The whole world uses Facebook, yet the social network still hasn’t found a way to properly monetize on that potential (or just hasn’t revealed these plans yet). Sure, they’ve got the ads but while Darren Barefoot was successfully guided to a cool band they were trying to sell me a fake Rolex the other day.

Facebook is probably not so desperate that they are going to try and earn their lunch money advertising fake watches from China, but this still left a bit of a bad aftertasete. Globally, counterfeit watches are estimated to cost the Swiss watch industry alone more than $600 million per year. I doubt Facebook wants to be known as a platform for this massive black market – it’s certainly not reputation enhancing.

-Jens

Inspired by Buzz Canuck’s recent post, we’ve also added ourselves to Blog Networks on Facebook. It is early days, so I’m not sure what the point of this little experiment will be, but join us and and see what happens.

Click here to join!

-Parker

Writes Techcrunch:

Facebook is starting to pursue social networks that have copied their design or features by suing German site StudiVZ. The Financial Times has reported that Facebook filed a suit in California against the German company for what it claims is an infringement of Facebook’s “look, feel, features and services”.

StudiVZ claims to have 10 million active members, and is the largest social network in the German-speaking world, covering Germany, Belgium, Austria and Switzerland. The network is actually comprised of three different sites, each one a separate social network aimed at different segments of the market. StudiVZ.net is the classic site for college-aged students, SchuelerVZ.net is for high school students and MeinVZ.net is for older adults (these three networks were very hard to decipher in German when I attempted to sign up).

As the German blog Netzwertig points out what Facebook basically admits with this is that studiVZ is the main hurdle for their expansion into the German market. Networking effects prevent studiVZ users from switching to the American competition and rumoured talks about a possible take over apparently didn’t lead to any result.

Netzwertig goes on to explain that after Facebook’s growth in the US, Great Britain and Scandinavia, regions where the service virally spread in an instant, slowed down it needs to exploit new markets. Consequently Facebook can’t ignore a tightly populated, affluent country like Germany.

Nevertheless: The launch in Germany was pretty half-assed, a minimum was spend on the localisation (which accordingly lacked quality) and marketing. The idea that new members turned up automatically didn’t work out. So now it’s time for plan B – sue the competition out of existence.

Netzwertig speculates that the chances of studiVZ still existing as an independent network in one year are marginal now that Facebook identified it as its nemesis. Eventually the outcome of this whole venture also very much depends on studiVZ’s current owners, the Holtzbrinck-Verlag, which acquired the service for 100 million Euros in 2007 but couldn’t capitalise on it yet.

Personally I think that there’s a reason that Mashable included studiVZ in their top 10 international Facebook clones list, pointing out that

StudiVZ is nearly identical to Facebook in terms of features, functionality, and interface.

As Anthony Barba explains studiVZ internally was even referred to as “project Fakebook”, a fact that was revealed later when error messages used the phrase “fakebook”.

The only reason I ever signed up for studiVZ was to stalk people I went to high school with (just as pretty much everyone else I know) – something I regretted immediately. Not only because I came across some characters of the past I’d rather forget, but also because of the absolute god awful functionality of this sorry, parochial excuse of a social network: Innovative developments towards a more comfortable service are virtually non-existent and I can’t connect with my English speaking friends abroad.

In short: The technology is just as sophisticated as one of the founder’s excuses:

One can’t confuse the platforms with each other. “The colours are different: studiVZ is red, Facebook is blue”

-Jens

Despite all the hype around Facebook these days (it seems that The Globe and Mail carries at least two stories on it per day), TechCrunch reminds us that MySpace is still way, way ahead in the America market.

Their market share is declining, but still sits above 70%, and that’s nothing to sneeze it.

TechCrunch’s Duncan Riley suggests that “if Facebook is worth $15 billion, on traffic ratios alone MySpace would be worth $67.67 billion.”

