Twitter's User Problem

Twitter announced its latest earnings this week, and the one thing that stood out during the call was the lack of any significant user growth. In addition to sending Twitter’s stock prices downwards, the revelation served to highlight the social platform’s biggest problem: its inability to attract a broad user base of the sort that might prove useful to the television networks they’ve spent so much time and effort trying to attract.

Adding insult to injury, Twitter released its first ever TV commercials on Tuesday night during Game One of the Mets-Royals World Series and the spots, which focused on Twitter’s new Moments feature, were routinely trashed. “Confusing” and “Incomprehensible” were two of the more printable epithets.

While many observers blame Twitter’s problems on the fact that it is can seem impenetrable for newcomers, I think the problem is more basic than that. I think Twitter’s problem lies in the fact that only a certain percentage of the population is comfortable putting their thoughts out there publicly and there’s nothing the platform can do to get them over that psychological barrier.
So rather than fight that problem, Twitter needs to roll with it. They need to make it easy for people to become “read-only” members, creating a version of the app that allows them to read tweets and possibly favorite them, without any pressure to retweet or respond.

That means accepting that for many users, Twitter will be a broadcast medium rather than a social one.

I don’t see that as a problem however, as given the large number of celebrities and media figures already on the platform, Twitter already functions that way for many users.
What’s more, this setup will make Twitter a more attractive platform for TV networks, who are looking to use it as a way to drive tune-in. By giving users a way to see all the second screen content a show is putting out, while receiving notifications each time their favorite shows and/or actors update their accounts, Twitter can give TV networks the type of delivery system they’re looking for.

This will be a win for both parties, for as I outlined in my recent report on Social TV, Twitter is currently headed for a significant decline as linear viewing tapers off (making a real time platform less relevant) and as networks increasingly see social as a paid platform (making their stagnant user base less attractive.)

A Change Has Got To Come

A read-only platform does not have to mean the end of Twitter as a social platform for those who want it. But if Twitter is serious about growing its user base, it will need to become proactive about creating a user experience that appeals to a broader base of users. This is critical, as one of the frequent complaints about Twitter that I hear from network executives is that the current user base consists of dozens of niche “villages” created by specific types of users, making it hard for programs who don’t hit those demographics to get any sort of traction on Twitter. A broader, more accessible platform will eliminate that issue.

To learn more about the future of Social TV, check out my new report at TDG Research

5 Ways Sports Rights Holders Can Make Periscope And Meerkat Work For Them

Originally published at TV[R]EV on August 20, 2015 


With the fall sports season fast approaching, we thought it was worthwhile to take another look at the way sports leagues were dealing with the streaming services Periscope and Meerkat. The two apps burst onto the scene last spring and put a scare into sports rights holders, especially after the MayPac fight pay-per-view event, where tens of thousands of viewers were using the apps to watch the fight for free.  Shortly thereafter, all the major sports leagues banned fans from using the apps at games, with the NFL even banning teams from running their own official streams.

While we think that rights holders do have a cause for concern when people are filming a $100 PPV event off their TV screens, we think they are missing a real opportunity to use these increasingly popular apps to engage with fans who are at the game. While pirating Pay-Per-View off the TV set is an issue, we don’t see fans broadcasting from inside the stadium as a real concern. In addition to the issue of spotty in-stadium Wi-Fi, logic would seem to indicate that a fan with a smartphone is not going to get a very clean video of a game, certainly nothing anyone else would want to watch. The far more likely use case is for fans to use these streaming services to take videos of themselves at the game.

So rather than ban Periscope and Meerkat from the stadium, we’ve got 5 ways teams and leagues can use them to increase fan engagement:

1. Allow fans to stream, but give them a place to save and share their clips for possible inclusion on a highlights or scoreboard reel
It is possible to save the streams as regular video, which makes for easier upload to your site. This will keep their video within your ecosystem where you maintain rights to it . On a practical level, this means setting up an alert for anyone who is streaming from the arena and tweeting at them to let them know about the upload.

2. Phrase the instructions to make it clear that you are talking about short clips  
We’re not talking about streaming the entire game of course. Encourage fans to take videos of themselves and their reactions before, during and after the game, with an eye towards being able to use them in a highlights clip or on the scoreboard.

3. Credit the fans whose clips you do use 
Make sure your official social media accounts give them a shout-out. This will make them feel appreciated and chances are good they will promote the link to your official highlights reel. This will also encourage other fans to take part.

4. Promote your official Periscope or Meerkat account
sports teams on periscope
Use it to focus on fans during the game, with an eye towards sharing the clips on the Jumbotron or on a post-game highlights reel. That will go a long way towards making fans feel like they are a part of the action. Some scenarios you can look to capture include:

• Pre-game  prep (tailgating, face-painting, traveling)
• Fan Predictions for the game
• Fan reactions between innings or between quarters
• Shout-outs and “pump ups” for their favorite players

5. Come down hard on anyone streaming the live TV broadcast
That’s where piracy becomes a real issue and where it’s possible for someone with a high end camera to do a good job of recreating the broadcast you paid good money for, cutting into your ad revenue and otherwise interfering with your profitability.  Twitter (Periscope’s parent company) and Meerkat have both promised to be responsive to illegal streams, so let’s take them at their word for now.

Conclusion

Embracing your streaming fans and making them part of the family, giving them a purpose and rewarding them for helping to promote your teams is a far better strategy than issuing an outright ban and can really work to boost engagement. That said, it will still be important to monitor how Periscope and Meerkat develop and how quickly fans adopt these live streaming apps.

