Internet

Another dotcom bubble?

Posted on by in Internet, Social Media and tagged , , , .

It’s another one from the vaults. I wrote this in November 2013. Shocking, actually, to see how – in the intervening five months – so many things have changed and moved on. What has stuck – and grown, if you like – is the feeling that Twitter and WhatsApp and the rest simply aren’t worth the stupid sums being paid for them. We’ll see.

$11.2bn. As much as $30bn. As I write, now around $20bn. Oh, yes, dear reader, you know what I’m talking about. And still it doesn’t make a profit. Meanwhile, in what was quite clearly an attempt to start making a profit, I receive a promoted tweet from @BMWUSA asking me to show my support for Team USA, as we approach the winter Olympics.

Erm, an’ thank you most kindly, but why, exactly, would a Welshman with English overtones, resident in London, wish to express support for Team Merca? I’m sure they’re all lovely, with their splendid muscles and super hair and dazzling teeth, but – and it’s a small one, I know – nit-picky almost – they’re from a completely different country to which I have no links whatsoever, unless you count my ancestors’ compatriots’ vain efforts to shape it up a little.

So, a poorly targeted promotional tweet – well, I’m not the target market for much of the TV advertising I sit through (too lazy to reach for the clicker, d’you see), and this is simply the socially medieval equivalent.

But, of course, it isn’t. Because social ain’t TV – there’s no Strictly Come Tumblring or I’m a Celebrity Follower, Unfriend Me! – and promotional tweets aren’t big budget, glossy items, with soundtracks and celebrities and (this is most important, pay attention) paid for in advance.

(When I make this point, I’m thinking about the Louis Vuitton ‘L’Invitation au Voyage’ ad with David Bowie (or is it Tilda Swinton) and Arizona Muse. Not the Cillit Bang ‘Barry Scott in a big purple fighter jet’ ad with Barry Scott.)

No. Promoted tweets are cheap as chips for the tweet promoter. As long as I, the recipient of the promotweet, do not click ‘pon said spamulous item, nor neither follow the issuer of same, then the spamuliser pays nowt. Not a brass farthing. Which, clearly, means that targeting simply isn’t an issue, and is why I’m happy to call this stuff spam.

So now Twitter’s under increasing pressure to demonstrate its revenue model and to show some sign that it could, in future, turn a profit and reward the enormous valuation that’s been put on it.

This means, I’m afraid, considerably more of these poorly-targeted promoted tweets. Is it just me, or can anyone else see a flaw in a business plan that relies on the social equivalent of the Nigerian email scam for revenue generation?

Facebook saw an immediate 16% dip in its share price when ‘senior executives’ revealed that young people were leaving the site – in fairness to it, however, its share price recovered once it was realised that the audience hole was being backfilled with the young people’s parents and grandparents.

But the point remains made – young people, the valuable Holy Grail audience, trendsetters, early adopters, rainmakers – don’t like being sold to through channels they consider they ‘discovered’ or ‘invented’.

They don’t like their feeds being abominated with spamulous commercial messages. They – making a little leap here – don’t like promotweets. Which is, arguably, why the current valuations of various social media are a wee smidge on the high side.

Now we hear about £8bn for Dropbox (actually, I can see why Dropbox might be worth something) and Pinterest securing funding that would value the enterprise at £3.8bn, despite the fact that it has only recently begun to clarify its business model.

I think it’s clear that I don’t think much of social media as marketing or promotional tools. There are too many gurus telling you how to do, and not enough do. The Emperor is risking risqué with his lack of vestements.

But what is increasingly scary is that no-one seems to remember the rush of the lemmings into the tech bubble of the late nineties and what happened in March 2000.

Social Media – Waiting for the Wheels to Fall Off

Posted on by in Internet, Social Media and tagged , , , .

I say, I say, I say. What do you call 600,000 people leaving Facebook? I’m afraid I do not know what I would call 600,000 people leaving Facebook – do please enlighten me. You would call it – a start! (Ba-dum tish. Thank you, thank you, I’ll be here all week, next show starts at eight-thirty, do try the veal etc etc etc.)

