Category Archives: Social Media

Event managers and planners have something to celebrate today. I’m sure you can ask any event planner how long they take to struggle to find the right place for your party or event. Not only do they have to navigate around the city, quotes, and specs, but it’s all time consuming. And often times, there’s not a website around that features photos of the event space — just how efficient is this? Well not very. But now, thanks to Los Angeles’s newest and hottest tech incubator, Eventup is here to help make your event planning much easier.

LA’s tech scene has definitely been heating up over the past few months and one of its main contributors has been the new incubator Science, the brainchild of former MySpace CEO Mike Jones and Color co-founder Peter Pham. After the latest collapse by MySpace, the LA tech scene took a hit and needed to find a solid foot hold in which they could bring back the success of days past. And with the recent release of Eventup, it looks like the incubator is onto something. And it’s not surprising since they have some of the best minds in the LA tech scenes, such as Mike Macadaan and Sean Percival, two former MySpace execs who have gone or are going through the fires of entrepreneurship and have created something great. And you might wonder why are all MySpace colleagues working in the same incubator? It seems to be perfectly normal, especially when you consider that MySpace encompassed a large portion of the existing talent pool in the city. VentureBeat’s Jolie O’Dell has a great interview about Science that you can read here.

But back to Eventup…we know that it’s a product of Science, but now that it’s launched, just what does it do? Well in a nutshell, it’s the AirBnB of event planning. As TheNextWeb’s Courney Boyd Myers writes, “just Googling ‘event spaces’ brings up a load of miserable options…” So why don’t you save youself some time and just go to Eventup’s website and do a search of what you want, easily. Right now it looks like only Los Angeles and Southern California venues are available in their database, although they’re doing a bit of a grassroots approach and crowdsourcing for venue information — so if you want to make sure your city is represented in here and help bring in more business, then share your venue with Eventup! But enough of the San Francisco plug, let’s talk about specifics in what event planners will get as a result of this experience: a pretty good results page that shows a lot of promise, I must say…let’s take a look at one in particular:

What event planners will get is a helpful screen with a description of the venue, the types of parties that can be held there, maximum capacity, photos, location and calendar of availability. And the fact that there’s a “verified listing” badge also adds a measure of security knowing that you’re looking at something legitimate.  And no longer will you need to trouble yourself into wondering whether it’s available or not — the calendar will allow you to easily look and book! It’s easy, right? I couldn’t have put it better than what they have on their site:

Simply, search by location, filter down by event type, your budget, how many people are attending, and find venues that are available for the date you have your heart set on. You’ll have high-resolution images, maps to show you what part of town it’s in, and ratings and reviews that help you not get ripped off. All of this, without having to spend hours, if not days, searching through various websites and making phone calls.

The cost? It’s probably all set up by the homeowners and venue managers, just like you’d expect when trying to find a place to stay outside of a hotel. Eventup will take 10% of each booking and will manage all financial transactions and bookings. And for your safety, they also offer venue owners insurance options just in case (we all know what happened to AirBnB, right?).

In one of my former lives, I used to work in tourism and each city has unique spaces that you could rent, like a museum or hotel conference room or even a restaurant back-room. Eventup is the replacement for that and very much the yellow pages of event space. Imagine being able to find some ridiculously awesome venues like Jim Morrison’s former residence or even one of Entourage’s actor’s home just to have an event — that’ll give your attendees something to remember, right? Right now they have over 350 venues in LA and I’m sure that it’s only going to grow.

Eventup is out in the wild now for you to check out. It’s also one of six products to come out of Science and is headed by former MySpace exec Tony Adam.

Yesterday, we bore witness to one of the greatest sporting events in the history of the modern age. A clash of titans, as it were…the New York Giants slugged it out against the New England Patriots and emerged to come out victorious in what is now being called the most-watched television program in US history and also the highest-rated Super Bowl in 26 years! Congratulations to the New York Giants!

