Unfortunately, I followed the link to the original article and found the numbers to be a little suspect. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying anyone is providing intentionally false numbers, but I will say the original post makes a couple of assumptions that most people wouldn’t.

Here’s the problem:  The $4.6 million in savings is calculated based on a survey of users of a knowledge repository. The users claim an average of 12 seconds saved per search. The post then multiplies those 12 seconds times the huge number of searches done every week (Over 286K–remember, this is IBM so they’re probably hitting this database all the time) to come up with 955 hours saved. That’s the first problem. Those 955 hours are made up of 12 second bits of work that it is assumed will be spent doing something else instead of watching a computer churn through a search. That’s not the way people work.

On Twitter I compared this to a company forcing employees to wear zippers on their coats instead of buttons because it saves 12 seconds to take a coat off and on with a zipper instead of buttons. A company with 1000 employees could then claim they saved $552,000 a year based on the aggregated time savings from not buttoning during the six months when coats are required. (See below for the hourly rate I used to figure that out.) That’s not even really an accurate comparison since you really could use 12 seconds not buttoning a coat to do something else. Waiting for a computer to churn through a search still requires your computer, i.e. the tool you’re using, to be occupied. But you get the point.

The second issue is that the 955 hours per week are then said to equal “roughly” $4.6  million in savings. By my calculation, that means that every person making a search is earning over $191,000. ($4.6 million divided by 955 hours x 52 weeks a year.) That’s a pretty high median income. I’m betting it’s based on the average billable hour for a consultant from IBM since it comes close to $92/hour. But that’s the problem: I have to make some assumptions to get to $4.6 million.

What is really interesting about the original post, and the savings claim they make on behalf of bookmarking, is that they mention the system they instituted the program on was not very well liked. By adding tags, standard taxonomy, etc. to it they made it more efficient and more user friendly. As I said, I’ve built things like this before and the changes they put in place are usually considered just good organization of a document system. So it seems to me they’re making the claim that doing the work right saved time over the way it had been done. To me that seems as though they are trying to use work done the wrong way as a benchmark for work done the right way. That’s like claiming you saved time by not getting lost.

As I said, I would love nothing more than the $4.6 million claim to be true, and I’m afraid it will now be a part of social media lore that gets quoted over and over. That’s too bad and won’t help with the perception that social media is not serious about numbers.

PLEASE NOTE: If I’m reading the blog posts wrong, or if the assumptions are clarified/explained somewhere, please let me know. This post has been hastily written and I’m not trying to be combative. I also do not want to imply that blogging and social bookmarking are not great knowledge-sharing tools. They are. I just don’t think they should be oversold with numbers that might not meet the sniff test.  I would love to discuss this with anyone and figure out what the numbers mean. And if no one disputes my numbers, and you use the $4.6 million in a presentation where I’m in the audience, expect to see me during the Q&A asking how they arrived at the numbers.

As you can see, posts are coming more frequently these days on Ignorantium. Posts had started to turn into 1000 word slogs for readers. That’s too long for a reader to read and a writer to write with any regularity, not to mention too hard to do and retain some level of quality. The result was large periods of time with no posts. Blogs die when they’re not fed and I didn’t want that to happen to Ignorantium. So instead, I went back to the way I did things a long time ago with quicker posts done more frequently. I may still do a longer piece every once in a while, but for now I’m sticking to the stuff that made me like doing this blog in the first place: product and site reviews, interesting tech bits I run across and opinion pieces aimed at trends in marketing, tech and social media. From the nice responses I’ve gotten, and the nice spike in traffic, apparently people are happier with this format as well. I’ll keep at it.

Expect to see more product reviews next week. The social media world is moving so quickly and spawning all sorts of interesting offerings that allow people to tag, file and connect with friends and strangers alike. As I run across interesting sites and tools I’ll throw up reviews. Also starting sometime next week I’m going to pick a day (probably Wednesdays) where I provide a ton of links to odd things and burgeoning web memes. If you’ve got something you think I might want to include, feel free to send me an email (host atsign ignorantium.com) or through Twitter @jameswester. (Until I get the purpose of @ignorantium figured out, replies and DMs to that account might go unnoticed.)

And finally, my picture today is from Wikipedia’s daily featured article. It’s a randomly chosen picture from my morning surfing, but it kind of fits in with today’s theme of where this blog is going. (The title of today’s post is taken from signs and warnings to riders of the London Underground to “mind the gap” between the platform edge and the train door. In this case, it means mind the gaps between blog posts. I thought that was moderately clever.)

