meinVZ noch nützlich, aber facebook wird wertvoller

Es wird schon länger darüber diskutiert, wie der Wettbewerb zwischen facebook.com und meinVZ.net in Deutschland ausgehen wird. Anfangs sah es aus, als ob meinVZ.net seinen führenden Platz in Deutschland halten konnte – trotz zahlreicher Rechtstreitigkeiten zwischen den beiden. Mittlerweile hat allerdings facebook.com in Deutschland die Nase vor, wenn man den Umfragen glauben darf.

Gestern habe ich ein wenig überlegt, ob der Trend dahin geht, dass am Ende die Nutzer sich nur auf ein soziales Netzwerk fokussieren, statt viele verschiedene Web 2.0-Dienste zu nutzen, und was das für die jeweiligen Anbieter bedeuten könnte. Da drei Personen aus meinen Bekanntenkreis neulich meinVZ.net und myspace.com verlassen haben, um den Schwerpunkt ihrer internetbasierten, sozialen Aktivitäten bei facebook.com zu legen, werde ich heute kurz schauen, wie es eigentlich in meinen Bekanntenkreis mit der Nutzung von meinVZ.net (95 Freunde) vs. facebook.com (185 Freunde) aussieht. Mal schauen, ob es auch für mich an der Zeit ist, meinVZ.net Tschüss zu sagen.

Mindestens 48 meiner meinVZ.net Freunde haben auch bei facebook.com einen Account. Wenn ich also nun meinen meinVZ.net Account deaktivieren würde, würde ich den Anschluss zu 47 bzw. 49% meiner Bekannten verlieren – ist wohl noch zu früh, um meinVZ.net ganz aufzugeben. Interessanterweise haben aber von meinen 95 Freunden bei meinVZ.net nur 28 Personen also 29% in den letzten 30 Tagen etwas auf der Plattform aktiv unternommen, d.h. beispielsweise persönliche Daten geändert/ergänzt, Bilder hochgeladen oder Buschfunk genutzt. Von diesen 28 aktiven Freunden sind jedoch 18 bzw. 64% auch bei facebook.com und schon sieht die Welt ein wenig anders aus – reicht das aber als Indiz aus, dass alle anderen nur Karteileichen bei meinVZ.net sind?

Das Fazit wäre damit aus heutiger Sicht, dass aktive meinVZ.net in der Mehrzahl auch bei facebook.com vertreten sind, es aber noch zu früh wäre, sich gänzlich von meinVZ.net zu verabschieden, da doch noch fast die Hälfte des Bekanntenkreises an meinVZ.net hängt und den Weg zu facebook.com noch nicht gefunden hat :o)

Social Media Optimization for Social Media

Social Media Optimization isn’t really new in the industry, so why not use Social Media Marketing to boost your own Social Service? I have found some Social Media Marketing Tactics on the web like e.g. ‘Five Pillars of Social Media Marketing‘ and ’How to Leverage Web 2.0 & Social Media Sites to Market Your Brand & Control Your Message‘, but also with some hints what you shouldn’t do, like DO NOT go around adding random people as your friends. But why not? I can’t believe that it is unhealthy to surf around and add strangers to your friend list and then try to market your service to your ‘new’ friends. If you browse some of the big social networks you always find people saying that they want to meet new people and make friendships. So it shouldn’t be a big annoyance to say hello and ask if they want to be my friends :o)

To investigate to potential of making new friends with random strangers, I joined the following networks and measured how many friends I will collect within 24 hours. By random I ask exactly 100 people, if they want to be my buddies. But I have to admit that I used a fake female profile for my little experiment:

 
All in all it was quite easy to set up an (fake) account and to add new friends. But in some social networks like itsmy.com and flirtomatic.com you must verify your cell phone number before connecting to other people. And some of the social services seem to have a limitation for adding friends. For example at sonico.com I got the note “You have reached your daily limit of manual invitations” after adding 10 friends, but you still can add friends directly by sending them an invite email. And at facebook.com I got a warning that I am “engaging in behavior that may be considered annoying or abusive by other users”. So I had to slow down with my new friends, because in the worst case they would temporary block or even close down my test account. I hope they will forgive me my little scientifically study and will not banish my real me ;o)