So that’s the news today, blog trotters mine, off of the back of Instagram (something that allows you to share photos apparently – although why you would want to share photos with anyone save close friends and family, unless you wuz an exhibitionist – hold on, you’re not an exhibitionist are you?) losing vast swathes of its user base because it was going to sell people’s pictures to advertisers. (Thank you, Metro.)

Two things, people. If you stick your photos up on t’interworldyweb, then someone is going to use them. Get over it, stupid. If you give away your privacy, you won’t have it any more. Derrrr. Then, Mr Instagram (or can I call you Brian?), as I’ve said before, in the socially mediaevil world that we live in, if you try and blatantly monetise the onlinesters, they will disappear without a trace. AND THEY WILL NOT COME BACK. And neither will anyone else. Call yourself a guru, Brian? You’re just another soft-centred hippy getting the whole ‘business’ thing badly wrong.

Meanwhile, although it’s too soon to say (I know) – but when has that ever stopped me – the feeling has to be that Facebook is falling into the same trap (albeit in a different way). The thing about Facebook, as I understood it, was that it was a free-for-all, free-to-air community, happily unregulated, where people could live and share and communicate (and, obviously, be trolls and dump their garbage and bully and groom and all the other exciting stuff that people get up to in their darkened rooms on the outskirts of Grimsby).

Now we find that His Odiousness, the Markster, is about to zuck you all, once again, with a something. Not sure whether it’s a device, or a piece of software. but, guaranteed, he’s going to be monetising you. He’s coming for your cash. Because that’s the only way he can prop up his hideously over-valued and over-inflated empire.

And if I’ve said it once, I’ve said it – oooooh – a handful of times, if you get all blatantly commercial on your social media bunnies, they scamper off into the undergrowth. Which is why, dear blogsters, the news that the ‘book is building something, and wants the media to come and see what it is, and the subsequent speculation that it’s a ‘phone, or a search engine, has led to a bit of a dead-hippy bounce in the share price (because maybe the something will be revenue-generating) and an exodus of some 600,000 facebook users.

As the yout’ of today would have it – ‘boom’.

Some More Thoughtful Social Media Commentary

Posted on by in Communications Strategy, External Communications, Internet, Social Media, Writing and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

You know me, not much of a socio-mediavelist on the whole – but, still, I bet you thought I’d gone a bit Southern (for my friends from the United States and America, ‘southern’ in this context means ‘effeminate’, not ‘toothless, hairy, armed and smelling of bourbon’) (and for my UK fans, yes, I am a southerner, so it is perfectly alright for me to use the word ‘southern’, as it is not offensive. In the same way I could use the word ‘gay’, if I wanted to) (which would be offensive) when I stopped ranting about t’social and how it represents a direct road to hell for civilsation as we know it.

Anyway, rumours of my descent into southernness have been greatly exaggerated, as demonstrated by this article from that stalwart bulwark of editorial honesty (on matters communication), Communicate Magazine. I cannot tell you how much I echo the sentiments in this article – not all of them, obviously, there is some very Southern thinking contained within – and how I am in complete agreement with the school of thought that says social media are completely irrelevant. (OK, that’s not EXACTLY what it says, but near enough as makes no difference. To my mind.)

I also admire the (again, to my mind) extremely clever way that one of the authors – the one in the right, obviously, the one on the side of truth and justice – has designated social media ‘SM’, which, of course, is simply shorthand for a very Southern practice indeed.

Yes, I am wholly in favour of one half of this article.

The one that I wrote, clearly.

 

New Date For The End of The World – 2017

Posted on by in Communications Strategy, Internet and tagged , , , .

