My Take On Social Media Tools For Influence

August 4th, 2010

Today I would like to offer my views on several social media tools. They are:

  • Peer Index
  • Klout
  • Quora
  • Yahoo! Answers
  • Facebook Questions

When I woke up this morning and got online, I went to Google Buzz! and found this Youtube video from the vernerable Robert Scoble, in which he interviewed the founder of a new Twitter social influence tool, Peer Index. Basically, Peer Index goes one level beyond what Klout does; instead of just ranking people as influencers, curators, pundits, etc., it goes one level beyond, and divides people into vertical groups, and the identifying the groups in which they are influential. Just to give you an idea of how it works, here is my profile on Peer Index.

Partway through the video, I got a little surprised and my ego puffed up a bit when the China economy and biz section was brought up and I was mentioned. Always thankful for nice little mentions!

This looks like quite an improvement over Klout because of the finer granularity than Klout. I have been disappointed in Klout lately because they don’t seem to have kept their index updated. Give you an example: Here is my profile on Klout; notice how my tagline hasn’t been updated compared to my Twitter page.

For this reason, I much prefer Peer Index to Klout.

Another area I have been interested in are online questions forums; these really started with Naver in Korea, which has the predominant search engine in Korea. At one time, Naver marketed itself as the leading human-powered search engine; it relied on human vertical sector experts to answer questions. Eventually, some of these people first became experts in their field and became well-known first on the Internet, then on TV and through society. A few even achieved fame and riches through Naver.

One of the interesting side effects of this was that when people become well-known for the right reasons, they want to use their real names. Naver enabled this to happen.

Yahoo! noticed the success of this, and created Yahoo! Answers , which was largely a copy of the Naver model. Since it did not have the rigorous enforcement, policing and feedback which Naver did though, the quality of the questions and answers quickly went down in quality, with the result that the audience which used it also went down.

A recent variation on this has been Quora. This is a well designed question and answer model, which has good design and a good clean interface, and is heavily policed by editors. I tried it out for most of July and generally like it, but I found the editors too intrusive in the way they tried to edit questions. The community which is there is heavily slanted to ex-Facebook people, and the venture capital community. For a while I found this amusing, but after two weeks I found it boring, since I found both communities to be navel-gazers. As a side-point, I found many of the editors to be either Taiwanese who were deep-green pro-independence folk, or Indian. (Not that I care, but it is interesting how sub-communities shown through.)

For me, the straw broke when I asked a question in Chinese: 能用中文发问吗？(Translation: Can I ask questions in Chinese?) My motivation in asking this question was to engage some lively discussions in Chinese, since there is a significant number of Chinese on Quora. This question was quickly deleted by one of the Quora editors, and I was told to send an email to feedback at quora dot com. This was too much, and told me that their rules were too inflexible to make it a truly global Q&A forum, and I had had enough of the ex-FB and VC community, so I left and haven’t been back.

Facebook Questions is now undergoing closed testing; I expect this to be much better than Quora because it will associate people using their real names with their FB identities. For advertisers, this will be a very powerful tool because it will identify who really knows their stuff, and it should quickly replace Quora because of Facebook’s huge user base. In my opinion, Quora is too little too late, and their community is too narrow, and their editors’ overzealousness will prevent it from growing significantly.

After seeing Peer Index and the Q&A portals, I have decided that the Peer Index approach is much better. When people go to portals, they want to strut their stuff and show off, or of that doesn’t work, they just leave. In my own case, I like it much better when people can build their crowds based on their tweets, and you can build and lose followers according to Twitter. This is why I like Twitter and Peer Index much better than any of the Q&A portals.

I hope that Peer Index represents the trend of the future so that we get better quality as well as quantitative research when looking for influencers and knowledge experts on Twitter and the Internet.

Advertising, Real-Name and Other Opportunities in China

July 14th, 2010

Several weeks ago, I wrote an article on China’s digital advertising industry for Forbes.com The China Tracker. Now that China’s online advertising expenditure is growing, I’d like to talk more about challenges, and what I see as good opportunities in the field.

The past few years in China have seen some investment in China in combined lead-gen/traffic websites in China. I won’t name any names, but if you know this space, then I’m sure you know a few players. Basically, combined lead-gen/traffic is not viable on the long-term because there is an inherent conflict in combining lead-gen and traffic together. Either you are in lead-gen, in which you sell your leads to other sites which then try to monetize them, or you are in the traffic business, and you sell your traffic to firms which try to segment that traffic for their campaigns.

You don’t do both under one roof.

I see advertisers and publishers getting smart about this very soon, and figuring out the inherent conflict, which will cause problems for the companies which are doing this, and I expect them to change to either traffic only or lead-gen only very soon.

This will lead to healthier market development, and will help digital advertising expenditure to grow as a whole, as the industry will then grow more healthily.

Many of the advertising plays in China have been laggards, as games have always generated more revenue. Growth is now slowing among game publishers, and the number of new game players is also slowing; this is a reflection of China’s aging demographics. The growth has moved from MMORPG games to casual games, which don’t eat up time and attention the same way MMORPG games do. With the growth of mobile phones, especially the Android and iPhone platforms, you can expect more mobile casual game popularity. Some of the MMORPG game publishers will move to these platforms; others will not. I expect their success to be mixed.

Blizzard and the Chinese government have all been trying to push real-name registration, for their own set of reasons. I predict that this year more people will begin using their real names on the Internet, not out of government registration threats and rules, but because they are building a following, and are becoming well-known, and even generating income from Internet referrals. This already happens for some people, but as the society becomes more digital, it is being pushed down further into society.

This will create a bifurcation of those who use multiple identities and remain anonymous, and those who use real names. Some people will become famous as leaders in their fields and will use their real names; in this respect, they will become like experts on South Korea’s leading search engine Naver.com. In this respect, I expect the Internet in China to develop along and follow South Korean lines. On the one hand, this will make the Chinese government more comfortable with its development, and it will also increase the accountability of the information.

I see the next five years in China as a kind of cleaning-up period, where content quality and reputation need to be re-examined. Let’s be honest, there is an awful lot of content on the Chinese Internet, and a lot of it is crap. Much of the content is just copied from other sites with no value added. Brands are going to advertise in China because of the importance of the market, but it would be much friendlier if it was cleaned up. This needs to be done.

As for advertising sites in China, too many of the startup ideas are content- and front-end related. This is because most of the westerners and westernized Chinese in China are content people. But content is not enough; the Internet is really about data and sorting and filtering very large amounts of data to capture insights for advertisers.

This is where the next generation of online advertising startups in China will add value. This will require REAL technology, and will be filled with terms like Hadoop, MapReduce, etc. This will replace terms like branding, China strategy, market entry, etc. In other words, the emphasis will move from the front-end to the back-end, where the real technology always is.

Google is the world’s most successful advertising company, and it is a backend data-driven business. Its front-end services are just there to drive traffic to the backend, where it is processed into useful data which generate profits.

That is something most people just don’t get.

It’s about time they did.

I wonder who will be the new VCs in this space?

I welcome your comments.