On Social Media Platforms & Doing it Virally

On the Momentum Conference's panel around social media networks at the Computer History Museum on Thursday, Accel Partner’s Kevin Efrusy talks about FaceBook versus MySpace.

MySpace is all about expressing yourself and FaceBook is about reaching out and meeting people. Says CNET’s Martin Green who is moderating the panel, “I think the Fox TV guys would argue that MySpace is a communications vehicle, as well as a place for self-expression.

They discuss social media platforms in general and getting the word out virally. Not every platform can turn into a MySpace overnight. Says Piczo’s Jeremy Verba, “the classic model is that you pay for content, you pay to market it and then you have the costs of distributing it. It is not that you don’t have content costs in viral models, but it is substantially less. You have to give users really good and simple tools to make that happen.”

He continues, “create your environment and make it really dead simple for your users to upload photos, video, whatever it is. Make it so easy they will want to do more on the site, create more, and tell their friends to do the same. Invite people in and encourage people to participate with you and build those tools to make that happen.”

The pivot point is around the individual users. When a user has created something and then links to nine or ten other sites, activity really spikes, and things start to really take off. It is not site-life; it is individualized, i.e., a lot of private parties going on.

Adds Pandora’s Jessica Stoner, “Pandora is now on the client too, so you do not have to download anything. Within one click of a mouse, music is already playing. We give something to the user first before they invest something and it has taken off.

We had early interactions with the blogosphere, which took off for us virally. We fan those flames with bloggers by creating widgets they can integrate into their blogs. We are catering to them, so the word will continue to spread. Our founder also talks to users and solicits their feedback.”

Café Press’ Fred Durham talks about their marketing. “The hard part of marketing is finding what things have growth potential. Identify what they are and spend your time, money and resources there. You need to really listen to users and take your own ego out of it.”

DEMOfall Photos Posted

I finally got around to uploading photos from this year's DEMOfall 2006.

Random Media Observations

DEMOfall’s final dinner pulled a handful of media visionaries to discuss the technologies they saw unveiled over the last couple of days, what trends were important and why. Network World’s John Gallant moderated the panel, which included BusinessWeek’s Steve Wildstrom, Forbes Victoria Barrett and Wall Street Journal’s Kara Swisher.

Kara is cynical about the whole notion of social media platforms and other related start-ups that focus their efforts on getting sold to Yahoo or Google.

Steve says, “there seems to be a lot more money out there now, good ideas can get funded again, and now even bad ideas can get funded too.”

Kara blames venture capitalists for the fate of the late nineties. “What happened in the dot.com era was about the ‘event, the sale,’ not about creating good companies.”

A few fabulous shots of the panelists in action below.

On the hype around user-generated content, Steve talks about the brilliance of YouTube, “sometimes I think it’s a great idea, it is also America’s best videos on the web but how are they going to make money long-term and avoid not getting sued?” He also brings up the point about how fickle youth is, one day, something is really cool and they next day, they are onto something new.

All seem to agree that Silicon Valley is insular and in their own web 2.0 bubble, their own web 2.0 thinking, which is not reflective of the rest of the world. It is a bunch of people within the industry talking to each other.

They also add that the blogosphere is an echochamber. Says Steve, “blogs keep us honest but they do less reporting.” While that is changing, it is still small. Kara reminds us of the importance to be cognitive to how people want to read in the format they want it in, and this will change depending on you audience and what the content is. (print versus online, and how it is presented on both sides).

Steve talks about the trend around advertising as a business model, so prominent among so many of the DEMO companies this year, “It is a strange thing about advertising only models…..you create customers that are your users and those who are your advertisers. There is a conflict there. Also, the metrics of how many people are reading, how many eyeballs are there, are not necessarily accurate.”

Victoria says, “half the companies are dependent on ads, is this disillusional?” The audience laughs.

Kara says, “We’re enjoying the guys on the treadmill.” Her dry and cynical sense of humor attracts this crowd as most resonate.

Bottom line, that while MySpace and YouTube are wildly successful, not everyone wants to share every aspect of their life with the whole world. Clearly a trend with the sub-25 year olds and some vertical market groups, but for mainstream, it will be much more narrow and it also needs to be much easier to use up front.

They ran through the companies and everyone agreed on the top cool factor companies – once again, the hardware guys. High votes went to the USB battery and the wireless rabbit, but BuzzLogic also got a plug.

eSnips For All Your Sharing Needs

Client eSnips founder & CEO Yael Elish and head of marketing Hagit Katzenelson presented on the DEMOfall stage Wednesday afternoon. I posted a video yesterday as well as a link to the DEMOfall video links.

