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Friday, November 30, 2007

An activist social media release

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In episode 278 of For Immediate Release, I reported on a brouhaha erupting over Facebook’s deletion of a user’s account that included a photo of her breast-feeding her child.

A variety of actions followed Facebook’s action (you don’t want to mess with lactivists), including the production of a protest video uploaded to YouTube—where it was banned. Not about to be silenced, The League of Maternal Justice (the effort of “two moms turned undercover mama vigilantes"which apparently sprung into existence in October, when an initial item appeared on its blog) produced psuedo social media release on its site. As any self-respecting social media release would, this one includes the video that YouTube banned. A recent post notes that YouTube has not responded to the group’s request for the reason the video was removed. (I’m kinda curious myself, since the key words “breast feeding” and “breastfeeding” each generated over 1,000 YouTube videos that are no less revealing than the one that was deleted.)

As with most social media releases, this one is intended to be comprehensive, providing everything and anything a blogger or journalists might need to report on the story. Of course, the League also blogged it; the blog asks readers to “Submit our press release to online media outlets and social bookmarking sites.” That’s exactly how this is supposed to work—the blog tells the tale in a format people would want to read and engage in while the release serves as a comprehensive resource in a format that makes it easy for online journalists, bloggers, and others to use it. And, of course, the release itself was published using blogging software.

The release also includes screen captures of YouTube’s deletion notice and links to relevant press coverage and resources. This release would be better if it included comments and tags—and there’s no embed code to run the video from other sites—but it’ll still be interesting to see what kind of pickup it gets in the blogosphere. The release was posted only three days ago, and already there’s a fair amount of coverage.

Hat tip to David Wescott, who alerted me through Facebook messaging.

Friday, November 16, 2007

FIR Interview - Jeremy Burton, CEO, Serena Software, on Facebook Fridays: November 16, 2007

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While reports continue to flood out of the business world of companies blocking employee access to online venues—notably social media and especially social networks—Serena Software has taken the opposite approach, actively encouraging employees to network with each other on Facebook. Serena’s CEO, Jeremy Burton, has written about his philosophy for ZDNet Asia; the company even issued a press release about it.

In this exclusive FIR Interview, Shel Holtz talked with Burton about the “Facebook Fridays” program, his view of the value social networks bring to the organization, and his opinion about how other companies are handling employee time spent on social networks.

About our Conversation Partner

Jeremy Burton brings 20 years in the high technology industry to Serena as president and CEO. Prior to joining Serena, Mr. Burton was group president of the enterprise security and data management business unit at Symantec. Mr. Burton was responsible for engineering, product management, alliances, and business development for Symantec’s endpoint security, compliance, archiving, Windows backup, security response, and managed security service offerings.

Burton joined Symantec through the company’s merger with VERITAS Software in July 2005. At VERITAS, he was executive vice president of the data management group. Previously, he served as the company’s senior vice president and chief marketing officer.

Before joining VERITAS in April 2002, Burton served as senior vice president of product and services marketing at Oracle Corporation. He also founded Oracle’s developer program, Oracle Technology Network, which today has millions of members. Before working in marketing, Mr. Burton held positions in customer support, pre-sales, product management, and engineering.

Burton graduated from the University of Surrey in Guildford, England in June 1990 with a bachelor’s degree in information systems engineering. He and his wife, Ruth, have three children.

Download the 24-minute conversation here (MP3, 11,2MB), or sign up for the Interviews RSS feed to get it and future interviews automatically. For automatic synchronization with your iPod or other digital player, you’ll also need a such as the free Juice, DopplerRadio or iTunes, or an RSS aggregator that supports podcasts such as FeedDemon. To receive all For Immediate Release podcasts including the twice-weekly Hobson & Holtz Report, sign up for the full RSS feed.

Listen to this podcast now:

If you have comments or questions about this podcast, or suggestions for future interviews, email us at fircomments@gmail.com; or call the Comment Line at +1 206 222 2803 (North America) or +44 20 8133 9844 (Europe); or Skype: fircomments; or comment at Twitter: twitter.com/FIR; or at Jaiku: fir.jaiku.com. You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We’ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.

Podsafe intro music - On A Podcast Instrumental Mix (MP3, 5Mb) by Cruisebox.

Wednesday, November 07, 2007

We love social networks…no, wait, we hate them…no wait…

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There seems to be a case of split personality going on in a lot of companies. On the one hand, the blocking of social media sites continues apace. On the other hand, the adoption of social media in the enterprise is also on a growth spurt.

