Arnold Waldstein's Blog

The promise of the social web is juicy and inspiring and confounding.

Be interesting. Be smart. Work like a maniac. Create value and your customers will find you.

It’s a socially brushed off sequel to “Build it and they will come”.

But even interesting becomes noisy and ineffective without context and connection. The truly great promise of democratizing access for all is eating its own tail as more and more noise creates less and less connections that lead to value.

This problem seems endemic of late.

We all use filters to personalize information to our own needs. A few dynamic blog communities and early smart curation platforms like ensembli and eqentia start to make sense of the noise and put immediacy and relevance into the social information stream.

As a business owner and marketer, pinpointing context creates value and connections. Firehosing information is akin to interrupt push advertising, spraying the already noisy world and creating social spam as exhaust.

All businesses and brands are faced with the same drive to rise above the noise, create connections and build momentum. And all of us are finding ourselves at communications crossroads.

What do our Facebook fans really want when choosing to ‘like’ us? Is this content or friendship? Many ‘friends’ with good intentions and divergent interests ask me to ‘like’ their causes. I do more than not, and each ‘like’ creates noise and spam.

Many of us are shyly guilty of the pure adrenalin approach to social communications where marketers and community managers are treating the world as an open Facebook page, equating coy with clever, chatter with info and volume with value.

And generally, across brands big and small, there is a misconstruing of the applause for the real connection. Mistaking supporters for true early adopters and fans as a contributing community.

It’s not really all that easy to sort out.

Companies need to connect with their customers. Want to be interesting to their fans. Want to be ‘liked’ and shared and rise on the positive strength of their customers and fans good will.

Almost as if in the drive to have conversations, we put chatty conviviality before context and interest. It’s just easier…but it’s noisy and unfocused.

Part of the problem is the power of the social medium itself, so fraught with democratizing empowerment that we live in a more aspirational reality and busyness is masquerading as focus and market intent.

So…what to do?

Business owners and marketers need to rethink how the social web intersects with value creation and marketing. It’s not one or the other, it’s an interlaced new order.

Two ideas help me navigate the always murky intersection of social web savvy and market building intentions.

Focus on the Interest not the Friend Graph

There are lots of ways to parse the internet. Most focus on friends’ connections. I like to focus on the superset of this, the interest graph.

On all social nets, metadata becomes valuable as more friends vet it. The crowd is the curation principal.

For example, coffee shops on Foursquare rise to the top of the list as ‘recommended’ because your friends went there and checked in. The equivalent of liking in a geo-connected world.

There are two inherent gotchas with this approach.

You need lots of friends to make the sample data valid. And while potential relevance and context is created, the byproduct is a roar of social noise.

Our ‘friends’ are friends for a multiplicity of reasons, not always because they are experts in everything we are interested in. They may have no taste buds for coffee or palate for wine even though we may want to meet to drink coffee with them or enjoy a flight of natural wine.

That’s the friends graph crowd sourcing point of view. That’s also its basic fallacy from a marketing perspective. The friendship graph is broad and narrow and noisy and anti-contextual by nature. This is the social web equivalent of ‘boiling the ocean’, the perennial marketing non-starter.

The interest graph takes the polar opposite starting point.

It begins with common interests (wines of Arbois, raw desserts, travel in Paris) and builds friendship under them, because of them, around them. It is grounded in contextual information that connects through interests. Not expertise necessarily but common passions around pursuits.

‘Like’ a fan page on Facebook sponsored by an organic wine zine or travel club. If I get real information, for example, an app for finding organic wine bars in Paris and NYC with tasting meet-ups highlighted, this is spot on. I’ll find new places, make new friends, and create a new contextual network around a common interest thread. Virality is given. Context and interest in this case is the superset of the friend networking machine.

So…businesses need to find those target connections, those alpha sharers and dream early customers.

If it’s me, focus with intention on intersecting interests and context. Offer interesting info in digestible bites. I’ll share it forward and connect the string from your business to my interest network.

Sharing it forward is not a phrase; it’s a behavioral reality

The need to share value forward is the behavioral key to channel social connections…and create community.

Sharing is not a platform derivative of Facebook or Foursquare; the platforms gave expression to this behavioral drive. They made it easy and ubiquitous and the common language of our connected lives.

The drive to share value forward is the core tenet of the social web.

Sharing is power pulse, the passionate heartbeat that makes social a transformation, a complete game changer for everything from commerce to education.

Our incessant need to check in on our nets, looking for push out stuff we like and think is important, is not lip service to a trend. Sharing makes people feel good.

Sharing is the social change agent of our times.