-Parker

Todd Zeigler and the Bivings Report led me to an interesting post by Sanford Dickert on his Political Gastronomica site about “the seeming lack of impact social networks have truly had on the 2008 elections so far” (as Zeigler puts it).Discussing the question: Will social networks impact the 2008 presidential election, Dickert writes:

I was asked this question last year by my friend from Wired, after I finished with another campaign, and I can STILL heartily say - even with techpresident’s MySpace, Facebook and YouTube counters - I believe that social networks will still NOT impact the coming 2008 election. “Wha?”, I hear my poli-tech friends gasp. “Didn’t you read the study that shows Facebook numbers are an indicator of relative success of drawing voters?” “Weren’t you at the Facebook Political Summit ?” “Aren’t you impressed by / using the new Facebook tools?” “Aren’t you impressed by the incredible reach of all of the candidates and their supporters through MySpace, facebook, flickr, YouTube?”. No. And why not? I think they are missing an essential ingredient: simple, human contact.

Dickert finally concludes:

When I go to the local mall, county fair, outdoor market - I can often see the ardent supporters of candidates “tabling” in the flow of traffic - holding their campaign literature, sign at the edge of the table, looking for eyes that are ready to learn more about the person running for State Senate, Congress or even President. You and your friends are there, giving each other moral support as the throngs of people walk by - nary paying attention to you, until a person walks up and says, “So….tell me about Senator X.”Where are the Virtual Tablers?This is where the campaigns can use their volunteers and give them the power to reach across their own networks and chat up people when they are interested in learning more about the candidate. But, it is not easy to go and “speak” to someone in Facebook since all of the communications are not interrupt-driven (as a face-to-face might be), they are addressed whenever the receiver wants to. How do you get people to accept the interrupts? Usually, that is the sense of presence - of human contact. Once that magic ingredient is “captured” and enabled, then I could see social networks truly engaging people.

Dickert might make a relevant point, to a certain extent, but we still feel that this is not the last word.

Our point is that claiming social networks will NOT impact the coming 2008 election because they do not have the ability to – as Dickert puts it – “chat up” people limits many factors about these networks that really might have the ability to impact the election.

Take a site like “One Million Against Hillary Clinton” (Facebook), that encourages people to go viral and recruit friends and neighbours to join them in the fight to stop Hillary Clinton. A sight like this might not have a direct impact on people’s voting behaviour. But when it makes CNN because of its viral marketing ability, it has certainly had an impact on the new agenda.

Also, take the “Vote Different” video on YouTube that attacks Hillary Clinton. This video has been viewed by over 3.8 million people. Saying that this video has not had an impact on the election is like saying that ads in general have no impact on elections.

Other notable examples for communities that have the potential to exercise influence on the voting process: moveon.org or getup.org.au. Both caused quite some stir in the political establishments of the respective countries they are active in.

It also seems that Sanford somehow equates human contact with an invasion of privacy and can’t seem to accept the fact that people are now able to escape the mall stands and make their own informed choices. This eventually gives the impression that he has an outdated model of the voter respectively of campaigning which sees the voter as somehow without agency. In the internet now this invasion of privacy just isn’t possible anymore (except for spam) but the voters are the ones in charge. And we better get used to it – if we need to resort to interrupting peoples’ lives as a major way to attract voters then we should really worry about our other campaigning techniques and what went wrong with them.

Also on a more basic level the question is: How do we measure impact?
Larry M. Bartels (1993, p. 267), once said that the state of research in the “media effects” area is “one of the most notable embarrassments of modern social science”. Over time theorists have gone from claiming that the media have had a strong, almost hypodermic effect that can shape opinions and beliefs, to suggesting that the media have only a minimal effect on citizens because they can not deliver political messages with any predictable effect.

On the other hand theories about agenda setting testify to the power media can have over the community. But then again: Social networks can set their own agendas and influence political discourses.

Eventually we don’t think that we have come to a stage where we in the “social network effects” area can exclude a hypothesis stating that social networks CAN or WILL impact the coming 2008 election. The reason: We ultimately do not yet have a clear enough understanding of how we can measure the impact of social networks.

Berelson (in Diamond & Bates 1984, p. 347) once said, musing about his own findings in the “media effects” area over the years, that: “some kinds of communication on some kinds of issues, brought to the attention of some kinds of people under some kinds of conditions, have some kinds of effects” (in Diamond & Bates 1984, p. 347).

So, in Berelson’s words, our understanding for now is: that social networks on some kind of issues, brought to attention of some kinds of people under some kinds of conditions, may have some kinds of effects – also on the coming 2008 election.

