| Bryan Dulaney |
| Bryan Dulaney |
| http://bryandulaney.com |
| Why Google Needs the Motorola Deal for Tablets |
| China is expected to rule soon on Google’s proposed acquisition of Motorola (MMI), with the deal already approved in the U.S. and Europe. When Google (GOOG) announced its intention to spend $12.5 billion on the mobile-phone maker—one of its own Android hardware partners—the purchase was considered to be aplay for Motorola’s mobile patents. There’s additional opportunity as well, in the form of the search engine giant’s having direct control over Android hardware. One research firm suggests this aspect is key for Google to have any success in the tablet market while also improving its revenue stream on mobile search. Goldman Sachs published a detailed research note on Thursday suggesting how critical the Motorola deal is for Google to battle both Apple’s iPad and Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet, which is actually built on the Android platform. Google gains no benefit from the Fire, however, as Amazon (AMZN) has created its own browser and curates an app store specific to the device. And although Google is the default search engine on the top-selling iPad, it pays Apple (AAPL) for that privilege, which offsets Google’s revenue from ads on Apple’s tablet. The research report explains it this way: On a tactical level, while we estimate mobile queries account for just 20 percent of searches, we believe they are growing four to five times as quickly as desktop queries. Thus, MMI’s patents would be important for protecting Android and improving mobile economics, as we estimate Google pays Apple roughly 75 percent revenue share to be the default in the Safari search bar, which we estimate accounts for roughly one-third of all mobile queries. The issue then is fairly simple to understand: Although mobile search volume is up, Goldman Sachs (GS) thinks it is costing Google too much—more than on the desktop—to acquire mobile search and ad revenue. In order to reduce this expense and boost net revenue in mobile, Google has to get consumers to buy more Android tablets. The Motorola buy can surely help this: I explained why in a GigaOM Pro report (subscription required) last month and took it one step further recently. Aside from Google using Motorola to develop tablets, it could also take advantage of Motorola’s Lapdock hardware, which uses an Android handset to power a notebook-like shell. Instead of a proprietary Motorola software environment, Google could use Android or even the Chrome OS for such a device. Some of these arguments, however, could be moot points now. Or they could be part of a larger strategy. Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal reported Google is considering working with several hardware partners on Nexus phones and tablets. That would help ease the mind of Samsung, HTC, LG, and other Android partners that might be concerned about Google’s Motorola purchase. In either case, these types of strategies are ideas I had hoped for when I adamantly suggested that Google find a way to take more control over Android. Source: Bloomberg Business Week |
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| Sector Snap: Social Media Stocks Tumble |
| Shares of social media companies tumbled Friday after Facebook made a lackluster stock-market debut amid reports of a slew technical trading glitches. After pricing at $38, Facebook Inc. shares opened at $42.05 on the Nasdaq market. The shares quickly fell back to their IPO price but later rebounded, rising $3.33, or 8.8 percent, to $41.33 in early afternoon trading. Nasdaq initially planned the first trades of Facebook’s stock for 11 a.m. EDT, then 11:05 a.m. The trading finally started at about 11:30 a.m. Just before noon, Nasdaq said on one of its websites that it was “investigating an issue in delivering trade execution messages” from the Facebook IPO. The stock’s tepid initial gains appeared to rattle investors in other social media companies, especially those with ties to Facebook. Shares of those companies tumbled shortly after the world’s largest social network made its market debut. One of the biggest losers was Zynga Inc., whose shares were halted shortly after Facebook began trading. The company is responsible for the popular FarmVille and Mafia Wars games played on Facebook and it relies on the social networking site for the bulk of its revenue. According to a Nasdaq website, Zynga’s stock was halted at 11:37 a.m. then resumed trading at 12:27 p.m., only to be halted again at 12:29 p.m. It then resumed again at 1:35 p.m. Shares of the San Francisco-based company, which went public in December, initially dropped $1.19, or 14 percent, to $7.08 before rebounding and were at $7.59 early in the afternoon. The initial drop easily passed the company’s previous low of $7.34. Elsewhere in the sector, shares in Groupon Inc. was off 73 cents, or almost 6 percent, to $11.68, after tumbling to $11.33 right after Facebook shares started trading. Since going public in November, the Chicago-based online deals company’s shares have traded between $9.63 and $31.14. Shares of Linkedin Corp. also tumbled as much as 8 percent to $96.60 in morning trading, before climbing back to $102.75 later in the session. The Mountain View, Calif.-based online professional networking service, which went public last year, is probably the closest thing to Facebook Wall Street has seen. Source. Boston.com |
