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.

Social Media in real life

After the first day of the CTIA Wireless 2008 we first went to the AdMob CTIA Dinner Party in the Ozumo Restaurant. Sometimes the best networking is after the trade show. Like in the last year AdMob did a great job with their reception bringing together many folks from the mobile industry. All in all a great evening with people like Omar, Jason and Thomas (AdMob), Michael and Gustaf (Heysan), Annika (Netbiscuits), Matthäus (mobile facts) and Ilja (getjar). Afterwards I was lucky to grab an invitation from Jamie (MocoSpace) for the CTIA DefJam, MocoSpace and Quattro Wireless party, where I also met  Justin (MocoSpace).

MoMo – OPEN Portals, Platforms, Communities

Before the MoMo I just couldn’t resist to go for some tasty Bavarian food. So I went to the ‘Zum Spöckmeier‘ - close to the Marienplatz – for a great plate with liver sausage, blood sausage and Bavarian veal sausage. Yummy :o)

On this Mobile Monday in the ’Neues Rathaus‘ at the Marienplatz in Munich I looked forward to the celebration of the 5th Anniversary of gofresh. So I even brought a nice bottle of champagne for the team of my favorite combatants and had the chance to clink glasses with the whole management team of itsmy.com; Vince Staybl, Sabine Irrgang, Jukka Saarelainen and Mikko Saarelainen. And we also celebrated today’s hot industry news ‘MocoSpace Raises $4 Million B Round‘. Congratulations Justin Siegel and Jamie Hall! 

Unfortunately I had to leave the party early, so we couldn’t celebrate all night long. Furthermore it was great to see some other ‘old’ business contacts like e.g. Ralph Suda (Contnet), Daniel Melter (M-Squad), Harald Müller (scopas medien) and Mark Wächter (MWC).

Agenda MoMo Munich 28.01.2008 

• Welcome Aperitif: Celebrating the 5th Anniversary of Gofresh 
• Introduction to the MobileMonday Creative Award 2008: Competition for the most creative digital ad or campaign
• “Enabling the Independency”, Dirk Barmscheidt, BILDmobil.de
• “An Introduction to the Android Application Framework”, Jason Chen, Google.com
• “The Social Phonebook”, Tommy Ahlers, CEO & Founder, zyb.com
• “The Mobile Community with Location-centric Content Enrichment”, Suk-Hyon Paek, CEO, Qiro
• “Launching the HOTorNOT OPEN Mobile Service”, Axel Schütz, Marketing Director & Founder, HOTorNOT.de
• “itsmy.com: The biggest free mobile content community”, Vince Staybl, CEO & Founder, gofresh GmbH
• Roundtable of Open Mobile Communities

The first day at the CTIA WIRELESS I.T. & Entertainment 2007 was very good for us, because it was full with talks and impressions about the mobile market in USA. And we also met for the first time ever the guys behind our combatant mocospace.com; Justin Siegel (CEO) and Jamie Hall (CTO). This day was really great, because later on we met even more of our combatants; Malcolm Wong (Business Development at buzzcity.com), Armando Pena (CEO at fotochatter.com), Sabine Irrgang (COO at gofresh.de) and Mikko Saarelainen (Director Content & Communities at gofresh.de). Even if we are amidst the battlefield, it was great the have a chat with all of them about our industry and next developments :o)

In the evenings we went to the admob.com Cocktail Reception in the Ozumo Restaurant. I was very amazed how fast the admob.com family grow in the last months and I was glad to meet some of the family members, like Omar, Niren, Zubair, Andy, Cheryl, Wendy, Jennifer, Tony, Kevin, Thomas, Jackson and many others…

I just found this headline by accident: ”MocoSpace nets $3M in funding round” on the Boston Business Journal and started to read up on this news, but now the surprise: according to TechCrunch “MocoSpace raised a $3 million in a series A financing in January 2007″. How could I miss that? Is this just a rumor? I couldn’t find anything about this invesment particularly on the sites of JNJ Mobile, Inc. (MocoSpace is one of their brands) ant their three investors: General Catalyst Partners (John Simon), Pilot Group and Michael Dearing (former eBay executive).

