Well, the playing field has shifted again, if a recent article appearing in Newsweek is any indication. In its feature, Newsweek suggests that users are getting sick of wondering whether the content their peers create can be trusted–pushing the pendulum back towards expert content. The article points to sites like Google’s Knol, best though of as a mashup between Wikipedia and Squidoo, which relies on expert contributors who share revenue.  It also mentions Mahalo, backed by the indefatigable serial entrepreneur and creator of Weblogs Inc., Jason Calcanis. Mahalo is a search engine whose results are driven by the quality of the content, as determined by panels of experts.

Actually, this is a back-to-the-future kinda thing, if you bear in mind that Ask.com has been doing something like this for, what, a decade?  But if Newsweek is right–and it’s hard to argue that they’re onto something here–we’re talking about a shift which is long overdue.  In short, it’s time to balance the amateurs, the whackos, the professionals and the big-dollar media plays online.  It just makes sense that neither expertly-crafted results nor the ramblings of unqualified strangers will do the job for everyone.

That being said, you’re not going to see Web content turn into a gated community for eggheads, either. Building content one piece at a time just doesn’t scale up well–it’s too much work!  So there’s still plenty of room for ventures that successfully capture the wild, wooly Web content out there generated by everyone from pros to cranks.  However, maybe it’s time to put a different wrapper on that content. What we need is something that offers much better tools for filtering and sorting non-professional content than any search engine does today. When someone invents that filter, we’ll see yet another shift.

OK, I’ll admit that the numbers cite above don’t exactly spell the death of YouTube, which draws about 68.5 million unique visitors and 3.7 billion page views per month. But when it comes to making money online, the commercially-created content has a tremendous advantage over YouTube’s amateur stuff. And that makes me wonder what’s going to happen to YouTube’s business model as consumers get sick of stupid teenage tricks, cute kids, lousy bands, boring pets and the like. (Hey, America’s Funniest Home Videos didn’t stay on the air forever either, right?)

What’s going on underneath the surface is that it’s getting increasingly unclear how to monetize junky amateur videos.

As a matter of policy, YouTube doesn’t run any ads along with videos submitted by regular users, because they don’t know enough about the clips’ content–and don’t know if the clips contain copyright-infringing material. It only runs ads against professional content from its commercial partners, such as the NBA, CBS and Universal Music. That leaves tons of content they have to deliver (a huge bandwidth hit even for Google (GOOG)) but can’t really monetize effectively.

TV networks, however, have complete control of their Web content from day one, which has to make it much easier to use te content for advertising sales.  In fact, one marketing exec recently told me that a cable network client of his was spending big bucks analyzing how much they spend to deliver each program viewed online, so they have accurate means for pricing ad spots against them, not to mention the demographics of viewers, the paths that bring viewers to look at a program and so on. What’s more, they can then turn and take these stats (and advertising response) and use it to boost the performance of their traditional TV programming. Sweet all around.

I guess the underlying question that comes up for me, here, is whether YouTube will ultimately stop looking like a consumer site at all–or whether consumer content will be shunted off into some other brand. Tricky stuff.

Still, with Microsoft (MSFT) looming over Yahoo(YHOO) and threatening to swallow it, I’ve been thinking about who the real power brokers are online. And I’ve concluded that a social media mega-power combination (FaceSpace? MyBook?) would have advantages that a Microsoft plus Yahoo teaming couldn’t duplicate, billions in assets or no.

For one thing, if the two combined their social maps–allowing people to connect their friends far more readily–it would expotentially increasing the value of each  connection through network effects.

Then, of course, there’s the plain fact that advertisers are stampeding toward the social media networks, while growing disgusted with branding/CPM deals that characterize the Yahoo era. “Advertisers are increasingly shifting ad dollars to social networking sites from portal sites,” notes Debra Aho Williamson, a senior analyst with eMarketer, which predicts that the networking sites will nab $1.3 billion in advertising this year alone. 

This just makes sense. After all, where would you rather place an ad–in an environment where you have a broad idea of a consumer’s interests (portal) or a very detailed picture of their associations, habits, interests and more?  It’s no contest.

I’m already tired of hearing about MicroHoo. Let’s face it–since the dawn of MSN, Microsoft has been trying to “get it” about consumer Web culture, but still remains a second-string player when it comes to agility and appeal. Bring on FaceSpace!

If you’re an Internet marketer with a visible brand, I’d make it my business to look at these sites now and again and check street level market perceptions. I know, it’s already enough of a pain to cope with the buzz on chat boards, chatter on the “positive” social media sites, discussion lists and what have you, but hey, at least these sites admit that the people there are peeved. They’re worth a look.

[Story courtesy of NPR.org]

Players in this space include Sparta Social Networks and  Onesite, which position themselves as experts on enterprise social networking, Small World Labs, which offers a platform it dubs a “base foundation” for communities, and HayStack, whose open API and SDK allows companies to integrate its apps into their sites. (Lots of open source solutions can apparently work for this purpose, too, though that may require more developer time.)  Forrester Research analyst Jeremiah Owyang, who’s been following this trend for a year or so, says that he’s found some 80 to 100 companies in this space.

