Published on: 2012-02-09 20:34:31

Need a shot of the milk of human kindness? Spend a little time on a social network and your faith in humanity will be renewed. So sayeth the majority of the 2,260 adults who responded to the latest Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project study. “ The tone of life on social networking sites ” takes a look at people’s perceptions about their interactions on sites such as Facebook and Twitter. 85% of adults said that their experiences were mostly kind. 68% went so far as to say that they had an experience that made them feel good and 61% felt closer to another person thanks to social media. And how about this? 39% said they frequently saw acts of generosity by others. Frequently! By comparison, only 13% of adults said someone was mean to them. The same number reported ending a friendship thanks to a social media faux pas and 11% ended up with family problems. The worst of the bunch, a mere 3%, said they got into a physical fight due to an experience on social media. Incredibly, 3% was also the percentage of people who got in trouble at work due to a posting. Teens had higher instances of negativity with 25% saying social media led to a face-to-face argument and 22% saw the end of a friendship. Marketing Pilgrim’s Social Channel is proudly sponsored by Full Sail University, where you can earn your Masters of Science Degree in Internet Marketing in less than 2 years. Visit FullSail.edu for more information. Watch Your Language To go along with their more negative bent, teens also reported higher instances of foul language and offensive images. 34% of Millennials used the word “frequently” while only 17% of GenXers noted offensive content. Logic would say that older people find more things offensive, thus would have the higher reported percentage, but the opposite is true. That tells me that the Millennials are simply hanging around with more people who present this type of content. What’s interesting is that the survey shows teens are more likely to get involved when things turn ugly. 61% of teens said they would defend a person who was being attacked and / or tell the offender to stop. 45% of adults said they’d ignore the behavior. Teens also took the higher number when it came to thinking twice about posting. 55% said they decided not to post something that might have made them look bad. Only 45% of adults made the same decision. This could mean that teens are more concerned about how they appear to others. Or it could mean that Millennials are simply smarter about social media usage having grown up with Facebook as a part of their life.

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Majority of Users Say Social Networkers Are Kind and Caring

Published on: 2012-02-09 20:04:31

I thought you would like this post I found for this blog. Read it here – Music Labels’ Joint Venture, VEVO, Shows Pirated NFL Game At Sundance