Buy This Book

At Amazon: Paperback  or  Kindle 

Introducing Whipclip, Your New Favorite 2nd Screen App

Originally published at 2nd Screen Society on March 26, 2015

While the industry may still be salivating over livestreaming in general and Meerkat in particular, a new app called Whipclip may well steal the thunder away from them. Designed to allow users to (legally) share high definition clips from current TV shows, WhipClip is going to be a force to be reckoned with.

The legal part is huge: Whipclip is partnering with a host of major TV networks, including ABC, CBS, Comedy Central, FOX, VH1, A+E Network, Lifetime, Bloomberg, OWN and Turner in order to launch the first legitimate TV clipping service.

It’s huge because not only are those networks making their programs available to Whipclippers, they’re actively working with the app to make previously aired shows searchable.

And therein lies the magic of Whipclip: Not only can you go in and find and edit a clip from a show you are currently watching, you can go in and search for a particular term or phrase or name from a sizable back catalog.

That means a user can go to the Bob’s Burgers page and search for “Tina” and turn up every scene featuring that character. Or they can get more specific and search for “Tina smells like ketchup” to turn up that particular scene.

The app serves up a one-minute clip, which the user can then edit down to 30 seconds using a very intuitive clipping tool. Searches can also be for real people, so that an actor’s manager can easily call up episodes of Late Night, Oprah and other shows the actor has appeared on and send them out to fans and/or interested production companies.

That’s pretty revolutionary, as Whipclips can be shared across a range of social networks: Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Pinterest (to start) as well as via email and text message, easily spreading the word to millions of fans.

The implications of all that sharing from a data perspective are tremendous: networks will be able to keep track of fans’ favorite moments in a show and understand which segments resonated with which demographic and on which platform.

In addition, they’ll be able to use Whipclip as a promotional vehicle, sending out the clips they want fans to share in the hopes of turning a popular moment into a meme.

Whipclip also works as a discovery tool, ranking the most shared moments so that users can easily see what everyone else is sharing. This feature then provides valuable data to the networks, who can use it to predict how well new shows are resonating with fans by the number of clips that wind up in the top lists.

The app launches today (Thursday, March 26th) in the App Store, and as part of the launch, Whipclip has partnered with Comedy Central and Justin Bieber so viewers can clip their favorite moments from the live broadcast of the “Comedy Central Roast of Justin Bieber” this, Monday, March 30 at 10 p.m. Whipclip users will be able to create customized clips of the #BieberRoast and then share them to their social networks, the first time a televised event has been shared in real-time.

Really ambitious users can also Meerkat themselves Whipclipping moments from the Bieber Roast for total Social Television Synergy.

We will be keeping our eye on this promising second screen app as it rolls out and reporting back on the unique ways fans and marketers are using it.

Facebook In 2015 and The Road Ahead

Co-written with Jesse Redniss, this was originally published at ProMaxDBA on March 26, 2015

It’s 2015, time to turn on Facebook TV. Over the top, personalized and in your stream. Just a few months into the year and the noise surrounding Facebook’s drive to video has already intensified.

When we last posted back in January, we were seeing major media companies utilizing Facebook’s native video player, and ending their strategy of posting video content solely on YouTube, a trend brought to life by the astonishing fact that Facebook’s native video views had jumped from 1 billion a day in September 2014 to 3 billion a day at the end of January 2015.

So let’s take a look at what our friends in Zuckistan have been up to:

The Livestream Experience

Livestreaming is what all the cool kids are doing these days and Facebook getting a piece of the action. For the second year in a row, Facebook is partnering with HBO to host the red carpet live stream of the Game of Thrones U.S. premiere. They are creating a fully interactive experience, with the show’s stars answering fan questions through Facebook and sibling platforms Instagram’s networks.

This is an attempt to move the social TV focus away from Twitter to Facebook, a platform that has traditionally served as a place for users to share thoughts with their friends. Opening up the platform — and the chatter — to the general public is a BRaVe move and Facebook will have to actively encourage users to think of them in this way.

The fact that the Game Of Thrones event is a Facebook exclusive will help too: Facebook put a lot of effort into their Super Bowl and Oscars experiences, but neither was a smash hit and rival Twitter still seemed to be getting the lion’s share of attention. This time though, there is no Twitter, so Throners should be flocking to Facebook. It may not be Meerkat, but it’s the only place to watch the livestream.

This Just In

The other big video news out of Facebook is that they will be running original programming from MSNBC and other news organizations. In fact, MSNBC’s two newest programs will debut on Facebook before they appear on TV or anywhere else.

The trick here will to be to get users to start thinking of Facebook as a media outlet, not just a social network. That’s easier said than done: how do you train people who are used to going to Facebook to see how many “Likes” their latest vacation photo got to go there to watch MSNBC? And while the content is still short form (one or two minutes at most) the habit is a new one.

How Facebook surfaces the videos will be of interest: are they at the top of subscribers newsfeeds every morning or do they just appear randomly in the newsfeed according to the algorithm? The former will let viewers know that this is something new and different and should be better at getting them to change their behavior.

This Too: News From F8

Facebook made several newsworthy announcements at this week’s F8 conference. We will topline the highlights here and explore them in depth in the weeks to come.

Embeddable Video: Now you can embed Facebook videos directly onto a third party site. This will be huge for spreading clips on fan blogs and news sites and presents a real challenge to YouTube who has made excellent use of this functionality for years.

