I picture in my mind data scattered, information fragmented in the vast cyber space, having lost connection to human beings, drifting without being found and used by anyone.  

Reviewing our lecture notes, I was nodding to “Data needs to be findable.” “It needs to be able to be used by many.” Yes, yes, yes.  Optimizing accessibility to data/information on the Internet for everyone is an urgent agenda. 

I also cheer to OpenID idea as I forget too often passwords of my so many online accounts.  It’s definitely convenient to be able to log in any account with my single ID.  But how about identity theft?  How does one’s OpenID get secured?  is my question.

oAuth appears to be convenient, but we really need to have a firm grip, control over our account info or personal data – you are going to give some Internet applications/Web sites permission for what part of your data/info is accessible.  I checked my Twitter account Connections and found an application, ShareThis, that I don’t recall when, where, and why I allowed it for access to my Twitter account.  But it says I approved it on Apr. 13 this year.  It’s pretty recent, but I don’t remember at all.  Who did that? Me? Really?

Well, we need to discuss more about these issues.  Here are recent news about Facebook’s new move on this subject.  Facebook seems to be ltaking over the whole Internet community for open info/knowledge sharing.   

How Facebook Could Organize the Internet

Facebook Open Graph: The Definitive Guide For Publishers, Users and Competitors

Facebook Open Graph: The Definitive Guide For Publishers, Users and Competitors – Page 2

Facebook Open Graph: The Definitive Guide For Publishers, Users and Competitors – Page 3

Tina was one of those ‘new’ significant others.  She is Karl’s new girlfriend, and Karl was being teased by us that day not for her but for his company, GS.  In less than three minutes after we started talking with each other, we found that both of us lived in New Jersey, worked in the same industry  - marketing/advertising, and were in search of a full-time position.  Our topic shifted to Linked-In.  Then, I learned a weird, scary, ‘hard -to -believe’ (or ‘don’t – want -to -believe’ ) story from her.  About six months ago, encouraged by her friends, she joined Linked – In and followed creating account and profile process.  By user’s permission, like Facebook, Linked- In gets access to your email address list, find out people who are already in Linked-In members, and encourage you to connect to them.  After Linked-In scanned her email address list, she found an unbelievable thing.   Her Linked- In profile automatically filled some of her personal information, such as DOB and what city she lives in.  I was like, “WHAT???” hardly I could believe, it shouldn’t happen by any means.   Then she said that she had tried to delete them but she could not have done so.  My second ”WHAAT???”.   She said that the system had allowed only to change/revise the profile data but had not allowed to erase or leave it blank.  I was speechless.  Can it be possible???  She then said, smiling, that she had changed her DOB.  She was born in ‘60s, but changed it to 1986.  After that, she found that some fashion magazines and brands targeting young women kept sending ads/catalogs/free samples.   Aha!

It is scary and outrageous.   As a consumer, how much can I protect my personal information?  As a marketer, what is the line? and how much info can we tap from our target consumers legally and ethically?  By now both side should have and understand some ‘terms and conditions’, privacy policies, etc.   But both sides, not one side, may be ignorant of what they really mean, what they do and don’t.  

My recommendation list:

The 3 Facebook Settings Every User Should Check Now

Social media and privacy issues: A little less scare mongering, a little more common sense please

Social Media Privacy and Personal Security Issues

Electronic  Privacy Information Center – Social Networking Privacy

Real-World Ethical Dilemmas in Social Media  (Ethical issues)

12 Social Media Ethics Issues for Lawyers  (Ethical issues)

Although I knew their services are extremely popular among young Japanese consumers, I did not know much about what their games were like.  So I did some research and stumbled on an article.  Can Japanese Social Gaming Site DeNA Make It In The US?  The article was issued on Oct. 21, 2008, so just one and a half years ago.  According to the article, WSJ’s bet was it’s unlikely.  Although if DeNA has been successful in their plan is a question mark, what’s happening here in the US has proved that the skepticism WSJ had about the prospect of mobile businesses was wrong.     

The US consumers are certainly following the path the Japanese went ahead.  Use of social media on mobile has been growing and playing games is part of it.  However, as to playing social games on mobile, Mobile Gaming Soars On Smartphones tells an interesting story.  According to a new comScore study, “The U.S. population playing games on regular mobile phones fell by 35% last year to 29.5 million, while the number of smartphone gamers shot up 60% to 21.4 million.” And although “The mobile gaming audience overall has dropped 13% to 51 million,” ComScore says, “The better user experience on smartphones is reflected in heavier game play.”  Hummm … Haves and Have nots among mobile phone users.  This was hardly an issue in Japan, for Japanese cell phones evolved pretty much like smartphones as I mentioned in my previous post.  

In Mobile Gaming Goes In Two Directions At Once, the author Steve Smith says, “how critical smartphones are to the future of mobile marketing and how much more penetration is needed for critical mass.”  I am not sure how much smartphone ownership will increase over the next 2 years in the U.S., but superior user experience, engagement those games can captivate the audience, and the social nature of the device, along with the competition among hardware manufacturers, will definitely accelerate the penetration.  Well, the time has come.

