Jonothan Stribling

I was talking with a colleague about the BONDS Facebook page today admiring their 600K+ likes when she challenged me to find another Australian brand with a higher number of likes. I’m happy to say that I did.

A few things stood out.

Australian fashion brands dominated the rankings. Global surfing brands Quiksilver and Billabong led the charge with over 1 million likes, followed by BONDS.

The NRL leads the AFL by around 30 thousand likes. Interestingly, the NRL fan site, my-nrl.com, has slightly more likes than the official NRL site.

Holden has over 200K followers, no doubt on the back of a big “social” campaign to launch the new Captiva. This indicates a well executed social media strategy.

The telcos, Telstra and Optus are pretty evenly matched. What’s interesting is that as “technology” brands they don’t have a higher number of likes.

The banks are poorly represented. The only banks I could find were the NAB and the new Bank of Melbourne. The new Bank of Melbourne billboard campaign has prominent social media icons and this has obviously been relatively successful as it has generated more followers than NAB.

Retailers like Myer, David Jones, and Harvey Norman are at the lower end of the rankings. Harvey Norman however did appear to be pursuing a pretty successful Facebook places strategy. It was unclear whether this had been initiated by them or simply organic.

The Australian brand social media rankings

1. Quiksilver 1,213,398
2. Billabong 1,040,527
3. BONDS 629,363
4. NRL 373,949
5. AFL 343,217
6. Holden 228,059
7. Optus 52,079
8. Myer 43,359
9. Big W 36,491
10. VB 33,643
11. Telstra 25,584
12. Seven Eleven 24,730
13. David Jones 22,993
14. iiNet 18,888
15. Harvey Norman 8,837
16. Bank of Melbourne 8,290
17. NAB 8,245
18. Coles 5,360
19. James Boag’s & Sons 3,814

This ranking was created 18 August and the brands ranked were my best estimation of major Australian brands. If you think any are missing, drop me a line.

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When Google+ was launched a few weeks ago I saw it as another Google Buzz writ large. Google Buzz was of course a lamentable failure after hype of dizzying proportions. Now I think Google+ may be different. In a little over 3 weeks the service has amassed 20  million users and seen the social media stars and blogger experts jump on board and make all sorts of wonderful claims. My favourites are:

• Personal blogs are no longer needed because Google+ allows maximum engagement;
• This will kill twitter and people are already bored by twitter;
• The 140 character limit is limiting twitter;
• This will kill Facebook;
• Google are playing favourites with brand pages and demonstrating how unethical they really are;
• Google+ will change how brands interact with social media;
• Google+ will not change how brands interact with social media;
• Twitter is still a better mobile tool;
• Google+ is a better curation tool;
• Google+ sucks;
• Google+ is like Friend Feed;
• Google+ vs Facebook is like Facebook vs MySpace circa 2005.

Some of the views above are not entirely crazy (apart from redirecting your personal blog to your Google+ profile), but people really need to calm the fuck down.

Sure Google+ is great and shiny and new. It is like the latest spring fashions from Paris, the new BMW M5, a latest Nike’s, or a new diet drink made from a substance found deep in the rainforest which magically makes you thinner, better looking and smarter.

In other words Google+ is simply fashion.

Geeks, techno-bloggers, and social media experts are flocking to Google+ so they can be part of the cool-set.

And Google are of course building a massive new data-set to crunch some data and sell advertising. I have no complaints about that, it is after all just business. My problem is with people magically forgetting that Google are not a charity creating some really innovative cool stuff to make everyone happy. They are building honeypot to make lots and lots of money because they have been watching Facebook pull in more than $1 Billion a year in advertising and have a massive share of Internet users invisible to Google.

The great thing about the world is that there will always be room for something new and innovative. And if Apple or Google are in business there will always be uncritical acceptance of whatever they do from guileless fools.

Oh, you can find me here if you want to follow me on Google+

Malcom Gladwell must be wondering what went wrong.

In October 2010 the award winning New Yorker writer penned a piece that tried to address the hyperbole about so-called twitter revolutions and suddenly he was the most hated man on twitter.

The response was spectacular. Twitter erupted into outrage, Biz Stone co-founder of twitter responded with a thoughtful but dense piece in The Atlantic Monthly that promoted twitter as a force for fostering relationships and creating meaningful change. For Stone the power of twitter lies in its ability to empower people through communication. He finishes his defence with:

Rudimentary communication among individuals in real time allows many to move together as one–suddenly uniting everyone in a common goal.