More voices on the MocoSpace investment:

• MocoSpace: Social networking hits mobile [BloggingStocks]
• MocoSpace Has Strong Growth; Race To Be MySpace For Mobile [TechCrunch]
• Mobile Social Network MocoSpace Gets $3 Million First Round Funding [podsanity]
• Mobile Social Network MocoSpace Gets $3 Million First Round Funding [mocoNews.net]

If MocoSpace really got this funding, then our race with peperonity.com could be thrilling, but as Tom Taulli says “we are still in the early innings on this”, so Justin Siegel (CEO of JNJ Mobile) and Jamie Hall (President & CTO of JNJ Mobile) please stop by if you’re in Germany :o)

One of my personal interests and tasks at Peperoni is to track the development of our industry sector (Mobile UGC / Mobile Social Networks). Furthermore people (mostly investment bankers :o) ask me often how big and valuable our community is – but honestly, it’s not easy to answer this question satisfiable.

In our and other communities you have “creators” and “viewers”. We also have some ”new visitors”, “repeat visitors”, “heavy users”, “sleepers” and of course some “bouncers”. (There is a small survey about the typical Web 2.0 users from Forrester Research on ECIN – for German speakers.) In between that we also have our “unique visitors” and “registered members”, which I think could be the most informative key figures in this category.

Beside the already existing challenges on the net, it also seems not to be so easy to count the “unique visitors” on the mobile internet. So how to manage a proper measurement based on IP addresses, if e.g. the mobile network operator (MNO) use dynamic IP technology and their customers share the same IP addresses? Some MNO give you the information about MSISDN or a customer-ID, but in the off-deck world only very few of them are such generous. Furthermore you can use cookies, but many of the cell phones and MNO don’t support this technology. The bottom line is that you have to have some king of extrapolation on your figures, but like my old professor on statistics Prof. Dr. Walter Krämer used to say: don’t believe statistics that you didn’t make/fake :o)

You can also count the “registered members” which seems to be obvious, but in some cases it doesn’t span the whole community. For example you don’t have to register to join peperonity.com. Many of our “members” appreciate the anonymity, by still have the access to a broad range of functions in the community. Here some figures that I found (or not found) on the net today:

• tagtag.com has 269,960 sites
  you can count the sites in the tagtag.com catalog
  but there is no figure about the number of members and you can’t deduce it, because a member can have more than one site in a member account.
   
• itsmy.com has 2,104,214 sites
  you can see the figures on the itsmy.com homepage
  I suppose they have the same number of members, because you can only have one “nickpage” in a member account.
   
• mocospace.com has 104,914 members
  you can count the profiles in the mocospace directory
  I assume that they have the same number of sites, because you can only have one “profile” in a member account.
   
• peperonity.com has 394,586 members
  you can see the figures on the peperonity.com homepage
  and they have definitely more sites, because you can have more than one site in a member account.
   
• mobango.com has 1,500,164 members
  you can see the figures on the mobango.com homepage
  and I assume that they have the same number of sites, because you can only have one “profile” in a member account.
   
• mygamma.com has 44,213 sites
  you can count the sites in the mygamma.com catalog
  but on the other side they have “only” 20,044 members on the Gamma Life Ladder.
   
• pitch.tv has ??? sites/members
  I couldn’t find a way to count anything here :o(

The conclusion is that nobody knows if these figures are true, if they reflect the total of uniqe members, if they include nominal members/sites and if they can verify the “quality” of an community. So for me such manifestation is just a simple marketing instrument - we also use it :o) – and not really a significant benchmark. Another interesting question would be, how big the overlap on members all communities have together. I know some “heavy users” having several accounts in different mobile communities. I myself have three accounts on peperonity.com and one on each of the above communities. Some days ago we had a chat with Fred from AirG.com about our industry sector and it’s quite difficult to measure the size and growth of our market in terms of end user. Maybe some of my visitors have a hint for me on some studies on this …

Another way would be to count “page impressions” which seems to be easier. But even here a clear definition of a page impressions is needed, because sometime you risk to get total figures included page impression on error pages and other technical notes :o) And those figures only a provider can tell you. There are some statistic tools on the net like alexa.com, but in my point of view you should take these tools with a pinch of salt, even if you receive a first impression on the differences between services. For example you can compare peperonity.com with other services, but according to my current knowledge alexa.com only count the PC web traffic of people with an alexa-plugin. And for instance alexa.com says that most of our users come from Indonesia – I can’t confirm that. So it’s an interesting tool, but not the whole story.

And I love such figures like “ad views so far” [greetings to admob.com] or “total downloads so far” [greetings to itsmy.com]. I must ask my team mates how many millions of billions of trillions of page views we have served so far, but I promise not to get megalomaniac :o)