Over the last decade the major music labels — and their trade organization, the Recording Industry Association of America — have established a repeated pattern of attacking consumers in the name of squelching illegal file-sharing. Piracy, they claim, has been the industry’s undoing, accounting for an over 50% drop in sales since 1999 (the industry likes to discount the impact of legal per-song music downloads via services like iTunes, and the myriad other changes facilitated by the rise of high-speed Internet connections). Their efforts to combat piracy are often draconian: threatening tens of thousands of people with lawsuits claiming obscenely high damages; attempting to coordinate their threats with consumers’ ISPs; and, most recently, supporting legislation like SOPA and PIPA that would undermine the fabric of the Internet. Hell, Universal once pulled down a 30 second YouTube video of a dancing baby because the baby had the audacity to dance to a Prince song. Which is why my jaw dropped when I saw that VEVO, a property jointly owned by some of the biggest record labels in the world, was showing a pirated stream of an ESPN football game at its Sundance PowerStation venue last month — on no fewer than two televisions, and a pair of laptops. First, some background. VEVO is a sort of ‘Hulu for music videos’ that’s owned by Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and the Abu Dhabi Media Group. EMI (which Universal and Sony are in the process of acquiring chunks of) has licensed its content to the site. Together, these labels comprise three of America’s ‘Big Four’ music labels — Warner Music being the lone holdout. And these Big Four make up the vast majority of the RIAA. So when you hear about the record labels suing people, or trying to get ISPs to clamp down on users, or trying to pass legislation that could destroy the web as we know it — a lot of these people are behind it. Back to the story. The scene at the VEVO PowerStation was fairly typical for a Sundance event. VEVO and a pair of other companies had taken over a local venue, emblazoning their logos on the wall in bright red and replacing the normal drink menu with an array of cleverly-named concoctions designed to help you forget you were sipping liquor at three in the afternoon. Celebrities strolled through at regular intervals, making rounds through the bar before they headed over to a room set aside to pick out their gift of furry Sorel boots. The event’s redeeming factors, at least as far as this reporter was concerned, were the tasty hamburger sliders and the Patriots v. Ravens playoff game on ESPN that was playing throughout the venue. That is, until the game was rudely interrupted — not by a commercial break, but by a bizarre buffering warning. In hindsight, I should have noticed it immediately. The shoddy video quality and jitters clearly didn’t belong to an HD feed, despite the ESPN America HD logo in the lower right hand corner. And then there’s the fact that ESPN America isn’t even available in US markets (it’s a UK-based station). But between the blaring music and having James Marsden ( Cyclops !) standing three feet in front of me, it wasn’t until the pirate flags were fully unfurled that I finally noticed them. First the buffering message appeared, then a mouse cursor — controlled by forces unseen — flew onto the TV to exit out of full-screen mode and refresh the page. I think it may have also closed a few popover ads. At this point I tried to figure out the origins of the feed. As far as I could tell, the stream itself was coming from a Spanish-language live-streaming site called TuTele.tv. But that feed had apparently been accessed via a site called Frontrow.tv, which is itself an aggregator of live sports streams. At first glance, neither site looked particularly trustworthy. But copyright on the web is a notoriously complex issue, so I went to the source to verify my suspicions: ESPN. Which confirmed that neither site has the rights to stream its content. In other words, yes — that game was indeed being pirated. In fact, Frontrow.tv has since apparently gone dark, likely as a result of a recent crackdown by federal authorities on sports sites with pirated content. Given that the venue probably had access to a cable subscription (or perhaps an antenna, given that this was broadcast over the air), I’m not sure why it would decide to go the piracy route. But I do have a strong suspicion that it was done primarily as a matter of convenience. The next day, when I made a return visit to the VEVO PowerStation, the football game obviously wasn’t on. This time the TV screens were playing VEVO music videos, which were being coordinated to match whatever celebrity was currently in the room — Tommy Lee walked in, and his music video serendipitously started playing, then the same thing happened when Deadmau5 made an appearance. My hunch is that the team hooked up a computer to the TVs throughout the venue so that they could accomplish this synchronized star-caressing — then, rather than rework their entire setup just to play the football game for a few hours, they opted for the easier route and looked for a stream on the web. Which perfectly underscores everything wrong with the media industry’s approach to piracy. They’ve long made out pirates to be lawless thieves who think they’re entitled to receive everything for free. But the reality is far less black-and-white. Sure, there are some people who will duck the bill when they can — but many of them were never going to buy the content they downloaded in the first place. And a huge swath of ‘pirates’ are driven to their ways because it’s easier to stream or download something via an illegal site, not because they’re averse to paying for content. Stick a bunch of DRM and ads in front of the media they’ve already paid for, and they may opt to go with the path of least resistance next time. Oh, and if the venue  had wanted to stream that football game online legally, they would have had a tough time doing it: the only NFL licensee that offers streaming games is DirectTV, which requires you to purchase an entire season of ‘NFL Sunday Ticket’ in order to stream a game from the web. For a mere $350. Reached for comment, VEVO unsurprisingly tried to shift any blame: it says that the event was produced by a creative agency called Continuum Entertainment, and that there were several other companies involved. However, the venue was broken into different sections, and the televisions in question were clearly those belonging to VEVO’s PowerStation — and VEVO confirms that the televisions were supposed to be used to showcase VEVO videos and “original content”. VEVO also claims it wasn’t aware the game was being streamed and that it turned it off once it realized that it was (though it was on the entire time I was there, a period of at least thirty minutes). As for who actually decided to play the stream, or why, VEVO says the public had access to the computer being used so they can’t say for sure who exactly was responsible. Which is dubious (and almost certainly spin) — there was clearly someone actively controlling the computer, because they refreshed it when the connection stalled, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a random attendee hoarding over the laptop. Must have been one of those nasty pirates. In any case, were it the music industry that was on the other side of this, you can be sure they’d dismiss all of the aforementioned explanations without a second thought. And then they’d probably assess damages in the realm of $20,000 per down. We’ve reached out to ESPN to ask if it will be pursuing legal action against VEVO, Continuum, or any of the other companies involved with the event.

