New Microblogging Site Rejaw is Not a Twitter Killer

Thought it best to address that one right out of the gate. Rejaw is a new microblogging site that sits in the microblog  -> lifestream spectrum between Twitter and FriendFeed. Rejaw is probably most similar to Plurk in that it focuses on short form posts by users, but unlike Twitter, it also lets users comment on each other’s posts.

Unlike Plurk, which also offers users the ability to post thoughts and then comment on each other’s musings, Rejaw has a more Twitter-like UI, making it more intuitive to a Twitter user.

Rejaw’s auto refresh of posts and comments adds replies to the conversation in real time. Once you get used to the accompanying flashing images and seeming lightshow, it is pretty cool.

Rejaw also departs from Twitter in that it allows for 1000-character posts versus 140. In playing around with Rejaw, I found most people sticking roughly to Twitter’s 140-character limit out of habit. I too found myself breaking thoughts into several smaller posts.

Early adopters from Twitter and FriendFeed — most notably Leo Laporte — joined Rejaw tonight mostly at the behest of uber FriendFeedstress Mona N .

My unofficial survey found that most users I interacted with were impressed. Several were up very late playing. Many, including Leo, worry about longer term scalability of the site.

Twitter competitors have faltered in the past due to a lack of open APIs and desktop apps. Rejaw is aggressively working on both fronts. Rejaw already opened an API, introduced a Mac desktop application and bookmarklet and promises a Windows desktop app soon.

For frustrated Twitter refugees, Rejaw might well be a haven. It has a clean and clear UX. It maps well to what Twitter users are used to and it does a nice job of addressing some of the pains of Twitter users. While the functionality is not radically different from Plurk, the UI is and that should be enough to draw in a good sized audience.

It already seems to be taking off among early adopters if only for testing purposes. Rejaw is a site to check out and watch to see if it continues to gain momentum.

Catch up with me on Rejaw at http://rejaw.com/christiananderson

Social Media How-to Guide: Diving into FriendFeed

Joining in on social media conversation can daunting — even downright scary. It can be hard to know where to start.

Earlier this week, I wrote about how to get started with with social media. Feedback was good, but several were still in need of a bit more prompting. FriendFeed and Twitter were regular conversation topics. The chats always came back to, “what would I say? Who is good to follow? No one cares what I ate for breakfast.”

Don’t start with a post. Start by listening.

Before you jump into the conversation, know your audience. In this case, know where people are coming from. Are people talking about topics you’re interested in? Start your social media engagement by knowing what is being said, who is saying it and what the tone is before weighing in.

As for who to follow, I can name quite a few, but you may not be interested in the same topics I am. That said, FriendFeed does a nice job of displaying who you find interesting and who is interested in you. The statistics below come from the last 30 days of activity on FriendFeed. “People I find interesting” are calculated by looking at the entries I have commented on and liked.

People I find interesting

Duncan Riley
Robert Scoble
Louis Gray
Jason Goldberg
Steve Rubel
michael arrington
l0ckergn0me
Jeremiah Owyang
Dave Winer
Sarah Perez

People who find me interesting

Robert Scoble
Jason Goldberg
David Young
james svenson
Bwana McCall
Ontario Emperor
Rahsheen Porter
Mark Trapp
possible248
Joel Ordesky

Top sites are calculated by looking at where my shared stuff has come from over the past 30 days.

Friends’ top sites

My top sites

Walt Mossberg’s Influence has Been Quantified

I wrote in June about early numbers from research being conducted at the University of Maimi that attempted to quatify the impact of a Walt Mossberg review on a company’s stock price:

Initial data shows on average, “firms with bad product reviews saw stock losses of $200 million, while those with positive reviews saw gains of $500 million,” proving traditional media influencers still pack a punch.

The research study, The Value of Quality: Stock Market Returns to Reviewed Quality of New Products, has now been published and can be downloaded without charge from the Social Science Research Network.

The research was conducted under the following premise: “Firms are always in a rush to bring new products to market. This attitude is probably driven by several factors such as capturing market share rewards to new products, shaping consumer preferences, exploiting economies of experience, or pre-empting lucrative supplies, market positions, distribution outlets, and shelf space (Robinson and Fornell 1985; Carpenter and Nakamoto 1989; Kalyanaram, Robinson and Urban 1995). However, compelling evidence and some theory suggest that first movers may not have the advantages attributed to them in the past (Golder and Tellis 1993; Shankar 1999; Zhang and Narasimhan 2000). Further researchers have shown that speed alone does not lead to higher sales growth nor does it lead to higher accounting returns (Ittner and Larcker 1997). Superior quality is what consumers really look for in a new product (Liebowitz and Margolis 1990; Yin and Tellis 2003). Indeed, quality may well be the most important factor in the success of products and the market performance of competing brands (Tellis and Golder 2001). Yet, firms may systematically undervalue the importance of quality.