But while we remember the game, let’s not forget all the other news that are happening around the Internet simultaneously as the big game. Not only was this the first time the Super Bowl was livestreamed on the Internet to mobile and tablet devices (leading to more viewership, I’m sure), there seemed to be a greater play on social media by not only the NFL and the NBC Network, but also advertisers too. Twitter reported today that the service set a record for the most tweets sent per second (TPS): 12,233 tweets! That’s an amazing amount since in 2008 during the Super Bowl, it was 27 TPS, and in 2011, it was 4,064 TPS. Of course, this massive record of tweets per second occurred during the last three minutes which is when Twitter says an average of 10,000 TPS were sent. But what does this all translate into? Well during the Super Bowl, there were 13.7 million related tweets sent out during the five hour game. These numbers are absolutely staggering!

And what about the other part of the game? The so-called “Brand Bowl”? Well some of them did very well in terms of the conversation, but it’s a bit of a mixed reaction. First, let’s see which of the brands succeeded in getting the most comments:
 In Advertising Age this morning, Bluefin Labs analyzed data of all the television commercials to see which one of them earned a spot in the top 10 highest rated spots with the most response. It should be noted that Bluefin only reviewed content pushed on two major networks: Twitter and Facebook. I wonder how these would be changed with Google+ or on social sporting networks like on OnShare?

Regardless, each ad was tracked for 45-minutes after it began to air and what’s surprising is that one of the first commercials to air during the game was the David Beckham H&M underwear commercial and received 108,914 comments – a sign that the first is the best? Either that, or sex sells…

Not surprising, Chrysler’s hit ad featuring Dirty Harry himself, actor/director Clint Eastwood in “It’s Halftime in America” was a rousing success with over 95,000 comments and came in second. It was definitely one of the big winners of the evening and people are STILL talking about it today! But nowhere on this list was the GoDaddy commercial – perhaps a sign that after years of the racy ads, the public is getting tired about ripping on them and decided there’s much more worthy commercials to talk about?

Perhaps the biggest stumble in the “Brand Bowl” this year was the use of the hashtag in commercials. In light of the McDonald’s hashtag debacle, it might not have seemed good to throw out a hashtag unless you were 100% sure that your commercial would ellicit the response you were hoping for. Some had a pretty good chance at positive reactions, like the Audi vampire commercial (#solongvampires) and the Bud Light Platinum (#MakeItPlatinum), but then there were others like GE’s commercial with the hashtag #whatworks — a friend of mine said that he would tweet out “#whatworks not this commercial”. Hashtags were genuinely a gamble for advertisers in an attempt to get into the social scene.

But did advertisers really embrace the role of social media this Super Bowl? According to the Altimeter Group’s Jeremiah Owyang and Brian Solis, maybe not and they’ve discovered five interesting trends out of the 87 advertisements:

• Brands heavily invested in promoting their traditional websites
• Many did not promote a call-to-action
• Only a sixth of ads explicitly promoted social media
• Hashtag marketing emerged to stimulate continual engagement
• Cutting edge marketers teased with new marketing tactics, including Shazam

So while I think that the hashtag attempt on commercials was a fumble, it’s a trend of the Super Bowl nevertheless. But is anyone still surprised at any of these trends? The website is here to stay and advertisers will continue to push people to them just like they asked them to call their 800 numbers for several decades. There are a few risky marketers who will ask people to tweet at them using the hashtag, but if anything, the Super Bowl is showing us that advertisers are starting to be a slightly bit more innovative in how they reach people, especially on television. Just take a look at this breakdown from the Altimeter Group:

Maybe the 32% of brands during the Super Bowl were airing ads more as brand promotion, but the question is why aren’t you giving your customers something more to take away from it? Even those commercials that asked viewers to use Shazam were giving them a song that would forever be associated with their commercial (lasting branding) and also invited them to rate their commercial (feedback), but by not doing anything like that leaves much to be desired.

So I leave you with this fascinating tip from the Altimeter Group report: promoting traditional websites still king with brands while social integration is “nascent”. Yes, that’s right…brands seem to be gun-shy at using social media to help converse with their customers and the viewers. If anything, the most successful commercials from last night will become viral and people will be talking about it. But will the brands actually be listening?