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Music Labels’ Joint Venture, VEVO, Shows Pirated NFL Game At Sundance

Check out this informative post written by TechCrunch. It provides interesting digital marketing information. To see all new blog posts featuring great marketing info, click here

Published on: 2012-02-09 19:47:59

As part of its 2012 US Digital Future in Focus whitepaper , comScore looked at the online ad landscape and found a mix of old and new names. The report includes a list of the top 10 display advertisers in the United States (all of this data is US-only), as measured by impressions. AT&T topped the list, as it has in previous years, but there’s a newcomer — Google, which delivered 40.4 billion ads for products like Chrome, Google Offers, and Google+. Large brand advertising on the Internet is growing in general, comScore says. To quantify that, it measured the number of advertisers delivering at least 1 billion impressions per quarter. There were 145 advertisers in that league during the final quarter of 2011, up 38 percent from the same period in 2010. As for where these ads are actually running, Facebook remains the leader in display advertising, with 1.3 trillion impressions adding up to 27.9 percent market share. Following Facebook, in descending order, were Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google. (Remember that display advertising is a relatively new area for Google, which has traditionally focused on search ads.) The report also includes the results of a December study looking at ad measurement. comScore calls the results “eye-opening”, arguing that visibility, geographic validation, brand safety, and audience targeting are all going to be big issues in 2012. For example, comScore found that 31 percent of ads in the study were delivered but never seen by consumers, presumably because people scrolled past before the ad loaded, or because they never scrolled down to see the at in the first place. comScore also found that 72 percent of campaigns ran at least some ads next to content that the advertisers said was not “brand safe”. Advertising is just one area covered in the new whitepaper. We’ve also covered the findings related to online video .

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Continued here: AT&T, Google Among The Biggest Online Advertisers — comScore

This is a good article called Avast, Me Hearties: How The Pirate Bay Changed The Way We Steal:

Published on: 2012-02-09 17:41:27

The Pirate Bay, in many ways, is disappearing. It is one of the most popular torrent sites on the web and its database of millions of torrent files – essentially pointers to pieces of files hosted elsewhere – has long been the go-to spot for budding pirates around the world. While it still exists in spirit, the admins are now moving all of the torrent files off the site and are instead offering magnet links. This is an important distinction that will move the locus of general piracy from a single site to any number of sites, reducing the Pirate Bays importance as a source. First, let’s talk a bit about torrenting in general. A torrent file is a document containing a number of pieces of information about a file including the names of its various component parts as well as pertinent identifying information. Torrent files do not point to specific files on specific servers but instead point to codes that identify chunks of a file. These files are actually quite large – a few kilobytes to a few hundred – and most BitTorrent feeds have used them exclusively for the past few years – The Pirate Bay included. There’s a problem with torrent files, however, that has to do more with perception than reality. To the average politico – and to the average media lobbyist – Torrent files are “files” that point to pirated content. It doesn’t matter that there are legitimate uses for Torrents and that torrent suppliers don’t actually know what those files contain. The idea is offensive to many, and so lots of legal muscle has been flexed to attack targets that pirates have already abandoned. The pirates snicker while authorities torch ghost ships in the night. Before going further, understand that I find the process of making money on piracy abhorrent while I consider the act of piracy to be a what amounts to a perfectly lubricated market. For example, a newsman in 1990 or so would consider what you are doing right now – reading a bit of news and opinion that you didn’t pay for – piracy. Granted that simplifies the matter considerably (you do pay for it indirectly through your attention and advertisers capitalize on that attention) but I doubt TechCrunch in its earliest form would have been very popular if it was a paid newsletter sent to Mike’s parents and close friends. That said, as a content producer, I find general “free” piracy to be a valuable tool, even an asset, in getting the word out. There is no clear reason why I should, for example, make an out-of-date book available to folks who may want to read it. I consider this a free form of advertising and the more people who like or dislike my work, the better. What the Pirate Bay did (and still does, just using a different record locator format) is offer links to files that may or may not be pirated content. Devin wrote a great piece on this concept last night. What the Pirate Bay also did was popularize torrents in the same way Napster popularized peer-to-peer sharing and the same way MegaUpload popularized massive file storage and the performance upsell. But what the Pirate Bay really did was put a snarky face on the pirate, moving the average pirate out of the realm of Neo or the evil, evil kids in this video: In general, we hear little about piracy but the tales of happy-go-lucky antics of the Pirate Bay and the associated groups, including the politicized Pirate Party. The MPAA and RIAA would love to associate piracy with terrorism, massive theft, and the decay of Western Civilization and, in a way, that’s their right. Their goal is to sell as many widgets as possible. A pirate’s goal is to see content that is otherwise unavailable to him or her. Not to get all Cory Doctorow here, but the Pirate Bay made pirating silly and the attacks by outside authorities made it look even more enticing. The site, with its jolly roger and swift ship tilting into the waves, makes it a Magic 8 Ball of piracy. You type something in, find it, wait, and if the stars are aligned you can grab the file you wanted. More often, however, you grab nothing because the swarm has moved on. As I said during the SOPA hubbub, there is no way for anyone to enforce anything. There are ways to make things uncomfortable for content sharers and there are ways to arrest people for soliciting pirated content, but in the vast panoply of the Internet there’s very little chance any dedicated enforcement agency can perform its duties with any effectiveness, China’s easily-avoidable Great Firewall being one example. The Pirate Bay changed piracy by becoming the Google of content. As of this writing it is no longer hosting torrent files and in fact you can download the entire contents of the site in a few minutes, proving that the Pirate Bay is essentially a guide and not a repository. The attacks against the Pirate Bay have given it far more popularity than it really deserves and through a combination of excellent branding and nearly non-stop coverage, everyone with an Internet connection knows of that Jolly Roger waving endlessly in the digital winds while the real business of piracy – counterfeiting, fake DVD sales, and fraud – are going on in the shadows. Whichever side you’re on, you have to admit the Pirate Bay asks for nothing and expects nothing in return. We feed the beast that is the pirate underground and, no matter how hard we try or how many times we seize a bunch of Swedish servers, we will never tame it.

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Original post: Avast, Me Hearties: How The Pirate Bay Changed The Way We Steal

Published on: 2012-02-09 15:24:40

According to a new report from Nielsen, the number of U.S. homes that have broadband Internet, but only free, broadcast TV, is on the rise. Although representing less than 5% of TV households, the number has grown 22.8% over the past year. In addition, the behaviors within these homes are unique. These broadband/broadcast-only households stream video twice as much as the general population, says Nielsen, and they watch half as much TV. Nielsen hesitates to dump all these households in the “cord cutters” bucket, though, saying that while perhaps some are cord cutters (the term that refers to those who gave up cable TV for streaming TV/streaming video), other homes may be former broadcast-only homes that now have upgraded Internet service. Even though the exact percentages are unknown, combined, this two groups are making up the small, but growing demographic of Internet TV watching homes without paid TV. Roughly the same percentage of consumers in this new and growing group of U.S. TV households watch traditional TV, stream or use the Internet as in all the cross-platform homes, but the difference is the time spent on these activities. The broadcast-only homes spent 122.6 minutes per day watching TV compared with cross-platform homes’ 265.5 minutes. Not surprisingly, they stream more video, at 11.2 minutes per day vs. 5 minutes for the traditional households. Those streaming numbers are interesting, however. Neither household (traditional or broadcast-only) is streaming the equivalent of even a sitcom’s worth of television. In other words, the Internet may not be just a new medium for TV to travel over, it’s an alternative to TV watching entirely. Specifically, younger Americans are growing up involved in different activities beyond staring vacantly at the TV screen, it seems. Those aged 12 to 34 are spending less time in front of the TV (120.56 monthly minutes), but those older than 35 are spending more. And those over 55 watch the most (195.10 minutes per month). Overall, few TV households are willing to give up the luxury of either TV or the Internet, regardless of how they choose to view either medium. The vast majority of TV households (90.4%) still pay for a TV subscription, and roughly tw0-thirds (75.3%) pay for broadband. The percentages of both have remained stable, despite the down economy. In fact, the number of homes paying for both a subscription and broadband has even increased by 5.5% over the past year. TV viewing isn’t just being impacted by the Internet, Nielsen found. From Q3 2008 to Q3 2011, the number of those watching time-shifted TV has increased by 65.9%, and mobile video viewing has seen a 205.7% increase in users. Meanwhile, watching TV on the Internet has increased by just 21.7% during the same time. What these numbers show is that the issue isn’t as simple as switching from one medium to another (traditional TV to video on the laptop, e.g.), but that there are today a plethora of new TV consumption choices. Americans are experimenting with finding the mix that’s right for them. And that mix may not even be consistently applied by every member under the same roof.

