buzz

Influence and Empire Avenue

August 19, 2010 By Dan Thornton

The quest to measure and monitor online influence is one that is enticing a lot of companies and individuals. Empire Avenue is a particularly different approach in that it mixes the financial market of stocks and shares, social gaming and networking, and peer review and influence into one big pot.

It seems to have recently experienced a bit of a growth spurt, around the same time as it received a new round of funding, but can it succeed where most other services seem to struggle?

I signed up a while ago, and the premise behind the social gaming element is a logical one. You buy and sell shares in other people registered on the network (similar ideas have been applied to celebrities in the past, e.g. the BBC and Celebdaq), and you can also earn by registering your social networking profiles and blogs and having activity on those sites earn you cash (or in Empire Avenue, Eaves).

All good fun – especially now I’ve started seeing people I actually know virtually or in real life start to appear. The payoff is that brands will be able to contact and reward the biggest influencers relevant to them.

Information and influencers:

Besides adding your social networks, you’re also encouraged to list the brands and interest you have, in typical social network style to build connections and to gift data to the Canadian company behind Empire Avenue – and to indicate which brands can contact you in the future.

But the big data gain comes from the ability to rate the activity content imported by others – specifically those people you invest in. The level of investment and ratings gives you an influence ranking, and the reward is intended to be allowing brands to communicate with those who are deemed most influential by the investment level rather than follower numbers.

Will it work?

There are definite advantages to this approach. Inbound links to blogs are counted by Google, but the rise of social networks means some highly influential people don’t have their own online presence with trackable linking.

Follower counts, particularly on Twitter, are effectively meaningless, due to the fact so many people are chasing high counts, and you can even buy friends and followers these days.

So a peer investment market seems like a more logical way of judging things – we’ll tend to invest in people we know and trust, even if they’re not digital celebrities (Although I suspect if and when Robert Scoble arrives we’ll see an Empire Avenue investment frenzy)

I’m still not entirely convinced that people will focus on investing in people they see as influential rather than trying to ‘game’ the system by simply investing in new people whose value will rise as they add their social networking profiles etc, but I suspect, as with most systems, it’ll be a fairly small percentage of people putting in the time and effort to gain wealth in that way, and those buying patterns could be tracked and minimised in various ways.

I think the biggest challenge on a membership level is to encourage people onto a platform in addition to their main social networks, and effectively onto one which isn’t amount engaging in sharing or conversation. There are plans to open up APIs and allow developers to play with the information, and a Facebook App or integration into the popular Twitter clients would help.

The other big challenge is on the brand level. Brands are increasingly engaging in social media, investing in time and resource to find influencers and brand advocates, and reach out to reward them in some way. But the fact that this is embedded so heavily in a gaming mechanic may put some off (although the rise of social gaming, and the rise of the average age of gamers might mean that the time is right for their type of mechanic), and I do wonder if the rewards will appear before the initial level of enthusiasm has worn off for many people – there seem to be a fair number of people signing up, filling out some details, and then not doing very much. Mind you, the same thing happened with Twitter back in the early days.

And there is one very clever element of the service – by rewarding external activity, those people who sign-up, link profiles, and never come back are still contributing to the data and receiving investments, so the service is still building while they’re absent. And even if they’re not checking their account or registered email addresses, you’ll be able to see which networks they’re actively using and track them down that way…

Now, who wants to buy a piece of me?

Privacy update for Google Buzz – removing auto-follow

April 6, 2010 By Dan Thornton

Google has rolled out updates to Google Buzz in the wake of privacy concerns, including replacing auto-following with suggestions for people to follow. And although the change was actually made back in February, an update today will make this change apparent to anyone who signed up before February 13th.

Aside from the fact that there has been a sizeable user backlash on the privacy problems initially created by Google Buzz, and potentially the service has failed to take off, Google also has another major privacy issue. Google Buzz is under investigation by the U.S FTC (Federal Trade Commission).

One example of the reason is that White House Deputy CTO Andrew McLaughlin, a former Google employee, recently found his Google Buzz account revealed many of his Gmail accounts publicly, including a number of Google lobbyists or lawyers. His account has now been deleted after a FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request.