Hope you have a great weekend. See you next week.

photo credit: Wikipedia

I’ve been watching ejamming.com for a while now, ever since a talented ex-co-worker of mine turned me on to the site. I’m still fascinated by the idea and keep expecting the site to break out and become more widely known. (It’s possible that there are a ton of musicians using the site. I don’t have any numbers for them but I get a sense they’re still in an early growth phase.) Basically, you plug in to eJamming, look up fellow musicians on the network–say a drummer, bass player, whatever–and begin playing with up to four musicians from anywhere in the world. It’s as simple as that: you collaborate online in real time. (There are some technology requirements to get instruments linked up, but nothing particularly advanced or onerous.) The technology behind it is smooth enough that there’s no latency, no hiccups; you just begin a virtual jam session. Reports from the talented ex-co-worker are that it all works well. eJamming offers a 30-day trial so musicians can give it a test. After that the subscription is around $10 a month. That seems a reasonable amount for anyone looking for an online musical hook-up.

And once you and your virtual bandmates decide you want to chuck it all for rock stardom, Guguchu is there to help you deal with fame and fortune. It provides a set of tools for bands/musicians to sell merchandise and music, book gigs and communicate with their (hopefully) growing fanbase. The site is still in beta, so I’m not sure how robust their tools are, but the concept is pretty smart and I appreciate the idea. There are a ton of good local bands that deserve more attention but simply don’t have the time and resources to support their own efforts. Guguchu is a way for them to coordinate everything and hopefully make some money. As far as I’m concerned, any tool that disrupts the way music has been marketed, distributed and sold (to the detriment of nearly every artist involved) for the past 50 years deserves my respect and attention.

Even with the twofer it’s a short post. As with all posts, as I learn more about eJamming and Guguchu I’ll provide updates. And if you’re from eJamming or Guguchu, reach out to me if you have more to share. I love what you’re doing and I’m happy to help you out.

I’ve been tinkering with Backupify the past few weeks since they so kindly gave me an upgraded subscription. (I’d love to think I’m special to them, but it was a promotion they offered to any old shlub.) I had been looking for some way to archive my little chestnuts of wisdom from my Twitter account (Who can forget this gem from February 7, 2009: “I have a wig in my front yard. Why?”), but with 5000 Twitter updates (and counting) I wasn’t sure how easy that would be. Turns out it’s pretty darn simple. Backupify allows you to archive updates and activity on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and a host of other social networking sites. There’s even a handy feature that allows you to create a pdf of your archives. (I’m having some issues with the non-pdf archives, but I’m assuming it’s user error and not a problem with the software.) It currently has some archiving for WordPress, Google docs and some others in beta. (I haven’t had a chance to play with the WordPress backup since I just installed the module today, but I’ll keep updating this post as I get more information.) They have a free version that is good and has the basic archiving features, but I have to say that I will likely pay to continue my subscription when it expires next year. (I think it’s $30.)

The fact is 5000 tweets is approximately 683 kilobytes of data. That’s about the size of a short novel. Include your replies, DM’s, etc. and you’re talking about a sizable amount of writing that goes into keeping a Twitter account active. And if you’re like me, those tweets form a skeleton of ideas, discussions and thoughts that may lead to deeper things. You’d hate to lose them and you might want to eventually go back through them to find good stuff that needs to be fleshed out. Searching through tweets now using the Twitter client or Tweetdeck is next to impossible. Backupify protects your work and makes it simple to sort through.

Like I said, I’ll come back to this as I tinker with Backupify, but it’s been a handy little tool to have. You can follow them on Twitter (@backupify) or go to backupify.com.

At this point I’m holding to my earlier opinion that it’s simply too soon to tell how the Old Spice social media campaign has affected their shower gel sales. As I’ve stated many times here and elsewhere, the real measure of social media success if it is to be accepted as a “real” marketing channel is how it affects revenue. There are lots of sides to take in this debate (well, there’s my side and then the wrong side), but I think figuring out if filming 186 YouTube videos makes a difference in sales is a pretty important exercise for P&G. Anyone who says otherwise, or who is saying it doesn’t while using bad data without checking it out first, may be pushing an agenda that has little to do with the merits of the actual effort. I’ll get to that in a second.