Espen & Jens

You absolutely have to watch this video about Microsoft’s Photosynth if you want to understand what Mark Evans is talking about when he says that will be the way we can browse through an online newspaper in much the same manner we do a paper newspaper.

(watch the video before reading more!)

However, I think that Photosynth will be much more than that. I think that it will probably revolutionize the way we do any of our online work. Done correctly, ordinary websites wouldn’t require any clicking in order to navigate them. Users would simply zoom in and out, and I’m sure that it would even be able to add fields. One corner of a giant ‘image’ could be a users inbox, while another could be Wikipedia. There is a lot of possibility here.

I realize that a Photosynth-style web is probably still a long way off (as most computers probably don’t have the processing power or connection speeds necessary to make it work) but we all know how quickly technology is changing.

I’m probably going to be dreaming about some sort of Photosynth-Facebook super-mashup tonight…

-Parker

Even though I like to think of myself as fairly young and “with it” in terms of technological innovation, it is the generation after mine that will probably be driving technological change. They are the ones that have grown up with it, and this is evident by way of studies like the recent one that says kids think that e-mail is ‘dead.’
This comes as no surprise.

Similarly, textually has a great quote from MTV’s Andrew Davidson where he says that for kids today, technology is essentially invisible. While my friends and I have been fairly quick to pick up on the latest tech trends, it’s still very much visible to us. We are old enough (barely) to reminisce about what it was like before we all had cellphones, and we shake our heads in wonder at the 12 year old with a nicer phone than us.

The generation below us doesn’t have that reference point. They’ve seen mobile technology used by their parents until they were old enough (a point that seems to be shifting to an increasingly lower age) to get their own.

From here, it’s difficult to see how this will impact the future. There is the one idea that perhaps it will free them from seeing the phone primarily as a talking device, with a cell phone simply being the a mobile extension of the traditional rotary deal. Even the fact that we still call it a cell phone (when its primary purpose these days is for multimedia and the internet) shows how antiquated our thinking has become.

Before long, we will see far greater advancements in the field of mobile community and communications than anyone thought we would, and that this will be the direct result of today’s youth having a lack of social and historical context about a world without cell phones and the internet. (I mean, they can even get wireless in Nigeria these days it seems.)

The other huge change is going to come in the form of virtual relationships. On the same post on textually, it says that the average Chinese computer user has 37 online friends that they have never met. Think about that. How many contacts do you have on your MSN contact list? how about Facebook? And how many of those have you never met in meatspace?

Bloggers probably have more friends like that than the average person, but I probably still only have about 5 friends on my Facebook that I have never met, and none on MSN.

I find that fact that this number comes out of China even more interesting. As we continually here, China is on the cusp of something great (if it can clean up its act…). Does that mean that the world’s new superpower will be built on virtual relationships? How will this affect politics? How will this change a nation’s concept of borders?

Ladies and gentlemen, I’d say that we are in for a very interesting next twenty years.

-Parker

In his recent post, Canuckflack asks “what do internal comms have to offer in the face of self-assembling employee groups?” To paraphrase him, corporate communications are dead, at least in the traditional sense. As a member of the Corporate Communications team for a company myself, this is a bit hard, albeit possibly necessary, to say.

As he so aptly points out, we’ve been subjected to copy that has gone through the fine-tooth comb of corporate approval so many times it is often meaningless. As a result, employees have turned to social networking in order to interact and learn about their coworkers.

The actual corporate information about new procedures, training, and meetings that was intermingled with this social intrigue is now being left in the dust.

Is the choice, then, for corporate communications to go to where the employees are?

This raises a number of interesting problems. For one, I am not totally sure how employees will feel about being contacted by their company on a social networking site. It is one thing for employees to band together and create their group. In this case, I’m not totally sure if the “if you build it, they’ll come” mentality will work. I feel that too many employees would worry that, despite privacy settings, management would be able to spy on their online activities. For many (and with good reason), there is a divide between social areas and work areas, online and off.

There is also the management concern that if you sanction the use of social networking sites at work, productivity will drop. I’m sure that a huge number of employees are already checking Facebook during the day anyways (and can tell that they are based on the status updates, wall messages, and so on that I see from not only my colleagues but from friends who work at other companies). In this case, inserting a bit of corporate info into the loop certainly can’t be a bad thing.

