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I.H.T. Special: Social Media Firms Move to Capitalize on Popularity in Middle East

February 6, 2013 by Leave a Comment

The use of social media exploded during the Arab Spring as people turned to cyberspace to express themselves. On the back of that, social media networks, including Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, have moved into the region commercially, setting up offices to sell advertising products to companies like Mobily, which has over 200,000 Twitter followers, to capitalize on the growing audience.

“In Saudi, social media gets everyone talking to everyone, which is something we just don’t have in the streets here,” said Muna AbuSulayman, a Saudi development consultant and formerly a popular television talk show host, who has over 100,000 followers on Twitter.

“It’s a unique opportunity that lets people have conversations in a boundary-less way that wasn’t possible before,” Ms. AbuSulayman said. “In addition to promoting social and political discussion, it carries a powerful economic incentive for businesses, too.”

The rise of social media in the Arab world is changing the game for regional advertisers, pushing growth in digital advertising in a part of the world where traditional methods like television and print advertising have so far remained dominant.

Digital advertising in the Middle East and North Africa accounts for only about 4 percent of the region’s total advertising spending, at a value of $200 million, according to the most recent available estimate, but it has become the fastest-growing media platform in the region, said a study by the business services firm Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, published in 2011. Deloitte’s Arab Media Outlook projected growth in digital advertising spending in the region of 35 percent a year over the next three years, generating about $580 million across the region by 2015.

“The fact is that consumers are online, so brands need to be online,” said Reda Raad, chief operating officer of TBWARaad, the Middle East arm of the global advertising agency TWBA. “The use of digital channels has continued to increase dramatically after the Arab Spring and advertising on social media has become a highly targeted, cost-efficient way of communicating with consumers.”

Major brands, including Pepsi Arabia, are taking note. Saudi Arabia has the highest number of Twitter users in the Arab world, holding 38 percent of the region’s two million users, according to a report by the Dubai School of Government’s Arab Social Media Report released in June. In the past year alone, the number of Twitter users in the Arab world tripled, according to Shailesh Rao, Twitter’s vice president for international operations.

Thanks to the platform’s popularity in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, Arabic is now the fastest-growing language on the Twitter platform.

“We prioritized a list of regions where we wanted to have a business presence, and the Mideast rises toward the top because the region’s user base is one of the fastest-growing in the world,” Mr. Rao said during an interview. “This represents a huge opportunity for brands looking for a large audience that is rapidly growing.”

Twitter has formed a partnership with the Egyptian digital advertising company Connect Ads to market and sell advertising services across the Middle East and North Africa region. Connect Ads will offer brand managers and marketers Twitter’s products, which include promoted tweets, promoted accounts and promoted trends.

Through these, a brand can reach broad Twitter audiences or more narrowly defined geographic or demographic segments. They can even target users of specific smartphone brands, like iPhones. Brands that have signed up so far include Mobily, Pepsi Arabia, the resort company Atlantis The Palm, and the events portal Dubai Calendar.

“Companies can learn a few things about their customers by optimizing for country and targeting those with specific interests,” said Mohamed El Mehairy, managing director of Connect Ads.

“They can probably uncover this type of information through market research,” he added, but it would come “at a higher expense and with more time and effort.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/07/world/middleeast/social-media-firms-move-to-capitalize-on-popularity-in-middle-east.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Media Decoder Blog: ESPN to Use Twitter to Send Instant Replays of College Football

December 14, 2012 by Leave a Comment

A mock-up of an instant replay embedded in a Twitter post from ESPN. A mock-up of an instant replay embedded in a Twitter post from ESPN.

For the holidays this year, college football fans are getting the gift of portable instant replay.

Starting Saturday, in time for bowl season, Twitter in partnership with ESPN and Ford will provide embedded replays from football games in posts sent via Twitter. Both ESPN and Ford will promote the tweets.

