Capture, resonance and exchange in the social media world…

So I’ve been watching the activity on my blog, and through google analytics on my site.  I can pretty much see where people are coming from and how long they stay and with a little effort, I could see where they go.  One way I can tell where they go is that they end up clicking on adsense ads on my site, and WP does a good job of telling me where people clicked out of my blog.

That being said, I’m starting to form a concept that has 3 parts.   These are capture, resonance and exchange.

The capture is ads or searches or links (twitter/facebook/digg) that lead people to your property.   That’s very measurable.

The resonance is inverse of bounce rate except that it is a higher level of abstraction.  It really is how long you can keep people in your orbit.   So if a person sees a link on one of my tweets, ends up poking around my website (which I watch through google analytics) then goes over to my blog (at which I can see some level of stats on WP) or my facebook product fan page (which also gives some level of stats).    So resonance is that ability to keep someone in your world for one moment longer learning something they didn’t know.

Finally there is exchange.  Exchange is when people click on an adsense ad you’ve place or go to your product site (like where my book is on Amazon) and turn that into a financial transaction.    It’s pretty interesting to track people in the waves that they come in and see them end up at one of the $$ endpoints.  On some of them (like adsense) I get paid for every click.  On Amazon, they get there and either buy or they don’t.

To some extent once they’ve left the site and gone onto adsense or Amazon, I’ve lost them for now or for good. I get a few cents for the adsense click or I may make a sale of my book.  but in either case, the interaction ends at that point.

So as an experiment for this weekend, I’m going to point you people to a couple of my links and see where they end up.

My Amazon site

My Blog (which you are on)

My website

My Digg profile

My twitter profile

My facebook profile

My facebook product page

my linkedin profile

I’ll let you know the results…on Monday night (Memorial Day)

Armen

Modified my social network map…

What a tangled web we weave part II

In another post I started to map this out.  So last night, I started poking around each of my feeds to make sure that I got it right.  I don’t use utterli much so when I went over there I noticed that my feed from ping was going there.   I’m not seeing stuff from double pumping into twitter if I start at ping.fm so something smart is going on here.  As one comment pointed out in my original post on all the social networks I was looking at, I can see how the ping -> friendfeed as the two ends is pretty useful.  The only thing that is odd is that the thing that I was trying to avoid was double pumping any of the sites, and it looks like friendfeed gets a copy of at least 3 to 4 depending on where the content starts.   I suppose in that way, I can use FriendFeed as a diagnostic tool for the rest of the network.  If for some reason something isn’t getting through I can tell from there.  But the jury is still out.

Truly though, there has to be a winnowing of technologies here.   As I mentioned somewhere else, back in the day when Palm first added the IrDA to beam things to other devices (before bluetooth), I had a small 2 line 2-way skypage motorola pager.  It had a single toggle key to allow you to blip out <300 character messages which could go from one pager to another (via the 877 numbers) or to an email address, or call a phone number and have the message read to the person answering (that was cool).   In those days most people still didn’t bring laptops to meetings, but I had my palm and a keyboard.  Which was an oddity.  Then I found an app on the palm that talked to the pager via the IrDA and I was able to send email real time in meetings to people and not be staring into my pager (like people do now with blackberries).  Somebody would say, we need an email sent to so and so, and I’d say, “Give me a sec”  I’d type it in, pick the person’s name from my palm address book, and hit send, and lift up my pager to the top of the palm and zing the message went out.  This was actually not dissimilar to tweeting because I could send email to distributions also.  Just as I got this all debugged and working (I also used Lotus Organizer on top of Lotus Notes to sync my palm….I could draw a map like the above about how this was all connected) Moto and RIM started coming out with the pagers with the small thumb keyboards attached.   My marrying of technologies was no longer looked upon as cool, it was suddenly a contraption right out of Rube Goldberg.

I mention that story because, again, having all these social networks all pinging each other is quite cool.  But at some point it is technology for technologies sake and will be winnowed, or whittled down so that the web isn’t just a rat’s nest.  There really ought to be 1-3 front end content generators (for arguments sake, Google MSN/Yahoo WordPress) which talk through a couple of sieves (Twitter, Facebook, Some IM engine) and maybe have a couple of rss feed aggregators (Google, FF).  I’m not picking technologies I’m somewhat agnostic (or in this case omni-gnostic),  I’m just saying, there are too many things now and winnowing is inevitable.

ilist

So I signed up for a new offering called ilist this evening.   It’s an interesting twist on the craigslist genre.  I’m not one who has often sold/promoted anything on using this method.  So just as an experiment I listed a pointer to a free excerpt of my book, for no other reason than to try it.

