Trendrr and Lexicon

I promised I’d report back on my experience with Trendrr. I just checked and here is my graph of the appearance of the words ["social network" advertising skepticism] in Google News articles. Though I’ve been tracking since April 2, the chart only shows data from around April 16 and I can’t figure out how to change it.

At any rate, it’s not much of a data set, yet. However, it appears the data has been viewed 30 times so somewhere out there a few others are apparently interested in tracking the same thing.

In the meantime, Facebook just launched its own trend tracker, Lexicon. It tracks the mention of words on Wall posts. Interesting scraping technology at work here - all anonymous, of course, but there are bound to be some embarrassing and potentially hurtful things people will do with this. Will be interesting to watch.

Is This Spam or Does Facebook Think It Knows Something?

This ad for “Seattle Hair Removal” appeared on my News Feed this morning. It’s one of those awkward moments when you wonder if it’s just spam or if Facebook has been checking my profile photo a bit too closely.

Sad but kind of true (and pretty funny)

“Social Networking Wars” by Current TV.

Where Will Facebook’s Developers Get Revenue?

First, apologies for the extended absense from posting. It’s not very blogger-like, I know. Between travel and presentations, my schedule got away from me.

TechCrunch reported yesterday that some developers are dissatisfied with Facebook. This is nothing new. What is new is the public debate over the (lack of) revenues developers are getting from being on Facebook. According to the blog post:

“The session started off with a disagreement over how much money developers are actually making through Facebook. Naval Ravikant from Venturehacks estimated that over $100M would be made in 2008, whereas Joyce Park of Renkoo and Matt Sanchez of VideoEgg predicted revenues as low as $10-35M this year.

All panelists agreed, however, that CPM rates on Facebook are miserably low, perhaps averaging 15 cents.”

I’ve believed for some time now that the widget and app space will not be the giant revenue generator that developers seem to think it is. Why? Too much clutter, not enough measurement, rogue apps, spam, to list a few quick reasons. Add in a messy US economy and things are starting to look dicey.

Cue the Carpenters

“We’ve only just begun….”

I hear that a lot lately when I talk to folks who are trying to figure out the best marketing models for brands to reach consumers in the social media realm. Though the skepticism over ad models for social networking is growing, some people lately seem to have very little hindsight.

Just think how far we’ve come already, from marketers building profile pages on MySpace to counting friends to tracking influencers to widgets and applications to Open Social. (OK, that last one’s just a maybe, since we haven’t exactly seen much from OS other than talk.)

And yet the conversation between brands and consumers has only just begun. It’s in that early, awkward stage. You know, the one where you run into a friend from college you haven’t seen in a long time and once you get past the “what are you up to” and “how many kids do you have” questions you start looking over their shoulder for something else to focus on. Or the conference cocktail party where you meet someone who wants to gab your ear off and you need to figure out how to gently extricate yourself. (No, this has never happened to me. I’m always interested in what you have to say. Always.)

John Battelle describes this uncomfortable dance in a recent Searchblog post:

In essence, brand advertising has been, up till now, an attempt to influence the conversation that potential consumers will have after experiencing the advertising. With conversational media and marketing, that concept is time shifting. Now brand advertising can *join* and even *initiate and convene* those brand conversations. And that requires a different skill set, one media folks are just starting to explore.

The key, as John says, is to find a marketing vehicle that works for brand, content producer and consumer. There will be a lot of awkward, uncomfortable conversations between brands and consumers in the future. But, like the best networkers, the brands that get the message right and know how to develop that first conversation into a lasting friendship will succeed.

Track Social Web Trends with Trendrr

I’ve just started playing around with a data-tracking tool called Trendrr. It allows you to create graphs that track keywords, photos, videos and blog mentions (among other things) for terms that you define. Then, you can view the things other Trendrr members are tracking and grab and post the graphs to your own Web page, social network page or PowerPoint presentation. (The latter is what I’m most interested in, since I have a presentation to give in a couple of weeks.)

One graph tracks news stories that mention “foreclosure” with news stories that mention “Britney Spears.” “Note the strong correlation,” the Trendrr member writes. And he/she is weirdly right.

The first thing I’m tracking is mentions of the terms (”social network” advertising skepticism) on Google Blogs and Google News. So far I’m not sure how to trend backwards (ie, for dates earlier than today) but it will be an interesting experiment. I’ll post results when I have them .

Trendrr will likely appeal to data wonks (like me) and to people with a passing interest in following what’s trendy online.