First Palm, then RIM and then Facebook?

You might ask what Facebook has to do with Palm or RIM. But at the end of the article you might get the point.

Palm was in the 90th the rising star. They came out in 1993 with their palm pilot and their innovative Palm OS. One of the best OS at its time. Palm in the time did reinvent hand writing rather than the palm pilot needs to learn the users writing, the user had to learn how to write as the palm can understand. At the time all others tried to build complex software for computers to understand different hand writing styles. It took me maybe three days to learn how to write on the palm and then it was just easy.




Palm eventually became big and hired a lot of people. Every year came a new model out, better faster etc, even with a color screen.
Palm allowed other companies to write application for the palm and users could choose from hundreds of extra apps to install on the palm.
The concept was similar to Apple. Palm developed hardware and OS.

Palm was on top and the leading company for handhelds, but their biggest problem was, that they had only one product. Instead of working on new products, besides handled, they focused too much on the handheld competition and lost the race. Palm is today a small devision of HP and only delivers the webOS which is Palm's latest OS based on Linux.


RIM (founded 1984) a Canadian company started in 1998 to sell Inter@ctive pager 950 which had two way paging and wireless e-mail network. About the size of a bar of soap, this device competed against the SkyTel two-way paging network developed by Motorola.

The big break through came 1999.
In 1999, the Blackberry wireless e-mail device, the BlackBerry 5790, was revealed along with the Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) for Microsoft Exchange. The BES provided the conduit between the wireless handheld and the corporate Exchange mailbox, with contacts and calendar, putting current business e-mail in the hands of the mobile worker. New content updated in the mailbox was “pushed” out to the BlackBerry keeping the worker up-to-date. The first fully integrated phones were shipped with the 6200 series after the 5810 and 5820 provided phone functionality only with an external headset. RIM also expanded its network coverage from GSM to add CDMA.

At this time cooperations started to buy cellphones from RIM because they could not only send and receive emails but were easily to connect to Microsoft Exchange and the data transfer were encrypted. RIM grew and grew. RIM was second largest smartphone company in the world in 2008




In 2010 RIM did fall back to 3rd place.






RIM had even a much higher market share in companies. But many companies did start to switch Apple iPhone. Our company had only blackberries for our sales people in 2008, today our salesforce is using only iPhones. We are not big, but we have hundred or so sales people.
RIM lost their momentum because they tried to fight against Google Android and Apple iPhone. RIM announced that they will lay off 2000 people. They should have extend their business to other types of products, when they were still the rising star. Now it is almost too late and RIM can be soon history. A much bigger fall is actually Nokia. Once unreachable number one cell phone company with over 50% market share, did fall down to just 20% in 2011.

Let us look at Apple. Apple was almost bankrupt when Steve Jobs came back in 1997. He did the right thing, he throw all kind of products away and concentrated on building just a few but great products (similar like Palm and RIM), However when the success started for Apple again, he did not stop. Apple did build new products. The trick behind was, that they took time to make the products good.
They started with a revolutionary iMac.



Just one form factor. It got successful. In the meantime they started to work on the iPod but did not release the iPod before it was ready for the world in 2001. And then a few years later the next product came and so on. But different than other hardware companies, they did not just throw products on the market, they took time to build them.

Apple could have just stopped with the iMac and build every year new models and some more sizes. But they did not. They have one product with max two versions. As soon the product does get very successful they bring out something new.

This Apple concept is genius. And any company should learn from it.
Imagine Apple would have stayed just with the iMac or maybe just with the iPod? Apple would be a small company today.

Back to my headline. What does this has to do with Facebook?

Everything.

Facebook did grow tremendous in the last 3 years and grew from 20 million to 700 million users. This is amazing. However Facebook has still one flaw which will kill Facebook (I think FB is already dead, they just don't know it). FB has only one product. The product which gave them success. But instead of building new products they just stay with their social network. Google+ will not kill Facebook but FB will kill themselves. Everything they do is around their FB, new features, layout changes or like recently a business Facebook. Google is smarter, they extend their business with new products. If nobody searches anymore on google, then they have still their ad servers for other companies to serve ads, and they have Android etc.

Bottom line is, that having just one product is great to get big, because you can concentrate just on this and make it perfect and it is easier for marketing. However when a company reaches the point, where they are market leader then they need to have already a different product to redefine their market niche. Jack Welsh once said, it is easier to get to number 1 than staying to be number 1.