Wrapping up

I’m really inspired by the business possibilities of the social web and humbled by the challenges to harness it. It’s replete with potential but elusive to grasp.

Figure it out (with a lot of luck) and the marketplace is truly your oyster.

Approach it from a distance without understanding its unique social gravity and you create noise and spam and just churn.

It is powered by honest communications. Fueled by the passion of people to connect with ideas and product and causes, and share that connection forward.

Can these really be the guidelines for a business platform?

Absolutely.

Do you ever wonder why everyone posting on your Facebook wall is happy or tan and interesting? Always eating at fabulous restaurants…or in my case only drinking the very best wine?

Welcome to the ‘other’ social filter.

Social information filters allow us to see what interests us, find more relevant information quicker and connect to people or causes of like mind effortlessly. They are core to the value of the social graph and of course Facebook.

They are magic of sorts. We hang around Facebook because it is relevant in a world we define.

But we also feel at home on Facebook because we are the architects of our physical identity which is inextricably tied to our social identity. We filter and control our physical image and persona. It’s human nature and part of socialization to look our best. Facebook understands this and let’s us easily architect the info we show. Everyone of us deletes posts from our wall that we don’t like.

We can “control the lighting” if you will on how we are perceived.

In an interesting post by Om Malik yesterday, “Now Starring You, in a Movie about You” talks about what he calls MeTV that ties into this perfectly:

‘I always thought millions of us were living inside our own weird version of reality television. But reality television can be ugly and sometimes too stark. Movies are curated, edited and have a sense of polish. That is one of the main reasons why Ratcliff (developer of the app“100 Cameras and I”) believes apps like his and Hisptamatic are selling briskly on the iTunes store. “The filters can turn ordinary into extraordinary.”

Turning the “ordinary into the extraordinary” is a potent phrase. This is about the intersection of identity management and personal fashion on our Facebook walls and blogs. It’s naturally what people do on Facebook, at a party, in a meeting and in life.

Om is mostly talking about photos and points to the massive growth of Instagram as a photo filter as an example. He is talking about images and filters…I’m thinking about live social video and chat.

I’ve been an enthusiast for social video for as long as video has been pushed around online.

All the infrastructure barriers to social video are mostly gone. Cheap bandwidth and free storage abound. Handheld mobile play and capture. And we have Facebook and Twitter identities as the social glue to tie us all together in a world where sharing is a behavioral norm.

Despite a host of interesting early products and a focus on the less self-conscious Y generation, social video and chat are still a juicy promise but a very early reality.

Even I, with all my passion for the medium, infrequently use any of the services except Skype for international business calls. Something has been missing.

I think Om, by identifying the ‘why’ of the boom in photo filters has found at least one important key to the puzzle. Social video chat feels and acts and looks like a dorm room video cam. Home-movie like. Awkward and overly self-conscious and glaring.

This is a filterless, uncontrolled reality. From childhood on we look in the mirror to see how others see us. Suspending the ability to control this seems antithetical to human nature.

For a long time I believed that the social and video chat market was waiting for a behavioral change in people to share more visually. I now feel the core human tenet of filtering our image to control our persona and identity may be the missing link.

Adding filters to video is not easy. It’s simpler for a B roll edit or filter, very challenging for a live stream. That’s why broadcast studios are what they are…expensive and complex and few.

To borrow a few words from Om’s terrific quote, in order for the ordinary to become extraordinary, we need to filter and stylize the video stream. And in order for that to be part of the social graph, everyone needs to be able to do this on the fly.

Seems possible in the face of all the other barriers that have been erased.

On the heels of Om’s post, the media was abuzz yesterday with the launch of SocialEyes, a well-funded startup with Rob Glaser of Microsoft and RealNetworks fame as the Chairman and product guru Rob Williams as CEO.

Om’s ideas and Glaser’s new company connect in an interesting way.

Rob Glaser understands the intersection of digital and audio video with the mass market better than most. And he has the chutzpah and connections and vision that few in this segment have. And first glimpses of the product coming out of Demo yesterday are interesting. SocialEyes looks like it has separated itself from the crowd and has learned from the companies that pioneered the space.

I believe that social video is the next communication’s frontier and have been blogging on it almost since the beginning. I want SocialEyes to get it right. I want someone to leap the chasm and unlock the gate for social video communications. Rob Williams, a really smart product guy, has mashed up some cool features. Adding B roll and content feeds with what looks like curated publishing channel on YouTube creates a semblance of dashboard and video publishing control. He knows that the market needs something more.

My only question is about you and me and how we can control the filters of our appearance, which is our social identity online.

Call this segment video chat or video conferencing or social video…it’s a lit image of ourselves nonetheless for all to see during the event and shared across the web in snippets of your live image.