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Nielsen: Cord Cutting And Internet TV Viewing On The Rise

Check out this informative article written by DMConfidential – Internet Marketing Newsletter. It provides good digital marketing information. To see all new blog posts featuring great marketing info, click here

Published on: 2012-02-09 05:00:00

While it might seem anachronistic to spend millions of dollars on 30 seconds of air time, and while it might seem completely illogical to do so in this internet era, the big investments and big bucks continue. We’re talking about the Super Bowl of course, and whether illogical or…

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See more here: What Game? The Ads Were Good though.

Published on: 2012-02-08 23:54:42

I thought you would like this article I found for this blog. Read it here – What Does a ‘Like’ Get You These Days?

We often talk about how much a “like” is worth in terms of marketing. But what is a “like” worth to the consumer? Take a look at this chart from eMarketer. The results clearly show that consumers expect to get something in return for their click. But when the CMO Council asked marketers what they thought, they said that consumers clicked out of loyalty or love for their product. It is true that clicking the like button does imply a certain fondness for a brand, but love will only get you so far. Once the bloom is off the rose, consumers want to be rewarded for their loyalty. You could go to Jared, or you could offer coupons, discounts, and freebies, They’re the best way to get me to like your Facebook page. The second most popular choice is an interesting one. At first, I was surprised that 60% of people wanted to interact with others. That’s because my initial concept of a branded Facebook page is one devoted to a product, restaurant or store. Then I thought of the official pages for TV shows, movies, bands, charity organizations, sports teams. . . all of these are the perfects places for sharing thoughts, photos and links. Marketing Pilgrim’s Social Channel is proudly sponsored by Full Sail University, where you can earn your Masters of Science Degree in Internet Marketing in less than 2 years. Visit FullSail.edu for more information. Now drop down four spaces to “Find service and support.” Half of the respondents chose this answer and it’s a big one. More and more, I see consumers using Facebook pages to register a complaint. I did it myself, a couple of days ago. And you know what? The company didn’t reply. Even after I left a follow up comment and three other people left complaints, the company still hasn’t replied. That’s a company that won’t be getting anymore of my money and all they had to do to keep me was answer. Facebook pages are an excellent way of encouraging commerce with coupons, perks and games. But you have to monitor your pages. You have to respond to the comments, good and bad (especially the bad) and you have to keep the conversation going. If you plan to build a page and forget it, then don’t build it in the first place. What’s happening when you’re not there could do you more harm than good.

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What Does a ‘Like’ Get You These Days?