Embeddable Comments: Along with embeddable video, users can leave comments on those videos on third party sites using their Facebook IDs, said comments coming back to Facebook to complete the Circle of Life.

Messenger Apps: 3rd parties can create their own apps using Facebook Messenger and use that platform as their main way to communicate with customers. Look for this to be a big OTT play and part of a log-in-with-Facebook data capture play too.

Spherical Videos: While not widely understood, these immersive multi-camera videos work with Oculus and immersive videos equal immersive fan experiences so they will be getting a lot of attention in the months to come.

YouTube vs Facebook: Discovery

Last week, Wall Street research firm, Nomura, forecast that by 2017, Facebook will reach $3.8 billion in video advertising revenue while YouTube will be at $8.5 billion. So while a Facebook victory does not appear imminent, the battle is just heating up.

The biggest distinction between Facebook and YouTube is in terms of intent and discovery. Users go to YouTube with the sole intent of watching videos and search for videos on their own, creating their own personlized viewing experiences.

Facebook, on the other hand, curates videos for their users: the videos show up in the Newsfeed based on what the Mighty Algorithm decides that particular user might want to see. There’s no real way to search for video: you either watch what they give you or you don’t.

In many ways, the difference between the two services is like the difference between Spotify and Pandora. YouTube is like Spotify: while there are channels and pre-selected playlists, the beauty of the service is in being able to do your own thing and choose the exact videos you want to see.

With Facebook, like Pandora, you are relying on the service to curate for you. If they’re accurate most of the time, you’ll stick with them, as it’s a lot easier than sorting through things yourself.

Is one model superior? Not really, and we predict most people will make use of both, depending on their mood.

YouTube vs Facebook: Interface and Innovation

The other difference between YouTube and Facebook is around the interface: Facebook keeps tweaking theirs while YouTube still looks a lot like 2004.

That may be changing however, as the platform recently rolled out a “cards” function; the plan is for this new feature to eventually replace annotations. It’s much slicker, way less 90’s and shows us that YouTube is indeed interested in keeping up with the Joneses. Our suggestion for Phase 2: get rid of the anonymous comments, home of some of the internet’s nastiest trolls and a reason why millions of people posted their ALS Ice Bucket Challenge videos directly to Facebook.

Not to be outdone on the innovation front, Facebook just launched a product called Topic Data in conjunction with social data firm, DataSift, The product taps into Facebook’s firehose of data to produce anonymized reports of what’s being discussed on the platform. This deeper insight into what’s being buzzed about gives marketers and advertisers a better idea of the type of content to use to target their demographic, making Facebook a more efficient platform overall.

Facebook is also experimenting with autoplay video, something we predicted a while back. According to a story in Recode, Facebook has been testing a Netflix-like system whereby new videos automatically start playing one after the other, creating a TV-like experience. We think this is a great move for Facebook as it, more than anything, will get users thinking of the platform as a video source.

What’s Next

While Facebook’s attempt to challenge YouTube is moving full speed ahead, they’re not the only ones looking to unseat the champion. Twitter, Snapchat and Meerkat are all waiting in the wings, along with startups like Vessel, all happy to give creators more than just 55% of revenue. YouTube won’t go down without a fight, but right now, Facebook seems to be a more formidable competitor.

Especially if they figure out livestreaming.

The Ellen Selfie And Other Oscar Dos and Don’ts

Ask someone what they remember about last year’s Oscar broadcast and the one thing they’re likely to spit back at you is the Ellen selfie. Or maybe they call it the Bradley Cooper selfie, or the celebrity selfie. The one thing they won’t be calling it though, is the Samsung selfie.

Which is a shame because it was Samsung who paid for and sponsored the shot.

Samsung is just the latest in a long line of brands who missed their close-ups, who paid to sponsor or promote something and wound up getting zero credit for it.

So how can you prevent this from happening to you?

Let’s look at the Samsung example first, for it contains some excellent lessons. Samsung gave Oscar MC Ellen DeGeneres a Samsung phone to carry with her during the telecast with the understanding she’d use it to take photos and viewers at home would be impressed that a celebrity like Ellen was using a Samsung Galaxy.

Big mistake.

While Samsung executives can no doubt recognize the difference between a Galaxy and an iPhone at 50 paces, the average consumer at home can not. Providing a close-up of the phone wouldn’t have helped much either — viewers would be too busy looking to see what apps Ellen had on her home screen to notice the logo. Chances are good most viewers assumed she was carrying an iPhone anyway. (The fact that she normally does carry an iPhone didn’t help that perception either.)

So what could Samsung have done differently?

This is one case where subtlety is a no-no. They should have had Ellen mention that she was taking photos with a Samsung Galaxy. Or at the very least included #Samsung as a hashtag. That way, what’s arguably the most famous piece of #CreatedWith content would have had some Samsung branding on it.

As we wend our way through this year’s award show season, we’ve already started to get a feel for this season’s winners and losers: Nationwide was a big loser during the Super Bowl after their home safety spot #NationwideDeadKid very quickly turned into the sort of meme brands fear most. Target on the other hand, was a winner for its four-minute Imagine Dragons concert during the Grammys, the first instance of branded content advertising.


Don’t want to be a loser? Here’s some do’s and don’ts on how to approach branded awards-show promotions:

— DO make sure there is some logical tie-in between your product and the event. If not, you’re going to want to create one because the only way people are going to listen to you is if they understand why you’re there. (HINT: “Because everyone else is” is not a good answer.)

— DON’T slap your logo on a promotion that has nothing to do with your brand . People won’t see your logo and they won’t know you’re behind it. And in the unlikely event they do see your logo, they won’t know why it’s up there.