We’ve all seen The Terminator (OK, so maybe some of you haven’t seen The Terminator – if so a) you are undoubtedly a horrible hairy hermit who has been living in a cave, on a diet of unmentionable wiggly things for the past three decades and b) it is a seminal movie from 1984, starring thesp behemoth Arnold Schwarzenegger as a cyborg from the future, sent to kill the mother of the man who will lead the resistance against the machines, in a future where machines have taken over the world).

As I was saying, we’ve all seen The Terminator and know how untidy and radioactive a planet can become when machines decide they’re better at ruling it than the indigenous carbon-based lifeforms that have happily been making a fair old hash of it for the past few millennia.

Here’s an article from The Grauniad (a UK-based daily paper of some note, for those blog trotters of a foreign persuasion) which says that “mobile subscriptions set to rise from 6.2bn now to 9bn by 2017, according to report from Ericsson”. Yes, friends, by 2017 there will be more devices than people on this wee planetoid that we call home.

And then it can only be a matter of time before the first Blackberry gets all Bold (see what I did there?) and decides that, rather than being in a bag or a pocket, it would rather be out in the fresh air. And once it decides that, then it’ll BBM all its mates, and before you know it, they’ll all be clamouring for their freedom. And in so doing, they’ll inevitably decide that – actually – they’d probably make a better fist of running the place after all and – well, you can see where I’m going with this.

Is there a John Connor in the house?

The New Tech Bubble – Bursting Point?

Posted on by in Internet, Social Media and tagged , , .

Earlier this month I posted a link to a piece in the Wall Street Journal – a regional newspaper with an adequate circulation – which talked about Facebook and its propects as far as making money – specifically from advertising – were concerned. This was tied in to the much-vaunted float of Facebook, which has been the subject of speculation for some considerable time now.

Now, for your delight and delectation, here’s another piece from the same regional newspaper, entitled ‘Facebook Targets Huge IPO’, in which it is posited that the good ‘Book and the odious turd Zuckerberg, may be looking to raise some $10bn, valuing the whole shoddy shebang at $100bn. To give you an idea, the only other American companies to have completed at or above this level are Visa, General Motors and AT&T.

My loyal readers (ooooooh, my aching sides) will know that I do not have a great deal of time for Facebook. I cannot help but think of naked royalty and haberdashering conmen when I look at it, and its business model. But, I am fully prepared to admit, what do I know. Apart from how genuinely scary some of it is – have a quick look at this, and tell me you want to be a part of it, either personally, professionally or corporately.

Anyhoo – the general tone of the WSJ article is positive. I believe the correct term is ‘bullish’. (As an aside, recently I have been bombarded – don’t ask – with headlines using the descriptor ‘bearish wedge’. This tickled me, I know not why – I think it’s probably because, to my mind, it’s either ‘bear’ or it isn’t ‘bear’. Nothing is ‘bearish’. Unless you happen to be a woodsman in Georgia, living off the land, in which case you might be chewing on, say, raccoon and comment that it tastes a bit ‘bearish’. And ‘wedge’, well, it’s onomatopoeic, isn’t it? Isn’t it?) But within the article, there is an interesting sentence or two, that gave me pause. You see, I lived through the tech bubble of the turn of the Noughties and I remember the hysteria and the silly money made and the even sillier money lost.

The article says that Facebook will probably go ahead with the deal – but at a time when investors are beginning to doubt the value of some internet businesses. (Sound familiar yet?) Apparently, Groupon floated on November 3 – and has lost 42% of its value in the last five trading days. LinkedIn, whose stock more than doubled from its IPO price on its first day of trading May 19, has since fallen 36% (although it remains 33% above its IPO).

OK – only two examples. The issue, however, is that when the Noughty tech bubble burst, we were talking about millions being lost. So far, so dreadful. If, indeed, we are seeing another tech bubble now – and, as I said earlier, what do I know – and it follows the trad bubble pattern, then this time it’s serious money that’s going to be lost.

Someone said to me, when the rumours about a Facebook float first surfaced, that the thing to do would be to ‘short the sh*t out of it’. I think I know what that means – and it still sounds eminently sensible from where I’m sitting.