“The instant replay applies classic Twitter strengths, mainly mobile and real time, to video,” said Glenn Brown, the director of promoted content and partnerships at Twitter.

Fans of college football will be able to see the replays on whatever platform they use to access Twitter, though ideally with a mobile device, Mr. Brown said. “You get an alert on your phone, you can run into a bar and catch the rest of the game,” he said.

Instead of being sent to watch the video clips on a separate Web site, users will be able to watch the videos without having to leave Twitter.

The replays, which will begin with a short promotional clip for the Ford Fusion, will be selected by ESPN’s college football editors. The posts will be promoted to people who are not following Ford or ESPN but who may be interested in the clips based on the people they follow, and what they post to Twitter about, Mr. Brown said.

“When it comes to college football it’s a tremendous opportunity to watch across all our screens,” said Lisa Valentino, the vice president of digital and mobile advertising sales at ESPN. “That appetite is tremendous.”

Tanzina Vega writes about advertising and digital media. Follow @tanzinavega on Twitter.

Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/14/espn-to-use-twitter-to-send-instant-replays-of-college-football/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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The Shrewd Shopper Carries a Smartphone on Black Friday

November 22, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Retailers are trying to lure shoppers away from the Internet, where they have increasingly been shopping to avoid Black Friday madness, and back to the stores. The bait is technological tools that will make shopping on the busiest day of the year a little more sane — and give shoppers an edge over their competition.

Those with smartphones in hand will get better planning tools, prices and parking spots. Walmart has a map that shows shoppers exactly where the top Black Friday specials can be found. A Mall of America Twitter feed gives advice on traffic and gifts, and the Macy’s app sends special deals for every five minutes a shopper stays in a store.

“The crazy mad rush to camp out and the crazy mad rush to hit the doorbusters have really made people think, ‘I’m just going to stay home on Black Friday,’ ” said Carey Rossi, editor in chief of ConsumerSearch.com, a review site. “This is going to invite some people back and say, ‘You know what? It doesn’t have to be that crazy.’ ”

Part of the retailers’ strategy is to slap back at online stores like Amazon.com, which last year used apps to pick off shoppers as they browsed in physical stores. But the stores are also recognizing that shopping on the Friday after Thanksgiving need not require an overnight wait in line, a helmet and elbow pads. A smartphone gives shoppers enough of an edge.

“This takes away that frantic Black Friday anxiety,” said Lawrence Fong, co-founder of BuyVia, an app that sends people price alerts and promotions. “While there’s a sport to it, life’s a little too short.”

Denise Fouts, 45, who works repairing fire and water damage in Chandler, Ariz., is already using apps to prepare for Black Friday, including Shopkick, Target’s app and one called Black Friday. “There still are going to be the crowds, but at least I already know ahead of time what I’m going specifically for,” Ms. Fouts said.

Last week, Macy’s released an update to its app with about 300 Black Friday specials and their location. In the Herald Square store, for instance, the $49.99 cashmere sweater specials will be in the Broadway side of the fifth-floor women’s department.

“With the speed that people are shopping with on Black Friday, they need to be really efficient about how they’re spending their time,” said Jennifer Kasper, group vice president for digital media at Macy’s.

When shoppers keep the app open, Macy’s will start sending special deals to the phone every five minutes. The deals are not advertised elsewhere.

Walmart has had an app for several years, but recently introduced an in-store mode, which shows things like the current circular or food tastings when a shopper is near a certain location. Twelve percent of Walmart’s mobile revenue now comes from when a person is inside a store.

For Black Friday, the app will have a map of each store, with the precise location of the top sale items — so planners can determine the best way to run. “The blitz items are not where you think they would be, because for traffic reasons, maybe the hot game console is in the lawn and garden center,” said Gibu Thomas, senior vice president for mobile and digital for Walmart Global eCommerce.

Target is also testing a way-finding feature on its app at stores that include some in Seattle, Chicago and Los Angeles. If a shopper types in an item, the app will give its location.