Now the idea of “rudimentary communication” happening in “real time” seems to me to be no different from me having a conversation with a stranger whilst waiting for my morning coffee, but I think I know what Stone was getting at – there is power is connecting heterogeneous conversations and rapidly distributing information. This is after all one of the revolutionary aspects of the Internet.

Interestingly, as far as I can tell, the Zuck and the gang at Facebook were too busy making money to respond.

What interests me about this is how thin-skinned the twitter fans appear to be. Gladwell was the subject of many vitriolic and hateful tweets that accused him of being part of old-media player and a right bastard. The debate was reminiscent of many techno-religious debates like Apple vs. PC or. NET vs PHP. Now the reductive fissure is social media vs. history, or twitter vs. Facebook.

Gladwell’s piece is problematic. He deliberately collapses issues with tools so as to be controversial saying:

Where activists were once defined by their causes, they are now defined by their tools.

I don’t think anyone could have easily missed what the activists in Egypt were rallying for or defined them merely assuming Facebook fans. It just so happened that Facebook was the most useful tool for communicating and organising the revolutionaries. In fact the only one defining activists by their tools is Gladwell.
Gladwell also takes issue with the claim by the US State department that cyber-activists are “the best hope for us all” dismissing the role of social media in the Moldovian and Iranian protests.

It is important to note that The New Yorker article was published in October 2011, well before the Egyptian or Tunisian revolutions.

Gladwell was right that about soneof the grandiose statements being made about how social media was enabling dissidents to protest in new ways. Whilst acknowledging that twitter was not the magic bullet against dictators, Time Magazine breathlessly proclaimed

But there’s no question that it has emboldened the protesters, reinforced their conviction that they are not alone and engaged populations outside Iran in an emotional, immediate way that was never possible before.

Wow. Little old twitter did all that? How’s this comment about a post in techmeme:

If Twitter stumbles, dictators, totalitarians and other thugs the world over will rejoice. The losers will be the people under their thumbs.

Clearly there was some hyperbole about twitter and social media that spurned Gladwell to write his slightly antagonistic piece.

Gladwell’s basic thesis is that social media creates what he calls weak ties. He did this after conveniently setting up the concept of social activism being dependent on what he called strong ties. He builds a lovely binary opposition of social activism = strong ties vs. social media = weak ties. Therefore social media is not a useful tool for activism.

That social activism is a dangerous activity involving much personal risk that requires courageous feats is not in dispute here. What is wrong with Gladwell’s approach is the overly simplistic and reductive dualism of real world vs Internet world. For Gladwell the Internet is a transient, temporary place whereas the physical world is real, robust and trusted. He seems to ignore that the Internet exists and is a reflection of the “real world”.

As a journalist Gladwell is blinded to the politics of information. For him politics is big boy stuff where information is controlled and disseminated by journalists, academics, politicians, and judges. Information is something formal which is produced and passively consumes. The idea of a heterogeneous sphere where information is distributed at the speed of light and old-world models of producer-consumer are obliterated are an anathema for a journalist whose strong ties have built an influential career.

Information, like power is always local. We are all subject to it and entwined within its grip. It can be distributed in multiple heterogeneous ways like a whisper on the street, by a bloke with a placard, by a blog, by a newspaper, by a teacher, or by an angry mob protesting against a repressive regime. Technology like the phone, the Internet, twitter, facebook, and mobiles can transform how information is distributed and transform structures of power.

I do feel to Gladwell, he has become the pinup boy for ludittes everywhere who bemoan the democraticisation of the distribution of information as being an irritating leach on corporate profits and political control. However, he really only has himself to blame, as he has acted the genius contrary clown in order to prove himself an original thinker. A debate on the true transformative and revolutionary impacts of technologies deserves better.

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Some time ago I wrote that Facebook was doomed because the business model relied on erecting billboards in parks.

People were there to play, not be sold to.

Since then, Facebook  has become bigger than many medium-sized countries and has been valued at more than $50 billion by investment bankers.

Oh and my Dad who is 74, is now on Facebook.

So if Facebook is bigger than most countries and worth a lot of money, how can I be right? 

The answer is in comparing Facebook to Google.  Google has become uber-successful by opening advertising to the masses. Anyone with a credit card and a website can advertise to qualified buyers fast. Google make it really easy by giving away advertising vouchers so anyone can try before they buy. The results are instantaneous and infinitely measurable.

Facebook on the other hand provides a weak value proposition for advertisers. The Facebook audience is not shopping for a gift for Aunt Rhonda in Ohio, they are looking to see what their BFF is up to, or to LOL at a chimpanzee eating its own poo. Or perhaps they are planning a revolution as recent events in Egypt demonstrate.