It was refreshing to represent two women at Demo, considering I can't remember in my more than a dozen years of product launches, having done that.

Unlike so many social media sharing sites, eSnips allows users to share every file type, not just photos, videos or links. You can create your own web space with personalized content that you can either share or keep private. Once you create different folders for each of your passions and interests, you decide what files to put in each folder, and you control who is allowed to view each folder – just you, a select group, or the world.

It is frustrating when you discover a service that not only you would use, but seems to solve a problem in the market, and yet it takes some of the influencers awhile to catch up, either that, or they prefer covering early adopter and youth technologies instead. Perhaps some things are too simple to write about?

eSnips is solving a problem that sites like YouSpace have not done for the over 25 crowd. Their nearly one millon registered users since their beta launched demonstrates the need - meaning, people like to share differently. An exceedingly high number of users compared to the 20,000 to 100,000 range many other Demo companies touted.

Problem. There are far too many sites and platforms to sign up for to handle all of your media publishing needs. Solution: one stop, one entry point, many media types. eSnips is that one-stop sharing and social media site that represents numerous aspects of you, your interests and passions. Simple, the way software should work.

With eSnips, in one space, you can publish and share any media type on all the topics you care about with others. From a single account, you can share things such as your thoughts, stories, artwork, photos, music, kids videos, flash files, presentations with business colleagues, party or vacation photos with friends, web research and tidbits you find on the web and more.

How does eSnips differ from blogs and social media platforms?

Blogs are about publishing content and stories you want to share.
Social Media Platforms are about finding and meeting people with shared interests.
Photo sharing sites are places to share and tag photos of interest to you and others.
eSnips is a way for sharing every aspect of your life using several data types – all in one place……whether that be a video, photo collection, poetry you have written, artwork you want to share or sell or a short story. You can then decide who sees what by assigning private or public to each folder.

Check it out, its a free download. And then spread the word, one person at a time!! Also take a look at Yael's latest blog post about feature updates and her DEMOfall experience.

Manning the Booth

Renee Blodgett, eSnips founder and CEO Yael Elish and head of marketing Hagit Katzenelson at the eSnips DEMOfall booth in San Diego this week

Yael Elish on the DEMOfall Stage

Client eSnips CEO and Founder Yael Elish is on the DEMOfall stage talking to attendees about eSnips for consumers. It is a tad choppy since I could not pan very well.

DEMO's website already has their videos posted, so you can get a much higher quality glimpse here.

Post DEMO Media Buzz

ZDNET, USA Today, San Diego Tribune, Smart Computing and Greg Naraine's blog SocialTwister talks about client eSnips approach, and how it is tailored to much more meanstream consumers, outside of MySpace demographics. Adults with publishing needs beyond that of a blog, flickr or YouTube alone. Enter eSnips.

Writes Dan Farber, "the demographic of eSnips skews older than MySpace, which also means that the audience is less prone to have grown up in a digital world, and requires a less cluttered, more well lighted space. It is a walled garden, but it also doesn’t require that users learn the idiosyncracies of multiple sites to represent their interests and relationships on line, or engage in commerce. It’s a social sharing site and network for mere mortals, which currently numbers about 1 million for eSnips."

More to come in the coming days and weeks.

WiFi Costs No More

I hung out with CNET's Daniel Terdiman at DEMOfall recently and a handful of us were complaining about the astronomical hotel charges to get connected when more than half the time, it doesn't work or at least not well.

He took it to another level by writing a blog post about it. Hopefully others who feel the same will also express their frustration and outrage.

Says Dan, "it is time for the millions of business travelers who constantly find themselves in hotels and coffee shops desperately trying to get online to say, loud and clear, "We're fed up and we're not going to take it anymore." That's because it is time for hotel and cafe operators to get it. It, of course, being the idea that this is late 2006, and Wi-Fi is a commodity, and should be free. Everywhere."

A Few Artistic Finds

A few pieces of art I discovered recently in a San Francisco restaurant and really liked.

Above: Jesus Marez

Video Activity Picking Up

The hype over video continues. This week, Jumpcut gets acquired by Yahoo. Yahoo's acquisition underscores how more people are going onto the Internet to watch video. This move comes not long after numerous other video deals this year, including Sony's $65 million purchase of Grouper in August.

VideoEgg also raises another $12 million from the Starbucks chairman's venture capital firm and other investors. The round of investment was led by Maveron, a $600 million VC firm based in Seattle. It also includes August Capital, whose latest fund has about $550 million.

And I just came back from DEMOfall, where Eyespot was making noise on the DEMO stage and all signs are pointing to continued growth.