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| Twitter Will Adopt Do-Not-Track Privacy Options |
| Twitter will honor requests from users who do not want their online behavior tracked, the company said on Thursday, in contrast with Web companies suchGoogle Inc and Facebook Inc whose business models rely heavily on collecting user data. Twitter said it will officially support “Do Not Track,” a standardized privacy initiative that has been heavily promoted by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, online privacy advocates and Mozilla, the non-profit developer of the Firefox Web browser. Some browsers, including Firefox, Microsoft Corp’s Internet Explorer and Apple Inc’s Safari, include a “Do Not Track” option that sends a line of code to websites indicating the user does not want to be tracked. But under current regulations, it is up to the website to honor the requests. Google has said it will implement a “Do Not Track” feature in its Chrome browser later this year. The “Do Not Track” announcement also coincides with Twitter’s recent push to provide a more personalized service. Twitter recommends “tailored suggestions” based on a user’s Web surfing history, but does not use the data for any other purpose, the company said on Thursday. “As always, we are committed to providing you with simple and meaningful choices about the information we collect to improve your Twitter experience,” Twitter’s Director, Growth and International, Othman Laraki, said in a blog post on Thursday. “For those who don’t want to tailor Twitter, we offer ways to turn off this collection.” Twitter’s support for the initiative was first announced on Thursday by Ed Felten, the FTC’s Chief Technology Officer, during a panel in New York. The microblogging site later confirmed Felten’s statement, adding in a Tweet: “We applaud the FTC’s leadership on DNT.” Mozilla praised Twitter’s move in a blog post and noted that adoption rates for “Do Not Track” have risen steadily, to 8.6 percent of desktop users and 19 percent of mobile users. “We’re excited that Twitter now supports Do Not Track and global user adoption rates continue to increase, which signifies a big step forward for Do Not Track and the Web,” Mozilla said. Twitter’s decision to get onboard with “Do Not Track” represents something of a balancing act for the six-year-old company, which has been closely scrutinized on how it can generate enough revenue to justify its multibillion-dollar valuation. Online tracking through bits of code embedded in websites known as “cookies” underpins the business models for many Internet companies. Facebook, due to go public on Friday in the largest-ever U.S. IPO, has been valued at $104 billion, partially by investors who believe it can offer advertisers a platform for highly targeted ads based on perceived user interests. Google similarly generates billions annually by targeting ads based on what a user is searching for. Major online destinations that have endorsed “Do Not Track” include Yahoo, which said in March it would allow consumers “to express their ad targeting preferences to Yahoo” beginning this summer. |
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| Google Knowledge Graph |
| On the surface, Google’s Knowledge Graph seems like just another search feature, but connect the dots and it could become the brains behind a Siri-like virtual assistant. In a blog post, Google’s Amit Singhal dropped a strong hint that there’s more to Knowledge Graph than meets the eye: “We’re proud of our first baby step—the Knowledge Graph—which will enable us to make search more intelligent, moving us closer to the ‘Star Trek computer’ that I’ve always dreamt of building,” Singhal wrote. Google has used the Star Trek reference before, when discussing its approach to speech recognition in Android. Here’s Matias Duarte, in an interview with Slashgear: “If [Siri]’s Star Wars, you have these robot personalities like C-3PO who runs around and he tries to do stuff for you, messes up and makes jokes, he’s kind of a comic relief guy. Our approach is more like Star Trek, right, starship Enterprise; every piece of computing surface, everything is voice-aware. It’s not that there’s a personality, it doesn’t have a name, it’s just ‘Computer.’” Add these comments to the rumors that Google is building a virtual assistant codenamed Majel–named after the wife of late Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry–and it’s easy to speculate where Google is going. Siri vs. Knowledge Graph Unlike Android’s existing voice commands, Apple’s Siri understands language. Siri doesn’t need to rely on a rigid set of instructions (such as Android’s “Navigate to” for directions or “Listen to” for music), because it can pick out keywords from naturally-spoken phrases. That makes Apple’s system much more accessible, and Google will have to come up with something similar. But with Knowledge Graph, Google seems to be thinking one step ahead. With any