Other app makers are betting that shoppers want apps that pull in information from a range of stores.

RedLaser, an eBay app, lets shoppers use their phones to compare prices and recently started using location data to give shoppers personalized promotions when they walk into stores, including items not on store shelves at Best Buy, for instance. RetailMeNot, which offers e-commerce coupons, now has offline coupons that will pop up on users’ cellphones when they step near 500 malls on Black Friday.

“Consumers are not going to download 40 different apps for 40 different stores,” said Cyriac Roeding, co-founder of Shopkick, a location-based app that gives shoppers points, redeemable for discounts or gifts, when they walk into stores or scan certain items.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/23/technology/the-shrewd-shopper-carries-a-smartphone-on-black-friday.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: , ,

False Posts on Facebook Undermine Its Credibility

November 13, 2012 by Leave a Comment

But in October, another Facebook page for the hospital popped up. This one posted denunciations of President Obama and what it derided as “Obamacare.” It swiftly gathered hundreds of followers, and the anti-Obama screeds picked up “likes.” Officials at the hospital, scrambling to get it taken down, turned to their real Facebook page for damage control. “We apologize for any confusion,” they posted on Oct. 8, “and appreciate the support of our followers.”

The fake page came down 11 days later, as mysteriously as it had come up. The hospital says it has no clue who was behind it.

Fakery is all over the Internet. Twitter, which allows pseudonyms, is rife with fake followers, and has been used to spread false rumors, as it was during Hurricane Sandy. False reviews are a constant problem on consumer Web sites.

Gaston Memorial’s experience is an object lesson in the problem of fakery on Facebook. For the world’s largest social network, it is an especially acute problem, because it calls into question its basic premise. Facebook has sought to distinguish itself as a place for real identity on the Web. As the company tells its users: “Facebook is a community where people use their real identities.” It goes on to advise: “The name you use should be your real name as it would be listed on your credit card, student ID, etc.”

Fraudulent “likes” damage the trust of advertisers, who want clicks from real people they can sell to and whom Facebook now relies on to make money. Fakery also can ruin the credibility of search results for the social search engine that Facebook says it is building.

Facebook says it has always taken the problem seriously, and recently stepped up efforts to cull fakes from the site. “It’s pretty much one of the top priorities for the company all the time,” said Joe Sullivan, who is in charge of security at Facebook.

The fakery problem on Facebook comes in many shapes. False profiles are fairly easy to create; hundreds can pop up simultaneously, sometimes with the help of robots, and often they persuade real users into friending them in a bid to spread malware. Fake Facebook friends and likes are sold on the Web like trinkets at a bazaar, directed at those who want to enhance their image. Fake coupons for meals and gadgets can appear on Facebook newsfeeds, aimed at tricking the unwitting into revealing their personal information.

Somewhat more benignly, some college students use fake names in an effort to protect their Facebook content from the eyes of future employers.

Mr. Sullivan declined to say what portion of the company’s now one billion plus users were fake. The company quantified the problem last June, in responding to an inquiry by the Securities and Exchange Commission. At that time, the company said that of its 855 million active users, 8.7 percent, or 83 million, were duplicates, false or “undesirable,” for instance, because they spread spam.

Mr. Sullivan said that since August, the company had put in place a new automated system to purge fake “likes.” The company said it has 150 to 300 staff members to weed out fraud.

Flags are raised if a user sends out hundreds of friend requests at a time, Mr. Sullivan explained, or likes hundreds of pages simultaneously, or most obvious of all, posts a link to a site that is known to contain a virus. Those suspected of being fakes are warned. Depending on what they do on the site, accounts can be suspended.

In October, Facebook announced new partnerships with antivirus companies. Facebook users can now download free or paid antivirus coverage to guard against malware.

“It’s something we have been pretty effective at all along,” Mr. Sullivan said.

