A Friend in Every City

With a new Social Networking site being announced almost every day or so, I am getting used to hearing about the next big destination in the Social Networking stakes. For now, there are a number of sites which are growing and others which are not. The growth areas still include MySpace and Facebook though it is almost certain that newer sites will, like YouTube though maybe not as dramatically, make their presence felt as they grow into the big league of Social Networking.

At the same time as the mainstream consolidates, it seems that there is a growing place for niche sites. These might include Activerain, a network for US Real Estate or LibraryThing a network for people who love books. There are many others uniting people who work in similar professions or share interests in some way. Ecademy caters for these needs with Clubs.

Until now, there has been a requirement to write or adapt software to get a Social Networking site operational. In our case, there has been an 8-year development and that development has not stopped - nor will it for the foreseeable future. Now it may be easier to put together Social Network sites using software that has been developed for the purpose. Two announcements in the past week seem to show the direction of these developments.

In San Francisco, at the Web 2.0 Summit last week, Marc Andreessen and Gina Bianchini publicly launched Ning.com, which lets people build Web sites for online socializing. ZDNet reported -

The company has been operating for more than a year, but waited until the conference to reveal details on its product. Bianchini, who is CEO, gave a demonstration in the afternoon after technical glitches marred the first attempt.

She showed that Ning allows people to create socially oriented Web sites without having to write code. People are presented with choices, such as who to share the site with and what kind of look it will have.

Ning has built templates for hosting discussions and sharing music, photos and videos. The site is set up so people can retain their own branding–a logo can appear in a video player, for example.

“What’s different about Ning from other services is that we give you your own video site like YouTube, or social-networking site like MySpace,” she said. “But unlike being a page in somebody else’s service, it’s yours. You get to choose what it’s about.”

Meanwhile, Techcrunch UK is reporting that a new UK based service is in the process of being launched and currently in alpha. Createmynet is currently taking email registrations ahead of a planned launch this month.

With the permission of its owners, TechCrunch UK secured a look at the Alpha version, and it is still very much in the early stages. But then again social networks are like that, right? Not much exists in the way of a network until people start to join, and to be fair they haven’t even launched yet. What can be said is that the Alpha site looks like a fairly standard PHP-driven community site.

The problem is, it is hard to see what CreateMyNet can offer over and above what LinkedIn, Xing (formerly Openbc.com and about to relaunch), SoFlow.com and every other networking community aimed at business people offers. But their PR lays out quite an ambitious project…

They plan to list the UK’s associations and professional bodies - giving them control over their CreateMyNet incarnation- while allowing users to create new communities of their own.

That’s not all. The site also plans to include an RSS reader, secure file storage, web conferencing, video messaging, calendaring, PC synchronisation, a marketplace, instant messaging and SMS. Most services will be free, while some will attract a low subscription, they say.

Techcrunch report favourably on the facilities they were able to see, including an anonymous browser capability, but remain sceptical of the market potential of the site which is offering to centralise “information management by providing contact management, task management and multiple levels of event and calendar management.” Techcrunch count off the rival companies also seeking to do this - “They are also quite large. Google? Yahoo? MSN? With the greatest respect, adversaries like these are perhaps a tad dicey to compete with, even for a plucky startup from Sheffield”.

The question that occurs to me is just how big a market is there for Network Creation software? How many networks will people join and participate in actively? We have some experience of this and the answer is a surprisingly small number (or maybe it’s not that surprising given the time that Social Network sites can consume). Maybe this is the Web2.0 equivalent of the Website Creation sites that offered templates to build web presence without coding during the first net boom. Few of them still remain and most websites are, I suspect, still coded rather than created from user-driven templates.

Marc Andreessen was part of that boom, too, famously co-developing the Mosaic browser and co-founding Netscape to exploit it. So maybe we do have to listen when he says, “Our basic theory is that as people get more sophisticated and used to social networks, they are going to want a lot more flexibility and a lot more customization. We’re making a big bet that there will be a lot more social networks over the next couple of years.”

I know that I have an interest in the way in which things develop in this area. And I have predicted that the growth of Social Networks is nowhere yet near to flattening out. However, I do wonder what the future is for those setting out on the Social Networking journey at this stage of the market when the big boys - News Corporation, Google and, reportedly, Yahoo - are already looking to find their positions in the social software industry.

Time, of course, will tell. But does the world need yet more Social Networking sites - or should we be concentrating on developing the ones that already exist?

Thomas Power
Chairman of Ecademy
Mobile: +447976438285

Exactly one week ago, Amy Gahran reported for Poynter Online that the Gannett newspaper group was reorganising its newsrooms into 24hour ‘Information Centers’ in order to better service their readers both in print and online. She quoted from a memo that was circulated to Gannett staff. The memo describes the changes as follows -

“What is it? The Information Center is a way to gather and disseminate news and information across all platforms, 24/7. The Information Center will let us gather the very local news and information that customers want, then distribute it when, where and how our customers seek it. It is the essence of our Vision and Mission and a key element of our Strategic Plan.

