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Frenemy mine: The pros and cons of social partnerships for online media companies

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 20:50:29 +0000

For online media companies, social platforms like Facebook and Twitter bring many opportunities as well as risks. An intelligent and proactive social media strategy can expand a brand’s reach. But the more heavily a media company relies upon a social media platform the more it relinquishes control over the customer experience.

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Content monetization: News licensing and syndication still need marketplaces and infrastructure

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 06:55:25 +0000

Publishers’ lack of strategic focus on licensing and syndication today is matched by nearly equal indifference from software developers, entrepreneurs, and investors. Millions of investment dollars and countless development hours have gone into creating online advertising tools, readership analytics, and aggregation engines. But comparatively little has gone into developing the sort of tools, APIs, metrics, or exchanges that might have aided the emergence of a content licensing and paid syndication business online.

Key highlights in this report include:

For publishers, the first step to monetizing something is to be able to measure it. The analytics tools now available make it possible to track the spread of content on social platforms closely.

Until now there has not been a marketplace where those potential buyers and sellers of content could meet. Nor were there adequate tools to enable verifiable transactions between them. Tools like Cascade and Ricochet are helping put the foundations of such a market in place.

Both publishers and licensees will need to seize the sort of ad hoc syndication opportunities that arise online and on social media networks. One of the major tasks facing publishers over the next three to five years will be to structure their repositories of content so they can be searched, sorted, customized, repackaged, and accessed in real time via standardized APIs.

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Google adds social advertising startup Wildfire to its ad tech stack

Ki Mae Heussner — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 19:35:36 +0000

Yet another social media management startup is off the market. Google today announced that it has purchased the Redwood City, Calif.-based Wildfire, which helps marketers manage their campaigns and presence on Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms.

In a blog post, the tech giant said the four-year-old company founded by Victoria Ransom and Alain Chuard would be joining Google to build out the stack of services it offers advertisers. Wildfire’s social advertising capabilities will ultimately complement and integrate with services from Admeld (which has helped serve ads in Facebook’s social apps), DoubleClick (which lets advertisers run and measure ads across social sites) and of course, Google’s own social platform, Google+.

“Indeed, a social presence can complement all marketing campaigns—search, display, video, mobile, offline ads and more,” Jason Miller, product development manager, said in the post.

The purchase, which was reportedly in the neighborhood of $250 million comes on the heels of Salesforce’s nearly $800 million acquisition of social advertising startup Buddy Media and Oracle’s (ORCL) decision to buy Vitrue, as well as rival Involver. Google was reportedly interested in buying Buddy Media but, according to tech blog AllThingsD, Buddy Media was more confident that Salesforce could actually close the deal given that regulators would give close scrutiny to any deal involving industry-giant Google.

Google’s purchase of Wildfire leaves just a few independent social media management platforms remaining, including Hearsay Social and Hootsuite.

In a post over on its own site, Wildfire, which has raised about $14 million in venture funding, said the company has grown to include more than 400 employees and 16,000 customers in the past four years. Interestingly, in thanking its partners (such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Google+), the company gave a special call out to Google arch rival Facebook.

“Were it not for the social media revolution that you have all helped to create, Wildfire would not even exist,” the company said. Going forward, it will be very interesting to see how Facebook chooses to work with Wildfire, which has historically been a very close partner of Facebook’s.

Ahead of Facebook’s IPO, Ransom told the Mercury News that she saw a future in which Wildfire’s workforce had grown into the thousands, with “a darn good chance” that it will have gone public. Funny how things change.

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Twitter snuffs an Olympics critic: smart play or censorship?

Jeff John Roberts — Mon, 30 Jul 2012 21:15:45 +0000

The media is fuming over Twitter’s decision to suspend the account of a British journalist who used the micro-blogging site to toss barbs at NBC’s decision to time-delay its Olympic coverage over the weekend. The episode raises questions about free speech and corporate control of social media platforms. (Updated, Tuesday 9:30am)

For anyone who missed it, the brouhaha began this morning when sports site Deadspin reported that Twitter had cut off Guy Adams, an LA-based reporter for The Independent. Adams has been a standard bearer for the new #nbcfail hashtag and used his account to rattle off a series of British-inflected tirades about NBC’s time delay: “‘Sneak peak’ my arse”; ”tosspot”; “Matt Lauer would do well to shut up, wouldn’t he?” and so on.

Adams apparently crossed a line when he published the email address of NBC executive Gary Zenkel and told followers to “Tell him what u think.” NBC complained to Twitter and shortly after the micro-blog site suspended Adams’ account.