Photo Credit: Football field by Juggernautco/Flickr

Are you on Facebook? What about Google+? Twitter? MySpace? Have you ever thought what happens to all the data that you put in there? Take your Facebook account, for example…you have so much useful information that you’d like to export and place into another place, but unfortunately you can’t. Robert Scoble tried that once and Facebook booted him off their network. The data that you enter into these social networks, while it’s your information, is being treated as if it was proprietary for the network. There’s no sharing allowed. And no matter how much you might think that the adage ”sharing means caring” might apply here, think again…the web is the wild wild West and its every social network for themselves.

Just read this latest post from Mr. Scoble as he comments that the common web is dead (or at least it’s too late to save). In 2008, he tried to export his Facebook information so he could apply it elsewhere, but Facebook wants to protect it and boots him off.  It seems that what you put into making your profile relevant is what you can’t get back. This was further reinforced, according to Scoble, on Friday’s episode of the Gillmore Gang where he once again rehashed his Facebook exile:

Facebook should be allowed to be a data roach motel: data can come in, but damn you Scoble if you want to take that data back out.

At this point, the open web is dead – Scoble has given up and feels that the struggle for data rights (my terminology), akin to basic human rights, is over  – the social networks have won. But is it? The data portability world still has its heroes, like Dave Winer, John Battelle, and Chris Saad. These three are not giving up on promoting the open web and fighting the good fight, but do most of us honestly care what happens to our data? Four years ago, John Battelle predicted the data constrictions we’re seeing now: “The web as we know it is rather like our polar ice caps: under severe, long-term attack by forces of our own creation.” We created this technology and now it’s evolved into a point that, over time, has slowly eroded away our feelings about data portability.

In today’s New York Times, Lori Andrews wrote an opinion article about how Facebook is making their money off of  our backs. In this article, Ms. Andrews states that unlike other big-ticket corporations, Facebook (estimated to be worth at least $75 billion), doesn’t have an inventory of widgets or gadgets, cars or phones.  Rather, the inventory consists of personal data. If you look at Facebook’s S-1 filing and also what I wrote about this when news first came that they would go public, most of Facebook’s revenue will come from advertising. And it’s no surprise that in order for advertisers to get more bang for their buck, Facebook allows them to target to us by key words or details that are associated with your profile or social graph (almost like a Klout perk, except being advertised to isn’t a perk). Whether it’s your relationship status, location, activities, favorite books, employment, etc., advertisers can have their pick of the litter of the entire 845 million users. This tactic has been especially beneficial for Facebook having made over $3.2 billion in advertising revenue last year and making up 85% of the total revenue. So it makes perfect sense for Facebook to want to protect the data that you put into it. No network wants to allow you to share your data you willingly give it because they want to protect its cash cow! Sure you get some minimal benefit by connecting with your friends and family, but for social networks, your data is virtual gold and worth more than anything else.

And while Ms. Andrews states her arguments about Facebook, the same can be said for Google+, MySpace (they’re still around), Twitter, and startups too…your data is invaluable to them and the only way they’ll probably give it up is if their service gets shuttered.

So is there any point in trying to resurrect the Open Web? Technically it’s not dead (yet), but there are certain steps that may be applicable to stem the damage and make things accessible. Echo’s Chris Saad penned a post in response to Mr. Scoble’s in which he agrees that the Open Web is in real danger, but also points to a bigger problem: we’ve lost sight of the things that matter. You can read his entire post here, but I wanted to highlight a few things that Mr. Saad says in his post that he believes would revitalize the open web:

Add to the web’s DNA
According to Chris, almost every startup he sees is focusing on building an “app” and calling it a “platform”, but they wind up being nothing more than “proprietary, incremental and niche attempts at making a quick buck.” The thought is that companies should think deeper and more long-term. He asks companies what are they doing to change the fabric of the web’s DNA forever? Are you being a true game-changer by contributing to the “essence of the Internet” like other technologies like TCP/IP, HTTP, HTML, JS, etc have done?

Don’t just iterate, innovate
Of course, someone has to build Apps. We can’t all be working at the infrastructure layer. But too many of the Apps we chose to build (or champion) are incremental. As startup founders, investors, and influencers, it’s so easy to understand something that can be described as the ‘Flipboard of Monkeys’ instead of thinking really hard about how a completely new idea might fit into the future. Sure there are plenty of good business and marketing reasons why you shouldn’t stray too far from the beaten path, broadening it one incremental feature at a time, but the core essence of what you’re working on can’t be yet another turn of a very tired wheel. If you’re shouting ‘Me too’ then you’re probably not thinking big enough.