“The Information Center, frankly, is the newsroom of the future. It will fulfill today’s needs for a more flexible, broader-based approach to the information gathering process. And it will be platform agnostic: News and information will be delivered to the right media — be it newspapers, online, mobile, video or ones not yet invented — at the right time. Our customers will decide which they prefer.

It appears that Gannett have been trialling the concept in various forms and in 3 locations, a full Information Center has been trialled. The results were clearly encouraging - “What they found is remarkable: Breaking news on the Web and updating for the newspaper draws more people to both those media. Asking the community for help, gets it — and delivers the newspaper into the heart of community conversations once again. Rich and deep databases with local, local information gathered efficiently are central to the whole process. The changes impact all media, and the public has approved. Results include stronger newspapers, more popular Web sites and more opportunities to attract the customers advertisers want”.

As Wired pointed out in an article by Jeff Howe, part of the strategy is to include more user generate content. “The initiative emphasizes four goals: Prioritize local news over national news; publish more user-generated content; become 24-7 news operations, in which the newspapers do less and the websites do much more; and finally, use crowdsourcing methods to put readers to work as watchdogs, whistle-blowers and researchers in large, investigative features”.

AP reported that “Gannett also plans to merge newspaper and online operations of USA Today and other publications. All Gannett newspapers are being urged to make the transition quickly”. So the implications of the change will be wide ranging. The use of non-journalists was said by AP to include “plans to create stories with information from bloggers, people who post in Internet discussion groups and other non-journalists in hopes of winning readers from the Internet, television and other news sources, officials with the company said”.

I’ve talked about this subject before and believe that this type of model is the way forward to counter what Wired call “great challenges”: They note that, “like other newspaper publishing companies, Gannett has watched its share price slide steadily southward, losing 30 percent of its value since January 2004. Although newspapers still post healthy profits, circulation has declined precipitously as more and more readers migrate to the internet, non-journalistic news sources like The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, and on-the-scene videos posted to Youtube.com. Readership figures in the 18- to 34-year-old demographic have been especially dispiriting, and Wall Street has aggressively demanded that papers cut costs and adapt to rapid changes in technology”.

It seems as though the ‘experimental’ model of professionally edited citizen content that Jay Rosen is setting up at Newassignment.net may be overtaken by the mainstream media they seek to shore up and enhance their business models in the face of permanently changing customer habits. Steve Fox at Newassignment speculates on the motivation for the citizen journalists - But, what about these citizen journalists? What motivates citizens to take part in such an enterprise? As one citizen journalist put it, “it helps to have a dog in the race.”

Will we trust the news with an increasing quota of citizen and blogger content, even with professional editing? Probably.

Are we likely to see the quality collapse in the way that Robin Sloane and Matt Thompson suggested in their short film about Googlezon (set in 2014 which is not that far away)?
I certainly hope not.

Thomas Power
Chairman of Ecademy
Mobile: +447976438285

The internet is a very big place and one in which you can find many conflicting opinions on any subject. Social Networks and other user-driven Web 2.0 sites are democratising the power of people to influence the buying patterns and behaviours of their peers. Brands, reminds the FT yesterday, need to be aware of the potential dangers of this phenomenon.

As the FT puts it

“In 1928, the controversial public relations pioneer Edward Bernays wrote: “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.”

Bernays would be horrified to find that today “the masses” can disseminate their own opinions to tens of thousands of viewers via blogs and videos on websites such as YouTube and MySpace.

For companies worried about how consumers and activists view their business practices, these new media channels present a fresh challenge, undermining a traditional command-and-control approach to corporate communication and reputation management.

It should come as no surprise to members of Ecademy that it is now possible to build a campaign using the internet and that the technology is such that campaigns stay around for a very long time - even when they are no longer relevant and have won the argument. The FT points to Nike - “A Google search for “Nike”, now considered a leader in managing labour conditions in its factories, still brings up a “Boycott Nike” website.”

In our book A Friend in Every City we told the story of Jeff Jarvis and ‘Dell Hell’.

Web analysis company Onalytica, in a December, 2005 White Paper ‘Measuring the Influence of Bloggers on Corporate Reputation’(PDF) notes that, “In June, 2005, blogger Jeff Jarvis complained about his new Dell on his blog Buzzmachine. It appeared that despite his paying extra for the machine to be repaired by an engineer at his home, the company was not in fact able to provide this service”

Not, on the face of it, a reason for Dell to be concerned. However, as Jarvis blogged about the problem, “he received hundreds and then thousands of links, emails and comments from other angryDell customers. He became their spokesman.” Onalytica continue the story: “Over the next few days and weeks, other aggrieved customers and interested bloggers discovered and responded to his problems. Dell responded to Jarvis by offering a refund. One of its spokespeople commented that the company had a ‘look, don’t touch’ policy about blog commentary. In July 2005, Dell closed down their popular online customer service forum. Whether coincidentally or not, Dell’s sales stalled.”

Jarvis coined the term ‘Dell Hell’ and a Google search for that phrase on Google brings up Buzzmachine as the second entry

The top entry and several of the top ten are references to Jarvis’ blog. The term ‘Dell Customer Service’ brings Dell’s site back at the top but has many references to Jarvis’ blog in the top 10. This is the power of one individual campaigning against a major
organisation. .