What prompted this post is an article from Advertising Age that came out today. What’s interesting is that their numbers seem to be coming from the same source (Symphony IRI) that BrandWeek (and then Yahoo) got their numbers; and yet they show that even with the caveats I mentioned in my earlier post, the Old Spice Guy is helping shower gel sales and market share. I don’t have access to the full report, but I can’t figure out how BrandWeek/Yahoo could come up with a story that says the Old Spice Guy is a bit of a failure using the same data that AdAge says shows Old Spice “consistently gaining market share.” Something isn’t right.

So why is all of this important? Why am I spending this much time on the data and its interpretation and not the campaign itself? Let me answer that second question first. The ad campaign is getting plenty of coverage elsewhere. Go use your google muscles and you’ll find lots to ponder on everything from the making of the campaign to Isaiah Mustafa himself. All good stuff, but I’m not really about that, now am I?

What is more striking to me is how quickly the “Old Spice Fails” meme spread around social media chatterers and how fast it became “conventional” wisdom. I saw snarky comments popping up almost within minutes of the Yahoo post. I read the post, noted the issues with the data, and assumed that someone somewhere would defend the social media campaign on something more than creative arguments. But all I saw was “A for effort” posts.

I couldn’t figure it out until I realized that many trashing the Old Spice campaign have a vested interest in keeping social media nebulous. They like the idea that it’s somehow a new and different form of marketing where a specialized skillset separates them from traditional marketing types.  Along comes a very calculated effort based on creating solid, funny content and it simply has to be squashed (or at least devalued). It’s the exact opposite of the “no one knows what makes a meme go viral” ethos and the “content is dead/long live curation” stuff. What’s more, the campaign came out of a traditional agency, not some specialty shop set up to navigate the intricacies of the social media universe. (Here‘s a good AdWeek article on the digital/traditional divide as it relates to Old Spice.)

I am certain there will be lots written about the Old Spice social media campaign. (Probably some of it by me!) But one thing that may be overlooked is how quickly many social media experts either wanted the campaign to fail, or how spreading that idea demonstrated how many of them don’t really know what they’re talking about when it comes to measuring success.

Many thanks to Eddy Badrina (his blog here or follow him on Twitter @eddybadrina) and Ross Kimbarovsky (his blog here or follow him on Twitter @rosskmbarovsky). I found the AdAge article through Eddy and the AdWeek article through Ross. They’re good guys and I recommend you follow both of them. (Heed my words!)

UPDATE: Fixed the link to the AdAge article.

This may have to be quick, since I want to do this before I forget it, but simply put: you’re wrong about Old Spice. (More links to come later.)

If you’re retweeting the Yahoo post (here) referencing a BrandWeek article about how Old Spice sales are down despite the great social ads featuring Isaiah Mustafa in a towel (aka The Old Spice Guy) then you’re not looking at the numbers closely enough. There seem to be some serious issues with the BrandWeek data as far as I can tell. As I tweeted this morning, here’s where I see some problems:

1 – The numbers do NOT come from Proctor & Gamble but from an analyst firm. I have no reason to doubt the numbers are fairly accurate, but “fairly” is a word that can cover a multitude of sins. What does make me wonder about them, however, is issue #2

2 – Walmart numbers are excluded from the data. I’m not an old CPG hand, but I would think Walmart (y’know, the world’s largest retail company) could skew figures considerably in either direction and affect the data set. Plus, I’d bet Walmart’s shoppers (who are ridiculously hard to pin down demographically regardless of what you might think) tend to be above average Old Spice buyers. (That’s a total hunch with no data, but it makes sense.)

3 – The numbers are for a 52 week period ending June 13th. The viral component of the campaign only began on July 14th. (I may be off by a day or two, but it was well after June 13th.) I would have said the numbers were too soon to draw conclusions even if they ended a day after the social media effort, since not everyone ran out of shower gel on the same day and it isn’t something you run out and buy spur-of-the-moment. But the fact that the numbers end well before the ‘second wave’ of social videos featuring the Old Spice guy makes them almost meaningless.

So before you begin dismantling the viral campaign as an “epic fail,” maybe you should check out this from PR Week on July 21st. It says JULY sales to date (as in the month containing the actual viral efforts) are UP 107%. And these are numbers coming directly from P&G (as in the folks who actually know).

I’ll come back and fix links, add some pics  and some clarifications to this post later, but I wanted to get this up right way.  Feel free to comment.

Now I’m on a horse…

Photo Credit: Michelanglo. It’s Isaiah from the Sistine Chapel. It’s funny. Oh, shut up.

UPDATE (already?!): I’ll do some follow-ups on this post. I’m also digging out some old posts I did after the Skittles social media campaign. It seems like what I said then is still apropos now.