If the decision was mine, utilizing social networking to disseminate corporate information would be the go. However, I feel that most companies are not there yet, and it will be some time before we see this kind of integration.

Are there any thoughts from the blogosphere on this issue? How would you feel if your company chose to communicate with you in this manner?

3.3 Blogs in campaigns

Whilst political campaign blogs are only a few years of age, it is likely that politicians and campaign strategists started developing an interest in the medium in the beginning of the 21st century when a substantial online blog community rose to prominence in the United States (Bahnisch in Bruns & Jacobs 2006, p. 140). Political commentator blogs started gaining a widespread audience in 2001 and 2002 with Andrew Sullivan’s The Daily Dish on the right, and Markos Moulitsas’ Daily Kos on the left (Bahnisch in Bruns & Jacobs 2006, p. 140). Assisted by the Iraq War and the U.S. presidential primaries and general election in 2004, the subsequent years saw the mainstreaming of the political blogosphere (Bahnisch in Bruns & Jacobs 2006, p. 141). The 2004 U.S. presidential election became the first election ever to see a campaign use a blog as an integral part of the campaign (Rice 2004, p. 1, Williams et al. 2005, p. 178).

Coggins (n.d.) argues that we can distinguish between three types of blogs found within political campaigns. These are: Official Candidate Blogs; “written and kept by politicians and their staff. These blogs are primarily used to report news, events and other information about a specific candidate’s campaign trail” (Coggins n.d.); Candidate Supporter Blogs, “’unofficial’ campaign blogs written and kept for particular candidates by individual or group supporters who are not officially part of that candidate’s staff. Like Official Candidate Blogs, these blogs also contain news, events and other relevant information” (Coggins n.d.); and Political Commentary and News Blogs, which “do not typically support a particular candidate, even though specific bloggers/authors may have personal biases. The main purpose of these blogs is journalistic in nature: providing news and commentaries regarding different candidates’ issues, events and platforms. These may be written and kept by individuals or by groups” (Coggins n.d.).

Although Coggins’ categories were coined in relation to the 2004 U.S. presidential election, they still remain useful as the main types of campaign blogs to play a role in elections. We should, however, add two new types of blogs to Coggins’ categories: Official Party Blogs and Party Supporter Blogs. Official Party Blogs basically serve the same functions as Official Candidate Blogs. Examples of party blogs are the U.S. Democratic Party’s official blog, Kicking Ass, and the official blog of the Republican National Committee. Surprisingly, few political parties in other western democracies have embraced blogs. The Germany Socialist party uses a platform or blog, Roteblogs, to encourage members to set up their own blogs in support of the party (Abold & Heltsche 2006, p. 6). In the UK we have lately seen the development of Party Supporter Blogs, like LabourHome and ConservativeHome, which have no official ties to the party they represent and basically serve the same functions as Candidate Supporter Blogs.

However, blogs are used in much more complex ways by campaigns today then they were in the 2004 election. Today, as opposed to the 2004 election, almost every campaign put elite bloggers on their campaign payroll (Armstrong 2007a, Glover 2006), “paying bloggers to write, develop Web sites, connect with energetic allies on the Internet, respond to online critics, and advise their employers about how to behave in the blogosphere” (Glover 2006). Bloggers have therefore, particularly in the U.S., become strategic advisors for campaigns. This might not come as a surprise considering the fact that the blogosphere today is 100 times as big as it was during the 2004 U.S. presidential election (Armstrong 2007a) and has a potential to reach a much larger audience. When blogs mainly relied on text to get their message across in the 2004 election, they have now become multimedia content producers. The creation of new social network sites such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc. has made it easier for campaigns to embed videos, images and text and link to platforms that give them the potential to reach a much larger audience than before (Armstrong 2007a). Blogs therefore provide an arena and an environment that are constantly changing, so it is important to look at how previous literature has assessed the medium’s impact on campaigns and elections.

5.3 How can we measure the impact of blogs?
During the period that the research took place, few bloggers, online communication experts or political commentators explicitly discussed technical aspects regarding how we actually can measure the impact of campaign blogs on political elections. The only reflection that explicitly dealt with this subject was produced by Todd Zeigler, Senior Vice President of the Bivings Group, on the company’s blog, The Bivings Report. Discussing the performances of the 2006 contestants’ official campaign blogs, Zeigler (2006b) raised the following question: “How influential/successful are the campaign blogs?”.

