Polygraph Media Blog

8 Observations from #mashcon (Mashable Connect)

I was fortunate to attend Mashable Connect late last week -- a great conference down in Orlando.  I don't have a ton of time to write right now, but I thought I'd jot down some observations.  Here were my takeaways:

1. Surprisingly (to me at least), I didn't hear a lot of innovation from the speakers.  The bigger companies innovating were really just showing off or describing their incremental advances on the iPad and in social.  The agency folks didn't really share anything I hadn't heard before and the startups were "eh".  No big deal but I didn't hear anything earthshattering and that shocked me a bit.
2. I though Michael Lazerow (@lazerow) from Buddy Media had an interesting vision.  It was almost a mini-pivot in that Buddy is moving from customized Facebook apps (where FBML once provided a "moat" but with the iFrame no longer does) to Social ROI.  Who knows how that will work.
3. I did talk with a lot of "social media cheerleaders', which is fine but to me indicative of both the fact that I was indeed at an industry event and that we're in a bubble.  Bubbles occur in any industry where there is rampant optimism and where skeptics are unpopular and their opinions are almost shocking.  An interesting data point for me was when @districtjoe (great guy) pointed out that I'm skeptical about everything and that he doesn't hear that often.  It's called an echo chamber & most folks at the event were squarely in it.
4. I loved @steverubel's clarity -- overall his presentation was great.  His explanation of the cloverleaf really made a lot of sense to me -- I had seen the illustration before but had not heard it described so well.
5. As is typically the case, there are a few brands who are silently & humbly kicking ass.  You know who you are -- and you know far more about the business than many of the invited speakers.
6. @scrollmotion dragged me kicking and screaming into submission.  The iPad (and the "tablet movement") is indeed real and here to stay.  Really impressive stuff.
7. I heard a great argument for Twitter from @jkrohrs, a new friend I made from ExactTarget.  I am not sure I totally agree with his points that Twitter is better for marketing than Facebook, but I understand the argument better just from spending a few minutes with him.  Smart guy.
8. Finally, this one has been covered a bit but I'll say it again -- tech startups are starting to behave more like agencies and vice versa.  Agencies control customer relationships and are finding small development projects that can be productized.  Tech companies are realizing the limitations of a software business model & can be much more profitable if they include a services/consulting component.  That's a dirty word for a lot of VC-funded tech startups, but it may make them financially viable and it can work out that way faster than the alternative.
9. (bonus) I really like Gowalla's clarity now.  They seemed to get caught up in "check-in mania" last year & it confused their value proposition.  Now they are enhancing experiences with location and vice versa.  Much clearer.  Much better.  The messaging and the approach fits them.  I hope they succeed.

Congrats to the Mashable team for a great event -- I really enjoyed it (maybe at times too much!!).

 

Status Updates, Social Data Mining, and Intelligence

Techcrunch ran an article yesterday on the Twitterer who unwittingly, unknowingly live tweeted the raid on Osama bin Laden's compound.  I thought it was a particularly interesting case that underscores a few things about social data mining -- an area where we've worked in earnest for about six months and where we are starting to make some real progress.

But first, a quick sidebar:

I've said numerous times that the "social" phenomenon of the present day is really a few things -- mapping of the social graph *and* the revolution in real-time/self-published data.

They are inherently different, although all the major social nets (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube) do both.

Twitter has mastered real-time data (for now).  As long as they don't freeze developers out of using the data stream, they'll be OK.  If they get too cute, they'll kill the golden goose and developers will innovate around Facebook's status updates and/or a Twitter competitor will emerge.

Facebook is the winner of the social graph (for now).  Similarly, if they just execute their plan and not freeze developers out of the social graph, they'll too be OK.  

So whether or not you like Facebook and Twitter, both are undeniably capturing a record of history like no other entity that ha scome before it.  Historians will have a field day poring over records of Tweets and Facebook updates to recount history as told and experienced by normal people.

Speed and transparency to relevant information are being redefined.  Tech-savvy observers of the bin Laden story knew that the best way to get the latest information was to run a search on http://search.twitter.com -- not to listen to the live broadcast of your favorite news outlet.

We discovered that 15 years ago at STRATFOR when we mined Lexis Nexis for relevant data and information as traditional news outlets relied upon tried & true methods of gathering news.  Lexis Nexis was just a digitized collection of articles -- certainly higher quality than the public stream of consciousness but more or less conceptually the same.

And even 15 years later, mining the Internet and real-time data is still the name of the game.  Facebook and Twitter users are people who (for their own reasons) talk about things they experience every day.  They do so in the open yet in relative anonymity because of the volume of the stream.  Decision makers who can pull out the intelligent nuggets from amidst the noise will beat other people who rely on others to tell them what is important, and there are implications in a variety of industries.  Consider the following:

• The aforementionied Twitter user who live tweeted the operation in Abottabad to find & kill Osama bin Laden -- that data was in the open hours before any news organization reported it.  News organizations can integrate the wisdom of the crowd into the newsroom like never before.
• Investors in a particular market or equity can find out about supply disruptions or can mine social networks for information on how employees of a company feel about business prospects.  They similarly can use the global feed or parts of it to monitor sentiment
• Companies in a competitive market can mine social networks for information on customers, leads, and people with purchase intent.  They can identify specific targets and understand their likes/dislikes.  They can also map influencers of that person, people that person influences, and more or less what makes them tick.

But despite all of the possibilities and all the advances in self-publishing and the Internet, collectively we have not gotten better at getting smarter, faster.  The news organizations, investors, and leading companies of the next decade will be people who learn how to mine real-time data -- both what is being said, by whom, and by the additional context that qualifies just how important the information is.