B2C, not Ego2C
Silicon valley is clearly a B2C town. We all love the sexy new app that our mother might eventually understand. Something we can get millions of users to use so we can show them lots of ads. Besides the fact that I think we should focus a little more on B2B, the problem is we’re not really a B2C town at all. We’re actually more focused on what I will call Ego2c. That is, we pick our favorite apps based on how famous the founding team is OR how easily we can use the app to build yet another niche audience for ourselves (and brands/marketers). It would be a tragedy if the social web revolution boils down to new methods of PR and marketing. But that’s what we seem to be obsessed with. As soon as any app from a famous founder gets released we give it tones of buzz while plenty of more deserving projects get barley a squeak. If the app gets a little traction (typically the ones that have Ego mechanics baked in) you see a million posts about how marketers can exploit it. Inevitably the app developers start to focus on how to ‘increase social coefficients’ instead of how to help human beings make a connection or find utility in their lives.

“Users don’t care”
Speaking more specifically about the Open vs. Closed debate, too often we hear the criticism ”Users don’t care about open”. This is absolutely true and the reason why most open efforts fail. Users don’t care about open. They care about utility and choice. This is why the only way to continue propagating the open web is to work with BUSINESS. B2C. Startups, Media Brands, The bigco Tech companies. They care about open because the proprietary winners are becoming more prominent and successful and that usually means there are at least one or more other startup/company out there who needs a competitive advantage. They need to team up and build, deploy and popularize the open alternative.  This is why Chris believes that open will win.

There are more interesting points that Mr. Saad makes in his post and you can read it all here.

But suffice it to say, there is a small war being waged on the Internet over proprietary sites and the Open Web. The average consumer probably doesn’t consider this in their factor as much, but whether or not it’s a consideration, the lesson here is that the data you put in, while it’s your personal information, no longer belongs to you. Be careful with it.

Photo Credit: Burns Library / Flickr

This Sunday, the world’s most watched event will be aired on television. For many, Super Bowl XLVI is one of the greatest moments of the year, leaving them glued to their seats as they watch the championship game against two formidable teams. Or, perhaps they’re just interested in the commercials (that, in of itself, should be a sporting event). And if you’re watching the big game, then chances are you’re hanging out with your friends. But unfortunately, there are many that don’t get a chance to have glamorous Super Bowl parties or even are able to watch it. But this year, technology has made itself available to help you enjoy every moment of the game!

In December, the National Football League (NFL) announced that the Super Bowl would be livestreamed for the first time in history. This Sunday, the matchup between the New England Patriots and the New York Giants will be shown on NBC, but also on NFL.com and NBCSports.com. It will also be available on mobile using the NFL Mobile only from Verizon app. According to Wired, the NFL has  ”experimented with live and mobile streaming of regular-season games, but has never before opened up live video of postseason games beyond broadcast TV.” It will be interesting to see the statistics on Monday to see how many people primarily watched the game on their mobile device instead of on television. Will this open up a whole new sports paradigm that leads to a revolution of games being livestreamed more and more?

To that effect, just yesterday, according to the Verge, the NFL released the official Super Bowl app for Android and the iPhone. If you happen to be one of the lucky few to actually BE at the game, don’t get lost around Indianapolis…this application will give you a detailed guide to local restaurants, nightlife, and official Super Bowl events. And regardless if you’re there or not, this app will give you a chance to join the conversation with millions of fans around the world – the app will allow you to follow all the social media buzz with NFL Huddle.

Another way is to use a brand new app that just became available to the public. ConnecTV is what TechCrunch calls an “ambitious new service for socializing the TV viewing experience” and using mobile and web-based applications. Primarily available now on the iPad, ConnecTV is a service that supports over 250 channels with partnerships with 10 leading broadcast groups. If you don’t have a Smart TV, but want to have something that will allow you to still communicate with your friends and social graph, then using ConnecTV might be the way to go. Akin to a “Shazam for television”, the app uses a mic to listen to what you’re watching while also linking up with two of the largest social networks: Twitter and Facebook. Whether this becomes a huge success remains to be seen, but this app holds some serious potential for making you part of the game. whether it’s offering a fan favorite for MVP, or talking about the most recent play.

