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Posted by Svetlana Gladkova on July 22nd, 2008
It is rather disturbing to see everything free online and users revolting even because of web services making them watch some ads to earn at least something to sustain their businesses. Today we are going to see another example of a product switched to a free model - this time by Vancouver-based Calgoo Software.
Basically, Calgoo is a suite of calendar tools that allows you to have a single desktop calendar solution that synchronizes all your calendars across different platforms, including Google Calendar, Microsoft Outlook, Apple iCal, 30 boxes, Plaxo. Moreover, it not only allows you to create an sync various calendars of your own using the tools of your choice - it also allows you to share calendars with your family and colleagues and collaborate on them, without making anyone switch to the calendar solution of your choice.
The tools included in the calendar suite by Calgoo are:
The pricing structure until today was pretty usual - there were limited free versions that were accompanied by pro versions available at a price of $30 a year for Calendar and the same $30 for Connect (Calgoo Hub, the web solution, was free anyway). But it looks like the sales have not been such a success (I can't see any other reason for a company with good sales volume to move to the feasible ad-supported model) so instead of charging their users for a better feature set they've decided to offer everything for free and make the users watch some ads while using their calendars. So at noon today (PST) all the solutions will become free and the Calgoo store will not sell any more licenses.
Now that the products are free for all to use, the company says to be working on a new in-calendar advertising model - it is obvious, everything that is free seems to be ad-supported these days. But initially the services will be simply free since the ad serving to calendar users is simply not ready yet. Obviously, there is a tricky issue of existing paying customers since it is not clear what exactly they are supposed to do with the purchased subscriptions and it looks like the only advantage they will continue to have is full email support through the date of license termination - while other users will have to stick to the support via company's support forums.
But to me the important issue is not that of any software manufacturer adopting ad-supported model for its products - it's the question of switching to this model after actually charging users for premium features for some time. It looks like internet users have grown too accustomed to having everything ready and for free that they don't even bother to contemplate the idea of paying for something, even if it is a service they rely on for this or that task. And this is a disturbing trend - watching companies fail on the sales road and resort to advertising is painful and it shows that the market where no one is really willing to buy anything and sellers are forced to provide everything for free can hardly be referred to as a healthy one.
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Posted by Leslie Poston on July 22nd, 2008
There was one thing that surprised me at PodCamp3 Boston, and that was how overwhelmed by choices even the best and brightest in the new media, old media and social fields are right now. With a new social media platform, application or site popping up near daily, the constant question was how to choose what to use.
The answer is to use what works for you, and nothing more. Unless you are someone like myself, whose bread and butter depends on having a presence on nearly every social media possibility, reduce your own noise level by making choices.
The option for social media are extensive, and the early adopter crowd is often loud. Just because so-called "A-Listers" like Robert Scoble or social media junkies mavens like myself love something like Twitter or FriendFeed doesn't mean you have to. Apply PodCamp's Law of Two Feet to your social media use and leave what isn't working for you to find something that does.
How do you find out what might work for you? The short answer is to try out many things and narrow it down to a few by trial and error. The other side of that is not to let anyone else dictate what you should be using. Just because I despise Plurk and think it is the "ugly MySpace page" of the microblogging universe doesn't mean that you will - you may love it. If you don't try it, you'll never know.
Maybe your temperament is more businesslike, and you find the whole idea of social media a waste of time. You may be better suited to dip your toes into LinkedIn as your first social media site. It is a very businesslike social business networking site with a very corporate look and feel that appeals to many.
Maybe you are someone who values a universal conversation and a fast way to connect with many new friends. Twitter might be for you. If you can manage the noise of having "all @s" turned on it will be even more productive for you. You may find one of the many desktop and mobile clients for it helpful in managing the stream of constant information.
If you are an artist there are sites like Flickr for you. A musician or band? Try Trig. A reader? GoodReads is full of book worms just like you. The fact is that there is a social media solution for any possible interest, type of person or type of business out there. if you can't find it, you can make it using a social community creation tool like Ning.
Maybe you are like me and need to use them all for whatever reason. Then you will need the tools to make them more efficient. Never fear, there are plenty of applications springing up to handle that as well, like Ping.fm, the new FaceBook interface and FriendFeed. I use Ping to send a message out to all of the services I use the least often, like Pownce or Plurk, reserving my more individual interaction for the services I use the most, like Twitter.
Social media types love to lament the "firehose" and talk about how "noisy" social media is, but I think some of that is ego-feeding. Social media is only as noisy as you make it. For me, it is quite noisy - it's my job. I love the noise. If you need a quieter way to connect, you can use fewer services or an aggregator like FriendFeed or FaceBook and control how much information you get bombarded with. It really is just as simple as being selective, not following the early adopters to every new and shiny object, and only using what works for you.