given set of keywords, Knowledge Graph tries to figure out what users actually want. The engine can figure out the most important facts about a person or place, and bring those details to the surface. When a search term has multiple meanings (such as apple the fruit or Apple the company), Knowledge Graph knows to ask what you meant. As Singal pointed out, the information Google shows for Tom Cruise answers 37 percent of the next queries people ask about him. Google may have a better system in place for answering questions, if the company can just nail the Siri-like natural language part. Instead of simply showing a page from Yelp or Wolfram Alpha, as Siri does, Google could potentially pull in what it thinks is the most relevant information from around the Web. The company has already developed a version of Knowledge Graph for mobile devices, so the groundwork is already in place. Of course, this is all just speculation on my part, but given Google’s high-minded thoughts on making search smarter, and the ever-increasing importance of mobile, Knowledge Graph seems likely to play a huge role in Android’s answer to Siri. For more information on the knowledge graph check out the Google Blog. |
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| Things You Should Know About Facebook’s IPO |
| The social network priced its shares at $38 apiece, valuing the company at $104 billion. The average first-day “pop” for a technology company is 32 percent; if Facebook follows that trend, it’ll be worth $137 billion by day’s end. But there’s little about Facebook that’s average, including its public offering. This is the technology’s biggest initial public offering and history’s second-biggest IPO, period, and it will raise about $16 billion. Statistics suggests that the first-day pop—if there is one—will be more modest than average. A lot of the smart money is getting out Early investors such as the venture capital firm Accel Partners are selling an unusually high number of shares.Nearly 60 percent of the stock sold today comes from insiders, compared to 37 percent for Google (GOOG)when it went public in 2004. Goldman Sachs (GS) is selling about half its stake, far more than the firm initially planned. “If you really thought that 12 months later the stock would be 50 percent higher, you wouldn’t leave that on the table,” Erik Gordon, a professor at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, toldBloomberg News. To justify its valuation, Facebook will need to annoy its users … Thanks in large part to General Motors’s (GM)decision to de-friend Facebook, there are a lot of questions about the efficacy and future of Facebook’s ad-dominant revenue model. And it has high expectations to live up to: The $38 price gives Facebook a whopping 107 price-to-earnings ratio. (For comparison, Apple’s (AAPL)is around 13.) To dramatically boost ad revenues, the two best options are either to put more ads on the site—which would annoy users—or find more places to put ads. The latter means creating a network of ad inventory across the Web, much the way Google’s Doubleclick sells ads and places them on sites like that of the New York Times (NYT). This would give Facebook far greater reach, but could also give users the creeps. Imagine updating your Facebook status (“Really loving that new Carly Rae Jepsen song!”) and then seeing ads to buy the track Call Me Maybe at every site you visit. … or do something besides advertising Currently Facebook’s only source of non-ad revenue is its digital currency, Facebook Credits, which people use to buy virtual goods, such as tractors in FarmVille (ZNGA). During the first quarter of 2012, payments grew to make up almost 18 percent of Facebook’s revenue—close to $200 million in total. Overall, though, fewer than 2 percent of Facebook’s users have bought virtual goods with their payments option. There’s a lot of potential growth, in other words, along with hints that a big online operator such as Spotify may begin accepting Facebook Credits in the future. Facebook has plenty of revenue options beyond payments and advertising Facebook is a force: It accounts for 9 percent of all online visits in the U.S., according to Experian Hitwise, a company that measures website traffic. Hitwise also says that Americans spend an average of 20 minutes per Facebook visit. Worldwide, nearly 1 billion people have a Facebook profile. As investor Chris Dixon puts it, Facebook has real assets—including “a vast number of extremely engaged users, its social graph, Facebook Connect”—and should be able “to monetize through another business model,” apart from advertising. It could create the Social Smartphone, sell data analytics products, charge for higher-res photo and video storage, or perhaps hawk vintage Mark Zuckerberg hoodies. There’s already a “Facebook Mafia” Heard of the PayPal Mafia? Former executives from the online-payment provider have gone on to start big-time tech firms, such as LinkedIn (LNKD), Yammer, and Yelp (YELP). (And one member, Peter Thiel, cut the first big check for Facebook.) A Facebook Mafia has already emerged, and members have founded Asana, Path, andQuora. The Facebook Mafia is real, even though the name could use some