— DO make sure that the promotion is relevant to the people watching the show. A hockey themed promotion may be part of who you are, but unless it’s going to resonate with the Oscar audience, don’t go there.

— DON’T do your own thing. If you’re piggybacking off of a show’s own promotion, don’t do your own (branded) version of it. The show’s version is fun and probably has a popular celebrity attached to it. Yours doesn’t. Guess who wins.

— DO be entertaining. While that sounds super obvious, we’re always amazed how often brands assume their strategic marketing position is so compelling audience will wait with baited breath to hear it. You’re running during an award show about the movies with every star in Hollywood. You’ve got to bring your A game or go home.

— DON’T be inorganic. Nobody likes a GMOP (genetically modified online promotion.) You want to strive to feel like a part of the program, not a bolted on side show.The more organic your promotion feels, the more likely it is to resonate with fans.

Originally published at brief.promaxbda.org on February 20, 2015

From Beet.TV: 2nd Screens Yield Vital Data For TV Networks

This interview I did with Andy Plesser from Beet.tv outlines what we're planning on doing with the 2nd Screen Summit next month at CES.

Take a look.

Twitter Fans Versus Tumblr Fans

There are a lot of terms bandied about to describe the difference in the commitment level of various types of fans, but I’ve found the easiest way to define them for social TV purposes is Twitter Fans vs Tumblr Fans.

Allow me to explain.

Twitter Fans like the show they’re watching but they’re not fanatical about it. Their tweets are more about increasing their own social standing by saying something clever than about expressing their heartfelt love of the show or the characters.

Tumblr Fans are the fanatics. They take the time to actually create animated gifs of their favorite characters and then post them to their Tumblr blogs. They make collages of stills they’ve grabbed off the multiple copies of the show they keep on their DVR. Their Tumblr blogs are designed to increase their social standing within the fan community— who can be the biggest Shipper (fan-speak for “worshipper” of a specific relationship), who can be the most dedicated fan? The opinions of people outside that community are worthless

So for a showrunner, who’s more valuable?

It depends on what you want. Twitter fans will help drive tune-in because they’re tweeting during the live broadcast of the show. (Well, most of them anyway.) They’ll get people talking about the show because because of all the activity on Twitter. If there’s enough activity and the show is one of the most tweeted about shows in its time slot, that drives tune-in even further as “popular on Twitter” is becoming a common EPG list.

Tumblr fans, on the other hand, don’t drive tune-in. They’re only talking to other hardcore fans, none of whom would dream of missing even a second of the show. But they do have the ability to keep the show front and center in between seasons. They’re the ones creating not only Tumblr blogs, but fan fiction, fan message boards even buying fan merchandise.


A savvy showrunner could harness their passion and use it during the off season to encourage new fans to tune in. It’s a tricky line however, as the hardcore fans don’t always take well to outsiders who don’t share their level of enthusiasm for the show and knowledge of insider lingo. But if they can be successfully deputized and empowered, their output excerpted rather than extracted whole, there’s a good chance their exuberance can be used to help drive new fans for the new season.

Both groups will continue to play an important role for showrunners and network executives. The key is being able to distinguish between them and play to the strengths of each group.

Ellen's Selfie: Whose Win Is It?

So Ellen’s Twitter selfie (taken by Bradley Cooper) has broken all sorts of retweet records and the usual suspects are claiming a win for Samsung.

But is it? To quote my friend Todd Walker (on Twitter) “the brand attached to that selfie is Twitter. Not one person's gonna remember what phone was used.”

Bingo.

The brands that will garner a win from this are (in order) Twitter, the Oscars, Ellen, Bradley Cooper. Meryl Streep, Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts, Angelina Jolie, Jennifer Lawrence, and then, maybe, Samsung.

USA Today’s insta-headline reads Ellen, Brad, Julia, Meryl Snap Starriest-Ever Selfie and the article doesn’t even mention Samsung. Ditto the Wall Street Journal's Ellen DeGeneres’s Epic Oscar Selfie Becomes Most Retweeted Tweet

So step one for the brand would be to get their PR people in gear and make sure they're attached to the moment.

Is this a replicable moment that proves the overall viability of social TV? Not really. The confluence of a widely viewed live broadcast (e.g. no time zone issues) with celebrity presence and a Twitter-heavy audience makes it more of a one-trick pony that's a great example of the power of real time marketing and the speed at which something can go viral.

Which is not to say it’s not a win for Samsung. It’s a great idea and far more powerful and buzzworthy than any of the TV spots on the show. But without the direct brand tie-in (and competition from Twitter and celebrity brands, it's not the win 1 million plus retweets would make it seem it is.

The Not So Secret Life of the American Teenager

There’s been so much written lately about teenagers in the age of social media, so much of it patently ridiculous (e.g. I talked to my sister and her friends and thus extrapolated what all teenagers were up to) and/or posited by people who haven’t actually seen a teenager since they themselves were one, that I felt a tirade was in order. So here goes:

What’s the one constant about teenagers, of any generation, beyond the whole horniness thing? The fact that so many teens are constantly trying on new personalities and new identities just to see what it feels like or to see what fits. And so what apps they are into varies wildly from day to day, from school to school, from clique to clique and (especially) from girls to boys.

Facebook is the one constant. They may tell you they don’t really like it, don’t like seeing the dumb things people post on it, but reality check: so do most adults. And like teens, we may gripe about it, but we still use it.