The current search on the term Dell Hell still reveals a series of stories, many linked to Jarvis’ original blog which is still the second entry - and still worth reading as a case study in how not to do it.

The FT uses examples from business, politics and charity to make the point that organisations are going to be the topic of conversations on the net and that engaging with those conversations will often be a way of convincing to least those who are open to rational argument. Some arguments, though, are just not winnable. Those who are using the net to get over their own message are finding it useful. “It does put us on a more level playing field,” says Tracy Frauzel, who manages online communications for Greenpeace UK. “The internet is becoming a conversation among a large group of people rather than just the companies with the biggest budgets.”

The game has changing, the FT notes. They quote Edelman, a public relations firm - “A growing amount of user-generated content relates to issues such as human rights, ethics and the environment. A report published this month by Edelman, found that in 2006, more than 3.5m posts appeared on these subjects - more than one every 10 seconds. More than 75 per cent of these were on environmental issues”. What is more, the odds are stacked against the bigger companies, “Companies right now complain about lack of accountability of NGOs - well, these guys are paragons of accountability compared to a blogger,” says Chris Deri, head of Edelman’s corporate responsibility practice. “A blogger has zero accountability, he has no advertisers, infrastructure or cost model to worry about and nobody’s going to sue him.”

Alan Marks, Nike’s head of media relations, reports the FT , believes the new forms of communication will be powerful both as a means of marketing products and engaging those concerned with corporate responsibility. “We’re learning from what we’re doing as a brand the power of digital to create strong connections with your audience,” he says. “And we’re looking at the same thing for our corporate responsibility audiences - how to use digital more effectively to have real-time conversations.”

MacDonalds head of corporate responsibility, Bob Langert comments, “You have to have a thick skin because you’re entering a dialogue where you have people that will have all sorts of opinions.”

Overall the article suggests ensuring that the corporate online stance and its day to day activities are not out of synch and being more aware of the need to respond quickly to new issues being raised. “… while many companies have policies on how to engage with traditional media and even on blogging, few have any in-house rules covering the kind of instant response required by bloggers and social networks”.

The FT ends with the thought that companies should engage in public discussions where they can and recognise that they are subject to a level of scrutiny previously unknown. “There’s a level of vigilance that didn’t exist two or three years ago,” says Rob Key, chief executive of Converseon, a New York-based digital communications company. “Companies are going to have to continue to be good corporate citizens because if they don’t they’ll be called out on it very rapidly.”

That’s a good thing - isn’t it?

Thomas Power
Chairman of Ecademy
Mobile: +447976438285

As part of the Centurion promotion celebrating 100,000 Ecademy members, we are offering an ebook copy of ‘A Friend in Every City’ to all PowerNetworkers and BlackStar life members entirely free of charge. Why? Because having a friend in every city is still our aim and I’m glad to say that we are beginning to see that happen. Our friends are now spread right across the world.

I get asked why we chose the title A Friend in Every City for a book about Business Networking. Here’s how we saw that in the book itself -

The title of this book ‘A Friend in Every City’ is carefully chosen. It talks about networking - so why didn’t we choose ‘A Contact in Every City’ or ‘A Business Partner in Every City’? It is because we believe that, as friends, we can be contacts and business partners on a much more intimate level.

What do we mean by friends? From childhood, we have made friends at a number of levels. Friends with whom we would walk to the shops or school, smoking friends sharing an illicit cigarette behind the bike sheds, drinking friends to share a night out, traveling friends to holiday with, neighbourhood friends to meet and greet in the street and business friends that we work with or do deals with.

Some friends will be left behind as we grow and develop our path, our journey. Others stay with us as we change, and we find new friends along the way. A few will become close friends with whom we can share intimate experiences. We move through stages of friendship with some - encounter, companionship, comradeship, togetherness, total intimacy - stopping at the place where we feel most comfortable. With others we go straight to intimacy - we feel that we have encountered a ‘kindred spirit’. This mutual resonance can be experienced online, but will be vastly reinforced by face-to- face meeting.

Connecting is what Business Networking is all about. We refer to Ecademy as Social Business Networking because of our belief that building friends through social interaction is a far more effective way of finding the business we need. As we said in the book -

the unique mixture of social and business contact and the third-party rating systems allow a trust to develop between contacts. It might not happen every time but it frequently does - which leads to friendship often before, or without, meeting. As friendship leads to trust, so trust leads to trade. The other members of Ecademy may not be your customers but they will know people who could be. They are your door openers - your route to market.

Some suggestions for finding more friends this week -

Have a great networking week.

Thomas Power
Chairman of Ecademy
Mobile: +447976438285

The New York Times yesterday featured a new offering from Dun and Bradstreet Business Research Unit, Hoovers, in the Business Networking space.

The article, by Bob Tedeschi, begins

SOCIAL networking sites captivate teenagers and young adults, but they repel professionals — and not just because they don’t want to be seen surfing MySpace before the big staff meeting.