Published on: 2012-02-08 21:31:12

Today, the fledgling social network Path was forced to issue an apology based on how it used contact data from its users. That’s an oversimplification of course but you can find plenty of places where the incidentals have been explained. Even Path investors like Michael Arrington’s CrunchFund had to call out the company. The story of the day is definitely about Path (a CrunchFund portfolio company). The company has been copying address book information to their servers without user knowledge. The company was apparently already aware of the issue and was taking steps to address it prior to this post coming out. The Android app has an opt-in, and a version of the app with an opt-in is awaiting approval at Apple, says CEO Dave Morin in the comments to the original post. Morin has also flat out apologized. What is most interesting though is that the CEO of Path, Dave Morin, issued his apology via the Path blog. The title is “ We are sorry .” and it goes something like this We made a mistake. Over the last couple of days users brought to light an issue concerning how we handle your personal information on Path, specifically the transmission and storage of your phone contacts. As our mission is to build the world’s first personal network, a trusted place for you to journal and share life with close friends and family, we take the storage and transmission of your personal information very, very seriously. Where else have we seen a young social network play fast and loose with the data that is their users then turn around and have to apologize? Hmmmmmmm, let me see. Wait, isn’t their one CEO that has said he is sorry so many times that anyone who is a thinking human being doesn’t believe him anymore? Oh yeah, that’s right! Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. He’s practicaly turned apologizing to his users into a cottage industry. Back in November of 2011 as Zuckerberg took to the Interwebz to discuss the smackdown that Facebook received from the feds about their privacy faux pas. Liz Gannes of All Things Digital did what was in essence a “Zuckerberg’s Greatest Apologies” retrospective in a post in which she led with At this point, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s pattern on privacy is clear. Launch new stuff that pushes the boundaries of what people consider comfortable. Apologize and assure users that they control their information, but rarely pull back entirely, and usually reintroduce similar features at a later date when people seem more ready for it. And followed up with Most of all, Zuckerberg seems to take pride in offering an explicit, earnest apology, but doesn’t actually admit he was wrong, just that he’s sorry for how things were rolled out or perceived. What followed was the determination that of the 25 posts that Zuckerberg made on the Facebook blog to that point, 10 were apologies. It’s pretty comical quite honestly. Now we have Path’s CEO Morin. Our hope is that this is not the first of many public mea culpas that serve to soothe the nerves of those who, for the time being, are focusing on Path’s mistake. One would like to think that Path will now walk down the straight and narrow path itself with regard to how it treats its users. All things considered though, Zuckerberg has already shown the way in that you can screw up numerous times and get away with a lot of shenanigans if you just play nice and apologize in an “aw, shucks” kind of way. Considering this established pattern and the likes of Arrington pushing some buttons at Path I bet this won’t be the last time they push the boundaries of Internet courtesy and good taste. At least it appears that Morin is willing to up the ante regarding how to apologize. He actually says that Path was wrong. Through the feedback we’ve received from all of you, we now understand that the way we had designed our ‘Add Friends’ feature was wrong. We are deeply sorry if you were uncomfortable with how our application used your phone contacts. Nice job, Dave but there is a problem. Now that you have established that your company is willing to walk in the footsteps of Facebook you have given all of us every reason to be suspicious of how you move forward with Path’s development as it relates to privacy and data protection. We have been burned enough by Zuck and Co. that the “Get Out of Privacy Screw-up Jail Free” cards are all used up. You are now on the clock and everyone is watching what will happen in the future. Just be aware that if you try to test these waters again your hopes of becoming something that might challenge Facebook or at least take some of its share could be dashed to bits on the rocky waters of Internet privacy. Was that over the top? I’m sorry.

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Is Path CEO a Zuckerberg Disciple?