Why? Because it’s its own self-contained theme park. You can chat, you can play games, you can look at pictures, listen to music, stalk old friends-- there’s a whole world of things you can do on Facebook depending on your mood. And everyone you know is on there, from Grandma to the kid you sat next to in kindergarten, so it’s got the same repellers and attractors as home. Especially if you’re 15 and undecided whether it’s comforting or mortifying that your mom “liked” your picture from soccer practice.

Apps are like teenage fashion choices. One day you’re wearing Ugg boots because they’re cool and trendy, the next day you decide they’re stupid and pretentious and want nothing to do with them. Substitute Pinterest or Twitter or Snapchat and you get the picture. And that shouldn’t be the least bit surprising: teenagers are like that, they’re capricious about pretty much everything from friends to music to the mood they’re in when they get home. And they have been like that since we invented them back in the 1950s.

So let’s stop trying to define them and assigning them a specific taste in apps. Vine is hot this month because comedians are making funny videos/hipsters are making cool artsy videos/someone was playing with it in study hall and everyone started watching/my older brother and his friends said it was cool.

Next month it’ll be something else.

Which is not to say that every teenager is doomed to spend their middle school and high school years in a permanent state of app flux. Sometimes it feels right and so you stick with it. But what that “it” is varies so widely, it’s foolish to try and define. The one thing we do know is that the next Facebook isn’t here yet. Facebook still feels like “home” and with the possible exception of Instagram and Snapchat, all the other apps are about interacting with others or about being entertained. None of them are the new Facebook, either singly or in combination.

The new Facebook won’t be here for a while: sea changes like that don’t come about very often. But when it does, don’t worry about trying to identify it: like the Supreme Court said about pornography, you’ll know it when you see it.

The Problem With Facebook Data

The more I use Facebook Graph Search, the more evident it becomes that Facebook made a major mistake with their most ubiquitous feature: the “Like.”

Follow this train: Facebook’s value, their kryptonite, is their data. They have a billion users, and they know the habits and preferences of all of billion of them because they can easily track that information by examining what they’ve Liked.

Or can they?

On the pre-Like Facebook, users were Fans of pages. That information - which brands, bands, books, movies, sports teams, etc. a user was a Fan of was prominently displayed on the user’s profile page. Which meant users spent a lot of time curating those selections, pruning and adding so that the list was an accurate reflection of who they were. Or at least who they wanted people to think they were.

As a result, it was tough (or tough-ish) to get users to become fans of pages they didn’t think would give them social currency or look good on their wall. Hence, the Like, an easy way to give a brand a thumbs-up (and permission to coat your wall with brand messages.)

But while the Like button has become ubiquitous and a seeming smash hit for Facebook, it does not appear to be used in any consistent manner. That was its selling point: a lower key way for users to indicate approval for a brand, but it’s also it’s Achille’s heel: if users aren’t displaying any sort of consistency in the way they use the like button, then the resulting data is fairly inaccurate and not all that useful. (Bye-bye monetization.)

This is evident in the spate of Tumblr blogs flagging the random overlaps Facebook Graph Search pulls up (married men who like prostitutes, Christians who like porn) and in less quirky uses, like the study BTIG did on the accuracy of using Graph Search as a movie recommendation engine. What they found should be somewhat troubling for Facebook: the movies users Liked overwhelmingly dated back to the list they compiled when they first signed up for the service or to the last used the Fan format.

There are multiple reasons users are either promiscuous or inconsistent with their Likes, but they all circle around two competing forces: (A) If The Brands We Like are how we present ourselves to the world, it takes a lot for a new brand to crack that list and (B) if Likes are easy to give and easily buried in the News Feed, there’s no reason not to give them out at random.

Now by brands, I mean any sort of product: movies, books, songs, actors, vacation spots, along with the more typical products and services we call brands. To the consumer, they’re all a part of who they are, and attaching their name to anything other than the tried and true, when that preference is in a prominent location, is a leap.

The constant rejiggering of the Facebook interface - particularly the introduction of the Timeline, where the “About” section, with the brands and media the user likes, is now one level down-- has lessened the amount of attention people give to their Likes. That in turn, works on the validity of Likes from another direction: those who don’t see their Likes as a reflection of who they are are likely to become more promiscuous with them, and at the same time more random, on the assumption that the action has both an immediate value (unlocking a coupon offer) and limited aftereffects.

The other culprit here, perhaps even more to blame than Timeline is Frictionless Sharing: by posting every article the user half-glanced at and every song they or their offspring started to listen to, Frictionless Sharing greatly reduced the impetus the user had to be sparing with their Likes. While “Mary is listening to Ruby Tuesday by the Rolling Stones on Spotify” was supposed to be of lesser significance than “Mary Liked Ruby Tuesday by the Rolling Stones,” users did not really grasp that subtlety and many likely figured that if all bets were off, why not just start Liking just about everything?

While it’s possible to imagine a scenario where Facebook encourages users to carefully parse out Likes to new products so that their opinions can help guide their friends, it seems unlikely:  first and foremost there is the black and white nature of the Like: it’s an endorsement, pure and simple, in the way that 3 stars out of 5 is not.

Can Facebook fix this? Probably. They’ll need to rethink both the Like and frictionless sharing and the value users place on having their brand and media preferences prominently featured on their profiles. If they can solve for that in a way that encourages more, rather than less interaction, and more curation of the brands (media and otherwise) a user Likes, they have a good chance to make their data more accurate and thus, more valuable.

The stakes are high, and it’s a big “if.”