Whereas Google is a community of buyers and shoppers, Facebook is a community of thrill-seekers, bored adolescents, peeping toms, and horny perverts. They are very disengaged consumers.

U.K. Facebook exec Stephen Gained sees a future where company websites are made obsolete by Facebook. His argument is that Facebook offers more ways for consumers to engage with brands through devices like the Like button, and that visit times to Facebook average 28 minutes – much longer than most company websites.

The metrics make for a compelling argument but Facebook is still a sad, closed, blue world offering low clicks and ROI.

Building a list of fans is a great way to promote your brand, model but it is a poor way to sell product. Most of the commerce success stories are just hyperbole, the social media community are so desperate to demonstrate value they promote small and meaningless examples of why Facebook will dominate the Internet.

So I agree that Facebook is a great place to recruit a graduate, promote a new shampoo, or run a competition to build brand awareness. But if it is engagement and revenue you’re after then search is the clear winner.

The focus on the short tail is not exactly what makes Facebook another MySpace and not another Google. My completely unprofessional advice to Facebook investors beguiled by the $60 Billion valuation is to get the out now.

Take a profit and wait for the bubble to pop.

You see them everywhere – people with their heads down, supplicant hands, silent, staring at a mobile device.

They are praying to the god of the Internet, requesting that the pipes and bytes entertain them, illuminate them and placate the boredom of being alive.

Between 9pm and midnight around the world, the TV sits mute while people hover around the LCD monitor watching a rerun on hulu, or a cat doing backflips whilst wearing a tutu on YouTube.

The Internet has simultaneously gone prime-time and become mobile and this is changing what people expect from their online experiences regardless of a sedentary or nomadic pattern of use. People expect to be entertained, engaged, informed, outraged and delighted from their online experiences. This has implications for online and offline retailers, publishers, bloggers, designers and online marketers.

Everyone needs to be a little more entertaining. Users expect it and businesses creating the best, most entertaining content will win regardless of industry.

Bryan Eisenberg talks about persuasion architecture, I think we should start talking about entertainment experience or lolcats architecture.

I don’t need to be persuaded or cajoled. I just need to be your friend and think that you’re the cleverest, the funniest, the fastest, the most innovative, or the toughest.

Relationships might originate in Facebook, Twitter or YouTube and finish with a purchase being made via a mobile site over a few drinks.

Or a work type relationship with your insurance company might evolve into a casual laugh over madcap YouTube accident videos. CGU are running a pretty good campaign featuring a dancing bricklayer that they are promoting in Facebook.

Seek.com have embraced entertainment commerce offering cute games that are promoted by their job seeker emails.

Google were a very early adopter with their logo memes now widely chattered about and promoted by people.

Zynga have built a billion dollar empire soley on entertaining kids and teaching about raising barns.

Moosejaw, an outdoors brand, made people laugh lots with their break up service that was featured in YouTube.

As the Internet evolves to become an intricate part of people’s social and personal lives, brands need to be smarter at how they reach their buyers.

If the 2000s were all about getting direct response campaigns right in search engines, then the 2010s will be about getting the entertainment experience right and driving new customers to your online door.

Last night I was watching the ABC news and checking our twitter when I was some mention of an #alpspill.

I searched for #spill, tweeted something inane and waited for the ABC to report something.

It came in the 7.30 report and it amounted to guesswork by Kerry O’Brien about Julia Gillard being in Kevin Rudd’s office.

Apart from the Twitter gossip there really wasn’t any news. Crikey was silent, The ABC was relatively silent, The SMage was relatively silent. Some “star tweeters” like @bernardkeane simply said “I can’t comment”.

What there was on twitter though was a lot of chatter. The 50 tweets a second about the #spill were not really news. It was a conversation between a whole bunch of people with very little authority.

The types tweets amounted to:

• An opinion about either Rudd or Gillard
• A joke about Rudd and the world cup or Malcom Turnbull
• A reference to Laurie Oakes who was appearing on Channel 9
• A comment about somepeople being in Rudd’s office

It was beguiling, fascinating and entertaining.

And entirely useless as news.

It wasn’t news it was a meta-conversation in a virtual pub. Everybody trying to be clever, funny and witty at the same time.

Twitter has a long way to go to become a viable news source as it lacks the authority that comes with being an established media institution or blog.

However, twitter demonstrated that it could deliver opinion about the news faster the the news could be published.

What is needed is an authority. What would enable this is a live curation where authoritative tweeters and sources are selected and promoted. This could be because of content or metadata like location, status or relationships with others.

This would mean that when something big happens twitter can continue to be a platform that provides real-time and more importantly, meaningful news.

Of course this could be just sucking the fun out of watching the conversation unfold.