There’s also a new Youtube channel for Google to share tips and tricks on using Google Buzz.

And new settings in your Googlemail preferences mean that you can now control which Buzz items arrive via email in future, to decide between comments on your posts, comments on posts after you’ve contributed, and comments on posts after you’ve been @replied on them. The promised ‘mute’ button hasn’t quite arrived yet, but the problem with Buzz is that it needs to keep changing incredibly quickly to adapt, and it needs to work across 50+ Gmail languages from the start without causing problems with latency or downtime.

Every other social network started small and then grew exponentially – Twitter, Facebook, Myspace etc. In the case of Google Buzz, it attempted to get a headstart by launching to millions and then adapting – something which might prove akin to trying to change natural evolution.

One, two, three and I think it too!

July 24, 2008 By Dan Thornton

A couple of conversations on Twitter had me dreaming up a great Twitter experiment.

Organize two very large groups on Twitter and make sure they have very few common links at the outset.
Now give one group red shirts and other one blue shirts. Don’t tell the red shirts that the blue shirts exist, or v.v.
Then after a while, get some red shirts to follow blue shirts and v.v. – but don’t mention the shirts. You are the only person in the know!
Check how many red shirt people start to wear blue shirts, and v.v.

Network theory suggests that we mimic what other people do, without realizing we are doing it. So red shirt wearers are likely to wear red shirts more and more often. As are blue shirt wearers.

When we introduce red shirt wearers to blue shirt wearers, they will wear each others’ colors without thinking.

Network theory also tells us that we are affected by what our friends’ friends do. We don’t need to know our friends’ friend either!

So if some red shirts start talking to people who wear blue shirts, other red shirts might start wearing blue shirts.

It is fairly alarming that we are so easy to influence. But there are two sides to the coin. It not three!

We influence back. if you want a tidy room, make it tidy! People who come in will be tidier than if their first look is an untidy room.

We also have many influences competing for our attention.

I think the key is that we have to budget for competition. How much work do we have to do to win? And what will we do if we come second? Toby Moores, the CEO of Sleepy Dog, budgets one successful commercial idea out of 200. How well do we understand the processes of creativity, innovation and group influence? How can we give kids experience of the give-and-take of creativity, innovation and group decision making?

Any experiments for that?

There really is nothing new in Web 2.0

May 22, 2008 By Dan Thornton

It’s been said before, but having chatted with some of my readers, and having been unable to quickly find a previous online example, I though it’s worth restating: There’s nothing new in Web 2.0.

And by that, I mean there’s nothing new about the facilities Web 2.0 offers. And now for some examples:

Tagging: Every time you’ve labeled anything in your life, you’ve tagged it. Putting your bills in a folder, putting a sticker on your homemade chutney, or creating a mixtape of songs. If only we’d called it labeling, rather than tagging, I’d have saved myself a few hours of explaining. And a Folksonomy is just what happens when information is structured by people labeling it.

Social networking: Every time you’ve been introduced to someone via a friend, or found yourself chatting to someone you’ve stood next to at a concert, or at the football, you’ve networked socially. Facebook and Myspace are the internet equivalents of your local pub, or the reading group at the local library.

Blogging: Diaries. Fanzines. The family newsletter tucked inside Christmas cards. Newspaper columns.

Crowdsourcing: Happened hundreds of years ago. Sticking up a ‘Wanted’ poster and offering a bounty was crowdsourcing people to catch a criminal.

Social news aggregators (e.g. Digg): Just recording online the same opinions you’d get chatting around the office coffee machine/smoking area.

Word of Mouth, Buzz, Social Media Marketing: When your pipe sprung a leak last night, and you came into work and asked your friend if they knew a good plumber – that’s Word of Mouth. Buzz is just getting lots of people talking and recommending. And social media marketing is just using the new online gathering places.

I did lie earlier.

There is one new thing about all Web 2.0 technology which radically changes everything we know. It’s made it so much easier to do all these things, that the amount of people involved, and the effects, have been amplified 100s, 1000s or even millions of times. It’s always happened. But now it’s happening on a global scale, and in a way that can change the fortunes of businesses.