Why is it bad to have just one product? First of all other can learn from your product and after a while they can make it better, because they saw the mistakes, the things which are missing and have more fresh ideas. Second, consumers needs are changing. Social is big today, but maybe not anymore tomorrow. I think social will not go away, however there will be no need in the future for one big social network because it will be a part of our online life. It is like the internet. AOL got big, because we needed an access point for Internet and there was AOL which offered it for us, but then when Internet got big, AOL was not anymore needed we suddenly could go to the internet without AOL.

Palm, RIM, Nokia, myspace, AOL were once the stars, now their light is out of fading.

And all ends that Palm, RIM and Facebook are so different but similar.


- Posted using BlogPress, please follow me on twitter @schlotz69

Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States

MySpace yourSpace NoSpace

MySpace was once the Internet’s equivalent of the hottest nightclub in town. In its heyday, the world’s dominant social network attracted some 3 million bands, 8,000 comedians and countless filmmakers and wannabes who came to see and be seen.

But even before this, myspace was the leading social network. All my friends inclusion me have been first at my space before joining Facebook. But we all stopped using myspace because it was too busy and after a while just ugly. It felt like social spam portal. But maybe it is no wonder, hence the founders (Chris deWolfe, Tom Anderson) got their start at Intermix (formerly eUniverse) where they worked on a series of profitable internet ventures. eUniverse made money running spyware and spam operations, as well as selling subscription skin medication, made famous by its "Better than Botox?" ads. eUniverse was a Los Angeles-based Internet marketing company. It was opened in 1998. In April 2005 New York State attorney-general Eliot Spitzer filed a lawsuit that alleged that the company is the source of secretly installed spyware that has illegally sent pop-up advertisements and other intrusions to millions of computer users.

In 2005 myspace was number one SNS

MySpace.com
Nov. 2004: 4.9 million
Nov. 2005: 26.7 million

Facebook.com
Nov. 2004: N/A
Nov. 2005: 11.1 million

Friendster.com
Nov. 2004: 966,000
Nov. 2005: 1.5 million

And still leading in 2008

1 Myspace.com 59,352 1%
2 Facebook 39,003 116%
3 Classmates Online 17,075 28%
4 LinkedIn 11,924 193%

Source: The Nielsen Company, Custom Analysis (September 2008).

But already in 2008 the falling trend started with myspace, which only grew 1% to the year before.
NewsCorp bought in 2009 myspace for around $580 million and reduced the workforce by 50%. Myspace got an overhaul but all this did not help.

Now, MySpace is seemingly no place — a digital castoff that corporate parent News Corp. [NWS] sold for $35 million in cash and equity to an Orange Country, Calif., digital media firm specializing in online advertising. That’s a fraction of the $580 million that the media giant controlled by Rupert Murdoch paid to acquire the site a scant six years ago, and well shy of its one-time $65 billion valuation.

But maybe Justin Timberlake (who has a now a stake in MySpace) can bring the portal alive again.

MySpace has 35 million users and got sold to Specific Media basically for $1 per member. This is pretty low. Which would put the value of Facebook to just $800 million.

But to be serious, in less than 3 years myspace went from a potential $30 billion company down to $35 million and lost users and traffic as much as almost no other company in such short time.





As much hype Facebook has today, as fast Facebook can decline and lose value like myspace if they are not careful.

Below are some screenshots from myspace over the years. The last one is from today.

2003




2006




2008




2011



All pictures from the Internet archive archive.org.

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Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States

Facebook - the beginning of the end?

Did you read the "Facebook Effect" or watch the movie "Social Network"? Or did you read any stories about the early ages of Facebook?

One interesting part was that E. Saverin as the CFO did want to monetize FB, but Mark Z. Did not like the idea and refused to allow any advertisement.

Now a few years later, Saverin long time gone, FB is full of ads and it gets more and more.

The latest step to a totally monetize website is the ability to tag images for any brand page within FB.









Right now the user has to tag the product, but I am pretty sure brands can (in the future) buy options that FB will tag images automatically. Of course there will be a privacy setting where the FB user can decide if automated brand tagging is allowed. Default setting will allow brand tagging.

The Lady on in the picture from posterous.com might have in the future not only a coca-cola tag, but as well a Crest teeth whitening tag.

All these product tags will link to the corresponding brand page.
Brands will start with contest how many images users are tagging with the brand which has the contest etc.

I think FB did smell the beauty of money through advertisement and learned as well that the investors want to see more and more revenue, but the challenge is to find the fine line to make a lot of money and not to piss your users off.