I really want to delete my facebook account.

I was enthusiastic about the idea after all the changes the Zuck made to “privacy” this year and then I read this polemic by Jason Calacanis about how facebook is evil and the Zuck has Zucked his way to the top.

I was kinda gratified because it meant that my suspicion and anxiety about facebook was felt tenfold over by an industry observer.

It meant that my doubts about the business model were in part justified because eroding privacy for commercial gain is clearly unethical.

And not being transparent about it is very unethical.

Privacy should NOT be opt-in.

A year ago I said facebook was (almost) doomed because of the difference between the sacred and the profane.

After facebook became the most visited US website for a week in March I thought I was completely wrong.

I wasn’t.

Running a massive website is expensive and advertising won’t generate enough of a return for the Zuck so he is monetising his biggest asset – you and me.

I don’t want my private data to be monetised and Zucked up. If I share publicly I use twitter. If it’s a private conversation between friends I might send an email, pick up the phone, send a text or just maybe use facebook.

The problem is that I need facebook. I need to understand if advertising and targeting is more cost effective for certain campaigns than Google.

I need to understand it, to use it for traffic generation, to observe it with a critical gaze.

So I guess I’ve been Zucked after all.

We all have.

Once watching the TV was a complete passive act of slovenly consumption. The evening show was watched while slumped on the couch all senses dulled by the blue rays of the box.

Now watching the TV is only one part of watching the TV. In face “TV events” can be enjoyed by hooking into the Twitter firehose and looking for the right hashtag.

During the Logies, an Australian TV award show for all US folks, I noticed that the digital hipsters at the event were tweeting, that people on the couch were tweeting, that journalists were tweeting.

Everybody was talking at the same time about the #logies. Cracking gags, being outrageous laughing at “the stars”.

And what for?

Comedian Wil Anderson (@Wil_Anderson) attempted controversy by alluding to John Mayer, herpes and his “white supremicist cock”. He passed comment about Michael Slater doing jokes, Sigrid Thornton looking like gollem and something about the Rogue Traders.

It was pretty nasty stuff. Funny when you’re pissed and wearing a dinner suit, not so funny the next day.

Wil Anderson wasn’t the only one trying to be real funny on twitter for free.

Catherine Deveny (@catherinedeveny), Melbourne comedian, satirist and athiest offered such gems as:

“Rove and Tasma look so cute … hope she doesn’t die, too”

“I do so hope Bindi Irwin gets laid”

She now claims that she has been taken out of context.

I am not massively offended by any of the logies comments by Anderson, Deveny or anyone of the other clowns.

In fact I think it’s great that celebrities can be taken down to size by anyone with an attitude, a twitter account and the right hashtag.

And this is just the start.

Twitter TV commentary is taking off in Australia.

The latest series of Masterchef has seen continuous tweeting.

Such was the volume of tweets during ABC’s live discussion show Q and A, that it now publishes selected and topical tweets as a way of engaging the home audience.

It is all a little fun.

What concerns me is that the greater the volume of tweets, the greater the tendency for some commentary to be mindless and involve badly executed irony, cruelty and thoughtless aphorisms.

There are gems to be found, but as Twitter grows they are harder to find.

According to Deveny, Twitter is

“a great challenge for us, to have a sophisticated response to the evolution of communication.”.

That implies that people are actually listening and engaging.

But they aren’t. They are too busy talking shouting.

As a means of cultural commentary Twitter is more like talk radio than the smart coffee chat. They only difference is that rather than being between a moron host and a moron caller there are a gazillion morons all saying the same thing, all crying out for attention, all hoping for a retweet from a celebrity.

If everyone in the room is talking loudly then the conversation is useless and boring.

Perhaps there needs to be a stop tweeting and listen campaign, real-time curation of TV and cultural events and an education program about satire and irony for Twitter to stay fascinating, beguilling and delightfully stupid.

Without that Twitter is doomed to become just a million moronic conversations.

Google just released Google Buzz which has demands that we “go beyond status messages”.

To me this appears to echo the feeling many people had, including me, when confronted with micro-blogging sites like Twitter – so what.

It represents a profound misunderstanding of what a status message actually is. Status messages are really:

• part of a conversation
• the start of a conversation
• a cry for help
• a complaint
• a grandiose aphorism about what’s wrong with the world
• a proclamation of love
• and of course a comedy.

Whilst twitter and Facebook might appear to a Google engineer to be merely a system that accepts, validates and publishes status messages, these sites are much more than than that.

They are communications systems that helps people connect.

Much like email does.