7 Things You Need To Know About Second Screen Interactions

Originally delivered in London at Screen Digests's Future of Digital Media event, this is my latest salvo in the crusade to introduce common sense to the discussion around second screen.

7 Things You Should Know About 2nd Screen Interaction from Alan Wolk

Dear Zuck: 5 Ways To Fix Facebook (And Get Your Stock Back Up)

Dear Zuck:

It breaks my heart to see your stock tanking because investors aren’t seeing eye-to-eye on the monetization thing. Especially since, from where I’m sitting, it doesn’t seem that hard. So here’s what you do to get your stock back on track again:

1. Forget about display ads. You’re never going to fix them. Apocryphal story: The other day, I overheard my eighth-grader and his friends talking about how you should never click on Facebook ads “because they’re just spam and they might break your computer.” Clearly not accurate, but here’s the thing: most of your users share that sentiment. All those years of ads for hair replacement services, Christian singles organizations and party clowns trained us to see that space as the Facebook equivalent of junk. So when you throw a Pepsi ad in there along with the miracle diets, most of us assume it’s not a real Pepsi ad and assume it’s a come-on for free Canadian Viagra, computer viruses or worse. 
2. Stop giving away the brand pages. At the same time you were delegitimizing your display ads, you were creating a whole ecosystem around your brand pages... and giving it away for free. What’s more, you’ve trained users to believe that brand pages are the only way big brands interact on Facebook. The success of all those contests and promotions bears that out. And yet you are giving this away for free. Make them pay for it Zuck. And while you’re at it, share some of the data you collect or even just give them rights to the 500K pictures users put up during a promotion. And make them pay for that too. I know you worry about user experience and all, but seriously Marc, I doubt most of those five hundred thousand people even realize that you own the pictures they’ve posted, not the brand. 
3. Get rid of the timeline from brand pages. Timeline is a great idea. Sam Lessin is a really smart guy. But the old tabs and unique homescreen format is something you can sell to brands. Every brand manager and agency I've spoken to is freaked out by timeline and they all agree it's greatly reduced the usefulness of their Facebook presence. Beyond that, consumers don’t expect brands to have timelines: they are not our friends. Ergo, friends have timelines, brands don’t. If you want to make money off brand pages, you’ve got to make them brand friendly. 
4. Stop trying to protect us from ourselves. I get that you don’t want the news feed turning into a advertising channel. But your users are smart enough to know how to block brands whose messaging has become annoying. Most of the brand messaging in my newsfeed is harmless and of the stuff I let through, a lot of it is actually useful. Put your trust in the free marketplace of ideas theory and let us eliminate the noise ourselves. (Because one person’s noise is another person’s “like”) 
5. Innovate: Once you’ve committed to brand pages, stop treating them like the crazy uncle in the basement and make them more useful. Here’s a freebie that should be pretty simple to implement: you know how I can select how frequently I hear from a person? Give me the same options for brands, only use language that make sense for those interactions, e.g. “all updates/contests and promotions only/product news only.” That’s the sort of option that works for all three parties: you, us and them. You’ve got a whole lot of smart people working for you, I’m sure they’ll come up with lots more of these. 

So take this for what it is: the semi-informed ramblings of someone who has no idea what’re really driving your decisions beyond what he reads in the trade press. If you like what you read though, you can always friend me and we’ll take it from there.

I'm Not Really Watching: Active vs Passive Viewing and Social TV

Quick question: when you’re watching TV, do you talk during the entire show? When the commercials come on (provided you’re not skipping through them) do you only think and talk about the show you’ve been watching?

I’m guessing the answer is no. So then why does so much of the activity in the social TV space assume the opposite?

Yes, a lot of people watch TV with a second screen device in hand. But there’s no logical path that says they are using that device solely to interact with whatever is on the screen. Chances are high that if they’ve whipped out the iPhone, they are checking email, looking at a friend’s Facebook photos, checking the score of the game they’re not watching or some other activity completely unrelated to the what’s on TV.

That’s because people often turn on the TV just to have some sort of background distraction. Call that “passive viewing.” Reading email and half-watching American Idol aren’t incompatible. Neither is going on the Fox website and looking up the bio of a contestant who captures our attention. They’re just two of the many things we might do during a passive viewing experience.

What about shows that aren’t just background noise? Shows we look forward to and actually care about what’s happening. Call that “active viewing.”  Logic dictates that if you are engrossed in a program, you are not going to wander off to look up the IMdB profile of the lead actor or open up TweetDeck to see if anyone else is tweeting about the District Attorney’s pink shoes.

That’s the thing about chat: there are events where we want to spend the entire time talking exclusively about what is happening onscreen: football games, political debates, reality game show finales. But those are the exception, not the rule. During active viewing we’re far more likely to give our undivided attention to what’s happening on the screen, to the point of letting phone calls go unanswered. During passive viewing, there’s not a whole lot of incentive to spend a time talking about a program we’re only casually watching.

All of which weighs in favor of a Social EPG: an application whose primary purpose is discovery: a nicely designed listing of all the programming options available to us and the ability to change the channel.

Everything else is just gravy: which shows our friends are watching, which ones they’ve liked, who is in the cast, what, if anything, are people saying about it. That’s all information we might want to have before we hit “Watch Now.”  Any “second screen experience” is unlikely to be the focus of our attention for shows we are actively watching and likely to be just one of several outlets during shows we are passively watching. A social EPG just a really useful tool, one that provides us with all the social and related data we need.

In other words, it’s not a magic bullet. Just a really powerful one.