This paper suggests a simple but powerful method by which one can measure quality and assess market rewards to it: the event analysis of abnormal stock market returns of firms whose new products are publicly and systematically rated. Use of stock prices for market valuation has at least three benefits. First, data on stock prices is abundant and precise. Second, an accepted paradigm of research provides a clear method, the event study, for assessing stock market returns to information about quality. Third, a focus on stock prices is responsive to the ultimate goal of the firm — maximizing shareholder value (Srivastava, Shervani and Fahey 1998).”

The clear takeaway here for product companies is to focus on getting the product right first and only when the product quality is high should you think about getting that product in front of Mossberg.

Wired may have captured it best:“Walt Mossberg is walking through a convention hall at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas when a man starts screaming at him. The screamer, Hugh Panero, blames Mossberg for his firm’s recent problems: falling stock price, a sudden plunge in consumer interest. Mossberg is annoyed but hardly intimidated. As the author of the weekly ‘Personal Technology’ column in The Wall Street Journal, he’s used to dealing with disgruntled execs. He lets Panero shout. A crowd is gathering. Finally, Mossberg yells back, ‘I don’t give a f—- about your stock price!’”

Data Pointing to Social Media Explosion

So, you’ve read my post on How to get started with social media or you follow what Chris Brogan, Sarah Perez, Jeremiah Owyang, Brian Solis and others have to say on the topic. You’re interested. Social media looks promising to you, but it also seems like a lot of time spent without measurable return and I’m too old to be taking part.

Am I close? If so, check out the research Universal McCann pulled together on social media in the embedded deck below.

The best part? There are fantastic resources all over the web where you can get all kinds of free advice, research and trend information. Bloggers are doing all the hard work and pulling all of the information together so you can digest in bite-sized chunks.

Brian Solis over at PR 2.0 created a graphic below to assist us all in knowing what service / Web app does what.

Remember, you don’t have to join every conversation and you don’t need a presence on every platform. The key is to start slowly. Pick people and topics to follow and engage that most closely map to your area of interest.

Don’t even try to keep track of every service out there. there are new ones popping up every day. Dip your toe in the water. Get a feel for the conversations and then ease in as you feel more comfortable.

Social Media How-to Guide: Getting Started

Yesterday, I was chatting with a friend of mine about the PR his startup had “fallen into.” They actually created a really cool iPhone application and people noticed. He was excited about the coverage, but while his company wants to be engaged with the media and users, he and his fellow entrepreneurs often find storytelling and driving the narrative around their brand takes a backseat to delivering product / shipping code. Product of course, is the right focus, but new social media tools are making the engagement piece of the puzzle a little easier.

LISTEN

Start by listening. Before you jump into the conversation, know your audience. In this case, know where people are coming from. Is your company being talked about? Start your social media engagement by knowing what is being said about your company online and in the media. Google Alerts (http://www.google.com/alerts) makes it easy to create a vanity search (your company name) and have news, video, web mentions, etc. sent to the email you choose. Depending on the industry, it may make sense to create similar alerts for competitors, industry news, key industry influentials, etc.

If that sounds like a lot of email, then consider collecting industry and competitive information via RSS feed on a website like Google Reader (https://www.google.com/reader). With Google Reader, you subscribe to your favorite websites and let new content come to you.

BLOG

It goes without saying that your company should have one or more blogs. There are very few exceptions to this one. Blogging doesn’t have to be a big job. Some of the best company blogs have several writers that all contribute to the same blog to share the load. Remember, this is your company blog – not your personal journal – so keep it professional, but show some personality. The blog should be a forum for “think pieces” about what is happening in your industry and at your company. Share tidbits and pieces of data that you’ve collected. Have an opinion. Along with having a blog, you should be reading and commenting on other blogs within your industry.

SYNDICATE

Is your blog RSS enabled? It probably is. Make sure people interested in what you are doing can follow you easily. RSS is a great way to do that. Another is to microblog. Twitter (www.twitter.com) is the most notable and while competitors are entering the space, it is still the best place to be. Create a profile for your company. You can use your company logo as your profile picture and link your blog to Twitter so people who follow your company get your receive your blog posts. This is another venue to engage in conversation with users of your site / product, share tidbits about your company and most importantly listen to what others have to say.

DIVE IN

Facebook now allows companies / brands to create what they call fan pages – a business presence to engage with your customers and “fans” on Facebook. Facebook users can express their support for your company by adding themselves as a fan, leaving messages, uploading photos, and joining other fans in discussion groups.