The best way to promptly make strangers be your friends is to talk to users that are online, but not every social service offers this functionality like peperonity.com does. The resume for me is that it is fun, because you get a lot of respond, but you have to be careful not to get banish and it just takes time to set up an account and find your new friends. And there’s more to it than that, because afterwards you have to find the right way to generate exposure for your business and not every social network is allowing the promotion of foreign services. For example fotochatter.com deleted my note and link to my service.

The Mobile Advertising Ecosystem

There are several business models for Mobile Social Networks (MSN). Asking users to pay for either community membership or for premium content like virtual goods are two examples. Lately, a few players have been experimenting with different premium models. Nevertheless, it seems to me that our market segment still favours the advertising-based business model.

When thinking about whom to choose as a partner I drew the diagram you see above to visualise which partners and options MSN currently have. In my view mobile social networks now have four different groups of potential advertising partners. In more detail, if you consider the various possible combinations for cooperations between partners, the money we look at can go through 7 different ways through the value chain) as the diagram illustrates. These four groups of partners are:

• Mobile Content / Service Provider
  A direct cooperation with mobile content and service provider can bring higher rates of the effective cost per mille (eCPM) for the social network’s inventory. On the other hand the cooperation requires a a higher sales effort from the MSN. To reach a 100% fill rate (defined here as ads shown by content partner/inventory offered by MSN) your inventory a MSN needs many business partners to gain enough advertising deals. It also takes a high technical integration effort and a lot time to manage the relationships with these partners. One well-known mobile content provider is e.g. Fox Mobile Group (Jamba/Jamster).
   
• Mobile Advertising Agency
  Mobile advertising agencies often work for several big brands and manage cross media advertising campaigns for them. Typically agencies wish to target a very specific audience for a very large MSN inventory volume within a certain period of time. For a MSN these specific types of demands are often difficult to serve properly. Two of such mobile advertising agencies are pi2006.es and glispa.de.
   
• Mobile Advertising Networks
  Mobile advertising networks pool different kinds of mobile players. They have elaborated ways how they can fulfill the specific needs of advertisers and help publishers to convert their inventory into revenues. From the point of view of a MSN their specific disadvantage is that MSN can not directly choose who advertises on on their site. Indirectly they can choose to put to put specific advertisers on “blacklists”. Examples of two such marketplaces are admob.com and adinfuse.com.
   
• Mobile Advertising Optimisers
  Mobile advertising optimisers offer a very tempting comprehensive monetization solution for MSNs. However, they represent a new branch of business in the mobile industry. If one is to believe them MSN can easily manage all their business cooperations and maximize the monetization of their inventory. On the other hand they represent a new part of the value chain which wants a bite from the revenue pie. Nexage.com and smaato.de are among those new players.

It should be mentioned that there is a even more complexity in the value chain. For example some mobile social networks like buzzcity.com offer their own mobile advertising networks. And you also can’t preclude that the mobile advertising optimisers integrate each other. So how does one choose as a mobile social network the right part of this value chain to work with? We don’t really know yet who in the value chain will survive in the long term because the mobile advertising business is still young. We know mobile advertising networks since 2006 (admob.com started in 2006) and mobile advertising optimisers since last year (smaato.de started with SOMA in 2008). Google introduced Adsense for mobile search just the other day. I am sure that we will also see another big movement in the industry when the first mobile ads appear on Facebook Mobile and MySpace Mobile‘s efforts increase in this regard. Facebook has got no ads yet, but just imagine the additional amount of mobile advertising inventory from ‘20 Million Users Now Accessing Facebook Through Mobile Platforms‘.