Twitter TV

In the spirit of research and investigation, I tried most of the Oscar oriented apps and several of the general social TV apps during last night's broadcast.

 Crickets.

At least from my friends, who all seemed to be on Twitter (as they always are for events like the Oscars). The 300 or so people I follow on Twitter provided enough rapid-fire commentary on their own to keep me from even bothering with hashtags.

Now while my Twitter friends do not a focus group make, the obvious takeaway here is that critical mass is very, very important to the success of any social TV app.

And that Twitter would be mad not to create one of their own.

They've already got the bulk of the conversation. And they desperately need a way to make money that doesn't involve sponsored tweets. So why not just create their own Social TV app that looks and feels just like Twitter only with extras like audio recognition for check-in or polls or the ability to see which shows are trending now.

The social TV functions don't even need to be a separate app- they would likely work better if Twitter just added a series of TV-focused features on the existing Twitter mobile apps and allowed them to function like "Trending Now" or hashtags - additional information available to users when they want to see it, but done in a way that doesn't interfere with their day-to-day tweeting.

The bulk of social TV experiences are going to be around the same big events we all talk about in real life: the Oscars, the Super Bowl, the Grammys. Twitter is the perfect companion for them and they'd be foolish not to capitalize on that.

Don't Make Me Think: Social TV and the Super Bowl

Back in seventh grade, I remember learning about some Renaissance-era British doctor who, in order to study the process of digestion, would swallow food in a linen bag attached to a string that he'd then drag back out of his stomach.

So comparatively, my experience using various social TV apps during the Super Bowl in order to report on them, was relatively painless.

But still.

So few of them were done with any forethought whatsoever. When we are watching TV, it’s generally a pretty immersive experience. We’ll multitask in short bursts, but please do not ask us to decide whether we want it shipped to our home or office, if standard shipping is okay and did we still want to buy it with our American Express card ending in xx-4099?

Here's the deal: E-commerce is best left until the show is over. Ditto getting “more information” on anything. So let me save something for later in a basket, bookcase, coupon book - whatever you want to call it. But don’t make me stop and make decisions I have to think about.

Especially on a tiny smart phone screen. Best Buy had a well-done commercial but the Shazam app took me to a screen that said something about saving money if I upgraded my phone. (There were too many words for me to actually want to try and make sense of it all.) What were they thinking? I’m not going to stop and spend 45 minutes upgrading my phone in the middle of the Super Bowl!

AmEx had something like that with (I think) FourSquare. If I remember, they were giving me 5 dollars off when I spent 10 dollars, but again, the process was way too time-consuming and confusing for me to actually be sure about what had just transpired.

Another note on Shazam-- which advertisers seem to gleefully be using as an audio-based replacement for those RFID tags no one ever figured out how to operate: The commercial starts. It’s 30 seconds long. 2 seconds into it, I see the Shazam logo. I then have 28 seconds to (a) find my phone, (b) turn it on, (c) find the Shazam app, (d) open the app and wait till it loads (e) hit “tag this” (f) wait for the tagging to happen.

That’s pretty ambitious for 28 seconds.

The Takeaway: Keep it simple. Keep the words short and sweet. Ditto the graphics. Tell me exactly what you want me to do and when and how: I'll appreciate both the brevity and the clarity. Save all the heavy lifting for later and make sure it's easy form me to find whatever it is you wanted me to do or look at when I get back to the app

Because I'm watching television. And you're just interrupting.


UPDATE: Check out similar conclusions from Jeremy Toeman at LiveDigitally

Changing Behavior Around TV

As the convergence of the TV and Interwebs moves ahead, there are still a number of behaviors the industry must figure out how to change, solve for or live with. To wit:

TV Is Not A Solitary Activity: whether it’s a group of college roommates or the more traditional family unit, few people have their own personal TVs. That makes recommendation engines a bigger challenge than the kool-aid drinkers let on. Figuring out an easy way for the system to understand who is in the room is going to be one of the biggest UX challenges of our time.

Because it’s not just knowing that Dad is in the room and showing him shows he might want to watch. It’s knowing that dad and 8-year old Betty are in the room and figuring out which shows the two of them might want to watch. Or knowing that Betty is the one actually watching TV and Dad is just there keeping her company while he tries to make his way through his email.

Or Is It?: One of the things that a TV Everywhere system may enable is more private viewing of programs. (Think of what the Walkman and the iPod did for music, which was once an unavoidably group activity.) The ability to pick up a show or movie on a smartphone from just about anywhere with a signal and watch with headphones on would seem to indicate that we’re on the road to more individualized viewing experiences and perhaps the lessening of the TV’s role as the electronic fireplace. If everyone is watching their own programming, the need for online social activity becomes at once more and less inmportant.

Surfing: Twenty years ago, Bruce Springsteen sang about “57 channels and nothing on” and now that we’re up 2,000 channel, it still feels like there’s nothing on. That’s why channel surfing is such an ingrained American habit. We turn on the TV and flip through to see what we can find. A lot of the time, we’re not looking for anything specific as much as a way to kill 20 minutes before the program we want to watch comes on. 

But in order for social TV to really work, Americans have got to stop surfing or randomly flipping channels and start exploring shows that are recommended for them. Or at least looking at those recommendations before they begin flipping.

Movies vs Televison: One of the reasons it’s so hard to break the surfing habit is that we don’t make a whole lot of distinction between various TV shows: they’re seen as fairly disposable and outside of shows on obscure channels, we’re generally aware of them: the TV networks spend a whole lot of money on advertising. So the odds of our friends or a smart recommendation engine introducing us to a show we’ve never considered  before aren’t all that high.