I think at least a few of these white-label companies will be very successful. After all, Facebook and MySpace, while full of folks, aren’t flexible enough to serve as sophisticated marketing and communications tools. Worse, neither offer much ability to customize groups, networks or pages. (No matter what you do to a MySpace page, you still have a truck-load of ugly.)

And of course, there’s the critical issue of whether data a marketer can move data he or she collects on the big social networks from one network to another or onto their private server (data portability still being very much up in the air). Using a private solution solves this problem.

Honestly, I doubt companies which have proved clueless in Facebook/MySpace/what have you marketing will suddenly get hip and savvy when they launch their own social media networks. Still, it seems to me that most marketers will be at least somewhat more effective with social media marketing if the networks are better integrated with their corporate Web efforts. Look for this approach to take off in ‘08.

Gosh, I’m not even sure what to say about this one, other than to shake my head and utter Yiddish expressions. (”Oy, gevalt!” comes to mind.) While Dell’s blog may still have that crisp Fortune 100 feel just beneath the hippy-dippy surface, at least it’s focused on one issue, the green movement, and it’s execution does do something to support that approach. It gets the job done without giving you the feeling that you’re being hustled (directly at least).

As for Wal-Mart’s effort, Check Out, in all honesty there’s certainly a lot that’s right about it. The voice of the blog entries is right–I’ll accept that someone under 50 wrote them–the graphics are nice without being overproduced, and the blogroll is ever so hip–it includes Gizmodo, Engadget, GigaOM, Slashdot and Joystiq, to name a few touchstones. (Boy, do they WISH they were Engadget, I’ll tell you what.)  They’ve even done a good job of pasting the Wal-Mart logo in there prominently, so full disclosure requirements definitely met.

The bottom line, though, is that you can’t promo computers and TVs and movies and games like independent sites, then turn around and hope people will buy them from you…without looking like a social media idiot, that is, or at least an invader in the space. 

I think with this whole social media problem, we’re running into a barrier the giant retailers can’t easily crack — in much the same way Microsoft and its ilk are still struggling with the Open Source movement. When information wants to be free, and people want to share just to be together, it’s hard for old-line capitalists to harness that for cash. My guess is that Wal-Mart will be no more agile than Microsoft at figuring out how to turn this to their advantage. They certainly haven’t broken any molds this time.

The site includes a nifty application allowing people to enter their thoughts on the meaning of “green” (and have them interactively displayed on a beautifully executed interactive “wall”), video and text blog entries, eco-news, Web tools allowing people to estimate their environmental impact and links to supporting organizations.

My feeling is that while this is a nice effort, it lacks a true social component, in that it’s still Dell pushing out its view of things (however crunchy, cool and green that view is), while cloaking itself in social media tools. After all, the site doesn’t offer any direct means of communicating with Dell, or even with other visitors to the site, provides no widgets to connect people (why not Twitter?) and provides no links to other social media forums like Facebook or MySpace (though for all I know such may exist.)

My take is that this is a nice effort, but not really a piece of social media marketing. To me, if Dell wanted to connect with the social media movement, it’d do more real listening  and less preaching. But what do you think?

I’m not here to complain about Digg’s sinister ways–though as a marketer I find them pretty frustrating!–but it is worth noting how things have evolved over there. In theory, social ranking of content sounds delightfully democratic, but in reality, it’s hard to create any system which doesn’t have powerful gatekeepers in place. It’s no surprise that Digg (and related content ranking sites like Reddit) create winners and losers.  Projects like Wikia Search, an “open source” search engine which allows users directly influence rankings, will also be hard-put to avoid this trap.

I’m not sure how marketers and PR pros can address this problem. If I knew, you’d probably be sitting in a pricey seminar listening to me tell you what to do. But I do think the communications and marketing people of the world are going to have to find ways to reach these new media elites. Unfortunately, standard PR outreach channels usually won’t get to them, and you can’t even embarass them into responding by calling their editor-in-chief. (They’re not usually media professionals!) It’s an extremely sticky problem.

I know may professionals speak casually of cultivating these guys, but I'm not sure how to even begin. Where do you find them? What do they want? (Many are antisocial geeks who don't respond to the same strokes that professional writers and socializers do.)  Got any ideas?

So people get to drag friend data from service to service–so what?  Even if all of the social networking services give up their data, they still keep control of the “social graphs” (the complex relationship networks people form).  And as long as social graphs remain the property of individual services, data portability won’t be worth much.

As Forrester Research’s Charlene Li cogently notes, it seems likely that for the forseeable future, social graphs will stay embedded in individual services. The real nirvana, an “open social graph”–a schema which integrates the relationship people have across the entire sprawling social Web– is at best a very long-term prospect.

Perhaps that’s why MySpace hasn’t come to the data portability party. While it has little to lose by letting users share basic “friend” data, execs may (rightfully) be afraid that they’re going to be pressured to give up one of ther most valuable assets–millions of relationship maps that users value highly.

You know, as I reflect on this, I’m not surprised that these companies don’t want to give relationship maps over without a struggle. Hey, marketers reading this…what would you rather pitch to, a) a e-mail or direct mail list of people with a certain title (VP of Purchasing) or b) the same names, plus a map to the relationships between those VPs, their existing suppliers, their direct reports, their colleagues from prior companies and their service providers?  We've all used a), but I think I'd kill a goat to get b).