Networking sites aimed at the working crowd, like LinkedIn, Spoke and Jigsaw, have failed to draw a fraction of the number of users on MySpace or Facebook, analysts said, because they are not yet easy or useful enough to improve workers’ performance.

Hoovers have joined forces with software provider Visible Path to challenge for a leading position in what the NYT accepts is ‘a cluttered marketplace’ with “a broadened array of services from the category leader, LinkedIn“.

Nevertheless, some analysts are predicting that Hoovers can take a place in that market. “This won’t knock Google out of the headlines, but for this category it’s a breakthrough service,” said Chuck Richard, an analyst with Outsell Inc., an information industry consultancy in Burlingame, Calif.

Despite the NYT assertion that the service was being previewed from yesterday on the Hoovers site, it wasn’t available and it was possible just to register for involvement at some unspecified time through Visible Path (now also on the Hoovers site). So I can’t comment on the functionality of the site as yet, other than to quote the NYT description of how the site will work and to include a graphic from the Hoovers site that may (or may not) add clarity.

Those who sign up for Connect can download software from Visible Path that makes note of whom a user messages via e-mail and how frequently (it does not monitor the content of the communications). The service tracks activities within Microsoft Outlook, the dominant business e-mail system, and will eventually include Web-based e-mail systems like Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo Mail.

From there, Connect builds a meta-network of sorts to determine how one is connected to other businesspeople across the country. When a user tries to find information about, say, Microsoft, he is greeted with a box saying: “Connect to Microsoft through someone you know.” Visible Path’s software maps the contacts between the user and workers in various parts of the company, then determines who in the network would be most likely to introduce the user to a given executive.

This all supposes that enough users have fed contacts into the system to make such connections possible. Paul Pellman, an executive vice president of Hoover’s, said that because the site was promoting the service prominently to its two million monthly users, establishing a strong base should not be difficult.
Assuming the right contacts exist at the right company, the service sends an e-mail message to that person — whose identity remains shielded from the outside user — identifying the person who is seeking an introduction, and offering the option to help or decline. Only if the invitation is accepted will the intermediary’s identity be revealed to the user.

Hoovers and Visible Path claim that they meet the main need of business networking, to control access to the contacts, something that LinkedIn and other Business Networking also do, “but the others do not put the networking tools in a place where they are most likely to be used. LinkedIn and other online networking services, he said, are not integrated into mainstream business applications, so it requires effort and forethought to switch over to the networking sites”, notes Mr Richard. “Visible Path found a way to put their content into a tool that people use, so you don’t have to leave what you’re doing to use it,” he said. “I use services like LinkedIn, Plaxo, Spoked, Jigsaw, but they’re just adjuncts to my Rolodex.”

Do LinkedIn see Hoovers as a threat? “Konstantin Guericke, a vice president at LinkedIn, was undaunted at the prospect of competing with Hoover’s and Visible Path. “It’s a good idea, but you have to provide incentives for people to participate,” he said. “Otherwise, it’s the sound of one hand clapping.”"

That, to me, is the key to Business Networking. You need to have contacts but, and this is where, I suspect, our approach at Ecademy remains different, you can’t always know who you need to know until you know them. It is often the unexpected contacts that yield the most benefit to all involved. Ecademy is Social Business Networking.

At the risk of starting a whole new debate, that’s why I still firmly believe in meeting as many people as possible and finding out about them.

On the face of it, Hoovers won’t do that but it may find a niche in Corporate Networking, if the downloaded software and the access to company email systems is accepted by corporate community.

How do you feel about having your email connections analysed and used?

Is Guericke right that the really critical connections happen on the phone anyway - or has that changed?

Is Hoovers.com the future of Online Business Networking?

Thomas Power
Chairman of Ecademy
Mobile: +447976438285
Co-author - A Friend in Every City

Online “communities,” where people with similar interests can post material such as blog items, are emerging as an increasingly popular way for companies to market products and connect with customers. The Campbell’s Soup Web site, for instance, has a section where customers can trade recipes.

Is that a quote from me, going on about social networks and brands again? Well, no, it comes from a Wall Street Journal article about LiveWorld, a company that provides community development for brands. So they would say so, too, wouldn’t they?

The WSJ interviewed Peter Friedman, CEO of LiveWorld. Friedman, 51 years old, founded LiveWorld in April 1996 after working as vice president and general manager of Apple Computer’s Internet/Online Services business unit, overseeing the creation of services like AppleLink, Apple’s global marketing and customer support service.

In setting the scene, the WSJ reporter comments, “LiveWorld has built a business helping companies, universities and other organizations set up these online networks. Clients include Campbell Soup, HBO, eBay and Tulane University — and now TV Guide. Madison Avenue’s growing recognition of the importance of online communities recently prompted ad-holding firm WPP Group to form a joint venture with LiveWorld called LiveWorld-WPP. The partnership will make it easier for LiveWorld to expand its business, as well as enhancing WPP’s credibility in the Internet world”. I mentioned LiveWorld WPP in a previous blog on this subject.

Some quotes from Friedman’s interview.