McAfee, the security company, is out with a study that concludes that one-third of bosses block employee access to music downloading sites like iTunes to dating sites. A quarter block access to sites like YouTube. More than half wish they could block access to social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, but only 20% have taken the step. McAfee suggests the rest have resisted because the sites are actually used for work-related communication. Kudos to McAfee Avert Labs Security Strategist Toralv Dirro, who tossed off this wonderful quote:

The lines between work and play are blurring… but putting fair-usage policies in place and educating people on how to be safe on these sites is the most realistic option.

That’s pretty enlightened for a security software company. It’ll be a cold day in hell before we hear similar quotes from the fearmongers at Websense.

According to surveys from Barracuda Networks, two-thirds of companies plan to restrict access to the Net over the next year, an increase of nearly 23% over this year. About half of the company’s customers already block access to social networking sites (25% block just MySpace, 6.3% block just Facebook, and 19.3% block both).

Meanwhile, the prospects for adoption of social media behind the firewall as part of a company’s intranet seem to be gaining momentum. SocialText secured $9.5 million in venture capital from its existing investors concurrent with the arrival of former Adobe and Cisco exec Eugene Lee as the company’s new CEO. (Founder Ross Mayfield is sticking around as president and chairman.) Ferris Research analyst David Ferris told InternetNews.com, “There is a strong interest in wikis in corporate environments, and most tools don’t give you the features Socialtext offers, like access controls, which are really important in the corporate space.”

There’s more: The Radicati Group has projected the market for “business social software” at $920 million this year, growing to $3 billion in four short years.

At some point, companies are going to have to come to terms with the fact that networks cross organizational boundaries and that open access—governed by clearly-communicated policies—will produce benefits that far outweigh the costs and risks. Companies that understand this sooner—like Serena Software, which has embraced Facebook as a resource for employees—are likely to gain a competitive edge over those businesses too busy quaking in their boots over the bogus issue of lost productivity.

Monday, October 29, 2007

Facebook advertising: There must be a model that will work

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Much of the reporting of Microft’s acquisition of a piece of Facebook has questioned the ultimate value of the social network. (Microsoft’s investment puts the total value of Facebook at about $15 billion.) With advertising as the only significant revenue channel, many are wondering if people networking on sites like MySpace and Facebook are paying any attention to the ads.

In a tweet today, Todd Defren underscores the point:

For all the hoopla about Facebook, you’d think there would be a wider variety of (classier) advertisements. It’s all “romance” stuff now.

While I did see an ad on Facebook today from Chrysler, you still have to wonder about the generic nature of the advertising in what is surely a venue that is used for mainly niche-focused activites. Consider that I have 259 friends on Facebook, and 258 of them have something to do with the PR/communications business. (The exception is my son who, contrary to conventional wisdom, friended me.) For me, Facebook is a professional pursuit, even if it means keeping up with the personal activities of professional colleagues. (Any executive who ever closed a deal on the golf course knows the value of that.) But what interest would I have when participating in, say, Joseph Jaffe‘s “Jaffe Juice” group, in a Discover credit card? (That’s the ad being served up to me on Joe’s group at this moment.)

The “For Immediate Release” group associated with For Immediate Release—the podcast I co-host with Neville Hobson—is presenting an add from cbCampus.com; my own cause-focused group related to my Stop Blocking campaign dishes me an ad for home furnishings from JC Penney.

I gotta admit, when I’m perusing these groups for communication-related content, an ad for a lamp isn’t going to attract my attention.

On the other hand, an ad from, say CustomScoop, a media monitoring service, or Proofread Now might very well interest me. It’s all about context.

It would be in the interests of profit-motivated social networks like Facebook to explore models that would allow users to choose the ads that will apear on their profiles and groups—particularly if they can share in the profits. This isn’t exactly an original concept. As a member of the Blubrry podcast network, I get offers fairly routinely to run ads on FIR. The advertiser benefits from the aggregate total number of podcasts promoting the product or service.

Some customization is already in the works at Facebook, but most of it is geared to keeping unwanted advertising off off a profile or group, and is aimed at appeasing the advertiser, not the Facebook member. (This got a fair amount of attention when people started complaining about advertisers perceived to be supporting the extreme right-wing political party in the U.K. when their ads appeared in rotation on the party’s Facebook group.)

It would certainly be more labor intensive for Facebook and its peers to set up a targeted ad insertion effort, but the click-through rates derived from relevant ads would certainly be higher than they are now (according to some reports). Ultimately, I suspect Facebook could make more money from thousands of smaller advertisers (think the likes of PR Newswire or Ragan Communications in the communications space) than they can from a few huge, generic brands.