work, says Dave Morin, Path’s chief executive officer, who previously developed Facebook’s development platform. “I guess we can’t escape from calling it that,” he says. Facebook goes where Google won’t in photos Facebook owns one of the largest photo repositories in the world, and its facial-recognition technology is getting a workout scanning them all, with more than 300 million photos uploaded per day. Facebook stores 60 billion images, a whopping 1.5 petabytes of data. For each uploaded photo, Facebook stores four images of different sizes. The site shows as many as 550,000 images per second. This is an area that has upset privacy critics and represents something that Facebook is willing to do that even Google isn’t: Google’s Eric Schmidt said last yearthat the company had built an app that would let people snap photos of others and identify who they are but decided not to release it, due to privacy concerns. Google and Facebook both have sophisticated facial-recognition technology, but Google requires users to opt into its photo-tagging service. Facebook users are included automatically. Facebook’s new campus could be cursed Late last year the social network moved into a 57-acre site in Menlo Park that was previously inhabited by Sun Microsystems. Sun’s fortunes soured shortly after the computer company took up residence there. The same thing has happened, in different times and places, to software-maker Borland, Silicon Graphics, and even Apple (which nearly went bankrupt three years after it moved into its current Cupertino, Calif., headquarters at 1 Infinite Loop). The good news: Companies that move into pre-existing campuses seem to fare better. Google, for instance, took up residence in SGI’s old digs. Up north, Facebook is the only thing better than hockey Facebook is one of the top two websites in every country except China. The social-networking site is most loved in Canada, where it wins 12 percent of all online visits. |
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| How powerful is a Facebook “like” for advertisers? |
| We know it’s a powerful way to stay connected to friends. The question is: How does that translate to profits for businesses? You may already like Quiznos, but if you make it official and “like” the company on Facebook, you get a free sub the next time you order a meal. Why would the company give away a $5 sandwich, just because someone gives it a thumbs-up on Facebook? “It actually builds an online loyalty base for us, which is really important,” explains Quiznos CEO Greg MacDonald. “We’ve got approximately 600,000 people on our ‘Face’ page, and that allows us to communicate back and forth with them — actually, sometimes on a daily or weekly basis.” What does Facebook still have to prove? New Yorker columnist Ken Auletta spoke about that with “CBS This Morning” co-hosts Charlie Rose and Erica Hill. To see the discussion, click on this video: MacDonald is part of a growing push to make advertising interactive, using things such as the Facebook “like” button. Is a customer who “likes” Quiznos on Facebook more valuable than one who doesn’t? “The advantage we get with Facebook customers,” says MacDonald, “is that they’ve opted in and they’ve selected in to want to know more about Quiznos, so that allows us to engage and tell them more about the brand, which is really, really important to us.” Around the world, people post 2 billion “likes” to the social network every day. And almost every business wants a cut. What’s the value of those “likes” to businesses? “It really depends on the type of business that you run and how much that data will be shared between your friends on Facebook,” says Backupify CEO and co-founded Rob May. “How similar are they to you? Are they likely to buy the same products? Is there’s a lot of overlap, then that’s pretty valuable.” That’s what Facebook will have to prove to get company ad dollars. In an interview in November on “The Charlie Rose Show” on PBS, Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sharyl Sandberg explained noted, “Marketers have always been looking for that person who’s not just going to buy, but spread the word to their friends. What we do on Facebook is we enable marketers to find that and then, if I do it on Facebook, I’m sharing with an average of 130 people. And so it becomes a word-of-mouth marketing at scale.” Marketing on the social network takes many forms. Companies can buy ads on Facebook, or have fan pages for free. General Motors decided this week that Facebook’s paid ads aren’t helping sell cars, but the company is keeping its fan pages. And sources tell CBS News GM is still spending $30 million on consultants to come up with a social media strategy. Ford, on the other hand, is spending one-in-four marketing dollars on digital ads. Ford says 60 percent of people who “like” Ford on Facebook wind up shopping for Fords. “It’s actually the combination of paid and content that seems to be the most effective to date,” observes Jeff Farley, Ford Global Marketing Vice President Jeff Farley. Ford launched its most recent Ford Explorer — not at an auto show — but on Facebook. And Farley says the response was huge. “Some of the metrics on our launches are much better than the Super Bowl,” Farley says. “Not that we’d never do a Super Bowl — it’s just that, you know, we ourselves were surprised.” Source: CBS |
