Collaboration Cast

Recently Prime Visibility (PrimeVisibility.com), a rapidly growing integrated online marketing company specializing in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay-Per-Click (PPC), released a study showing which presidential candidate was most preferred by social media sites.

Sites such as bookmarking (digg, del.icio.us), video (YouTube, MetaCafe), widgets, podcasts, image/photo-sharing services (Flickr, Photobucket), social networking (MySpace, Facebook), social knowledge (Yahoo! Answers, Wikipedia), directory submissions (Google Directory, DMOZ) and online reputation management (ORM) were monitored.

Results showed that through Oct 17th Obama was leading 20 of the 43 sites monitored, McCain led three, and both tied in one site.

The two candidates tied on Yahoo, which had over 1.1 billion comments each.

Obama won on Google Blog Search with approximately 227.7 million comments versus 93.2 million for McCain, while Google search produced 201 million page views for Obama versus 141 million for McCain.

In the following video clip, Barack talks about his use of social media and how internet volunteers helped his campaign succeed in many states.

This recent study shows the power of the web and how candidates can no longer discount the need to leverage social media in their campaigns. Tomorrow’s election results could potentially validate if a win in cyberspace could be a good indicator of a true election win.

This last week, Alterian, a provider of marketing resource management and enterprise marketing management software, announced that it intends to acquire Mediasurface, a Web content management (WCM) vendor.

Mediasurf will be acquired for $35.6 million.  Now a part of Alteria, Mediasurf  will have the opportunity to sell into 1,000 marketing departments and leverage a network of 100 channel partners across 26 countries.

 Alterian’s goal from the acquisition was to provide a platform to allow business units to take control of their Web content authoring and help turn “visitors” to a Web site into “users.” The move empowers marketing managers to have greater control of their web campaigns, visibility into their campaign progress, success in driving their online sales, and ability to report on a campaign’s ROI.

This latest consolidation marks the beginning for further consolidation in this space.  In the end, my bet is that the analytics, enterprise marketing management, content management, and social software vendors will primarily consolidate to create a single platform that can drive and show ROI for web investments.

It will not only be interesting to see the success from this acquisition, but to see how the market consolidates.

In an attempt to re-invent itself, Netscape is planning to launch itself as the news service of the future.  While most sites cover today’s news, Netscape is planning to cover tomorrow’s news, looking 10 years out and letting people vote on where they think the future is headed.  

Behind the covers this to me looks like a blog site with Ideastorm like functionality (www.ideastorm.com) and maybe some more advance idea market features, such as the ones offered by Spigit (www.spigit.com).  

A friend of mine, Andy Fundinger, had the same idea as Netscape.  He started the site memebox.com.   Memebox covers futuristic news issues and lets people comment on these issues.  So far Andy has received some comments on his blog.  

My opinion is that if Netscape is able to seriously grain critical mass and build a pretty user friendly site that incorporates such innovation market tools into their site’s content, then they may transform they may have a compelling offering.  People are curious to find out what the future holds and will for sure share their opinions.  Maybe they can even find a way to allow people to financially bet on future waves.

 The leader of this re-invention is Jason Calacanis, 35,  general manager.  He made his name as a publisher of the Silicon Alley Reporter magazine, entered the blogging world by starting a popular blog called Engaget.com and eventual sold webblogs.com to AOL for $25 million.  It seems like Netscape has the right person for the job, the name recognition, and an interesting model.  

I wish them best of luck on their re-invention.  If they pull it off, this would be a good success story to document.  

Collaboration,Media,Dish Networks,Entertainment,Revenue Opportunity,Innovation

Over the last year it has been very interesting to see how collaboration technologies have integrated into different vertical industries. One of the most interesting industries I have been monitoring has been the entertainment industry. Collaboration technologies are being adopted and monetized in this industry. Not only are companies seeing greater user stickiness, but also new revenue opportunities are presenting themselves. Here are some examples:

Instant Message/Text Message and Television - In India there is a television network that has integrated instant message/text messaging with their television programs. This way viewers can comment and discuss the television program in real-time as the program is playing. Messages are displayed right below the program and viewers can see what they post in real-time. I am sure there is a moderation feature that prevents certain words from being used or spam from being sent. As I watched this program, I really got interested on the discussions users were having. I could see the next step to such an implementation would be a social network that allowed for targeted ads or special promotions to be sent directly to the community members.

Collaborative Gaming - The video game industry has been one of the first media industries to leverage the power of collaboration with multi-player games and then virtual multi-player games, which allow people to meet each other over the internet to play each other. I have seen airlines start introducing multi-player games on-board their planes, where passengers can play other passengers, who can be sitting aisles away from each other. Other companies, such as Disney, Yahoo, and MTV have already leveraged the Internet to create their own game environments to capture the attention of a targeted audience, to then up-sell or cross-sell additional services.

Community and Television - No longer can a network launch a new show without thinking about a community strategy that can help them maintain the interest of their audience and further advertise, up-sell, or cross-sell additional services. With a new release of a history channel series you can see the birth of a new community that includes games, additional footage, interviews, second life presence, and forums. Fans of the show will participate in the community and spend more time at the history channel’s site to learn more, while purchasing items or viewing advertising, which will increase profits and advertising opportunities.

The value of collaborative technologies is moving beyond the enterprise. Both consumers and media companies are seeing the value of leveraging collaborative technologies in their advertising and monetization strategies. Not only do collaborative technologies increase site stickiness, but they also enable companies to find additional forms of monetization, cross-sell, and up-sell opportunities. The future of the integration between collaborative technologies and media is just beginning and it will be very interesting to see the different creative ways companies choose to apply and monetize the use of collaborative technologies.