“When we create these branded communities, these private-label communities, we are a little bit ahead of those sites (MySpace, Facebook and Xanga) because we are deeper into creating an immersive branding experience…. It is not like a brand should do what we do or just go advertise on the social networks. Brands really need to create an online-community social-network brand strategy that uses each of these elements”.

“We did a study with McKinsey that showed that people who participate in an online community, if it is done well, return to a site nine times as often and five times as long…that is a 45 times increase in loyalty…”.

“This is not a mousetrap that you build it, and they just come. You have to be proactive and participate with your audience”.

“One thing we tell our customers is if they are going to say something bad about your brand on your community, you can be sure they are saying it someplace else. You might as well get your arms around it, address it, listen to it and know what it is”.

“You want to create a culture in the community that is consistent with your brand goals. What you are trying to do is attract people and give them cues in what they will do. … So you are creating a sense of context and culture. Again, it has to be very much engaged with what the users are about, why are they there. But people want to go to a party that has a theme…. The really critical thing is to be clear what the community is about and to manage it to that”.

There’s much more in the article which is on LiveWorld’s website. I like Peter Friedman’s approach and philosophy. Simply creating a community at arms length will not be enough, it will need to be integrated throughout the organisation.

The dangers of simply acting as a cuckoo and infiltrating the public Social Networks is demonstrated in a blog by Donna Bogatin on Digital Micro-Markets. Her case is simple, that the constant repetition of ‘Users are in Control’ when talking about sites like MySpace and Facebook, especially when major corporate players like NBC get involved is just not credible.

“Users are in control? Of what?

Are non-paying users in control of the multi-million dollar online infrastructures that host their MySpace and Facebook profiles for free? Of course not.

Are amateur content “creators” in control of the professionally produced, copyright mainstream content that they depend on for their “mashups” and “remixes”? Only by design.”

She quotes Ross Levinsohn, FIM (Fox Interactive Media) President on the value of MySpace “friends”- ”

I asked Levinsohn how user-generated content could be “king” for FIM as his 100 million MySpace friends are only commanding “junk” CPMs. I pointed out that I had written about one particular MySpace friend - Sexxy Sangria-and noted that even Google shows little interest in trying to sell ads against her very friendly profile.

Levinsohn replied that even at low CPMs there is a great value in an aggregated billions of impressions. He also expressed enthusiasm for “immersing” professionally produced content within the viral MySpace experience.

She concludes, “At Facebook, MySpace and NBC are users “in control,” or are users being controlled by multi-million dollar corporate brand messages?”

It is clear to me that this is the reason that brands must develop their own networks rather than depending on only having a presence on the major public Social Nets. They do need to do both.

Do LiveWorld have the right approach?
Is Donna Bogatin right?

Thomas Power
Chairman of Ecademy
Mobile: +447976438285
Co-author - A Friend in Every City

It will fuel the arguments about a repeat of the 2000 bubble and subsequent crash but both the Dow Jones and the FTSE indices have reached record highs. The main difference between the two indices is that the Dow, at 12,127.88 on Tuesday was over 400 points ahead of its previous record set in January 2000 at the height of the DotCom boom, whereas the FTSE at 6,214.60 points, is at its highest level since February 13, 2001, post crash.

Those who know me, know that I love this sort of stuff, so I make no apologies for the detailed content of this article.

A number of factors lifted the Dow on Monday and Tuesday according to reports.

The Washington Post highlighted “optimism about the spending outlook at Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and the belief that falling gasoline prices will help boost consumer spending”. They also noted that “Google Inc. rallied to a new all-time high of $484.64, following the Web search company’s quarterly profit report last week” (of which more in a moment).

According to the Post, “Stocks have been on a gradual ascent since mid-July when major indexes began moving up from lows in May and June. Also, with crude prices falling, investors have grown optimistic that the decline could help consumer spending”.

On Tuesday, reported USA Today reporter, Matt Krantz, the Dow hit further high but “ investors were hardly ebullient the day before the Federal Reserve was expected to make a decision on any changes to short-term interest rates”. In the event, the Fed held interest rates at 5.25%.

Activity in other indices told its own story, according to Krantz. The broader Standard & Poor’s 500 index gained just 0.36 points to 1377.38 to increase its 2006 gain to 10.3% whilst , “the tech-heavy Nasdaq composite index lost 10.72 points to 2344.84. The Nasdaq is still up 6.3% this year”. He quotes Stephen Sachs, trader at Rydex Investments, “Shares of big companies, including those in the Dow, continue to win over investors who want something more stable as the economy’s growth moderates. If you’re uncertain about the economy’s growth prospects, you want to be in the big-caps, which are able to weather that storm better than small,”

Meanwhile in London, reports the Gulf Times, the “FTSE 100 index of leading shares closed 0.52% higher at 6,214.60 points, its highest level since February 13, 2001”. Other European markets were also higher.

Amongst the companies reporting in past two weeks have been Microsoft, Google and Yahoo. There was a marked contrast in fortunes with both Microsoft and Google growing well whilst Yahoo had a challenging third quarter with 37% lower net revenues for Q3 2006 than for Q3 2005 on increased sales.