Some figures on this blog surprised me.  More Women Play Social Games Than Men. (Daniel’s Web Trends Blog by Daniel Nations.) According to a survey conducted by PopCap Games,

-55% of social gamers are women.  But it does not show age group %. 
-More than half of social gamers say their average session lasts over half an hour.
-10% say their average time exceeds three hours.
-69% of social gamers also play other types of video games with 23% also playing console  games and 13% playing mobile phone games.
-95% play social games multiple times a week and 34% play several times a day.

Hummm … sounds pretty addictive.  Yes, it is! Continue reading.

-35% say their game play has increased over the past three months compared to only 10% whose  game play decreased.
-27% say they read less since they began playing.
-26% watch fewer movies or less TV.
-24% surf the web less.
-21% are skimping on exercise to play social games.

Clearly social games have enormous power to engage people in playing, investing their time on it.  No way that marketers can ignore these people. 

But the most interesting finding of all from the survey is

-One-fourth of social gamers say they have been mislead by an ad or special offer related to playing a social networking game.
 
Hahaha … we’ve gotta figure out how we can deliver relevant ads/messages/offer, associated with the games they are playing.

The class subject that day was metrics, and Devin’s talk touched several important points of it.  Among the things he mentioned, an eye opening concept to me was about ‘influencers’.

Measuring social media is more than numbers.  Reach is not much important.  Size doesn’t necessarily matter. (McKinsey seeks very qualified reach – i.e. Fortune 500 CEOs.)  Who is your audience? Who is influencer? How they are evangelized to spread knowledge and brand? Identifying influencers among your audience, tracking them, and helping them add more conversation are important. 

True.  As to engagement, it is about the influencer’s credibility and both the size and quality of his/her followers’ pool.  A couple of days after his lecture, I came across What Social Media Will Look Like in 2012.  Among the 11 predictions the author, Freddie Laker made, he  says on the 6^th ‘Influencer marketing will be redefined’ that we will see the significance of influencer marketing grow dramatically for not only digital media but also all kinds of channels.  Citing ‘’Google’s soon-to-be-released Social Search’’, he asserts “Discovering people that can help you to reach your desired consumer will become exponentially more effective and important.”  

Influencers are your leverage.  Extremely important leverage to spread word about your business, product, or brand.

Have you had a chance to touch it and play with it?  I did, I went to Apple store in my local northern New Jersey on Saturday Apr. 5 early in the afternoon.  At around 1:30pm, there was no line outside the store in the biggest shopping mall in the most populated area in NJ. Store employees in Apple’s blue uniform were on the both sides of the store entrance, smiling, greeting and ushering visitors.  I was expecting that we’d be given a waiting number to get in the store.  It’s not!  Although inside the store was more crowded than usual, in less than 5 minutes I was able to grab a store demo iPad. 

Wow, it’s so thin and much lighter than I expected!  You wouldn’t be bothered to carry it around! 

To those who are an owner of iPhone or iTouch, it operates the same way as they do, only better. To those who do not own iPhone or iTouch, I bet you’ll find it quite intuitive and comfortable to use as you learn how to use and get used to it.  I got an iPhone just a couple of weeks ago.  I am still in the learning process, but have found that the larger iPad screen is much easier to type, touch and see things.  I tweeted from my demo iPad.  I also logged in foursquare and added the venue, Apple Store in GS plaza, NJ, to it.  People around me were playing video games, which looked pretty good, checking their email/facebook pages, and watching photos and videos.  For consuming a variety of contents wherever, iPad seems great!  though it does not carry flash.   

One thing I forgot to check, though I had read Mossberg’s excellent review, Laptop Killer? Pretty Close on WSJ, was productivity tools (word processor, spread sheet, presentation application) on iPad.

Unfortunately, MS Office – Word, Excel, and Power Point – today’s ‘de fact standard’ business applications are not compatible with iPad.  For road warriors like me, it is a huge drawback. I am too busy to entertain myself all the way up and down my commute on the bus.  In terms of content creation, it isn’t very business oriented.  Thus, whether it’s worth buying or not depends on, as Mossberg made it clear, your needs, what you want to do with it. 

As for me, I’ve been contemplating buying a net book, considering work productivity on the go.  Only if iPad carried MS Office apps, I would have no hesitation paying $499=<.  That is regrettable! 

iPad Unleashes Media App Frenzy

Loopt Launches Photo-Centric iPad App

300,000 iPads Sold On Day 1

For iPad, Lines but No Shortage

However, as we have seen so far, so many companies, from Starbucks to Dell to Best Buy to Papa John’s, are using social media in different ways and benefiting from it.  Traditional sense of advertising, for example, placing online display ad, is not the only way.  The point is what you want to achieve in the short run and the long run – setting clear objectives and determining how you use social media for the ends. Then, you will figure out what would be metrics for your plan.  Unless you are not the CEO, then you have to convince your boss – senior and/or top management that different dynamics work in social media; they need to change the way of thinking about investment on it.      