Presentation:

ilist has a really nice clean looking product.  as opposed to craigslist, which looks like a web 1.0 forum, this has nice ajax look and feel, meaning things do things you expect on the browser.   From a UI ease of use perspective, they’ve done a good job of leading you by the nose through the process of listing something, without clippy getting in your face.

General Setup:

Getting started was quite easy.  ilist makes sure that you are you by sending you a text message with a code you can use to verify who you are.  I was up in about 1 minute.

Karma:

ilist has this concept of Karma that they promote whereby the more you share, the more Karma you earn.  list something, you get Karma.  Share it via facebook or twitter, you earn more Karma.   You can also promote your friends products to gain Karma.   It wasn’t too clear to me how to cash in on my Karma, but I saw I was accumulating it during the experiment.

Social Network Connections:

ilist provide a series of connections to the typical social networking sites as well as allowing you to send promotions through Yahoo, Gmail and Hotmail.  It’s a pretty comprehensive list.   A few minutes after I promoted my listing through facebook and twitter, I saw my feed on facebook get a new entry.  I’m not sure what it did with the twitter update, but if I see it, I’ll say so in a subsequent comment.   Promoting virally is part of the value proposition.

Search/Browse:

ilist presents the typical classified ad/personals listings which you can browse.  You can pretty well tell, for the geographic area you ask to focus in on, whether there is something there or not under the page of categories.  There’s a quick search at the top of the category browser for you to drill down into the listings.

Terms of Use/How do they make money?

ilist is free, as far as I can tell, at the moment.  In the terms of service it does say that from time to time certain services can be paid for through major credit cards.   However, they do explicitly say that they do not take part in the transactions between buyers and sellers (so this isn’t ebay).

Summary:

Anyway it seems like a pretty cool set of services, well presented and organized, easy to use, and not too in your face helpful but helpful nonetheless.   Something you all should check out if you have things you want to sell or promote services/stuff on the web.

iSocial…

My introduction to modern electronic social networking was LinkedIn.  I was invited to join the day I left Teradyne.  It seemed kinda weird, sort of an online resume so I thought it not a bad thing, especially since it gave me the option of somewhat limiting my audience.    I kinda avoided the myspace thing, it just seemed too weird and the few people’s pages that I was referred to sang back at me so I would get annoyed.  Nothing like slamming on the mute key in a coffee shop because a friend referred me to their page that played the tune they karaoked the night before in the Atlanta underground.

When I joined Intuit, Intuit itself was (and still is) going through a massive transformation.  It actually has a lot of web properties, but the mindset (and the cash cows) were on the desktop.  At this point I knew that I had to figure this thing out.  So over the last year I signed up for facebook and created a wordpress blog and experimented with twitter and plaxo and utterli and various other things.

My conclusion after watching other people’s tweets go by this morning is that this is attempting to replace the traditional physical neighboorhood/ghetto/small town where everyone knows your business to the web.  Now anyone and everyone is in your mental ghetto.   You tweet and your facebook status gets updated and people comment on it.  Your blog has an rss feed watching your tweets and people start following you.

Random people read about “Steak Armeen” and leave only a footprint that you can trace through your dashboard.  The come into your ghetto somewhat anonymously and exit when they’ve satisfied their curiousity.  If they are motivated by what you say, they might comment, although if you look at the wordpress blogs with the top hits it’s not always friendly banter.

The one other difference in the iSocial network vs your neighborhood is that in your neighborhood the information, your whereabouts, your acquaintances were monitored by the old lady on the second floor of the 2 family sitting on your porch.  If your house had smoke coming out of it, she’d call 911.   On the web, we create a sense of neighborhood, but with none (or at least very little) of the old lady watching to make sure that the neighborhood was safe.  To some extent we rely on the site owner/moderators, but the truth is the one thing that is truly missing in this neighborhood is the collective protection that we as social animals have relied on since sitting around the fire.  Somebody was supposed to stand guard.

You can try to mimic it by having your friends and friends kids all on facebook (let’s say) and hope that someone is watching with the intent of helping you, but truly, you are on your own.   I think that solving that problem, creating the safe zone or collective security, is the next real innovation that needs to be done.  I guess you can call it web gangs to in it’s logical extreme.  And parental controls on the computer is not a substitute for it.