If it goes too far, then in a short term, the revenue will explode but then the users are going away and the revenue will go down.

I see companies which don't produce anything with value and have no productx which can't be touched with my fingers are following almost same wave behavior like the stock market. I believe such companies will have every seven years a down and some can survive and some can't. When the company down comes in parallel with the market down than there is nothing which can help.

Google once the Internet star is not really straggling but has had not the best year, just 6 years after IPO. The stock went 30% in 6 months in 2010 down.







And look at AOL and Yahoo, once the big Internet companies are now straggling to survive and firing thousands of people. Both make their money withs advertising.

If a business is build solo around ads then you are relying and your users, brands and agencies.

I give FB not more than 24 months if they keep going the direction as they are today. We will find other places where we will have fun if needed.
Especially that there are no costs for the user to switch.

If you have a computer or car and you don't like the type you have, then the switch is not easy and costs money. But switching from google to bing or from FB to another social network does not hurt and costs nothing.
MySpace or friendster could tell stories about this. They started before FB and were many years bigger but lost a lot of their users to FB.

Companies like Google and FB have to invent constantly new revenue streams which cost at the end a lot of money and can be exhausting.

Mark Z. And Facebook did many mistakes with privacy or stupid campaigns against Google. But now everybody sees FB as a grown up and stupid mistakes can't be done anymore, the freebee effect is over. Let us hope FB will stay a platform to socialize and does not move totally in a advertisement platform.

I personally like the idea of product placement tagging and if I drink a coke in a photo why should the brand not have the right to be linked to it, I am just afraid that Facebook will soon go too far.

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Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States

What is the right social network?

Today is all about being in social networks. There are many social networks from Facebook, twitter, foursquare to linkedin, living social, Groupon and myspace.

Trying to keep up with all of them is almost not possible. At the end we need to make decision which one serve us the best. But which one is the best for us?

Let us first look to what kind group we belong to. I believe we can reduce it to three main groups:
Consumer, celebrities and brands. All three groups have many sub groups but I try to keep it simple with these main groups.
All 3 types have two ways to be social. Either reading information and make certain decisions based on collected information or to post information to influence others to make their decision.

As a consumer we gather information to make buying decisions or to express ourself to let others know what we are doing and what we like.

Facebook:
One of the most prominent platform for social media marketing is FaceBook. FaceBook was born in Harvard dorm room under the aegis of Mark Zukerberg and co- founders Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, Eduardo Saverin in February 2004.

50% of active users log on to the site in any given day
People spend over 700 billion minutes per month on FaceBook
More than 35 million users update their position apiece day
More than 60 million position updates posted apiece day
More than 3 billion pictures uploaded on the site apiece month
There are over 900 million objects that people interact with (pages, groups, events and community pages)
More than 30 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, pic albums, etc.) shared apiece month
More than 3 million active pages
More than 1.5 million local businesses have active pages
More than 20 million people become fans of pages apiece day
More than 5.3 billion fans are created by Pages
Average individual has 130 friends
Average individual sends 8 friend requests per month
Average individual spends 55 minutes on FaceBook
Average individual clicks the Like button on 9 pieces of content apiece month
Average individual writes 25 comments on FaceBook content apiece month
Average individual becomes a fan of 4 pages apiece month
Average individual is invited to 3 events per month
Average individual is a member of 13 groups
More than 70 translations acquirable on the site
Top countries using FaceBook are US, UK, Indonesia, Turkey, France, Italy, Canada, Philippines and Mexico
More than 200 million active users currently access FaceBook through their mobile phones


Facebook has over 850 Million accounts and over 500 million active user. In average each user has 130 friends with 70% Facebook users outside of the US.
Facebook is the right place for keeping in touch with friends far away or to find old friends. The chances are really good to find somebody you did not hear from over 20 years. Many people are posting every day images or small status updates. But the most rime user are spending in playing games.
Facebook is a great tool for brands to engage their consumers and to learn about the consumers needs, likes and dislikes. Facebook is a great place for brands to test products before they are even on the market. Important for brands is a fan base. There are multiple ways to gain more fans. The most successful way today is to post everywhere (on website, packages and ads) the Facebook page URL with special deals which the user can only unlock if they "like" the fan page.
Brands need to post daily news on their wall and need to be proactive in communicating with the consumer on Facebook. A brand can learn a lot from their consumers but need to be aware that there will be a lot of negative comments and maybe an anti brand fan page. Negative comments and anti fan pages are good. No comments and no fans are bad. It is important to react correct to negative comments. The more brands engage the consumer to tell them their true feeling the more the fan page will regulate itself as a positive page, as long the brand answers these negative vibes in a positive way. If consumers are complaining about bad customer service then listen and change the quality of customer service. Let the fans know you changed the customer service and let them vote again how the service is now. The results sill be better than any other PR action.
Facebook is as well a good place for celebrities but as well a dangerous place to be. Many celebrities are engaging marketing firms to handle their Facebook page. The fans will find out when the voice is different than in public. A good example for a great page is lady gaga. The Facebook page sounds authentic, you feel like reading her real diary. As a result she has over 32 million fans.