With this subject I have found some very interesting articles lately.  Among them the one that elicited my deep sigh was Memo From CFO: Ad Metrics Not Good Enough.  I want you take a look at the comments on the article also.

Consumer behavior on media and ad has been changing, and new metrics are evolving: New Ad Model: Minimum Motivational Frequency.  Why Your Brand Needs to Be on Facebook Now.  Omniture And Facebook Ink Deal To Bring Analytics And Buying Tools To Social Marketing.

Appendix:

Helpful for UnME discussion.

The Maturation of Social Media ROI

What Social Media Ad Types Work Best? [STATS]

The Ten Plagues Of Social Media

Her talk about how the media agency develops marketing communication- and media strategies in this emerging digital media era was very interesting and assured me that social media were now in the center stage of marketing and advertising communications.  As for engagement, the analogy of ‘fishing’ was right to the point.  The working of the agency – developing strategies and plans of how to communicate a brand with its target consumers and what media to use – involves understanding diverse groups or clusters of consumers, their behavior a lot. 

One thing she iterated, which is notable to me, was the importance of analytics: quite high level of marketing analytics, which requires developing sophisticated statistical models to predict likelihood of target consumers’ behavior – who is going to buy what and how much he/she will spend and media mix models to reach right people most effectively and optimize ROI.  For this reason, digital agencies are now hiring, recruiting ‘number’ smart folks from Wall Street.  Ever since marketing went online in the middle ‘90s, it has become more and more scientific – mathematical and statistical and measurable. Amazing!       

The very next morning I got this article and chuckled. Building or Buying The Right Media Mix Model? I Say Build For Now by Corry Treffiletti. 

He says that these kinds of predictor tools that have been used by large marketers for years are ‘a broadcast-centric landscape and are not easily tailored to an engagement-centric landscape where the desired impact of marketing is to create conversations and involve consumers.’

It is still difficult to measure effectiveness and ROI of social media, isolating it from all the others.  You will find what works for you, and he encourages, build the model on your own.

There is also http://mixi.jp/.  Started in 2004, it is the most popular social networking site in Japan, and now it is accessed overwhelmingly by cell phones. 

Location (GPS) based service is something Japanese mobile phone carriers have been providing consumers for years.  However, I don’t know if the Japanese are playing around with location ‘check-in’ service. 

Since the mid ’90s the Japanese has become heavily dependent on one device: cell phone.  In Japanese, KEITAI.  The only one device you need to survive in Japan.  From kids to older adults, their everyday lives revolve around KEITAI.  You do search, banking, make payments, purchase and reservation, participate in auction, download music, watch videos, play games, subscribe a variety of contents including news papers and magazines, read new novels and blogs, manage schedule, etc. etc. with a vast range of apps.   

By carrying it around, you’re 24/7 online.  As you go, wherever and whenever you can get in touch with your friends and family.  You are not alone! 

Three years ago in the summer of 2007 when I visited Japan, I was shocked to learn from my high school classmates that they didn’t really email from their desktop or laptop.  They have their KEITAI email address (different from regular email addresses you get from your ISP or free email accounts such as Gmail, Yahoo mail, or Hotmail) and exchange messages via KEITAI.   Also, KEITAI email account catch messages sent from PCs.  

What I have seen in the past several years in Japan is blossoming, well, exploding here now.  No surprise.  Being connected to people around the world 24/7 online via your tiny mobile phone will soon to be De facto standard.  Didn’t we see that happening in some SiFi movies/TV shows when we were little???

Here’s the story of someone who found her sister- in -law via Twitter.  Twitter Helps Find Missing Family Member After Chile Earthquake .  She relied on Twitter after she had attempted to reach her sister-in-law via phone, cell phone, and text messaging and learned that it had not worked. Her messages were retweeted.  Also she used a hash tag and finally was able to reach someone whom she does not know directly but was in a city close to where her sister-in-law lived.  That person went out to look for her sister-in-law and found her! She was alive and safe.  Our connection over connection can help or save someone via Twitter. 

I remember that one day when I was young (more than a decade ago : ) I told my boy friend  then that how limited the number of people we would meet or interact in some way throughout our lives was, though billions of people lived on the earth the same time.  He seemed to be quite impressed with my thought.  It was the time in which our connection was limited to direct, physically close and interactive ones such as neighborhood, friends, colleagues and business partners.   

The nature of interaction of Twitter – simultaneous ‘one to many’ or ‘many to many’ and retweeting has broaden the circle much bigger.  Now we can reach, connect to far more people than we could imagine and make things happen. 

I personally do not think Twitter needs ad.  No, it’s not the way if you, as a marketer, want to reach and develop relationships with your target audience.