shakers over an intimate lunch on Saturday during the conference!
Hear first-hand stories, have the chance to ask questions, and really dive deep into what you really want to know from these leading ladies (and a few good men).
Who’s coming for lunch?
- Chris Shipley (Founder, DEMO)
- Christine Herron (First Round Capital)
- Katherine Barr (Partner, MDV)
- Sundeep Ahuja (Co-Founder, richrelevance)
- Susas Lucas-Conwell (Executive Director, SD Forum)
- Surya Yalamanchili (Director, Marketing, LinkedIn)
- Will Bunker (Co-Founder and Principal, WhiteSpace Ventures)
- Alka Gupta (Managing Director, Ojas Group)
….and many, many more
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Update on Social Gaming Summit - More Blog Posts to Come
By charles | May 7, 2008
I haven’t been blogging too much lately. There are three main reasons why this is the case:
1. I’ve been really busy at Gaia.
2. Most of the posts I’ve had about technology are mildy acerbic and I’m trying to decide whether or not to post them. I think I will but give me a few days.
2. I’ve been working really hard with Jeremy Liew (Lightspeed is a sponsor and a great one at that) and David Sachs on the Social Gaming Summit.
Oh, and it’s my birthday on Friday.
In news, I wanted to give you all an update on the Social Gaming Summit. We’ve done a ton of work to fill out the speaker lineup and the list of topics we plan to cover. If you read my blog, you can save 10% on the ticket price by using the discount code “CHUDSON” at checkout. More details on the updated lineup below:
The Social Gaming Summit is a one day conference focused on the intersection of casual gaming, immersive worlds, and social networking. Games are becoming one of the most popular activities within social networks and game developers continue to spend increasing amounts of energy figuring out how to leverage and apply the growth in social networking to the games they are developing. The conference will bring together leaders in the social networking and gaming spaces to share insights into the convergence of these worlds.
What: Social Gaming Summit (http://www.socialgamingsummit.com)
Where: UCSF Mission Bay Conference Center, San Francisco, CA
When: Friday, June 13th 2008
Register Here: http://socialgamingsummit.eventbrite.com/
Confirmed speakers already include the following list of folks:
* Dave Williams, Shockwave and AddictingGames
* Craig Sherman, Gaia Online
* Jim Greer, Kongregate
* Siqi Chen, Serious Business (Friends for Sale)
* Blake Commagere, Mogad.com / Vampires / Werewolves
* Erik Bethke, Go Pets
* Teemu Huutanen, Sulake (Habbo)
* Daniel James, Three Rings
* Cary Rosenzweig, IMVU
* Amy Jo Kim, ShuffleBrain
* Nicole Lazarro, XEODesign
* Matt Mihaly, Sparkplay Media
* Shervin Pishevar, Social Gaming Network
* Mark Pincus, Zynga
* Jeremy Liew, Lightspeed Venture Partners
* Mike Sego, (fluff)Friends
* John Welch, Playfirst
* Matt Palmer, Stardoll
* Ted Rheingold, Dogster
We’ll be announcing more speakers over the next week or so - we’ve got some great people lined up and I think you’ll really get a lot out of spending the day with us.
I’m also including some brief descriptions of the panel and discussion topics we’re planning to cover at the event - you can read more about the details below:
Casual MMOs and Immersive Worlds
Many so-called “casual MMOs” and immersive worlds are casual only in the sense that the point of the game is not to bash gruesome looking monsters or the game isn’t set in a sci-fi fantasy world. The engagement story around existing and upcoming casual MMOs is real and very compelling. This panel will discuss what it takes to build a successful casual MMO that users love to play.
Asynchronous Games on Social Networks
There are a lot of interesting asynchronous activities happening on social networks. Some of them are traditional games, others are games in disguise. Join us and hear from some of the leading voices in this space share their views on how to build great gameplay characteristics into social networking applications and what opportunities exist for gameplay to take advantage of the social graph.
Building Communities and Social Interaction In and Around Games
Social networking and games go hand in hand. Whether it’s taking advantage of the relationship data in social networks to build novel gameplay or building community among people who play games, game developers are discovering clever ways to build real communities around the games they’re developing. Hear from our panel of thought leaders about what it takes to successfully integrate community and social interaction into the next generation of games.