UPDATE II: Added the pic and made some spelling fixes. My original post was rife with typos but I did it quickly lest anyone think I was late to the party on this topic. I hate to be a tooter of my own horn, but I was actually pointing this stuff out as soon as the Yahoo post came out (I admit to not seeing the Brandweek article) and the social media ‘mavens’ began pushing the “Old Spice Guy Fails” meme. I was actually surprised that meme caught on the way it did.

UDATE III: My new post on this topic here. BrandChannel has a more in depth look at the numbers here that echoes some of what I said in my post. It looks like I was right. (Woo hoo!) Some discussion on the BrandChannel numbers with lots of insights from Stephen Denny here. (Follow him on Twitter @note_to_cmo.)

Not long ago I was listening to the local news radio station. They interviewed a researcher from some North Texas mental health facility or research group. The topic? Increased mortality rates during economic hard times. His projection? Expect to see deaths, things like stress-related heart attacks and strokes or suicides and homicides, rise due to the recession. What’s more, the worse the recession is, the more dead people we’ll see.

Boy, was he a breath of fresh air.

I’m sure the good doctor is a fine man who is loved by his wife and family, but he could not have been more depressing. I have to blame the radio station for scheduling the topic, but I think the palpable sense of gloominess even surprised the hosts. Of course they didn’t help the situation by asking questions like, “Will lack of affordable healthcare cause people not to take their medications and maybe commit suicide or seek treatment for stress-related illnesses?” My favorite question was: “Is the stress of the economy what causes people to go into an office building and shoot people?” There was almost a glimmer of excitement in the doctor’s voice when he said something like, “Yes, we do see an increase in murder/suicides during times like these.” So we have that to look forward to, I guess.

(If I can find a clip or transcript I’ll try to get exact quotes. I don’t want anyone to think I’m making this up.)

Nice topic, eh?

There’s more to discuss here, I’m sure. For instance, there was also a point made during the interview that being poor and uneducated makes people die earlier. That seems to make intuitive sense, but shouldn’t that be something we tell kids when they want to drop out of school? If the standard “You’re never going to succeed without an education ” message isn’t strong enough, how about “Drop Out and Die Young!” That message may resonate a little more.

I feel as though I should apologize for such a downer of a post, so I’ll mitigate the mood a bit by providing you an uplifting image from that time of happiness and harmony known as the 70′s. Hang in there, baby….

Update: I’ve done everything I can to locate the actual copyright holder for this picture or the story behind it. I can’t find it. I seem to remember there were many versions of this poster, but this is the one that Mrs Scott, my 9th grade English teacher, had hanging in her classroom. If you know the story behind the poster, or can point me to the company that manufactured this and all the other dreadful motivational posters from the 70′s, I’d love to hear from you.

In that time I have seen vast sums of money spent on bad ideas, watched enormous quantities of shareholder value dissipate and participated in more than a few Whacking Days. (No, not this kind.) I know the ups and downs that come with working for a technology company. You wear your experiences like badges of honor. When you start at a new company, you and your new co-workers share your histories.

“You were with Synegistix? I worked for Ingeniko Corp before they acquired them.”
“No kidding. I was a part of the transition team on that.”
“Really? Yeah, I took the package right after.”
“Yeah, I got laid off during the next round.”

You start a job knowing that your tenure will likely end one of two ways: move on or get whacked. Retirement is not a part of the picture. The people I know who have been with a job longer than 10 years is very short indeed. The people I know intending to stay with a company longer than 10 years is even shorter. It’s not that anyone wants to leave a company, but no one believes that to be possible. No one.

To the grizzled IT veteran, a layoff isn’t the end of the world. It comes with the territory. But there’s something a little different to me about the recent economic troubles and the rise in unemployment numbers. This time, it isn’t just us (or is that “we?”). When Internet companies began to implode around 2000, technology companies contributed mightily to the rolls of the unemployed. Then the recession following 9/11 hit sending more companies into “restructurement.” It happened so frequently that even when times began to get better, tech companies still shed jobs on a regular basis. Again, to those of us who had been through it a few times, we never considered that the companies we worked for wouldn’t have layoffs. (There’s a post in there somewhere that I’ll have to tease out sometime. Something along the lines of technology companies and the poor managers who ran them using the Q4 layoff as a means to fill a budget gap.) You pack up your necessities, leave the company t-shirts, tchotchkes and awards (MARKETING EMPLOYEE OF THE MONTH) in your cube and drive to the after-layoff party. It’s the way it’s done.