Critics have since called attention to the fact that Twitter has partnered with NBC’s parent company to promote the games, and suggested that the companies decided to shut down Adams’ account as an act of reprisal.

In an email message to Adams, Twitter explained the account had been suspended because he had violated terms of service that forbid disclosing private information like a person’s telephone number or private email address. Deadspin and others have noted that gary.zenkel@nbcuni.com is a corporate address.

So who is right? Did Adams overstep a boundary or are Twitter and NBC wrongfully censoring a journalist? Well, from a legal point of view, Twitter is in the clear. The company’s terms of service make it plain that it can boot users off the site anytime and for any reason.

Twitter’s moral position is a lot more shaky. Its reason for tossing Adams is flimsy (the email he printed was not private) and, worse, they simply caused him to disappear altogether. If you search @guyadams on Twitter, the company will suggest users with similar handles but the original Guy Adams has simply vanished in the same way that disgraced communists would vanish from Kremlin photographs.

This policy of “disappearing” people without a trace is unhealthy and something Twitter should reconsider. The site has bravely opposed police gag orders and published a groundbreaking transparency report to highlight government censorship.

In the future, Twitter should show who it is barring from the site and explain why. In the meantime, it should give Guy Adams his account back.

Update: The Telegraph reported Tuesday that NBC claims that it was Twitter who informed their social media department about Adams’ tweets and informed them how to file a complaint. Meanwhile, respected social media journalist Danny Sullivan has pointed out that Gary Zenkel’s email address was not widely available. Other are questioning the appropriateness of using Twitter to initiate ‘email bombing.’ As of Tuesday morning, Twitter has remained silent in the face of what appears to be its biggest PR crisis to date.

(Image by Rui Vale de Sousa via Shutterstock)

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LuxeYard puts a social spin on high-end flash sales

Colleen Taylor — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 05:01:38 +0000

LuxeYard, a members-only e-commerce website that sells discounted high-end furniture and home decor products, is launching Tuesday to users in the United States and Canada. Yes, it’s technically another flash sales site. But what’s interesting about LuxeYard is that it’s doing things a bit differently from the established players in the space such as One Kings Lane and Gilt Groupe.

Crowdsourcing the inventory selection

Firstly, rather than populating its site with objects selected by a group of buyers operating autonomously based on their own taste, LuxeYard is taking cues from its users on what items to sell. LuxeYard members can post photos of the type of items they’d like to buy on social media platforms, and other members can vote up on products they would also like to buy. Essentially, the items for sale on site will be crowdsourced according to users’ wants.

LuxeYard screenshot (click to enlarge)

“We’re really establishing a pattern of listening,” LuxeYard COO Steve Beauregard said in a phone interview Monday. “We’re really trying to build a conversation around certain pieces, and that will help focus our buyers and attune them to our users’ tastes, rather than just buying something they think is interesting.”

Taking group buying one step further

Secondly, LuxeYard is employing truly flexible group buying. This is where members use their social networks to encourage their friends to buy the same product on LuxeYard they’re buying, thereby driving down the price of that item. For example: I could buy a chair on LuxeYard for $150, and then post about that chair on Facebook. If a certain number of other people end up buying the same chair, the final cost for everyone buying the chair could be driven down to $100.

A unique financial starting point

And another unique thing about LuxeYard is that it’s hitting the ground running from a financial perspective. The company has raised $3.5 million from private investors, but has technically already gone public by conducting a reverse merger into a publicly-held shell company. Details are still being ironed out, so there is no public float to LuxeYard’s stock, but it will begin trading under the ticker symbol “LXRD” at some point in the coming months. Access to public market investors will potentially give LuxeYard the monetary wherewithal to compete head-to-head in the flash sales and group buying space already filled with solid players such as Wayfair, One Kings Lane and others, not to mention more general e-commerce sites such as Amazon.

But how long can exclusivity last?

Now, LuxeYard also claims it will be more choosy about the items it selects to sell on the site. According to Beauregard, if a company’s products are already being sold on existing e-commerce sites or major chain stores, LuxeYard will not sell any of its products. That’s an honorable goal, but true exclusivity is not always an easy thing to maintain when you’re also balancing the demand from investors for constant growth. And being that LuxeYard is starting out as a public company with notoriously demanding Wall Street-style investors, that could be an even harder balance to strike. But overall, LuxeYard’s offering seems unique enough that the company has a good shot at success — even in the hyper competitive world of e-commerce.

Here’s one more screenshot of LuxeYard (click to enlarge):

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