FriendFeed is another interesting two-way communication vehicle. It is much more immediate and direct, similar to Twitter, but build for threaded conversations on topics users create. If Twitter is a conversation at a party, FriendFeed is about stepping to the side with the people interested in a topic and discussing further. Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook can be great ways join the conversation that is already happening about your company.

This, of course, is a high-level view of tactics your company can and should be considering as you grow your brand presence online. There is certainly more that can be said about all of the above, but the sites / tools discussed are very easy and intuitive. I won’t take much to get going.

If you’re already doing much of what is listed above and are interested in what else is out there, take a look at the following:

• Mashable’s 35+ Examples of Corporate Social Media in Action
• Chris Brogan’s Social MediaStarter Pack
• Marshall Kirkpatrick’s Social Media Starter Kit
• Jeremiah Owyang’s 50 Ways to use Social Media

And, before you go overboard with social media, check out this post on ReadWriteWeb, “Corporate Social Networks Are A Waste of Money, Study Finds.”

Ryan Block Stepping Down as Editor of Engadget: Adjust Pitches Accordingly

If you’ve got a hot new gadget you want to pitch and you want Ryan Block to write on it, you’d better act fast. Block will step down as editor of this publication in late August to start a new (undisclosed) company.

In his post today, he said of his new chapter, “I’m extremely excited — but there’s also simply no way I can give up working with Engadget that easily, so I’ll remain on as editor-at-large, where I’ll have a longer-term advisory role to the site (and do some writing from time to time, as well).”

Ryan Block and Peter Rojas built one of the most successful blogs on the Web in Engadget.

Engadget remains the go-to gadget blog and is #4 on Technorati.com’s top blogs.

With the departure of Peter Rojas and now Ryan Block, Engadget will be in the hands of Josh Topolsky and Joshua Fruhlinger. After August, you’ll want to be pitching them to cover your latest innovation.

Follow Ryan at www.ryanblock.com.

socialmedian Emerging from Alpha with Social News Network

(UPDATED July 30, 2007) socialmedian, which styles itself as a social news network, is slowly emerging from stealth mode has emered from alpha. Founded by serial entrepreneur Jason Goldberg and backed by notables, Gordon Crovitz (WSJ), Reed Hundt (FCC), Julius Genachowski, (IAC/ LunchBox Digital), Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive and Allen Morgan (Mayfield Fund); socialmedian’s goal is to help users keep up-to-date on the news AND the news makers that matters to them. TheDeal has more on the funding.

Imagine FriendFeed meets Techmeme.

On socialmedian, users set up News Networks (ostensibly mini Techmemes) based on any topic(s) they are interested in and populated with content from the news sources they specify. It’s all fully user-customizable, which means people like “a VC” blogger Fred Wilson can filter news so he can hear from who he is interested in “…like seth godin, jeff jarvis, dave winer, scoble, umair, calacanis, nick carr…” (via tweet).

(Updated) MEDIAdeluge here:

• CNET, Socialmedian tweaks conversation mechanics
• TechCrunch, Socialmedian Brings A New Take On Social News Filtering
• LouisGray.com, SocialMedian Opens Up and Launches Beta
• Robert Scoble (via FriendFeed), “I’m testing out Social Median: http://www.socialmedian.com/sc… what do you think?”
• ReadWriteWeb, Socialmedian Launches Open Beta: Personalize Your News Filter

What interests me most about socialmedian is the filtering. In my post about the conversational Web, I disagreed with Jeremiah Owyang, who suggested, information on the social web needs to be sorted around people, not content My thinking: Jeremiah is a smart and interesting guy. I follow him on Twitter and FriendFeed, but I’m not really interested in what he ate for breakfast (not that he necessarily posts that sort of thing). That said, when he writes about the social web, I want to know about it.

socialmedian lets me do just that. I can follow everything Jeremiah posts, or just what is relevant to me. This could become a very popular feature as the noise online grows and it becomes harder to sift through all of it to find what you want.

As part of socialmedian’s emergence from closed alpha, it now connects new users to the people they follow on Twitter who are already on socialmedian using the Twitter social graph API. So, when a new user joins socialmedian using their Twitter username, socialmedian will pre-populate the people the new user already knows.

As socialmedian emerges from closed alpha, it has relatively few users – especially when compared to FriendFeed – but that appears to be changing as influential bloggers like Louis Gray and Robert Scoble commit to trying out the site.

What will be interesting for socialmedian will be the potential Scoble effect. What seems to be more and more critical for social sites to gain traction with the tech early adopter crowd is Scoble’s seal of approval.