Movies, on the other hand, are exactly the sort of thing we’d want a recommendation engine for. First off, given the rights issues around many movies, we’ll want to know which ones are actually available to us right now, and then we’ll want to know which ones our friends (or the critics) liked to help narrow down our choices.

TV Is For Couch Potatoes: Americans tend to regard TV the way they regard chocolate cake: it’s good in small doses, but you wouldn’t want to eat too much of it, much less publicly profess your love. The conventional wisdom in the US right now is still that TV is essentially bad for us, that it turns us into fat, lazy couch potatoes who while the day away watching mindless game shows and soap operas while filling up on transfat-laden foods. It’s okay to like a particular show or two, but TV as a category is just unhealthy.

We have to get people over that hang-up if they’re going to actively participate in any sort of social TV. The way I see it, movies may be the gateway drug here: according to the conventional wisdom, it’s okay to like movies. We even have a flattering word for people who really like movies: cinemaphiles. So if it’s okay to like movies, then it’s okay to talk about them on your social networks, recommend them, even announce that you are watching them. And once it’s okay to obsess over movies, sharing all your TV watching habits will will lose its stigma too. 

Are there other behaviors a more interactive and social TV experience will have to acknowledge, solve for or change? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Why We Won't Have A Virtual MSO in 2012

There’s been a lot of noise this week around an article (registration required) by noted analyst Rich Greenfield claiming that 2012 will see the launch of an internet-based MSO (multi-system operator, e.g. a large pay TV provider like Comcast or Time-Warner.)

It’s an interesting argument, one that all but guarantees a lot of buzz since so many would like to see it happen, but I’m just not seeing it.

Greenfield’s argument is that virtual MSOs will be considerably cheaper and more user friendly:

 (V)irtual MSO pricing to the consumer will be substantially lower, subscribers will receive a significantly better user-interface/navigation across a wide-array of IP-enabled devices in the home and service will be accessible anywhere in the US, rather than being stuck in a certain region.

I’ll buy the user interface argument… maybe-- existing pay TV operators are putting a lot of time and effort into improving that experience precisely because they know it’s an area they are weak on. 

But price? That’s where I have trouble with his logic.

You see most people in the U.S. have their broadband and television service from the same provider (looking at Comcast’s subscriber figures, it seems that somewhere around 70% of its TV customers also get their internet from Comcast.) The advantage to this is that the providers discount the cost if you choose both services, with an even deeper discount if you get phone service thrown in (the “Triple Play” deal.)

So for Greenfield’s virtual MSO to work, I’d have to drop the TV part of my bundle, which automatically raises my monthly cost for my newly unbundled internet. At which point I am at the mercy of my internet provider, who, in the face of heavy amounts of streaming by TV viewers, will likely institute bandwidth usage caps and charge me every time I go over my limit. Which, if I’m a fairly heavy TV viewer, or part of a family, is a likely option. (Pay TV operators like Time Warner and Verizon are not going to give up the money they make on TV subscriptions without figuring out a way to get it back on internet fees.)

So there go all my savings.

 In return, I may get a nicer interface, but I lose out on picture quality and on the number of channels I’m getting – the virtual MSO is likely to start out with a very scaled-down package and may not get ESPN or other sports networks to sign up. (Live sports being a common reason people have for not giving up their pay TV subscriptions.) In addition, I have a new stressor each month: am I going over my allotted bandwidth amount

If you're a single person who doesn't watch a lot of TV, this new set-up will be perfect for you and may indeed allow you to send a message to Big Cable.. But for a family, where each member has a completely different set of channels they watch, sending that message is going to prove to costly and inconvenient.

There's also the technophobe factor: for a lot of people installing something like a Roku box and having that be the sole source of a TV signal is a serious source of anxiety. Having an actual "cable guy" come in, install the set top box, explain how the remote works and how to program the DVR is a real source of comfort to many and one of the existing pay TV provider's big advantages.

What we are likely to see is a scaled-down, internet-only subscription service from one (if not all) the major pay TV providers, a service that is heavy on the VOD content and is delivered via Xbox, PS3, Roku, Boxee and similar devices.

It will basically serve as an option for cord-cutters who don’t want to totally abandon live TV while allowing pay TV operators to sell their newly expanded VOD offerings to people outside their current geographic zone. And maybe take a bite out of Netflix while they're at it.

Verizon has already started down this path: anyone with a valid credit card can buy or rent their FlexView movies via Xbox or via their iPad app. So it's only a matter of time before everyone else gets on board.

These new services may well prove popular with consumers who don’t watch a whole lot of broadcast television but still want to be able to see the local news. They’ll compete with Netflix and Amazon and other movie providers (or they may be Netflix or Amazon) rather than Comcast and DirectTV– either way though, calling them “virtual MSOs” is quite a stretch.

Though it does make for good headlines.

Part 2 of DigiDay SocialTV series: When 30-Second Spots Morph into ‘Social Intermissions’

Part 1 made it onto their list of Most Popular Stories, here's hoping Part 2 will do the same.

Please leave comments, etc. over at DigiDay. Thanks.

Three Stages of Social TV, Part 1, now up on DigiDay Daily

A revised version of the Three Stages of Social TV post is up on DigiDay Daily today, check it out here

You can also see me at DCM East in New York, tomorrow, October 13th at the Millennium Broadway Hotel, where I’ll be acting as emcee and leading the afternoon panels on Monetizing Social Media and Creating An Online Community