To me as MSN one must broadly consider of a trade-off between money (content providers, agencies) vs security (optimizers). The best business option for a mobile social network depends much on which strategy in general they pursue. If you go for the big money, you go directly to the content / service providers or/and advertising agency and accept the high business efforts and the risk depending on few big customers. If you aim for more secureness and less work, but at the worst also less money for your inventory, than you go for the mobile advertising marketplaces and optimizers.
 
But at the end, how to chose the right business partners for the corresponding cooperation? For an informed decision you need some criteria; I can think of a set of 14 criteria to bear in mind when selecting one. Firstly we can have a look on basic facts about the potential business friends like company age, references, team and investors. Some operating figures like the market coverage, achieved average fill rate and achieved average eCPM are also of interest. Than we should consider the business aspects like revenue share, contract duration, contractual specials and payment target / reliability. And of course don’t forget the technical issues like integration efforts, performance / scalability and support quality. But at the end it’s all about individual experience with specific business partners, because mostly you have to deal with young players in our turbulent industrial sector.
 
For peperonity.com we have found our strategy and good business partners. Understandably I can’t tell you the details, but I am open for discussion about the mobile advertising ecosystem from the perspective of MSN or a publisher in general. Our mobile industry is just vibrant and full of surprises :o)

(Note: This is my contribution for the ‘FACTS OF THE WEEK NO 1′ at www.mobile-facts.com)

Mobile Social Web – Web 2.0 für die Hosentasche

Two days ago I was asked by Mark Wächter, if I can fill in for facebook on the Mobile Media Summit at MedienForum.NRW in cologne. They didn’t ask me first, but why not :o) So I had the great opportunity to join the panel ‘Mobile Social Web – Web 2.0 für die Hosentasche’ (English: Mobile Social Web – Web 2.0 for the trouser pocket) and to discuss the developments in mobile social networks with Sarik Weber (Vice President – Marketing, cellity AG), Olaf Kroll (Director Business Development Europe, Fox Interactive Media / MySpace.com), Mark Wächter (chairman of Fachgruppe Mobile of Bundesverbandes der Digitalen Wirtschaft e.V.) and Ossi Urchs (F.F.T. Medienagentur).

Markus Nass made some pics with me in action, as carnival barker and in the panel. And here are my slides:

[slideshare id=465745&doc=20080611-peperonide-mk-mobile-summit-1213346077798560-8&w=425]

There were also other interesting lectures that day like the one by Dr. Rainer Deutschmann (Executive Vice President Mobile Internet, T-Mobile International AG), telling that they are changing more and more from a portal to a platform for third parties. And that it is important for them right now to explain to the user that they can now find the web brands like eBay – that they are familiar with on their personal computer at home – on the their mobile phone. And I just loved the statement of Michael Stenberg (Partner Director Mobile, Central & Eastern Europe, Yahoo! Deutschland GmbH): ‘the mobile internet is big’ :o)

Mobile Media Summit 2008 Agenda:

Mobile Internet – Kampf um die beste Startposition

• Keynote: Dr. Rainer Deutschmann
• Moderation: Ossi Urchs
• Panel participants: Mark Wächter, Dr. Rainer Deutschmann, Michael Stenberg, Matthias Büchs
• Presentations: Michael Stenberg, Matthias Büchs

Mobile Social Web – Web 2.0 für die Hosentasche

• Keynote: Sarik Weber
• Moderation: Ossi Urchs
• Panel participants: Maciej A. Kuszpa, Mark Wächter, Olaf Kroll, Sarik Weber
• Presentations: Olaf Kroll, Maciej A. Kuszpa

Mobile Advertising – Werbung direkt beim Kunden

• Keynote: Burkhard Leimbrock
• Moderation: Ossi Urchs
• Panel participants: Dirk Kraus, Mark Wächter, Burkhard Leimbrock, Stefan Meyer-Spickenagel
• Presentations: Dirk Kraus, Stefan Meyer-Spickenagel