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Posted by Leslie Poston on July 21st, 2008
Throughout my weekend at PodCamp3 Boston, woven in amongst the learning, the collaboration and the intensely communal environment, were the marketers and monetizers. I have nothing against marketers, public relations people, and people who are all about making money by monetizing the social media arena, but in the context of the weekend, I watched the focus on ads eventually hamper every discussion.
Whether it was an impromptu, informal cafeteria session with Chris Brogan, myself, Paul Gillin, John Herman, John Coyne and 40 other people who wanted to talk about old media versus new media or my session on Busting the Clique of Social Media, at least one person asked about ads or mentioned ads as a revenue stream in some way. In my session we were able to steer the talk back on point but in many cases that question derailed many a session from useful to yawner.
Don't get me wrong, I realize that social media desperately needs a revenue source, an overall business plan. I just don't think that ads are the holy grail of income any more. To continually focus on ads as the one, sole way to make money is to shoot yourself in the foot as a social media company or user and to devalue the conversation about new social media ideas. People flat out no longer look at ads.
How can I say that? Think about how you watch television to put it in perspective. If your house is anything like mine, the invention of the DVR and availability of television shows on sites like Hulu (or for the more stupid daring in these RIAA/MPAA policed times, BitTorrent sites) has allowed you to avoid having to watch commercials most of the time.
When you find yourself forced to watch regular programming in real time what do you do during commercials? If you are like my household, you get up and go do something else, complaining all the while about the fact that there is advertising interrupting your program. Newspapers and magazines are the same - all of those pricey ads that we collectively ignore.
The internet isn't any different. Google is noticing a drop in ad revenue as more and more people find ways to tune out even the least obtrusive AdSense text ads by running AdBlocker and similar browser plugins. I still recommend putting ads on your site to catch those few people who haven't caught on to the ad blocking movement yet, but in the long run you are better off to think outside the box as far as how you will monetize your social media application, site or other online venture.
How do you monetize something that is, for all intents and purposes, an intangible? How do you make money on the concept of being social? Than answer is that for every company it will be different. A company like Zappos that sells tangible goods using social media will have a far easier time that one like Twitter, who sells a service. That said, Twitter should be able to leverage its usefulness to companies like Zappos into value, whether it is by charging for SMS use over a certain level, or charging heavy users a nominal fee for the strain on the fail whale carrying birds servers.
Another hurdle to monetary success is attitude. We have bred an attitude that everything should be free, and we are paying the price for that. There is always a cost to someone, somewhere for any service. It may be behind the scenes in servers, bandwidth, SMS charges, staff to keep it running, etc but there is always money involved. Every social media business should begin its life with a business plan and more than one idea of how to make money.
Users will pay for a service they find valuable. Shoot, to use a silly example, I pay Pogo.com a miniscule $5.99 every month for a site membership on the off chance I want to play social card games or similar, all to keep my avatar and game history on their servers (I am phoenixxrisingg on Pogo, by the way, feel free to friend me up). I know that storing that information costs them money, as does running the service, so I'm happy to pay it. Also, they picked a price point that is small enough it doesn't feel painful to my wallet, something else that is key.
How do you think social media sites, platforms, clients and applications should monetize? What's your big idea for breaking the ad mold? You should have your plan in place, because the end of the ad era is coming, whether we like it or not. The world is moving to engagement marketing - how are you going to use that to pay the bills?
Image courtesy of ByrdBaggett
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Posted by Triston McIntyre on July 21st, 2008
Last week I attended the Twin Tech media event in Washington, D.C, and one topic that kept popping up in conversation was the issue of privacy in this relatively new world of mobile social networking. Mobile social platforms designed to keep track of users' locations are all the rage, just like VGA camera-phones were many, many moons ago.
Though we may not be at the point where everyone can be found at the touch of a mobile screen, that day is approaching rapidly. Not enough people have the smart phones or data plans necessary to properly execute global mobile social location. The social location platforms that are available make it clear as to how users can safely maintain privacy, which is a relief. Beyond that, the people using platforms like Loopt and Brightkite are those that normally ride the crest of the technology wave and are savvy about privacy concerns.
That group of people is most certainly not representative of the Facebook user community, sadly. If you could design a Pong-like game application for Facebook that bounced users' social security numbers instead of balls between the pads, Facebook users would not only play it, they would also recommend it daily to every single one of their friends. Facebook is in the position of being a perfect launching platform for technology like mobile social location, and has already made it known that it intends to do that very thing.