Facebook is for brands a great advertising platform. No other platform can offer such targeted advertisement to such a big user base. However Facebook ads are not very speaking to the users and have a very low click rate. More users are moving to to mobile Facebook which has no ads at all.

The best addition for companies and brands at Facebook is places. We all love to check-in into restaurants and concerts etc. Brands can offer specials right when the consumer is already outside of their home and ready to spend money.


Linkedin

LinkedIn was founded in 2003. The site launched on May 5th (affectionately referred to by employees as "Cinco de LinkedIn") when the five founders invited about 350 of their most important contacts to join. At the end of the first month in operation, LinkedIn had a total of 4,500 members in the network. LinkedIn's first "real" office was on Shoreline Road in Mountain View.

LinkedIn adds a new member every second and just hit 100 million users.
52% are outside the US.
44 million users are in the US
India has 9 million and UK has 6 million users.
The avearge age of global users is 25-45 and it’s almost 60% males on there globally (compare this to Twitter which has more females). The US has the most females with 45% and the Middle East the least with 33%.
Most users are working for companies with over 1,000 employees, this is especially true in Asia. The biggest proportion of companies are active in High-Tech (16%), Finance (13%) and Manufacturing.
12% of all users say they are in a sales function. 10% are either in academia, administration or operations.
Engineering is the profession of 9% and 8% are in information technology.

Linkedin is the number one social network for professionals. It is a great place to build your network around your profession, If you are looking for a new job or for an investor. But be careful with linkedin. Most employer will look up your profile and compare it against your resume. Brands can utilize linkedin to find new talents for their company. Linkedin has over 100 million users and is a better job market than monster (in my opinion). Linkedin helps to build networks within the network. People might not use linkedin as frequent as Facebook but every entry is more powerful in good as in bad. Companies can easily build a personalty profile on linkedin entries. Connections to a certain group of people or a list of profile updates and reading list can tell stories. Your employer might get suspicious when you you suddenly get a lot of recommendations or if you connect with multiple recruiters. All these updates are showing in your status list. People tend to connect with coworkers really fast and then a job search is no secret anymore.
At the other hand linkedin can be very powerful when your are in sales and need a contact to a company. Many times we are only 2 connections away to the company. Getting introduced is pretty easy.
Linkedin helps to gather information about companies which we might not find easily through google or company websites.





Twitter
Initially, code titled Twttr, inspired by Flickr, Twitter privately appeared in March 2006. Later, in June 2006, it was launched for public with the study Twttr.com and rebranded to Twitter.com later in October the same year. Twitter is a real-time information network that connects you to the latest information about what you find interesting. It is an online application that is part blog, part social networking site, part cell phone/IM tool, designed to let users answer the question “What are you doing?”. Users have 140 characters for apiece posting (or “tweet”) to state whatever they care to say. In terms of online traffic density and visit frequency, Twitter leads the breed of social media sites.

Important Statistics about Twitter

More than 175 million accounts
Number of Twitter users increases at 300,000 everyday
3 Billion requests apiece day generated by 180 million one-of-a-kind visitors
95 million tweets per day, that gives circa 640 tweets per second
Twitter’s search engine gets 600 million queries each day
Thursday and Friday are the most active days on Twitter
32% of accounts are active users
10-11pm is the most active hour on twitter
Top languages used are english, portugese, japanese and spanish
Top countries using twitter are US, India, Japan, Germany, UK, Brazil, Canada, Indonesia, Australia and Spain
More than 70,000 applications have been created using Twitter API
More than 67% of Twitter messages are in the form of user’s current status, private conversation and links to news and blog articles
The majority of twitter users are female.