Published on: 2012-02-08 19:08:34

While the Internet cynics are looking at the Google Screenwise project as something curious in light of recent Google moves, I find the general idea a bit refreshing and something that has been sorely missing from the equation for a very long time. The page at Google which describes this service offering says the following Google is building a new panel to learn more about how everyday people use the Internet. The new project is called Screenwise. As a panelist, you’ll add a browser extension that will share with Google the sites you visit and how you use them. What we learn from you, and others like you, will help us improve Google products and services and make a better online experience for everyone. Wait, did I read that correctly? Google wants to learn more about how everyday people use the Internet? Wait, you mean Google is not interested in the prevailing wisdom that everyone is some Internet power user and sits around all day long wondering what kind of sinister change Google will next thrust upon the poor self-important Silicon Valley hipster “regular” Internet user? It’s about time Google acts like it is interested in the vast majority of those who use the Internet. We are constantly focusing on the uber-user of search engines and the Internet in general and, let’s face it, that’s not how most people use the search engine or the Internet in general at all. Heck, if everyone was a Scoble or (insert Internet pseudo celebrity name here) then all of these cries of “Foul!” around Google would actually make sense in the big picture. The truth is that most people are not super users. They do not know the ins and outs of search. They are not thinking about privacy. They are simply interested in getting answers to questions. They don’t freak out every time Google makes a change. In fact, they are oblivious to the business of Google and quite happy to stay that way. It’s about time Google offers an olive branch (although it feels the need to use Amazon gift cards as bait, which is just silly) to the Internet commoner. The online world has a concentration of power users that has unfair influence and sway in saying how it should all work. Google should be studying the regular Joe’s of the Internet so they can be better served in their mere mortal user of the Internet. Why? Because that’s a big number of people! I know I am laying it on thick here but the Internet industry should do everyone a service and get over itself. There are many more people out there who are getting great benefit from the Internet as a whole without having a kitten every time Google, or any other company for that matter, does something that could further their business or, better yet, the experience of users. In the end, marketers are trying to reach those who might end up buying their stuff as a result of their online interactions. That includes large numbers of “everyday” people. In a way, just the fact that Google uses that terminology shows just how disconnected the whole Internet business is from reality. I hope this chasm closes sooner than later. Your take?

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Google Screenwise: Google Looks To Learn How Everyday People Use the Internet

Published on: 2012-02-08 17:00:37

I thought you would like this article I found for this blog. Read it here – Pivot Smart: Social News Network XYDO Goes Pure B2B With New Content Marketing Platform