I can see why the Google engineers and product marketing folks decided to use focus on doing more than updating and reading status messages. It is a good spin and a great reflection on Gmail’s strengths, which are that it’s very bloody easy to use and has a huge base of installed customers who are already having conversations.

What is missing from Gmail is a an ecosystem of third party applications which can help me share anywhere I like from practically any device I like.

Of course this wouldn’t sell any advertising.

And this is why I reckon Google wants to “go social”. The more people tweet or exchange Facebook messages the less they email and of course  Google has a reduced audience to display advertisements to.

After a long break from blogging which was sandwiched by two overhyped product releases, one from Google and one from Apple, I am feeling a little fatigued with product releases that are thinly masked market share grabs and do nothing to solve my problems.

And let’s not forget that Yahoo and Microsoft have had similar features for quite some time.

My first impressions from Buzz are that is pretty cool. The user interface is very slick and it is easy to do stuff like attach images, add people, comment, like, post links and browse posts.

My big complaint is that  I cannot update Twitter from Buzz although I can see my tweets in Buzz.

Since Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle introduced the term Web 2.0 five years ago, there has been an explosion of web tools and Internet-connected gadgets that foster conversations, interactions and discoveries.

In the past five years startups have built massive brands by harnessing communities and conversations. Brands like Twitter, Facebook, Stumble Upon, Ebay, Amazon and many others grew massive audiences by offering means for related and unrelated people to connect using Internet technologies. By crowdsourcing these brands provided platforms for collective interactions that create useful and cool tools like book reviews, movie databases, online encycopedias, map annotations, link resources .

There has also been a lot of chatter about what’s next. The teleological nature of the term, Web 2.0, lead some to focus on what web 3.0 might look like. Is it the mobile Internet? Is it the fast(er) Internet?

O’Reilly and Battelle see Web 2.0 simply as “harnessing collective intelligence.”

I always found the term a really useful rallying cry but overall a spurious oversimplification for what the web was always meant to be. Web 2.0 for me is a great epochal term expressing the evolution of how we use and interact with technology rather than a concrete real-world thing. And the danger with epochal terms is that we focus too much on the term, defining and justifying it, rather than the really interesting stuff that helps us understand the intersections between culture and technology.

In a new paper “Web Squared“, O’Reilly and Battelle write about how the web is on a “collision course with the physical world” through a proliferation of Internet-enabled devices, smartphones and real-time
microblogging platforms like Twitter.

For the authors Web Squared is “Web meets World” and they mount a compelling case for web technologies being applied to solve the problems of the world using the principles of “openness, collective intelligence, and transparency”.

I found the article to be both insightful and inspiring. The idea that the web is an entity comprised of devices and the collective intelligence of millions of users, which could be applied to the real problems of the world really speaks to my aspirations and vanity.

I can’t help think that O’Reilly and Batelle are speaking from a very privileged position as elites in the most webified economy in the world and that the global problems including hunger and poverty, drought, global warming, war, slavery, health, corruption and despotism are a long way from being solved by a bunch of well intentioned web developers, designers, strategics, venture capitalists and well-intentioned twitterers.

Not straight away anyway.

There is a direct line between the invention of the printing press and the breakdown of the dominance of the Roman Catholic Church in Europe. The opportunities offered by being able to easily and quickly distribute information meant that the monopoly the elite (the Church) had on knowledge was no longer tenable. The consequences of this “revolution”  took hundreds of years to emerge.

My point is that we’re too close, too involved, too emotionally engaged to really see whaat the epochal implications of the Internet revolution are. It is entirely possible that the Internet having been responsible for the breakdown of Western media empires dominance of the distribution of knowledge and information will be the catalyst for the breakdown of the Western economic hegemony. If 80% of the populations of China and India get access to the Internet and relative economic security the world and the web will look completely different. It will be dominated not by the privileged citizens of the West but by the “Other”.

The rise of the Arabic TV network, Al Jazeera and their release of broadcast quality footage from Gaza on a Creative Commons license puts this evolution in real context. I can’t see CNN, the BBC or even the Australian ABC putting their syndication deals at risk.

In fact it could be the case that the real revolution could be the emergence of a new global heterogeneity in the distributiom and consumption of knowledge, rather than the homogenous US dominated Internet. This has less to do with Web 2.0 than multi-lingual domain names and the rise of affordable Internet enabled mobile devices.

When we talk about conversations and interactions, most of us still have what Edward Said would have called an Orientalist point of view: “There are a lot of them and their economy is going well, but we invented Google and the iPhone”.

If we are to have a rallying cry to use the web to solve the worlds problems then it needs to be grounded in those radical ideas that provide the economic tools, including the Internet, to the world’s poorest peoples.