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| Facebook IPO Halo Boosts Social Media Stocks |
| Facebook’s imminent initial public offering (IPO) might mint a mess of millionaires in Silicon Valley by Friday, but in the meantime, it is driving wealth in a few newly-public internet companies as well. With the social networking company’s offering reportedly oversubscribed, some investors are looking at ancillary ways to profit from it and seem to be turning to Facebook’s already-public peers. “I do sense some ‘temporary’ momentum for these related social media stocks,” observed Arvind Bhatia, a financial analyst who covers Facebook for Sterne Agee. Shares of LinkedIn, Zynga, Pandora and Yelp all were trading up in advance of Facebook’s IPO. LinkedIn closed at $113.49 on Wednesday — up from $106 on May 1. Pandora shares ended Wednesday at $11.37, having closed at $8.56 on May 1. More recently, shares in Yelp — which had been slipping lower in value — saw a sudden uptick around May 11. Zynga, which accounts for about 15 percent of Facebook’s revenue, has seen the same pattern. While its stock has been down 25 percent in the last month, it is up 2.75 percent over the last five days. Meanwhile, RenRen, the so-called “Facebook of China,” saw shares up more than seven percent Tuesday. You could add Groupon to this list, as well — although much of the recent upswing in its share price is likely due to the company’s strong first-quarter results that beat Wall Street expectations. More likely than a coincidence, these stocks are benefiting from the halo of interest surrounding Facebook’s IPO, an offering that may well prove to be the biggest ever in the internet space. Investor drive for a piece of Facebook is becoming the drive for a piece of a company like Facebook or, better yet, one that might be acquired by it. “LinkedIn, Zynga, Pandora, Yelp … these are all potential acquisition bait for Facebook,” Ironfire Capital founder Eric Jackson said. “If Facebook is going to trade at a premium — like $150 billion to $200 billion, why not buy the fish and the bait, too?” But this is all pre-IPO chatter. What happens Friday and the Monday following — and in the months to come — will provide a hard and fast answer to that question of whether the Facebook halo has any true longevity. |
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| Social Media Is Reinventing How Business Is Done |
| When Red Robin Gourmet Burgers introduced its new Tavern Double burger line last month, the company had to get everything right. So it turned to social media. The 460-restaurant chain used an internal social network that resembles Facebook to teach its managers everything from the recipes to the best, fastest way to make them. Instead of mailing out spiral-bound books, getting feedback during executives’ sporadic store visits and taking six months to act on advice from the trenches, the network’s freewheeling discussion and video produced results in days. Red Robin is already kitchen-testing recipe tweaks based on customer feedback — and the four new sandwiches just hit the table April 30. Facebook’s initial public offering Friday — the largest by a technology company — is a watershed moment for the consumer side of the Web, but social networking’s real economic impact might be ahead as companies learn how to harness “social business” tools. Beyond advertising on Facebook or Twitter, companies are using social networks to build teams that solve problems faster, share information better among their employees and partners, bring customer ideas for new product designs to market earlier, and redesign all kinds of corporate software in Facebook’s easy-to-learn style. “At a very basic level, Facebook is the most popular application ever, with a billion people who know how to use it,” said Marc Benioff, chief executive of salesforce.com, whose Chatter social-networking tools are used by 150,000 companies. “The ability to access information is much better because it’s easier to get to it.” After a slow start, Big Business is embracing social media in a big way. Forrester Research says the sales of software to run corporate social networks will grow 61% a year and be a $6.4 billion business by 2016. Two-thirds of big companies surveyed now use Web 2.0 tools such as social networks or blogs, with use of internal social networks up 50% since 2008, according to a survey by McKinsey & Co. Nearly 90% said they have reaped at least one measurable business benefit, though most say the improvements have been modest. Heavy use of social tools has a statistically significant correlation to profitability, said Michael Chui, senior fellow at the McKinsey Global Institute. But it’s early: Only about 3% of respondents used social business tools for all three major uses — reaching customers, connecting employees and coordinating with suppliers, McKinsey said. The Social Web seems to be doing a different job in Corporate America than the first-generation Web. In the late 1990s, companies such as Wal-Mart used the Internet to