On this go-round, even though there are people from tech companies being kicked to the curb, for the first time in my career they are being joined at the curb by a lot of people with surprised looks on their faces. There are some layoff newbies who are coming from companies and departments that have been relatively untouched in past cycles; people who seemed to think that they were untouchable.

To those poor folks I say this: Welcome!

Welcome to the world of the newly unemployed. You’ll have a couple of weeks of telling everyone you’re fine and that you’re actually glad to have been let go. It was a good thing, you’ll say. The company was on its way out, you’ll contend. Then you’ll tell yourself how glad you are that you were let go while there was still some money for a package. Then you’ll begin the process of rewriting your resume a couple hundred times trying to make the last few years of your life sound like you were curing cancer. (“Hmmm….Did I ‘interface’ or ‘liaise’ with the project budget operating unit? And was I ‘crucial’ or ‘imperative’ to the success of the Q4 Logistical Re-engineering Process?”) Oh, and just wait until you see the typo you missed before you sent it out to 200 prospective employers. Sometime after the third or fourth week you’ll discover that one of your cable channels in the upper 150’s (Is there an 80’s Channel?) runs Magnum P.I. marathons on Thursdays. At that point, you’re nearing the bottom.

But don’t worry…

Just like that “friendly” break-up you once had after college that sent you into a tailspin where you gained 25 pounds and became addicted to the original Duke Nukem, you will survive. After all, if nothing else there’s still 75% of the stimulus package still waiting to be spent putting you to work on our nation’s infrastructure.

Good luck, my friend!

I ran across this factoid today on Twitter (H/T @marc_meyer): Australian courts have said distributing legal documents via Facebook is acceptable. I had no idea. After doing some additional research, I found that New Zealand (New Zealander? Zealandish?) and Canadian courts have also ruled that posting a document to a Facebook account is fine. (Link here.) US courts have not held that to be the case, but the idea that Facebook–a for-profit, American, public company run by non-elected employees with their own set of interests, ideas and agenda–should be placed in the position of distributing legal documents in any country just doesn’t seem smart to me.

I’m sure some would think that’s a little overboard; after all, why should Facebook be any different than UPS or Fedex or a bicycle messenger or a process server in distributing legal documents? In principle, I don’t disagree with that. But then I ran across this story that has received very little notice in the press. That’s right, Facebook was socked with a $9.5 million judgment in a class action suit for divulging user’s private information through its misguided (and now defunct) Beacon project. And these are the folks that should be handling legal documents?

This is in no way an attempt to single out Facebook or its employees as irresponsible or bad. Someone made a boneheaded decision and Facebook is being asked to pay for it. But the payment is being made through a civil proceeding, not criminal, so it means that consumers were responsible for policing this part of the social networking world. (Sadly, the affected class of consumers are getting next to nothing while class action attorneys, as is usually the case, are getting about a third of the judgment. Nice.)

I’m no fan of criminalizing everything, and I don’t know that a criminal case against Facebook would have yielded any better results or encouraged Facebook to rethink its privacy standards. These two cases simply underscore my growing feeling that it is up to consumers to be vigilant in monitoring their online presence and the data that is being used to define them more and more. I’m going to revisit this topic in my next post because the sheer volume of data that is collected, analyzed and distributed is mind boggling. Don’t worry, it’s not an anti-big-brother screed. In fact, I think consumers are now better positioned to understand and control their ‘data fates’ than ever before.

There’s a new sheriff in town and that sheriff is us…

(And before you send me an email that the correct usage is ‘we,’ don’t bother. I know. I’m just paraphrasing the famous saying. Relax, ok?)

First, we have the Wikipedia entry for Epping. In it we learn that Epping is a nice suburb of London. We also learn this little nugget about the Epping train station (It’s where the Central Line terminates, in case you wanted to know):

“The station has a car park with 508 spaces and is the second largest car park on the London Underground network, a toilet, a ticket machine, a pay phone as well as seats for sitting outside of the station.“ (I’ve left the original links in because you might want to know more about ticket machines and pay phones.)

I don’t know about you, but the fact that someone loves the Epping train station enough to comment on the number of parking spaces, and note it is the second largest car park on the London Underground, is charming. I also note with some real surprise that there is a toilet there. As a denizen of New York for many years, I know working toilets in train stations are very, very rare. (And just to show I’m not mocking the person who wrote that Wiki entry, I say with some pride that my Subway station in Manhattan at 190th on the A line had the deepest station in the entire NYC Subway system. I too am a train geek.)

