virtualeconomics

Competitive analysis in the social media age

Last week my team and I were looking at some new software. No reason for it to be a secret - we were looking at Vocus, a news/PR/social media monitoring tool. It was...pretty good. We liked it.

My next question is always - who are their competitors? Sure, we could buy this, but what else is out there? Is it any good? Is it better?

Having spent a few years selling software in the City, this question always fascinates me. When you're selling one of half a dozen systems into a small market, you know who your comeptitors are - you bump into them every day, your customers are forever thinking about replacing your system with one or another of theirs and there are competitive pitches going on all the time. But from the point of view of someone buying a system, it's surprisingly easy not to know that one or more of the half dozen options out there even exists. The sales guys at company X aren't going to tell them that company Y has a great piece of kit too; they might ask their competitors what they use but hey, they're competitors and who wants to look clueless in front of competitors?

Learning to be the guy who turned down the Beatles

In a recent post I talked about the media tech bubble ("of course it's a bubble"), hypothesising that the clearest sign of a bubble is that every single IPO is being priced as if it's the next Google...which of course they can't all be. So some brief thoughts on why this might be.

Nobody wants to be the guy who turned down the next Beatles (or the next J K Rowling, or perhaps more germanely the next Google) - every industry has its legendary poor dumb bastard, "that guy" who had the Next Big Thing sitting right across his desk and passed. I've worked on acquisition strategies before with people who seemed more concerned than was entirely healthy that they not be "that guy".

A citizen journalism model that really breaks news?

London-based citizen journalism start-up Blottr, which destealthed towards the end of February with a Techrunch write-up and recently announced a round of angel funding, led the news agenda for much of Monday by breaking the day's major UK news story. 

First publishing a few minutes after 10am, Blottr broke the news of a bomb alert in London and over the day added pictures, detail and coverage of the events in the square and the controlled explosion carried out in Trafalgar Square around 9am. Sky and the BBC picked up the story around 3 hours later, and Blottr founder Adam Baker told virtualeconomics:

"It was the only full story available of the incident for 3 hours, until Sky News put it as their "breaking" news, followed by the BBC. By this time, everyone discussing the story on Twitter (was) linking to our story, as the main source."

The people formerly known as the media

"Billy Jones" is not, of course, the first person on Twitter to break (or pretend to break, or erroneously break) a super-injunction. All of Fleet Street knows who is named in the super-injunctions, not least because those injunctions require them to be told so they don't cover the story or name the names.

But over the past day or so Billy Jones' "Injunctionsuper" Twitter account has made a fair job of demolishing the comfortable celebrity fantasy that sending half a dozen letters to the lawyers at Northcliffe House, Wapping and Buckingham Palace Road to say that their papers are not allowed to cover some of the news is the same as keeping that news a secret.

Everyone is a media company now.

Privacy and publicity

Three things interest me about the John Snow debacle (if you haven't followed the saga of a Soho pub kicking out two gay drinkers for kissing, summary here), two of them mainly about Facebook.

First, the incident itself seems to indicate that the internet has made the maintenance of private little fiefdoms of bigotry harder than ever. Run a covertly homophobic, racist or otherwise unsavory pub even ten years ago and it was non-trivial for anyone to do much about it. Now that a protest as peacefully whimsical as a kiss-in can be knocked together on Facebook, not once but as often as the pub tries to lock the protestors out, it's much harder. I'm as much a fan of cultural diversity and people being allowed to do what they like as the next virtual federalist, but one of the consequences of freedom, even the freedom to be a bigot, is bearing its consequences - including nationwide calumny and what looks increasingly for the John Snow's current management like financial disaster.

MySpace goes down as fast as it went up

The collapse of MySpace proves that network effects work both ways.

It is not, in fact, amazing that the decline of the site's traffic is accelerating. The value of the site as a social network will diminish exponentially for its users as other users leave, just as the usefulness of the site increased exponentially as everyone joined.

The first telephone in the world is no use at all. The second one makes the first one a way for two people to talk; the third, then the fourth and the fifth, increase the possible connections exponentially. But the last telephone in the world is no use either, and as people leave MySpace in a trickle the trickle becomes a flood because the number of possible connections falls below the level that is useful to anyone. The last MySpace account, of course, is no more use than the last telephone. It is only to be expected that the network effect collapses as quickly as once it grew. 

I don't expect to talk about MySpace again until they sell it for pennies or close it down.

Well that about wraps it up for offline cameras

If Color is all it's claimed to be, offline cameras are on their way out even faster than we thought.

Taking photos and not being able to immediately upload and share them already seems absurd - I still have my DSLR, cos it takes good pictures, but having to download photos from it manually hours after the event has the feel of setting hot metal type by hand or binding my own books.

New York Times experiments with perverse incentives

The New York Times paywall (don't call it a paywall? Right...) is a strategic error, and not even a very complicated one.

So there's some science behind it, and the number of articles you can see before you have to pay (20) has been calculated from actual traffic data rather than just pulled out of the air, which is a good start. And it's always good to see a news org putting in some serious R&D, which at $40 million just to develop NYT's paywall definitely counts. It's not as if there's nothing about the move to like - it's considerably more thoughtful and nuanced than TimesSelect or the other, many, failed experiments in charging for (non-porn, non-finance) content that have failed over the past decade and a half.

All the news that's useful to print

There was an interest rate announcement today from the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee. They voted to keep interest rates at 0.5%.

I know because I read it on Twitter. And -here'd the important bit - that headline is all I had to read.

In most media, interest rate announcements make for an article or a news story. They spin it out, because the format they have available, indeed all they know how to do, requires each story to be just that. A story, with a bit of context and analysis and speculation for what it will mean in the future. So the newspaper journalist will tell us a bit about how Gordon made the MPC politically independent and the TV newsreader will point out what it means for mortgage rates, probably with a talking head (or two, for "balance") discussing whether it's good or bad.

But interest rate announcements are precisely the sort of news where absolutely everything relevant can be conveyed in a sentence.

Twelve year old bank letter spoof celebrates its anniversary by fooling a new generation on Twitter

Twelve years ago to the day, on 7th January 1999, a spoof letter, allegedly sent by a customer to their bank, appeared on page 11 of the Queensland Courier Mail. The letter purported to be a sarcastic response to the increasing automation of the bank's customer services, demanded that the bank henceforth contact them via the customer's own automated telephone system using a PIN, and the story that accompanied it claimed that the manager of the bank liked the letter so much he had forwarded it to the paper. 

The story is not, of course, true. The letter is a spoof, and Snopes.com debunked it at some length back in 2003 when it resurfaced as an Internet meme and floated around on email for a few days. It has since been attributed to the Guardian and a variety of other newspapers, but the most recent manifestation of the letter doing the rounds today on Twitter claims it was written by a 98-year-old woman and published in the New York Times. Apart from updating the imaginary customer's age from 96 to 98 (a strange way of reflecting the passage of some eight years) the letter has barely changed in more than a decade, but it's nice to see Twitter giving it a chance to celebrate its birthday.

(Photo from Ardfern on Wikimedia Commons)