streamline supply chains and better manage inventories to hold down prices. Banks used the new technology to cut the cost of processing mortgages by as much as two-thirds, by eliminating clerical workers and substituting e-mail for expensive overnight deliveries. If Web 1.0 automated routine processes and warehouses, Web 2.0 is about organizing design work and creativity, said Andrew McAfee, professor of technology and operations management at Harvard Business School. “We asked ourselves where would social networking go once everyone had a Facebook account?” said David Sacks, president of San Francisco-based Yammer, whose software runs Red Robin’s internal social network. “Big ideas always move from the consumer market into the enterprise market.” “Innovation is a two-way street,” said Chris Laping, Red Robin’s senior vice president for business transformation. “When people see things, they feel things. And when they feel things, they change.” Making connections Using social networks to foster connections lets companies match the skills of people working all over the world who wouldn’t easily find each other, said Eric Lesser, a research director at IBM’s Institute for Business Value. It’s especially valuable for companies built by acquisition, whose managers in different divisions often don’t know each other, he said. Take SuperValu, a collection of supermarket chains ranging from Shaw’s in Boston to Albertsons in California. SuperValu last year used Yammer to build a network to connect 11,000 executives and store managers, chief information officer Wayne Shurts said. They’ve organized themselves into more than 1,000 groups to talk about specific challenges. For example, 182 managers from different chains joined a group to mull common problems of running markets in college towns. Another 153 banded together to talk about running stores in beach communities, where business is seasonal. Those didn’t replace any other process, because there was no way to do it before: The managers couldn’t all be pulled from their stores for retreats or meetings, and the cost of getting them together would have been prohibitive, Shurts said. One result: A promotion at college-oriented stores that sold 8,000 $99 mini-refrigerators last fall, each stuffed with $99 worth of coupons to bring the customers back for food. Another discussion led to college-town “beer pong” displays packaging ping-pong balls, red Solo cups and brewskis to fill them up. Both ideas were floated last spring and ready by August, he said. “You’ve got to let the conversations happen, even if you might not like all of that conversation,” Shurts said. “It’s going to happen around the water cooler anyway.” Listening to customers Companies can also use blogs and social sites to bring customers into their product-design process, said Barton George, director of the Dell computer division that sells to Internet-based companies. Through its IdeaStorm site, Dell has taken in more than 17,000 ideas for new or improved products, and has adopted nearly 500, including backlit keyboards that are better for working on airplanes. Other times, Dell puts its own ideas on IdeaStorm, in what it calls a Storm Session, to get feedback before going ahead. On May 6, Dell posted a plan on IdeaStorm describing a proposed specialty laptop, upgrading an existing machine to target people who write wireless apps and other Web-based software using a variation of the Linux operating system called Ubuntu, George said. By Monday, customers had posted 83 ideas for refinements to the machine on IdeaStorm, covering specific software bugs to broader issues such as whether the screen should be shiny or not. In addition, 35,000 people visited George’s Web posting about the new laptop — 10 times more than any other posting he’s ever made, he said. The laptop is due on the market by year’s end. Dell says the process produces more detailed feedback than traditional focus groups, and builds links to an important group of customers. So far, the social Web hasn’t boosted U.S. productivity growth the way the first-generation Internet did in the late 1990s. But economists such as MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson say it takes about five years for a new technology to show its full impact on companies that deploy it. Social networking is about two or three years in at most companies, McAfee said. Companies are tinkering with the technology and their own business processes, trying to find ways to match them up to get the most impact and learn how to interpret all the unorganized data users disclose about themselves on the sites, Lesser said. In the meantime, the trend has already generated one IPO for a smaller company, Jive Software, that sells social-networking tools to companies. Jive went public at $12 a share in December and now trades around $19.50, achieving a $1.2 billion market value, though it’s not yet profitable. Facebook hasn’t actively pursued the social business market. It let companies such as Yammer and Jive mimic its look and feel, because making Facebook-like features an industry standard helped cement Facebook’s leadership in consumer social networks, Yammer’s Sacks said. Social media has the potential to be as important to the broader economy as more obviously business-related information technologies such as mobile phones and cloud computing, said Stacey Bishop, a venture capitalist at Scale Venture Partners, in Foster City, Calif. “I’d put the cloud first, but they’re all important and they’re all related,” Bishop said. “Mobile is an extension of the cloud, because it lets you get your data wherever you are. And social is the layer on top of that, making it easier to cross-communicate.” Source: USA Today |
