AlexSchleber’s Quick Hits Business Mindhacks

Scott "Our Boy @unmarketing" Stratten presenting on what I must assume to be the unwitting dangers of unchecked geo-location services in social media... :)

By all means click through to the post, great recap of Scott's smart takes.

#foursquare #four2 #geo

But who else wins? Developers, developers, developers, developers. Why? Because I’m hearing rumors that Twitter is trying to charge developers for access to its full-firehose feed. How much? I can’t yet say because I haven’t confirmed the figures with Twitter but let’s just say that the figures I’m hearing are BIG. Six to eight figures big depending on the size of the company.

Now, what if Google turns on a microblogging/status message system like Facebook or Twitter have [...] ? What happens if they also open up an application store (oh, already done on Android, or as they announced yesterday for business apps)? What happens if they give away access to these APIs for free instead of trying to charge developers tons of money?

If Twitter has to/decides to turn to charging app developers for access to their firehose for a business model, then that could rapidly kill off the 3rd party service ecosystem that's been growing like weeds around Twitter.

For they would face essentially the same predicament as Twitter itself: How to sufficiently monetize social page views of one sort or another.

So far, they've been doing OK because it was free for them to play. Once they have to pay the kind of money that Robert is hinting at here, their calculus may shift dramatically.

From "we can be alright by putting a little AdSense on these page views", to "What do we do now?!?" And Robert is right that this could signifcantly shift the playing field in the direction of Google for a Twitter replacement.

Since Twitter mostly withholds our and our friends' tweets from us anyway (poor to non-existent archiving & search access except through indirect means like importing into Friendfeed), all that really matters is the followers/following social graph, and Lists. If Google allowed you to seemlessly import those into your Google profile, would you feel a lot of loyalty to Twitter?

Presumably there was going to be a revolutionary new ad model that Twitter hinted toward and that we were supposedly "going to love". If so, then the above step may not be necessary, at least not at the high price points:

http://alexschleber.posterous.com/my-comment-on-twitter-to-turn-on-advertising

Steve's got bigger worries than what McGraw said about the iPad hours before his big unveiling.

He just launched 7x9 version of the iPod touch. The entire world yawned in unison.

Background: "The awkward array of five logos used to be a tidy lineup of six. The day before the show, Apple removed McGraw-Hill, the 122-year-old publisher whose 61-year-old leader, Harold McGraw III — better known as Terry — prattled...about the tablet’s iPhone operating system on CNBC." - http://venturebeat.com/2010/01/27/mcgraw-ipad/

AAPL Jan 27 2010, 04:30 PM EST

"Apple CEO Steve Jobs trotted out on stage in San Francisco today, promising "a truly magical and revolutionary" new product. He didn't deliver."

I'd add: enough. He didn't deliver enough. Given the fever pitch unveiling hype, the bar was set very high:

Read -> The Apple Tablet And Planned Insanity

Here are five classic Confucian quotes that are vital to remember if you want a successful blog.

1. The essence of knowledge is having it, to apply it

Information and knowledge sharing are the main driving forces behind the web. If you want people to read your blog and follow it loyally, you can’t be greedy with your knowledge.

You need to give your readers something that will make their lives better — every time they visit your blog. When you feel you’re giving too much away for free, you’re on the right track.

My BOLD highlights.

The last sentence is a great reminder for us all to practice Moving The Freeline more often and FURTHER than we might feel comfortable with this year.

Feel wealthy right now, and give some of your best ideas away. Else, it is extremely unlikely that all but a few will ever hear of them.

Trust that the "Thank You Economy" is already here, and will only be growing every day in 2010. Read Gary Vaynerchuck's example here:

http://bit.ly/freeline

2. Hyperlocal advertising will heat up, delivering another nail in the traditional newspaper industry's coffin. (Very similar to one of my 2008 predictions, but this time focused on the advertising aspects.) Specifically, it will be more common for a local establishment to pay marketing dollars to Yelp or FourSquare, for example, than their local newspaper.

Very smartly put. Put that in your pipe & smoke it, Rupert Murdoch...

The new FTC guidelines actually go farther than just bloggers.  They also make celebrity endorsers disclose more explicitly the compensation they receive for flacking products:

Celebrity endorsers also are addressed in the revised Guides. [...] celebrities have a duty to disclose their relationships with advertisers when making endorsements outside the context of traditional ads, such as on talk shows or in social media.

And the guidelines don’t stop there, either.  Also under FTC scrutiny is “word of mouth” marketing, which seems to imply that anyone in any context that receives some sort of material remuneration for talking about a product will come under the FTC’s jurisdiction:

These examples address what constitutes an endorsement when the message is conveyed by bloggers or other “word-of-mouth” marketers.

Where does the FTC’s jurisdiction end?  If I get a free tube of toothpaste in the mail and say nice things about it on Twitter, Facebook, or in a PTA meeting, do I have to disclose it as a freebie or pay the $11,000 fine the FTC imposes?  What kind of disclosure can one fit into a 140-character Twitter message, anyway?

This is another in a line of paternalistic decisions on consumer product issues from the federal bureaucracy.  It treats blog readers like idiots who are in constant danger of brainwashing by bloggers.  American consumers are much brighter than the FTC assumes, but treating us like adults would not give them leverage to increase their power and their intrusiveness.

Don’t get me wrong.  If a blogger gets paid to write a review, the blogger should disclose it.  If the product comes free from the manufacturer, as a rule, that should also be disclosed.  However, that should also apply to the mainstream media as well as everyone else, but in the rational manner of audience credibility [...]

My BOLD highlights.

Good that at least celebrity endorsements are going to be subject to this to some extent, because as I previously wrote, the entire new legislation appeared as more of an exercise by big business (Old Media, etc. etc.) to beat up on the little guy (i.e. bloggers, small business, solopreneurs). Especially in regard to the even more questionable new Testimonial rules.

But will they require a large font disclosure of paid endorsement for TV ads? As in "Howie Long is being paid to talk about our product", etc.??

As is pointed out, when it gets to Word-of-mouth, is everyone potentially going to be both subject to the FTC rules, as well as spy/enforcer? Which is what has been worrying me more than anything else about this, the opening up of a whole new class of complaint, many of which will likely be frivolous, or placed by competitors. As if our society weren't litigious enough already.

And all of this for, as is rightly pointed out, a paternalistic overreach that treats consumers as hapless, and places additional burdens on small business. The best defense against this may well be a good offense, of proactively "overdisclosing" as John Chow is demonstrating here:

http://www.johnchow.com/about/my-disclosure-policy/