What Makes Games Fun?
We all like to have fun, right? What is it about games that makes them so fun? Is it gameplay? Social interaction? Achievements and accomplishments? Our panel of thought leaders will share their perspectives on what it takes to build a fun game and why building fun into games is more difficult than it looks.
Monetization and Business Models for Social Games
There are a handful of viable (proven) business models for social games. How should game developers go about choosing the best business model for their games? Our panel of experts will share their thoughts on the various business models and how to think through the right one for a given game.
User-Generated Games in Social Networks
Curious about how social network users are creating games of their own within the context of existing game structures? This is the panel for you.
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Social Networking Advertising - It Will Be Even Harder than we Think
By charles | April 20, 2008
I’ve had a few experiences in the past few weeks that continue to bolster my belief that monetizing social networks and communities will continue to be a lot harder than people think.
1. I posted a question on Twitter about the difference between two different sets of Bose headphones and got a lot of information back that ended up influencing a purchase decision.
2. I updated my Facebook status with a request for some restaurant recommendations and I got a lot of good ones, one of which I ended up using.
3. I updated my Facebook status to let folks know I had bought some tickets for a comedy show and two of my friends ended up buying them as a result.
In each case, I was part of a transaction that was socially influenced (as many were even before the advent of social networking sites). And in each case, I had a hard time envisioning how either of the services in question (Facebook and Twitter) could have laid claim to a portion of the resulting transaction. Judging by the activity I see within my own network, there are a lot of my friends using social networks as social Q&A systems to get input, advice, and recommendations in addition to just letting folks know what they’re up to at the moment.
Models that rely on capturing value based on social recommendations, particularly those models which want to tax those transactions by taking a share of the transaction, are going to have a hard time getting traction today. Two reasons why this will be a hard road in the short term:
Neither Twitter nor Facebook had any visibility into the resulting transaction as it all happened out of band from their perspective - the consumption all happened offline and outside of the networks they manage and monitor. I’m not sure how most of these models are going to work if the social networks only have visibility into online transactions and many of these loops close offline.
Even if these networks could demonstrate that they were driving referral behavior based on social interactions, why would advertisers want to pay for the resulting transactions?
Google can charge advertisers for AdWords placements because they are the intermediary that actually connects users and advertisers. In the social networking context, though, Facebook and Twitter aren’t actually acting as intermediaries - they’re providing a platform that allows for direct, user-to-user communication. If you’re not an intermediary, it’s hard to extract a fee. And if an advertiser doesn’t have to pay for the referrals they’re getting, why would they want to do so?
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Why the Google Apps and Salesforce Integration Doesn’t Solve My Problem
By charles | April 15, 2008
I was re-reading the announcement about how Google Apps and Salesforce will be working together more closely to make Google Apps and Salesforce work together more closely. As someone who has used a number of CRM products over the years, I welcome this announcement. I continue to believe one of the big things that hampers the overall utility of CRM systems is that it’s generally pretty painful to get data into the system. Even though Salesforce has built some clever hooks into Microsoft Outlook and other email systems, I don’t think this type of application coupling is really what will make CRM more useful.
My greatest frustration with all CRM systems is that they are fundamentally about structure and structured data when most of the data I want to put into the system is unstructured data (email, call notes, free text, etc). If you really want to make my CRM system more useful, don’t focus on integrating with more mail clients and web-based document systems - get better at taking my unstructured inputs and turning them into structured data the CRM system needs to function properly. My biggest complaint about systems like Salesforce is that it takes a lot of time to manually categorize new data (emails, contracts, documents, notes, etc) in order to put it into the system. At some point, this manual system begins to get tedious. I’m willing to do some of the training work required to get the system to the point where I’ve seeded it with some core data (accounts, contacts, opportunities, etc) - at some point, I’d like to see a return on my time investment and have the system get smart enough
to take my raw inputs and “figure out” where they belong. That would be an innovation. And it would make CRM systems a whole lot more usefu.
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