The utility of live chat and the fun of connecting live with friends and partners is very compelling. My sense is that the more you can controlling the lighting and airbrush the image so we look like ourselves, the faster the mass market will grab this and make it their own. All the other components are in place, just the filters have been missing.

Community and communications are two parts of a social whole.

The Facebook and Skype merger rumors are a perfect backdrop to relook at the Facebook community paradigm and how it will change with Skype as a partner.

To hundreds of millions of people, Facebook is the web. The first place they go in the morning and their principal source of news information. What’s remarkable is that while Facebook has defined social, you can’t really have a conversation there. Share of course; talk not much. This has been a missing link.

Today, on Facebook, we can post and comment but real conversations are not possible. Comment strings get moved to email or blog posts or a phone call or to a coffee shop for a meeting. Facebook is a check-in portal to see what’s going on. To do anything beyond sharing, you need to leave.

Facebook wants “To mesh communications and community more tightly together and add more tools to allow users to do so.” According to Kara Swisher who broke the merger story. Adding deeper communications capabilities in voice, text, and video are naturally the next step for Facebook and an evolving need for the ever growing group of people who run their lives from their profile pages.

Facebook fulfils that unique promise of a place to hang out at the intersection of our off and online lives where you share…and to many, create your life.  It is the ‘homepage’ to the global and flattened mass market, the news source of reference to most, and fast becoming a merchant mall to most global brands. Google is where you go to work and look stuff up. Facebook is where you share it.

The merger would add a communications layer (Skype) to Facebook’s community network that makes sense on at least three levels:

1. Voice and text

Voice communications is a ‘gimme’ for the social graph. It’s been overdue in arriving.

Why say “I’ll call you”, jump off of Facebook…rather than make that call immediately? Having an integrated phone book built off of Facebook membership seems like a no brainer. Skype is great alone. Integrated without an extraneous Skype phonebook is considerably better.

No one likes the phone company. If we can make calls from our social homepage…we will. And since many of the Skype calls we make are international, this feature has the added benefit of accelerating international expansion to the Facebook network. And to the members, the more people on the network, the more useful it is.

Texting is an obvious missing link

Most notices from Facebook and my blog communities come through text.  Texts are our rapid alert system from our networks.…”At the store.” “Meet you at the movies.” “Sign on to Facebook to chat.” Why have a one-way text pipe? On Facebook, on my phone…I would simply send text from within my profile…so would hundreds of millions more.

With Skype integrated, this issue is resolved…and of course, from a single Facebook address book.  The sub 25 year-old, mini-millennium generation, would jump on this en masse as text on the phones is their principal communications jargon.

And with Skype’s partnership with Avaya (think VoIP PBS) it is possible to conceptualize a fan page as a business center with conference calling and call analytics. Powerful in its possibilities. Your fan page could become the portal into your VoIP-based, Facebook centric global BBS system.

2. Video chat and social video are the big promises that just haven’t materialized

Social video has been stumbling forward in fits and starts. I expected it sooner, but it has eluded the mass market’s momentum…so far that is.

Creative startups like Vpype, and even Facebook with video wall posts have tried to make it easy to use video as a new social form of communications. They’ve succeeded in making it easy; they’ve been unsuccessful so far in making this a mass market need…or want for that matter. All the pieces are there…cams, free usage, address books, but human behavior hasn’t made the leap.

Video Skype calling to friends and for business is already a well accepted behavior. Integrating this capability within the social graph from a branded and trusted provider like Skype could possibly push behavioral usage to fruition. Maybe we needed a communications brand to kick start this.

My sense is that if you add video Skype calling into the social ecosystem of Facebook, the dream of party-line video calling, interactive video presentations and distance learning just might take off. Social video may go from a good idea to an explosive reality…and drag along the work of start-ups who are verticalizing the video pipe for all of us, with apps from entertainment to business.

3. The Facebook social TV channel

Live conferences from Facebook corporate are streamed frequently, and free. Boring stuff but there is already the concept of TV within Facebook. It works pretty well actually on the small screen.

TV, the holy grail of home entertainment is a living room paradigm. Skype and Facebook are already built into millions of connected TVs and DVRs coming out this holiday season. Add Facebook Connect, Skype’s SDK, a connected TV broad footprint and Facebook may be the network for content consumption, including TV as a social medium. I’ve blogged on this here.

“Facebook is the equivalent for us to what TV was for marketers back in the 1960s. It’s an integral part of what we do now.” This comes from Davide Grasso, CMO from Nike. Facebook could well become the new social TV platform, where people watch and share video content in a brand new way.