Microsoft yesterday reported first quarter earnings ahead of forecast. ZDNet reported. “The software giant said it earned $3.48 billion, or 35 cents a share, on revenue of $10.81 billion, for the three months ended Sept. 30. That compares with earnings of $3.14 billion, or 29 cents a share, on revenue of $9.74 billion for the same quarter a year ago. The year-ago earnings figure included legal expenses that amounted to 2 cents a share”.

The company said it now expects revenue in the range of $50 billion to $50.9 billion and per-share earnings in the range of $1.43 to $1.46. In July, Microsoft had said to expect revenue between $49.7 billion and $50.7 billion and diluted earnings per share between $1.43 and $1.47. That included a boost in spending as the company invests in both the launch of Vista and Office 2007, as well as in its online and other emerging businesses.

Microsoft said earnings and sales were boosted by strong responses to the products that Microsoft has launched in recent months, including the Xbox 360 and SQL Server.

Google also enjoyed a positive quarter. The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Kentucky last Friday reported Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt saying that strong user growth and improvements in the quality of its search technology and the ads it shows drove strong third-quarter results for the company. “Business is very, very good here at Google, and we had an exceptional quarter in all respects, especially in international,” Schmidt said on a conference call with Wall Street analysts.

The Courier-Journal notes that Google reported third-quarter results that exceeded Wall Street expectations both in profit and revenue. Its results also displayed little sign of margin pressure from rising expenses, though the company has warned in the past that it expected its expenses would grow faster than revenue as it invests aggressively in new initiatives. In the latest demonstration of the Internet search leader’s phenomenal financial firepower, the company reported net income of $733.4 million, compared with $381.2 million a year earlier. Revenue rose 70 percent to $2.69 billion.

Yahoo, meanwhile, had a disappointing third quarter. As Beta News puts it “last week, the question many analysts were asking openly was, why didn’t Yahoo purchase YouTube when it had the chance? Today, investors are asking instead whether that chance ever really existed”.

While Yahoo continues to make more money — in fact, $1.58 billion, which is 19% more than it did during the third quarter of 2005 — its cost of revenues and operating expenses rose, contributing to 37% lower net revenues for Q3 2006 than for Q3 2005. Net income for the quarter just ended was only $158 million, down from $253 million for this quarter a year ago.

Yahoo chairman and CEO Terry Semel just came right out with it yesterday afternoon: “While we are tremendously excited about many things happening at Yahoo!, we are not satisfied with our third quarter financial performance. We continued to grow and believe that we outperformed the graphical market but not at a rate that met our expectations.”

But there was a hope for the future – “On Tuesday (last week), Yahoo let it “leak” that Project Panama (their new ad platform) was now out of the basement, and operational. This gave at least a hopeful rhythm to the company’s fourth-quarter guidance, not unlike hearing ragtime jazz at a Louisiana funeral”.

It looks to me as if the growth in markets is set to continue, and the inevitable growth of both Microsoft and Google also seems set for the future. Maybe Yahoo’s third quarter will turn out to be a blip, but there is a view that they have lost their way and that Google can only strengthen their lead in the search market whilst extending their business into other areas – like Social Networking.

Time will tell, but there must be intense activity at Yahoo at the moment.

I’m in Bucharest this week for Bizdays, a major conference organised by Business Media Group and Lucian Despoiu at the World Trade Centre. Penny is here with me and spoke on Monday. You can listen to our podcast from Romania here.

I’m due to speak today and will be sharing a platform with a really nice, Canadian guy called Jeremy Wright. Jeremy is President of B5media, “a blogging network by bloggers from around the world covering the subjects they are most passionate about” which has just been funded to the tune of US$ 2 million.

B5media is a truly virtual company. Jeremy is based in Toronto and his three partners, Duncan Riley, Darren Rowse and Shai Coggins are all based in Australia. The organisation was formed in August, 2005 when three of the four partners (Jeremy, Duncan and Darren) decided to pool their blog networks as “some sort of ‘advertising alliance’”. In a blog at the end of August, 2005, Jeremy wrote the following -

Me, being me, wondered why it couldn’t be something bigger. Specifically, I pressed really hard for this new ‘thing’ (no name yet) to be a blog network where we all pitched our blogs in.

This idea eventually became too complex, as it was hard to figure out how people could still own their own blogs while still being part of the network.

But, the core of it lived on: we all believed that there was not only space for a new blogging network, but also demand for it. The big blogging networks (Gawker, Weblogs Inc and 9rules) are covering a lot of topic areas, but we believe there’s potential not only for more topics, but also for covering them in new and exciting ways.

Out of the three networks listed above, our model follows closest to the Weblogs Inc model. We aren’t Gawker, which is totally a commercially driven, tabloid-esque company. And we aren’t 9rules, which is a loosely aligned network of blogs which cooperate as they see fit.

We’re a network of people.

So far, Jeremy hasn’t met his fellow directors but will be finally doing so in the next few weeks.

On the 4th October, 2006, B5Media announced that they had “raised US$2-million of equity financing in a transaction co-lead by Brightspark Ventures and J. L. Albright Venture Partners. The funding will strengthen the company’s network of bloggers to create greater value for readers and advertisers.”