The reason we should be concerned about mobile social location is that Facebook is working on adding mobile social location to its mobile platform right now; couple Facebook mobile locating with a society that is quickly adopting smartphones and data packages, and you have millions of little homing beacons begging to be stalked.
I'm certainly not saying that everyone will misuse the technology, or that everyone will be as stupid as to use it without taking precautions to protect their privacy. But if one person with bad intent uses mobile social locating to harm someone without the wherewithal to protect his or her own privacy, the government and media groups will be all over the "danger" that is technological advancement. As we all know, what the government or media groups don't understand is a threat (or terrorism, as it is called today), and some Jack Thompson character will be shouting from a soapbox for laws that either ban mobile social networking or allow the government to monitor our social accounts.
Even with the best laid safeguards, Facebook could be just too big of a platform for mobile social locating to be executed in a safe manner. All we can do now is sit back and hope that by the time that the feature launch and the widespread adoption of next-gen mobile handsets meet, consumers have been made aware to the dangers of being too connected and available.
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Posted by Svetlana Gladkova on July 21st, 2008
This weekend I have been very much impressed by a simple fact: even behemoths like Facebook still find time to listen to their users. I really thought it was virtually impossible for a single user of such a huge social network to be heard at all but I've received a proof that it's really otherwise and they do care about what we think about their network, even if it takes them a few months. I am not sure how much they will listen to their users' feedback after the redesign is rolled out today - probably they won't be able to fulfill even half of the requirements, since they are all so different and some even controversial. But the point of this post is another story that has made me rethink the issue of user visibility.
Let me start with a little prehistory. Back on the 9th of May I noticed a pretty offensive Russian-language ad. I have not actually clicked through to see the advertised website and have some extra proof - instead I have chosen to make a screenshot of the page with the ad:
The text above the photo can be translated into English as a B-word that I don't think is appropriate on Profy while the text below the picture reads something that can be translated as "Videos and photos featuring minor Russian girls". It was actually not the first time that I saw this particular ad but at that point I think I reached some kind of saturation with looking at the rather offensive ad on Facebook constantly. So I've had the screenshot captured, uploaded it to my Flickr account and tweeted the link to my followers. Some people were very surprised it could be possible at all and commented on the photo page on Flickr. Others admitted that Facebook often does strange things with the ads served to international users.
The story did not seem to go anywhere from there, except that I continued to see this very ad for some time and then stopped (I thought the campaign limit was reached simply).
But Facebook still had some further surprises for me as a Russian user: they showed (and continue to show) ads for the largest Russian social network - Odnoklassniki.ru. The screenshot is below and I can't really figure out why the banner is in English (especially since Odnoklassniki.ru does not even have any English-language version for its users).
I personally think that serving an ad for its main competitor now that Facebook launched its own Russian version is not very reasonable but it looks like they don't think so. On Saturday I received a message in my inbox from Alex Moskalyuk, a Facebook ads engineer. The message read:
Hey, I noticed your comment regarding bad ads on Facebook targeted to you. Do you remember any wording or perhaps URLs of the offending ads?
Since not only I remembered the wording but had a screenshot on Flickr, I was more than happy to send the link to Alex - after all, when developers want the service I heavily use to improve, I am generally more than happy to help them. In the reply message I also pointed out that I continued to see the ads for Odnoklassniki.ru on Facebook and mentioned that I thought it was not particularly reasonable to sell ad space to a direct competitor.
To my surprise, Alex replied the very same day with an explanation that the offending ad I was so concerned about was disabled (yes, I've noticed). He also chose to clarify that advertising from their competitors was not against Facebook Advertising ToS since even on Google AdWords you can be advertised as "search engine". In my opinion this is another story because AdWords are displayed on a whole range of websites - but Google AdSense publishers have access to competitive ads filter to filter out the ads that are deemed inappropriate, including those by competitors.
I have pondered over the topic of Facebook advertising for a while now since I've already heard the voices concerned about inappropriate ads served to Facebook users. But this post is actually to share my appreciation of the fact that a behemoth like Facebook actually reacts to users' feedback - even when it is not submitted to them directly and simply tweeted instead. Even though the feedback took two month to reach them, it still matters a lot to me. We have already talked about the importance of listening to your users on social media and there's no doubt it is extremely important for startups only working on building brand awareness for their products. But when a network with millions and millions of international users chooses to listen to the users everywhere it can - and even reacts to their complaints, this is amazing and it really proves that every single voice online can be heard.
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