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| Tips From A Marketing Guru |
| What people remember about Dan Kendrick is that he always wears red gym shoes. That might not work for you as a marketing gimmick. But for the power behind Red Gym Shoes, a sales, marketing and career advice consultancy based in Overland Park, Kan., it’s a no-brainer. Kendrick particularly likes to help startups get noticed. “When you’re a small company starting out and you don’t have a wheelbarrow full of cash to buy your way into a market, you need to go guerrilla,” he recommends — to stage “little wars” that surprise the competition. Kendrick self-publishes books, gets on the speaker circuit and uses every relationship he has. Admittedly, that “sometimes wears out a few welcomes in the process.” And many entrepreneurs lack those talents or chutzpah. But here are some of Kendrick’s marketing tactics that he urges others to try: —Strew business cards “like confetti.” —Use bumper stickers. “It’s so last decade, but it still works.” —Hand out branded balloons. (My aside: Environmentalists would prefer you didn’t.) —Print lapel buttons. —Use banners and post in prominent locations. —Slip brochures under windshield wipers and doors. —Give away branded pens and whatnot. —Pay someone to wear a sandwich sign in a high-traffic location. —Hit the “like” button on others’ Facebook pages and hope they “like” you in return. You do have a Facebook page, right? —Tweet. A lot. —Tie in with a well-known brand and do a co-promotion. —Talk to people. Business relationships have been made because of chats with fellow airline passengers and, yes, on the golf course. “You need something creative to differentiate yourself from other people,” Kendrick advises. But in the end, “it all goes down to being yourself. That appeals to people. You can’t sell yourself if it’s not something you want to do.” And he really does like red gym shoes. Source: Chicago Tribune |
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| GM Poised To Drop Facebook Ads |
| General Motors is dropping its advertising on Facebook just as the social-media giant’s public stock offering is poised to become one of the largest in IPO history. GM spokesman Greg Martin confirmed that after reassessing its media spending it has decided to stop advertising on the popular social-media site. GM spends about $40 million a year on Facebook marketing, the Wall Street Journal said, about $10 million of which is for paid advertisements. GM spokesman Pat Morrissey stressed that the automaker will continue to promote its cars and trucks on its own Facebook pages, but is evaluating its ad spending. “We are committed to a content strategy,” Morrissey said. News of the automaker’s review came on the same day that an Associated Press-CNBC poll revealed that ads on Facebook are not very effective. In the poll, 83% of respondents said they “hardly ever” or “never” click on the ads Facebook serves up. The ones who did click through were enough to yield the company$4.34 per user in advertising last year. That’s up from $3.07 in 2009. GM’s view of Facebook differs from crosstown rival Ford, which said it will continue to advertise on the site. Ford has made extensive use of Facebook and other social-media sites, becoming the first automaker to reveal a model on the social-media network in July 2010. Normally, automakers reveal models at major auto shows but Ford unveiled the redesigned Explorer on Facebook first as well as at a series of live events in cities across the country. “Our approach is different than others,” when it comes to Facebook, said Matt VanDyke, director of marketing communications for Ford. “We worked with Facebook in advance on how to buy some paid and sponsored advertising to really amplify and leverage the things we were already doing.” VanDyke said Ford’s social/digital advertising budget is about a third of Ford’s overall advertising budget. “For us it’s all about the execution. It’s not just a paid advertising strategy, or go create wacky content and see if it goes viral.” VanDyke said. VanDyke said he views Facebook differently than traditional media. “Social networking is the No. 1 activity and Facebook is the No. 1 site for networking in the U.S.,” VanDyke said. Facebook is scheduled to begin trading on Nasdaq on Friday. The world’s largest online social network on Tuesday increased the planned price range for its stock to $34 to $38 per share in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. That’s up from its previous range of $28 to $35. At the upper limit of $38, the sale would raise about $12.8 billion. Source: Detroit Press |
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