In an extension to his own question, Zeigler writes:

“How many people are reading them? How many people are linking to them? How well networked are they? Are they working? These questions are pretty much impossible to answer in an academically defensible way: we’d need access to the logs of all the campaign blogs to answer adequately. We’re left picking through anecdotes” (Zeigler 2006b).

Zeigler validly raises a relevant point about the complexity surrounding some of the metrical factors that can explain the reach of the content produced on blogs. But it is what he further says that interestingly shows that there are other simpler, non quantitative factors, which also can tell us something about efforts politicians’ dedicate to making their blog successful. In an attempt to somehow answer his first question – “how influential/successful are the campaign blogs” – Zeigler (2006b) decides to use the search engine Technorati to look at aspects that can tell us something about how effective the medium is when used as a campaign tool.

The first aspect Zeigler looks at is how the candidates’ campaign blogs ranked in the search engine. The paper has earlier mentioned that Technorati ranks the blogs in its database by the number of incoming links. Zeigler (2006b) assumes that links are the most effective way we have to measure the influence of a blog. The two next aspects Zeigler examines are how the main campaign sites rank in the search engine and how many links they attract. While these aspects can give us an indication of how much attention the candidates receive from the blogosphere in general, they will unfortunately not teach us much about the influence of the candidates’ blog itself, Zeigler (2006b) argues. The last two aspects examined by Zeigler (2006b) are whether the candidates are doing a good job of actually getting their blog content in the search engine, and whether the candidates have bothered to actually claim their blog in the search engine. Zeigler (2006b) argues that these measurements might give us an indication of how serious candidates are about their blog.

Based on his methodology Zeigler found that:

• “Only 44% of the blogs we looked at had been indexed by Technorati in the last 15 days. And many of these blogs that had been indexed weren’t being done so regularly. Seems a lot of campaigns are unfamilar with pinging.
• Only 18% of the campaigns have claimed their blog on Technorati.
• Generally speaking, these campaign blogs are not linked to that much by other blogs. It was surprising” (Zeigler 2006b).

He concludes that:

(1) “Campaigns haven’t mastered some of the technical aspects of blog promotion
This is evidenced by the fact that most of these blogs aren’t getting indexed regularly by blog search engines and most campaigns haven’t claimed their blog on Technorati. If people can’t find your posts, they aren’t going to link to them.

(2) Campaigns aren’t networking effectively with other bloggers
I know lots of candidates have conference calls with bloggers. And I also know you can’t judge the effectiveness of blog outreach efforts based solely on the results above. However, a lot of blogging is building online relationships one blogger at a time. You exchange emails with other bloggers. You link to them. You comment on their blogs. You add them to your blogroll. Given the results shown above, I can’t imagine that most of the campaign blogs are doing a good job at building these sorts of relationship. I suspect a lot of them are operating in a bit of a vacuum.

(3) Campaigns aren’t producing compelling content
Any successful blogger you talk to will say you earn links by creating good content. Write something great and people will find it and link to it. Click through on the blogs above yourself and see what you think about the content” (Zeigler 2006b).

None of the academic studies reviewed earlier in this paper have considered any of these aspects in the same way as Zeigler does. It should also be noted that many blogs and newspapers are in fact using measurements such as incoming blog links, daily hit rates provided by search engines like Alexa and the number of friends on social media platforms like MySpace and Facebook, as indicators for which of the contestants in the 2008 presidential race that are doing best on blogger outreach (see Easter 2007). There is no reason why future studies should not use measurements like these to test the correlation between online campaigning and electoral success. However, by measuring a blog’s reach and incoming links we still do not examine the correlation between voters that read a candidate’s blog and people that vote for the candidate operating the blog. We also have to take into account that the aspects Zeigler examines can be proxies for a campaign’s overall level of preparedness and organisation. In his analyses of the effects websites had on people’s voting decision during the 1996 U.S. congressional election, D’Alessio (1997) (discussed in chapter 4) found that “the more sophisticated and better resourced candidates were more likely to operate websites” (Gibson & McAllister 2005, p. 6). It might also be plausible to assume that campaigns operating a blog in a modern election campaign are more professional and overall better prepared than the average campaign.