Second, a link to Rod Stewart. Mr Stewart is a current resident of Epping. There’s a list on the Wikipedia entry of famous Eppingians, but some on the list may have just passed through Epping. Rod Stewart was the most notable on the list who actually lives there. (Just in case, if Mr Stewart is my reader in Epping, thanks for visiting. I have a song of yours on my playlist for my morning run, if you care.)

Here’s a link to the site of Eleanor Laing, the Member of Parliament (MP to we Anglophiles) for Epping Forest. She seems like a fine person, though she does appear to have only one green jacket. (PR tip to Ms Laing: If you’re going to do a series of photo ops on the same day, bring a change of jackets. Alternatively, women can wear something plain like a black jacket and then accessorize with something notable like a chunky necklace that can be switched out between photo ops. That’s all that will catch the eye and no one will notice you’re wearing the same clothes.) That’s all I can really add there. As Anglophilic as I am, I haven’t a clue about the English parliamentary system. Apparently Ms. Laing is also a “Shadow Minister” which sounds cool but slightly evil. I put British governance on the list of English things I just don’t undertand along with cricket and steak and kidney pie.

For my non-Epping readers, if you ever wish to visit Epping, here is the link to a travel and tourism site featuring Epping. If you visit, send me pics.

And to my Epping reader, if you are not Rod Stewart : Please send me a comment or a note. I’d love to know your opinions of the site. Cheers to you, my friend! Thanks for stopping by.

Thanks to non-Eppingians for stopping by as well.

First some background: “Personal brands” is a subject about which many social media mavens love to wax philosophic. Just like a brand message for a product, it’s the bundle of qualities and characteristics that your online presence projects. In short, it’s the various answers to the question “What is Person X all about?” And just like a corporate brand, it has real value, especially to those who look to their online personal brand to help them with professional and career advancement.

A friend of mine who spends a lot of time considering personal brands (he’s a recruiter) recommended sticking to a few networks, like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. That struck me as almost counterintuitive. I’m already on those sites, but why not put my stuff out on a few more. No harm, right? From a PR perspective, it’s all about presence. Yet here is a recruiter saying it’s possible to over-extend. Why? Because social media is different from PR in that it’s not all about projecting a presence. It’s about relationships, and relationships are as much about listening as they are about talking. (Somewhere my wife just had an urge to say “duh!”) I can’t maintain a relationship everywhere and hope to provide updated content, feedback and responses. On those sites where my presence is lacking attention, I do myself a disservice by seeming disengaged.

There are all sorts of discussions to be had about social media and personal brands. How do you create them? How do you expand them? How do you protect them? I have come across a ton of people who are self-proclaimed experts on creating and sustaining a personal brand. Some are completely full of themselves, but others make good sense and I’m fascinated by the entire phenomenon. After all, it’s about people taking control of the online reputations that are coming to define them more and more.

And here’s my follow-up question: What does this mean for the social media sites themselves? How does the market determine where people congregate and where they simply abandon a network? Is their an online equivalent to the old real estate adage about location, location, location? How will this play out for these companies once people begin to sense that their social networks are basically located in a bad neighborhood? Is there room for all of them? We’re all buzzing about social media at the moment, but how soon before we start hearing about social networking sites closing down or migrating somewhere else? It’s a mean old world right now. Doesn’t something have to give?

Reed’s Law says the value of a social network scales exponentially with the number of its members. If members begin to leave, is there a tipping point where the value diminishes exponentially as well? Will people abandon a network because they just don’t perceive any value to themselves or their personal brand? How do networks that see that behavior in their members react? Do they rebrand? Do they become niche networks, something like “the network of left-leaning European pop artists,” or just whither away?

I just tweaked some tools on this blog last week and redid the plug-in that allows readers to post content on their network pages. It had a list of social networks that was huge, literally dozens of sites, many of which I had never heard of. Someone feels it’s necessary to make these sites available via a coded link, so obviously there are people using them. Is that how they all will survive. Will they end up being so linked together through API’s and shared authentications that users barely know when they’ve crossed into another network, and updates migrate out to various parts of their online brand automatically. All I know at this point is that keeping an eye on content at more than a few places is time-consuming and difficult. I’ll hope that some smart coder figures out how to keep it all updated and relevant. If that same coder can figure out how to make me sound smarter, funnier and more accomplished, that would be great too.