In that announcement, Jeremy commented, “There are tremendous growth opportunities and we plan to expand strategically to appeal to a broad market. We are working in a fantastic industry. In the year since we launched, we have made major progress attracting readers to our high-quality content, which is produced by an engaged and excited group of bloggers. The extra resources now available to us will only increase these areas as key strengths of b5media going forward.”

Rick Segal of J. L. Albright Venture Partners explains why he invested in B5media in his blog. He doesn’t see blogging as “the end game”. “What is different today are the habits of a generation coming right up my proverbial tailpipe. They share a passion for information, the sharing of information, and most importantly the critical examination of information as a community. We’ve seen famous people busted for saying/doing dumb things, amazing ideas get accepted lightning fast, and unknown issues become major mainstream causes virtually overnight”.

Segal sees Techcrunch as an example of achieving authority in their sector and expects that B5media and their increasing blogger ranks can grow “their respective authority and thus increase the networks value”. He cites Doc Searls (of Cluetrain Manifesto fame) as another inflencer in his thinking about the intention economy.

“The general thinking on Doc’s thesis applied here is fairly simple. When I sign up for a blog about a specific topic, there is an intent by me to obtain that knowledge. With that knowledge comes the ability to focus economic offers that may be of interest to me. I own a Volvo, read a Volvo blog, and find offers (ads if you will) about things about/for/related to Volvo of interest and not necessarily noise. I love digital photography, listen to smart people and do read the ads when I’m immersed in that hobby.

All of this translates into an opportunity to grow a business that is about the intention economy. While many will dismiss this as just blather about making money with ads, I believe there is more to it and b5 represents a good opportunity (and great team) to test out/play out some of these ideas.”

Jeremy, of course, has his own personal blog and has a book - Blog Marketing published and available.

I’m looking forward to hearing what he has to say to the conference.

Thomas Power
Chairman of Ecademy
Mobile: +447976438285
Co author - A Friend in Every City

It never ceases to amaze me how much time, effort and knowledge members of the Ecademy community are prepared to contribute. You are here blogging, running clubs, acting as buddies and mentors and helping each other quietly in the background. I’ve often wondered why that is and have come across a variety of theories to explain it. Whilst surfing one of my favourite sites, Wikipedia, last night, I came across a very good explanation based on the work of Peter Kollock and Marc Smith. I’d like to share that here and maybe get a discussion going about YOUR reasons for supporting communities.

Peter Kollock (1999) researched motivations for contributing to online communities. In ” The Economies of Online Cooperation: Gifts and Public Goods in Cyberspace“, he outlines three motivations (Kollock:227) that do not rely on altruistic behavior on the part of the contributor:

Anticipated Reciprocity

Increased Reputation

Sense of efficacy

There is another motivation, implicit in the above, which Marc Smith mentions in his 1992 thesis: Voices from the WELL: The Logic of the Virtual Commons:

Communion, as Smith terms it, or “sense of community” as it is referred to in social psychology.

Wikpedia then goes on to expand on each of the four reasons -

Anticipated Reciprocity
A person is motivated to contribute valuable information to the group in the expectation that one will receive useful help and information in return. Indeed, there is evidence that active participants in online communities get more responses faster to questions than unknown participants (Kollock 178).

Increased Reputation
Reputation is important to online contributors such that, in general, individuals want recognition for their contributions, some have called this Egoboo. Kollock outlines the importance of reputation online: “Rheingold (1993) in his discussion of the WELL (an early online community) lists the desire for prestige as one of the key motivations of individuals’ contributions to the group. To the extent this is the concern of an individual, contributions will likely be increased to the degree that the contribution is visible to the community as a whole and to the extent there is some recognition of the person’s contributions. … the powerful effects of seemingly trivial markers of recognition (e.g. being designated as an “official helper”) has been commented on in a number of online communities…”

One of the key ingredients of encouraging a reputation is to allow contributors to be known or not to be anonymous. The following example, from Meyers (1989) study of the computer underground illustrates the power of reputation. When involved in illegal activities, computer hackers must protect their personal identities with pseudonyms. If hackers use the same nicknames repeatedly, this can help the authorities to trace them. Nevertheless, hackers are reluctant to change their pseudonyms regularly because the status associated with a particular nickname would be lost.

Profiles and reputation are clearly evident in online communities today. Amazon.com is a case in point, as all contributors are allowed to create profiles about themselves and as their contributions are measured by the community, their reputation increases. Myspace.com encourages elaborate profiles for members where they can share all kinds of information about themselves including what music they like, their heroes, etc. In addition to this, many communities give incentives for contributing. For example, many forums award you points for posting. Members can spend these points in a virtual store. eBay is an example of an online community where reputation is very important because it is used to measure the trustworthiness of someone you potentially will do business with. With eBay, you have the opportunity to rate your experience with someone and they, likewise, can rate you. This has an effect on the reputation score.