Use this link as an invite to socialmedian. Follow me at http://www.socialmedian.com/christiananderson

ContentNext, PaidContent.org Publisher, Acquired by Guardian Media Group

The acquisition, slated to be announced today was reported early this morning by Kara Swisher at AllThingsD. ReadWriteWeb, in post also early this morning, reported confirmation of the story based on a Twitter conversation between the Guardian’s Technology Editor Charles Arthur and travel writer Craig McGinty.

The move so far has been received very positively by new media content providers. Although, given the reported $30 million price tag, it’s easy to understand why.

With the acquisition of Ars Technica by Wired, Guardian Media Group’s acquisition of ContentNext and the New York Times’ apparent offer to buy CenterNetworks (via Twitter), there looks to be a trend developing in which the big blogs are being gobbled up by “old media.”

MEDIAdeluge here:

• VentureBeat, Guardian buys pathbreaking blog network ContentNext for rumored $30M
• GigaOM, Why Guardian Media Bought paidContent for $30M
• paidContent.org, Guardian News & Media to buy ContentNext Media
• mathewingram.com/work, Guardian buys PaidContent = Smart
• The Inquisitr, PaidContent acquired for $30 million
• CenterNetworks, PaidContent Acquired By Guardian Media Group
• BuzzMachine, Paid Content, indeed
• Mashable, Guardian Acquires paidContent for $30+ Million
• Techmeme has more here

For those who follow social media closely, this emerging trend really comes as no surprise. The savvy media people have been treating the big blogs like the highly influential media they are.

As the old ways of consuming content (read: print/newspapers) continue to wane, it is natural that they would refocus their distribution online. What seems to be slowly happening is media content providers are finally realizing what business they are in. As the writing on the wall gets harder and harder to ignore, we will see a huge uptick in media consolidation between traditional “old media” and new media. More specifically, when newspapers and magazines realize they are in the content business, radio realizes they’re in the audio business and TV realizes they’re in the video business; the acquisitions we’re seeing today will be small potatoes.

The better question is who will consume whom. Will old media get it soon enough to buy thier way out of their current perdicament or will they wait to long? It is conceivable that emerging new media companies like TechCrunch, for example, could buy “old media” outlets in a play for writing talent.

Yaari = Spam: Note to Emerging Social Networking Sites, This is Bad

Social Networks continue to pop up at quite a clip. The newest one to catch my attention was Yaari – the India-based social network. I received an invite from someone I respect and thought I’d check Yaari out. I went to the site, gave an email address and password.

Everyone in my Gmail address book knows what happened next because you received an invite to Yaari anyway. My apologies to all who Yaari spammed on my behalf.

Of course, I was embarrassed and mad and conveyed as much on Twitter and FriendFeed. Today, I received a note from Yaari CEO, Prerna Gupta. She wrote, “…By registering for Yaari and agreeing to the Terms of Service, you authorized Yaari to send an email notification to all the contacts listed in the address book of the email address you provided during registration. This is clearly stated in our Terms of Service and on the Registration Page.”

Yaari does in fact note this in the fine print in a tiny, gray font at the bottom of the registration page. You can see how I missed it.

Shame on me for not reading the fine print in the footer, but there is a bigger issue here. You don’t grow your site, social network, etc. – no matter what it is – by tricking users into inviting their friends. If you build a valuable service, they will do so on their own. The key here is to be compelling, or interesting, or valuable, etc. and people will find you.

Lead with the product, not the marketing.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying you shouldn’t encourage your users to invite their friends to your site. By all means, make your site as viral as you can. But, there is a line and Yaari has clearly crossed it.

According to the note, Yaari will – at some as yet undefined point in the future – change its TOS and will no longer notify your entire your address book when you sign up. I, however, will not be back to Yaari to test that promise. As an emerging web destination, you get one chance to win the hearts and minds of your users. Breaching that trust right out of the gate sets a terrible tone going forward, that is assuming you get any users to go forward.

Plurk Makes Compete’s Top Five Fastest Growing Sites

Compete.com just released its June 2008 Top Movers data. In the top five was Plurk.Landing the #4 positioin was the newest microblogging site to hit the web.

In my June 1 Twitter versus Plurk post, I wondered aloud if Plurk might be the prime beneficiary of Twitter’s trouble scaling and related downtime. Based on the Compete data, that appears to be the case.

I’ve continued to play around with Plurk, here.

With all of Twitter’s faults, it has remained sticky – mainly due to the inertia it has created, couple with all of the Twitter apps that make accessing Twitter so easy. While Twitter continues to grow, part of that growth may be due to PR momentum that to date has help Twitter add more user that it is losing due to performance. Whether Twitter can shake off the “dead man walking” moniker remains to be seen.