Twitter is for most users about consuming. Twitter is right now mostly used by celebrities to post their updates. Only 24% of twitter posts are directly done through twitter website or twitter app. Most posts are generated as a side effect on webpages and blogs.
Many brands don't know yet to utilize twitter other than having a tweet button on their website. The risk with twitter is the 140 characters length of posts. There are risks to send the wrong message which can be dangerous for companies.
But twitter can be a great consumer building tool when using twitter as a real group building social platform. This can be as simple as posting a job opening and to engage the applicants to use twitter to apply or as complex as taking all new twitter posts to a topic to generate the longest song lyric in history.
Twitter is for consumer mostly to consume and not to be active. For celebrities it is the perfect tool to bind their fans. Posts are easy and fast and cam be done everywhere the cell phone works.
The top 5 twitter accounts are celebrities.



But twitter is as well a perfect tool to see trends and to learn about people. Usually people, especially business people, do only post on twitter when they do care about things, either positive or negative. Sales managers can use twitter to find out what their potential buyer like (who is he following) and what does the potential buyer think (postings by the buyer).
Companies doe good to hire data mining experts to scan and analyze twitter posts. Big international events have been faster on twitter than in the news. Facebook and twitter even helped to start revolutions like the latest in Egypt.

There are many other social networks, which can be considered and I could write a whole book, but I guess nobody would want to read hundreds of pages about social networks therefore I decided to stay with the top 3 for this post.

Coming back to the original question, which social network is the right one?
It depends on the goal, and I hope my little comparison could help to make a decision. At the end there is only one big mistake we can do and not to use any of these networks or platforms regularly.

Remember before Internet, we could have a flyer or catalog for over years with same content and nobody did care. With the Internet we learned that we had to change info weekly that our readers or consumers don't lose interest.
The social networks are forcing us to do multiple times a day updates otherwise we lose our readers/friends/followers.

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Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States

Photos- the next social frontier

Many of us are using flickr, Apple me, google picasa or for uploading their images into the internet to make them viewable for friends and sometimes the rest of the world. But it seems that till now advertising did not really take advantage of it.
More and more smart phones have high resolution image capture of 5MB even 8MB photos and the most important part they have geo tagging. And there are more and more pocket cameras with GPS for geo tagging.
I am imagine a new photo/travel service coming up. A portal to upload picture and for others to see them on map.
I travel a lot, i might want to upload images from my trip, maybe only images from buildings or nature. Other people can see them and maybe decide to go to a small town like Bretten in Germany because they liked what they saw. I know this is not really new, other services are already offering this.
But what if this portal is a travel portal, and we can not only upload images with geo information but as well Twitter tweets with things what we ate or saw etc. Twitter already has Geo data capturing when we use our phone for the tweets. Basically everybody can have in this portal their own travel guide with real time info and locations.
Financed is this service from local stores and restaurant and global brands. An user might upload a picture of the eiffel tower and tweet how he liked the food in Paris. A local restaurant bought ad space and the restaurant shows up in the page like in the yellow pages with current menu.
This is just a high level of the idea, but I see here a great method to get local advertisement where it makes sense.
Everybody is talking since years about better local advertisement, but nobody really found the golden egg. This is the golden egg, because the ads would reach travelers and friends.
To give this service more hype, an user would get for each uploaded photo points, enough points will give the user a coupon for a local business nearby the users current location. When a tagged image is uploaded a local business shows up and the user can rate it to get more points. Every other user who looks at the pictures and clicks on one of the shown local ads (local to image location, not local to viewer location) will give the person who clicks a coupon.
This service will have mobile version as well. On mobile devices the user can collect QR codes instead of print coupons. These QR codes are the coupons which the local store can scan to give the user discount.
These codes or always unique and only valid for one scan. As soon it is scanned the target page to redeem is not available anymore.

The user has to use his facebook account, to register on this travel portal. This helps the user not to remember another login and the portals owner can better customize and personalize the page to the users interests.

To be a member of this portal the user need to have an invitation from another Facebook user similar like rockmelt is doing.
And of course it can run as well as a Facebook app. And because myspace is coming back, the portal would show to the images the favorite songs of the person who did upload the photos.

A portal like this would combine social like Twitter and Facebook, geo tagging, QR Codes, coupons, loyalty points and local ads in one place without annoying the users.

These are all the latest trends combine in one. Why is not anybody thinking about this?

Or do i miss something why it should not work?

You want to know more about the concept? Email me and I will tell you more in details.


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Please visit my blog http://www.new-kid-on-the-blog.com

Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Spring Hill,United States