Sense of Efficacy
Individuals may contribute valuable information because the act results in a sense of efficacy, that is, a sense that they have had some effect on this environment. There is well-developed research literature that has shown how important a sense of efficacy is (e.g. Bandura 1995), and making regular and high quality contributions to the group can help individuals believe that they have an impact on the group and support their own self-image as an efficacious person.

Wikipedia is a prime example of an online community that gives contributors a sense of efficacy. Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia which uses online software to enable anyone to create new articles and change any article in the encyclopedia. The changes you make are immediate, obvious, and available to the world.

Sense of Community
People, in general, are fairly social beings and it is motivating to many people to be responded to directly for their contributions. Most online communities enable this by allowing people to reply back to contributions (i.e. many Blogs allow comments from readers, you can reply back to forum posts, etc). Again, using Amazon.com, other users can rate whether your product review was helpful or not. Granted, there is some overlap between increasing reputation and gaining a sense of community, however, it seems safe to say that there is some overlapping areas between all four motivators.

I make no apologies for reproducing such a large part of a Wikpedia entry here. I think that the insight and understanding that it contains is awesome and it should help many of us who contribute to Ecademy and to other communities to better understand what motivates us to do that.

Whilst personal gain must be somewhere in the equation, I strongly believe that most of the activity in Ecademy, especially that in the clubs, is based on giving simply because we can. Maybe reciprocity, reputation, efficacy and community explain why that is. In smaller communities like villages, people still help each other for all of those reasons. To some extent that has been lost in larger population centres, though community organisations can help to bring it back. I believe that we all need community to be complete. That’s why we’ve spent 8 years building a community like Ecademy.

Does the Wikipedia article cover your reasons for contributing to communities. Whether it does or doesn’t, I’d like to hear your views on community, on giving unconditionally and on any other issues that this article raises.

As more people get involved in global online networks like MySpace, do we still need locally based communities as well?

Thomas Power
Chairman of Ecademy
Mobile: +447976438285
Co-author - A Friend in Every City

The FT is reporting today that a new Social Networking site has been created by its users. Islandoo.com

When Stephen Lambert, the creator of the television series Shipwrecked, urged wannabe TV stars to audition for the reality show earlier this year, he had no idea what he was starting.

The chief creative officer of RDF Media, the television production group behind programmes such as Wife Swap and Supernanny, decided to create a website where they could sign up.

However, the internet site, Islandoo.com, created only last month, has taken on a life of its own. Thanks to the numbers of youngsters who have uploaded pictures and videos, the site has developed into a full-blown social networking site, with participants who heard of it through word of mouth messaging each other and reacting to one another’s comments.

The FT reports that since its launch it has collected almost 18,000 profiles, 1.5m comments from users and almost 10m page views. “While many television programmes have forums and chat rooms, very few have profiles of the users allowing the photo and video uploading and messaging that characterise the social networking phenomenon”.

RDF are apparently planning to take the show and the Website to the US, with the hope, I suspect, that it will build a huge viral effect.

Explaining the merits of Islandoo.com, Mr Lambert says: “With a chat room, there is mainly one public conversation with everybody. Here people get to know each other between themselves.”

Nothing very new in what is happening there. Social Networking is all about “people getting to know each other”. What is new and very different is that a new site, with a purpose that wasn’t to create yet another Social Networking site, has been taken over by its users and turned into just that. Not that RDF media are in the slightest concerned by that - just look at the publicity effect of joining the MySpace media effect.

Two quotes that the FT use are worth investigating further.

Sam Sethi of TechCrunchUK, the technology blogging site, adds: “The site mixes the social network aspect of MySpace, instant messaging of MSN and YouTube videos in a single application.”

.
Take a look at the site and it will become apparent, I think, that it is nothing new. Maybe what we are seeing here is not a new use of technology, simply the migration of a youinger, less loyal, audience to the latest place that seems to be ‘cool’. MySpace’s success was built on gaining auidience from other sites and a migration away to a newer, trendier site is frequently mentioned as a potential cause of their ultimate demise.

The second -

Janet Goldsmith, co-managing director of Mediatique media consultancy, suggests that in future many other television broadcasters will seek to follow Shipwrecked’s example by creating website communities to ensure a buzz around a new show. She says: “Technology has caught up with what people want to do, and it’s facilitating other worlds. Creating a community around a programme brand across other platforms is absolutely essential.”

.

She is right that TV broadcasters will build communities around new shows. However this is already happening on MySpace and YouTube. TV programmes and Hollywood films are taking profiles on such sites and becoming ‘friends’ of the other members. This may be the first dedicated TV programme website to ‘go social’ but it certainly isn’t the first piece of entertainment to use social capital to build an audience.

The trend, however, is likely to continue so long as the TV companies apply ingenuity and innovation to the problem. If they simply copy each other, the process may stall and move elsewhere. What is clear is that the audience is sufficiently motivated to create its own opportunities for social networking. That makes it difficult to predict and to control. Business, if it wants to reach this audience, will have to adjust to new rules of engagement.

Where entertainment leads, other brands will follow. ‘Going social’ is a trend that is beginning to find its time and place.

Thomas Power
Chairman of Ecademy
Mobile: +447976438285
Co-author - A Friend in Every City