Zipfluence

The endless lists of likes

Summer 2011

The original ExCapite blog examined the challenges facing old media in a hyper connected world.

By early 2011 it had crept into the Top 1.5 Million Alexa Rankings.

Putting it in the rarefied company of the Top 0.5% of web sites on the web.

It started out as a Google experiment. Could you build an Brand in 90 days online?

It consisted of a 3 part strategy. Images, Frequency and Ignition.

Some old PowerPoint Telco strategy slides provided the images.

Over a 90 day period I posted 150 posts and the Google ignition strategy consisted of a global network of contacts Googling "Excapite" for 90 days to kick start the climb to the top.

The strategy proved remarkably successful and we achieved Top 10 listings on a raft of key topics. Including how to make money out of eBooks, iPhone Games and later iPad Apps. What was surprising was the lack of traffic the strategy generated. Whereby one was lead by the search guru's to expect the site to be over powered by seekers of knowledge what was left to count handfuls.

So that answer to the original question was no... You couldn’t build an brand in 90 days online.... But it lead me to explore in detail the deeper question... why not?

This diagram illustrates what I have discovered over those first 2 years of tracking search traffic behaviour vs. the typical user experience of reading a magazine or newspaper.

The key here is of course the bounce rate. Online content isn't sticky simply because the user prefers to bounce back to their endless lists of likes in preference to continuing their search by navigating the content on the site or the links to external content provided in the content.

Google has successfully pivoted the old media model and today (as Ged Carroll has so eloquently stated elsewhere) there are no target audiences just target moments.

Put simply they prefer the Google list experience to the content exploration and discovery experience.

In most cases if Google doesn't give them what they want they simply go back and try again.

This of course makes Google more of a knowledge casino than a knowledge discovery engine.

So where as the old media experience was linear and the ads were part of the flow of content. The reality is on the Google web the ads have to be part of the search experience

Simply because the vast bulk of the activity is focused around generating these endless lists of likes.

This of course suggests that the only way anyone is going to disrupt Google is by creating a better "endless lists of likes" engine. This of course is what makes Twitter interesting. It represents something of a paradigm shift in the lists of likes business.

It also represents the core of the challenge facing old media in a hyper connected world. They must either reinvent themselves as endless lists of likes or discover new ways of making the linear information flow more compelling than creating endless lists of likes.

Either way it is a big ask.

But what about Facebook?

In a Google world targeting is linked to the moment and not the demographic.

Meanwhile at the heart of the Facebook business model is the social graph. The market valuations for Facebook are based largely on the very simple idea that if the social graph can be mapped and then explored at the most granular level imaginable then ultimately the Facebook is a direct marketer's dream.

Note: Twitter is better understood as mapping the interest graph.

In this context the evolution of social media is better understood as a response to the advertising industry’s craving for the next generation Direct Marketing platform

The problem of course with this simple idea is that Google has already rendered this model of targeting people and their preferences for content (be it professional or DIY) obsolete.

Google doesn't care if you're male, female, black, white, green or blue, an only child or part of a family of 10, a baseball supporter or a member of MOMA, watch So you think you can dance?, Desperate Housewives or Two and half men, drink Coca Cola or Pepsi, like Gucci or Hugo Boss. All that matters to Google is you have typed in "Hot Water Heater", "Convertible" or "Apartments in Chicago" into that search bar and that at this moment in time that is what you are interested in finding.

This then is the paradox facing the Social Media economy. It deals in the currency of personalities and interests when the new currency is the ability to create Synchronicity in real time. Or as I have said many times before the new world of media is all about Find Me, Find You and Let's Exchange.

Facebook has gone to great lengths to building a technology that harvests vast quantities of personal information that are in the most part redundant when it comes to doing business in the new Google economy. Far from being the future of media, the aptly named Meaning Machine is an industrial age solution to a problem that has already been solved.

Put very simply, Facebook (at least in its present form) is the future of media and commerce for those who lack the imagination to comprehend what the future of media and commerce could look like. (Hint: It's Mobile)

The premise behind the model is more data equals more value. Where perhaps more data equals more digital dust is closer to the truth.

I say that because anybody who has spent any time around databases, business intelligence and big data knows intuitively that if you own the data you own the past. Or, more accurately, you own the memory.

If you have any understanding of information theory (i.e. Shannon's Law) then you will know that data on its own is inert, or more accurately meaningless, until you apply the question.

The question constitutes the decision point, the pivot point, upon which the future path is selected.

If you want to own the future then you need to own the question. Or, more accurately the point at where the decision to execute the question is made. The transaction, the exchange. Or, what I have described in the past as the Decision Point.

This of course is the fundamental difference between Google's search model and Facebook's social graph model.

Facebook owns the data. Google owns the question.

That's why Facebook's revenue model - as with most social and traditional media platforms - is best described as a platform rent tax. While Google's revenue model is best described as a referral engine.

Copyright 2011 Digital Partners Pty Limited. All Rights Reserved.