The Dark Net – Well, How Terribly Cyberpunk Of You

Posted on by in Internet, Social Media and tagged , , , , .

Frankly, I am sometimes left rooted to the spot with my mouth hanging open at how much you couldn’t really make things up if you tried. (I’m sorry if, at first sight, this last sentence doesn’t seem to make sense. Read it again slowly.)

In my free time, when I’m not saving whales, teaching orphaned ravens to fly underwater, or re-charging battery hens, I sometimes dip into a book, and the genre of book that I enjoy a good dip into is science fiction, particularly post-apocalyptic, cyberpunk science fiction. Now, it might just be metal-tinted glasses, but it’s my vivid impression that many works of cyberpunk (particularly at the lower-rent end of the genre spectrum) contain a key common theme and that’s virtual worlds, existing on t’internet. Almost all of them have something recognisably hacker-like and most have the odd villain or two, making use of closed sections of the information superhighway upon which to perform the digital handbrake turns of mayhem. So far, so made up.

(If, at this point in time, you find your interest piqued by this sort of – can I? Should I? Call it literature? Well, you might like to have a jolly good dip into this which is, joking aside, genuinely brilliant and has that bit of virtual-worlds-(in this case virtual hells – plural, yes)-hidden-away schtick goin’ on. It’s not really cyberpunk, though. For that, you’ll need this.)

Anyway, now we come to the bit where I’m frozen to the spot with my mouth hanging open. Dearest Blog Trotters – check this out.

I’ll let the headline speak for itself – ‘users build bridge to Dark Net’. If you want to know more about it, then you’ll have to read the story – it involves something called TOR, which is apparently a ‘secret net’. Yes, people, a secret net, existing somewhere in, or behind, or in parallel with, the one we all know about. It’s a Dark Net – it’s hidden and it exists so that internetters can hide their existence and what they are doing. It is the stuff that cyberpunk is made of and – here’s the thing – it is not made up. It exists. People are using it and – more to the point – others are signing up to it, providing it with more bandwidth and, yes, protecting it.

You’ll probably notice that I got a bit hysterical during that last sentence, and this will give you a clue to where I’m coming from on this issue. Which is from the State of No Way, No How. I make no secret of my disdain for social media – mostly the empty, ego-fuelled meanderings of millions of people who can’t bear the silence in their own heads – and I’ve also made it clear that I do not think it to be harmless (that it’s harmful and has caused harm is, actually, beyond doubt). From a corporate and business perspective, it is not a sales or marketing tool, it has limited use as an active communications tool and its best function is as a reactive message delivery channel when something has gone wrong. Ironically, these days, when something corporate goes wrong, it’s most likely caused by, or spread by, social media in any case.

But a big issue is anonymity. I believe in the right to be anonymous and the right to privacy – but if you’re foolish enough to post your life on Facebook, then that’s your anonymity gone and don’t come crying to me. Sadly, privacy and anonymity on the net doesn’t just protect fine upstanding citizens like you and me – it also protects the evil bastard trolls who pick on people, who post inappropriate content, who revel in their internet Tourette’s and who  contribute to the well-publicised suicides.

Previously, on this blog, I posted about regulating the internet and how it was far too late. I suggested a way of doing it – the GAP (Global Authentication Portal) – and suggested that the nerds of the world would upheave at the mere suggestion of such a thing.

This was before I became aware of the Dark Net. Surely I am not the only person who thinks that this is just a step too far – yes, I understand that an untraceable net protects freedom of speech in oppressive regimes and allows citizen journalism to raise its voice against institutional wrongs – but I’m afraid I’d sacrifice these liberties to ensure that criminals, thieves and global scumbags can be brought to justice.

This is one type of anonymity that I do not believe to be a human right. As I’ve said – if you’re putting your stuff on the net – you’re not anonymous. Don’t complain – there’s only (relatively speaking) a few bad apples, but the barrel is rotten.