Okay, so chances are you don’t have an iPad or an Android tablet on you. Well then you probably have at least a mobile device on you like an iPhone or an Android phone, right? Well, being social and watching the Super Bowl doesn’t have to be a complicated thing…you can just watch the game and resort to your traditional social media behavior — snapping photos and posting them to Facebook and Twitter and sharing related comments. But what if you want to get more bang for your buck? You can definitely post as much as you want on your social feed, but what are the odds that everyone that follows you is interested in your sports posting? Well OnSports is an app that will allow you to connect specifically with like-minded sports fans, some who are actually AT the game and some that are not. Have polls, talk about the MVPs, discuss the game and share photos/videos. Could be pretty useful because aside from politics, isn’t one of the most discussed industries on the web about sports? That sounds about right, but if you want to keep in touch and get a virtual experience of the game, this might be worth using. This application is available right now for the iPhone and Android.

Are there any other apps that you’re planning on using to help keep you up-to-date about the Super Bowl? Feel free to share them in the comments below!

Update: Learnvest has an interesting infographic on their post about the Facebook IPO and who owns Facebook. This data was gathered by the Wall Street Journal and the Guardian.

If you were like me this morning, you woke up early wondering if Facebook was eager enough to file their intent to go public at 9am EST. Sadly, here on the west coast, at 6am, there wasn’t a peep about it. My Twitter stream wasn’t flooded with people retweeting article after article from sites like  TechCrunch, Mashable, All Things D, Pando Daily or even from MG Seigler. Turns out, as All Things D’s Kara Swisher so eloquently points out, there seems to be some sort of delay in the filing and everyone was just eager to find out when would Facebook decide to make the inevitable move.

Well wait no more, because as of a few minutes ago, Facebook just filed their Form S-1 registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission to go public. Yes, that’s right…get ready folks because one of the largest social networks in the past few years is going to enter the world of the stock market and, if experts and analysts are correct, will become one of the largest publically traded companies in the world. And as a result, millionaires and maybe even billionaires will be made. Facebook has also enlisted the help of Bank of America/Merrill Lynch, JP Morgan, and Goldman, Sachs & Co. to help them through this process.

Now that Facebook has officially filed its papers to go public, under the rules of the Securities Act of 1933, Facebook will need to wait until the SEC staff declares the registration statement effective. And we will basically see all sorts of news severely limited or blocked because laws are in place to limit what information Facebook and related parties are able to share with the public.

The company intends to raise $5 billion in their Initial Public Offering . In 2011, they received over $1 billion on sales of $3.7 billion with over 845 million monthly users. Where does all of this come from? Advertising and platform developer payments.

MSNBC has analyzed the filing and they are reporting:

Facebook’s billionaire chairman Mark Zuckerberg, 27, made $500,000 in base salary last year, plus a $220,000 first-half bonus, apparently making him the company’s highest-paid employee, at least in cash compensation, according to an initial look at the filing. His salary will go to a nominal $1 a year at his request effective in 2013, Facebook said in the filing.

The New York Times’ Bits blog has really scrutinized Facebook’s filing. In their post, they’ve posted some interesting tidbits:

Perhaps after the long-awaited filing for their IPO, analysts and the public are wondering what the recognized stock ticker symbol will be. The New York Times says that Facebook will seek to have “FB” for its shares. And there was rumors of a war between exchanges on who would receive Facebook’s prized listing? Well that remains unclear as the filing doesn’t mention it.

And if you don’t think that Facebook gives a damn about Google+, then you’re wrong. Claire Cain Miller from the NY Times reports that the filing has more space allotted to it and the social network states “we compete broadly with Google’s social networking offerings, including Google+, which it has integrated with certain of its products, including search and Android.” Will wonders never cease…this should make for an interesting competition both in the stock market and in the future who will come out victorious.

More about these fun facts can be found here.

Mashable has embedded the SEC filing on their site so I’m embedding it here for your convenience.

Facebook S 1

You can read the entire SEC filing here.

Photo Credit: Jeanette Runyon/Flickr