A Skype and Facebook merger or partnership makes sense to me. Check out Om Malik’s piece on GigaOm for a positive view and Rick Aristotle Munarriz in The Motley Fool for an aggressive anti-merger point of view.

Regardless of the outcome of the Skype/Facebook saga, integration of community with communications will occur in the Facebook network and deepen a whole social reality that is greater than the sum of its community and communications parts.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my mother lately.

She’s 91 years old. Healthy. Spunky with a large extended family of kids, grand kids and great grand kids. There are people all around in her retirement community. In spite of this she appears lonely and bored…achingly so at times.

I sense she feels isolated from her past and trapped in an ever-shrinking present. Not abandoned certainly–but friendships and networks outside of immediate family that come to visit are just not there. And there is little productive to do.

Her communities, once very large, are evaporating. Connections outside of the family are gone mostly. And to someone whose father drove a horse drawn cab in NYC at her birth, computers are just not truly a part of who she is.

And she is not unique, but an example of many who live between the extended family structure of the immigrant family and the social reality of a networked world that many of us inhabit.

For most of us, social networks have flattened the world and community has taken on new forms, providing a huge umbrella of support. We have Facebook walls, niche interest groups, blog communities, and offline/online connections. We have numerous lingering touch points with contacts and friends in a way that my mother never had.

This is not about richness of life…my mother’s life has been very rich. It’s about something new and extraordinary that the social web has empowered. This ability to create community as a hedge against location, a hedge against aging to some degree and certainly…a hedge against isolation as it engenders friendships in new ways.

My mother’s world has been one of astonishing change…world wars, the great depression, air travel, empowered middle class, electric powered everything, but for her, it stopped at the networked world. We spring off where she stopped and nothing is more compelling or revolutionary that what the social web empowers around people and friendships and community.

My mother sends (some) emails. Plays computer solitaire…so it is not simply technology where we spring beyond her generation. It’s networks and the social possibilities that are the great chasm here. And while we understand intellectually the power of social and community, my sense is that it is just beginning and its power is just getting tapped.

Maybe when I’m my mother’s age…when the baby boomers succumb to old age…the body will not hold us back as much. And will not create isolation or lack of productivity as our physical reality becomes less limber and more confined.

Science has extended our lives and made the middle of life longer, more productive and not much different from the decades preceding. I’m thinking that a networked and community driven, intertwined off and online world, will extend that even further, enabling connections, productivity and support for an even longer, richer period.

Add the science of health aging to the empowerment of community and socialization in a connected world, and we have something new and powerful. Technology usually evolves from one thing to another. The social web and community is a revolution in how we live better…for far longer.

The game has changed obviously…but, it’s certainly not over.

Facebook is becoming what Microsoft used to be back in the 90s…essential to everyone, impossible to beat and feeling a bit like the platform bully.

They are smart to leverage what they have to the hilt. It’s just good business and I would have done the same, but like Microsoft, they will lose  (if they have not already) the passion and commitment of those who have no choice but to use their platform, which today is everyone.  This is starting to sound like Windows to me.

You can’t beat Facebook at their game…but you can build great companies that can win around them. Anyone in the gaming or multimedia or peripheral add-on space in the 90s will tell you the same. I have personal scars from this and am a veteran of the birth of coopetition.

The announcement (I watched the livestream on Facebook) was like a webcam in a frat house. Nonetheless, Facebook Places will certainly be a monster product and hugely successful based on the massive leverage of of the platform obviously. Their reach and numbers are poetic in their size.

And yes, I’m a power Facebook user, a fan, consult on how to best use fan pages to my clients… and am excited about Places even though underwhelmed by their lack of originality. I’ll certainly use it because the Facebook platform is core to how I live, but I’m still checking in on Foursquare for now.

I’m just a big believer in the check-in space and rooting for the underdog today. I believe in people who are inventive and I think the Foursquare guys are… and with spunk, smarts and yes, a good chunk of luck can potentially carve out something that makes sense, has value to the users and the merchants.

What’s the answer? I’m not certain but here’s Foursquare’s response in SAI today. We do need more of a answer from them though.

I like the intersection of the check-in and coupon space a lot. That’s where I’m looking for the next great explosion on the streets with check-in. I’m searching for apps that are at the intersection of these because I believe that the social commerce component is key…as it creates an open market and value potentially for user and businesses alike.

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Postscript thought

I’m starting to think that Om Malik may have it right that Facebook is after the local merchants and Yelp. His post is here. Thanks to @PS 98 for surfacing this.

Even though I still believe that the check-in space is embryonic, and even if Facebook’s focus is Yelp, the swishing of the giant’s tail still makes it a difficult place for Foursquare and the other players.