In case you haven’t noticed, the Internet has become a content fire hose. There’s a lot of junk floating around out there (my posts not included, of course), and, as a result, a spate of digital readers and aggregators have popped up to offer our blood-shot eyes improved filtering mechanisms that channel the noise into signal. Some of them even get snatched up by Twitter, a la Summify . One of these startups, the Summify competitor and Utah-based XYDO , launched in May of last year, followed shortly thereafter by closing a $1.25 million round of series A financing from EPIC Ventures and a host of angels. But, in case you’re unfamiliar, XYDO’s value proposition has essentially been that it creates a social news platform that combines the best parts of Digg and, say, Hacker News, on the back of technology that combs a swath of content to serve you with relevant, curated news from trustworthy sources. Initially, XYDO (pronounced “zy-doo”) focused on offering its socially curated, personalized news streams through a consumer-facing web platform. It quickly followed that up with XYDO Brief , which capitalized on this renaissance of email newsletters by delivering the same news it curated based on users’ social interactions, networks, and foot prints on its web platform — via your inbox. XYDO co-founder Cameron Brain, who, besides having a great last name and holding three patents for his innovations in the delivery and display of video on mobile devices, told us that XYDO Brief was launched as a kind of side project — after all, curated email newsletters were nothing new. But, to the team’s surprise, XYDO Brief quickly became the most popular aspect of the service, with a bunch of tech industry honchos signing on. (TC’s Erick Schonfeld is a subscriber.) In addition, XYDO’s curated content sources found a foothold among businesses looking to offer relevant, popular content to supplement their existing marketing services. As has always been true, content is king, but many businesses, blogs — really any service with a web presence — struggle to create engaging content, generate and convert leads, and establish themselves as viable (or at least interesting) content producers. Due to flagging interest in its web platform, XYDO is officially announcing today that it’s pivoting to a business-to-business (B2B) approach. For those familiar, you may have noticed that the startup’s homepage looks a bit different today. That’s because the team is doing away with its existing social news platform (though it will continue to offer XYDO Brief to the public), and is instead taking a semi-PaaS approach, launching an email marketing solution for businesses. The company has already signed on a roster of companies, including the Utah Jazz, Lendio.com, Interbank, and BYU Athletics — to name a few. Most of them are Utah-based, as the co-founders are of the mindset that, if you can’t get adoption in your own backyard, then you might as well call it quits. To that end, XYDO sent over 12 million of its curated emails on behalf of its customers. Again, most businesses have a story to tell, and a brand to hawk along with that story, but many find more than a little difficulty in sharing that message in a way that is authentic, relevant, and drives engagement. Typically, when businesses look to bolster their content production, they employ bloggers, try their hand at blogging themselves, or hire a team of awkward interns to produce that content. Businesses have also been saturated with the “you have to get social, or perish” message, and try to create content for social networks to boot, but that usually just means they manually copy-and-paste their stories into social feeds. Some even outsource content production to foreign lands, paying a sweat shop of quasi-bloggers $10K a pop to create content for their Facebook brand pages. All in all, it’s an expensive, time-consuming, and messy process. Thus, XYDO has developed a white-label email solution that goes out to sources like Reddit or Drudge Report, finds the hottest, freshest content (piping hot), and includes it businesses’ Twitter streams, on their sites, etc. That’s really XYDO’s secret sauce: It’s not just about finding content that’s relevant to the business and their audience, but within those topics, locating a small subset of content that’s accelerating on the Web — just starting to become popular. Using the same tech behind XYDO Brief, which analyzes up to 300K articles per day, and then matches it against some three million influential, social media taste-makers, keeping score of what’s being shared, accelerating the velocity metric associated with that content. You want 10 articles on startups or banks and loans? XYDO wants to give you stories on those topics that are just starting to take off, in near-realtime. Not unlike a Hootsuite for email, XYDO’s platform offers the ability to produce these weekly curated content reports, personalizing content feeds by category, schedule email newsletters, and so on. The new XYDO will do all the curation for businesses, and let them control it from a single dashboard. The startup is also offering re-targeting services via Google in addition to their own analytics, which analyze and present data (on a per subscriber basis), like what links subscribers are clicking, how they’re sharing and interacting with the content, etc. The goal is, simply put, to try and limit the amount of spam businesses send to their customers, while giving them share-able content and the tools to measure its share-ability. Another result of the startup’s pivot? It’s becoming a paid service, with pricing being dependent on the size of a company’s subscriber list. On the bottom end, the co-founder says, businesses would pay about $250 a month, while larger list customers can pay up to $1K. ( More on pricing here .) While some XYDO fans won’t be thrilled with losing its consumer-facing social news platform, the truth is, many entrepreneurs and startups are catching on to the value of creating B2B services. It’s difficult to resist the urge to build for the consumer web, what with the funding available, and the hopes of millions of users, but the B2B and B2B2C spaces, generally have lower barriers for entry, and business models are more defined. As I wrote here , there are lots of B2B companies out there that don’t have millions of users and may not be sexy at first glance, but they have solid, sustainable customer bases, and enough revenue to continue building. XYDO is hoping that by taking a B2B approach, it can ride the growing wave of content marketing and businesses demand for smart solutions to the marketing and content engagement issues — to glory. The XYDO co-founder said that email is just the beginning, next they’ll look to implement additional publishing tools, further extend functionality in social media, likely in the form of designing tools to help businesses automate content publishing in their Facebook feeds, etc. I think it’s a smart move. XYDO wasn’t seeing the kind of user adoption they wanted from their web platform, so they’ve pivoted to focus on bringing their email service to businesses. They’re currently in the process of inking deals with companies that have 3 million+ sized subscriber lists, and with that, they are able to gain a ready-made audience. No more having to fight tooth and nail for one subscriber. For more, check out the startup at home here . What do you think, readers? A smart pivot?

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Pivot Smart: Social News Network XYDO Goes Pure B2B With New Content Marketing Platform