Facebook’s new aggressiveness toward fake “likes” became noticeable in September, when brand pages started seeing their fan numbers dip noticeably. An average brand page, Facebook said at the time, would lose less than 1 percent of its fans.

But the thriving market for fakery makes it hard to keep up with the problem. Gaston Memorial, for instance, first detected a fake page in its name in August; three days later, it vanished. The fake page popped up again on Oct. 4, and this time filled up quickly with the loud denunciations of the Obama administration. Dallas P. Wilborn, the hospital’s public relations manager, said her office tried to leave a voice-mail message for Facebook but was disconnected; an e-mail response from the social network ruled that the fake page did not violate its terms of service. The hospital submitted more evidence, saying that the impostor was using its company logo.

Eleven days later, the hospital said, Facebook found in its favor. But by then, the local newspaper, The Gaston Gazette, had written about the matter, and the fake page had disappeared.

Facebook declined to comment on the incident, and pointed only to its general Statement of Rights and Responsibilities.

The election season seems to have increased the fakery.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/13/technology/false-posts-on-facebook-undermine-its-credibility.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: ,

Oliver Luckett of theAudience, Building Online Fan Bases

November 10, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Raised in Mississippi and with the accent to prove it, Mr. Luckett, 38, is known for zooming around town in an Aston Martin — that is, when he’s not jetting off to places like Iceland, where he was last December to compete against Bjork in a gingerbread house-building contest. He lost, despite help from a buddy in Disneyland’s research and design lab.

With his new company — a social media start-up called theAudience — Mr. Luckett promises nothing short of rewiring celebrity economics, and he abruptly dismisses skeptics. “Get on my train,” he likes to say, his blue eyes blazing. “We’re leaving now.” Yet he can also be a big softy known for his striped-sock collection. During a business meeting not so long ago, he veered into an emotional story about coming out of the closet and started to weep.

Just another showy show-business personality? Some people think so. But many of the entertainment factory’s most powerful forces — William Morris Endeavor, Lionsgate, Universal Pictures — and one tech superstar, Sean Parker, are taking him very, very seriously.

About two years ago, Mr. Luckett left a senior position at Walt Disney, where he managed the social media presence of Cinderella and her cartoon friends, to do the same for actors and musicians. For each client, theAudience works to build a network of fans across the likes of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google Plus and to keep those followers engaged by posting a steady stream of catchy pictures, comments and videos.

THEAUDIENCE, part of a stampede of start-ups aiming to exploit the intersection of celebrity and social media, also sells its services directly to movie marketers, record labels and concert promoters. It did stealth work on behalf of the hit movie “Ted,” for instance, and the Coachella music festival. Mr. Luckett refuses to identify his clients, but he says theAudience publishes thousands of items a month on behalf of about 300 accounts, reaching a total of 800 million fans.

Movie and music executives say theAudience’s clients include Mark Wahlberg, Charlize Theron, Jack Black, Eddie Murphy, Hugh Jackman, Usher, Pitbull and LMFAO.

Celebrities seizing opportunities to promote themselves? As Captain Renault would say, “I’m shocked, shocked.” But theAudience illustrates something important about where Hollywood is headed. After largely ignoring social media — allowing fake Facebook pages to proliferate, sticking with tried-and-true publicity stops like “Entertainment Tonight” — stars and agents are realizing en masse that they need to get on that train.

There is intense downward pressure on artist salaries in all corners of entertainment. Movie attendance over the summer hit a 20-year low. The Web has decimated the music industry. DVRs are roiling television. William Morris Endeavor, a founding investor in theAudience, sees the assertive cultivation of social media networks as one way to shift power back to stars.

To agents, the metrics of theAudience offer crucial leverage: If you cast Ms. Theron in a movie, she comes with an ability to fill seats through her social network, and we can prove it with data. Oh, and she needs to be paid more because of that. The same leverage holds true for sealing endorsement deals, which is where celebrities, and their agency backers, increasingly make their real money.

“That is absolutely part of the conversation now,” says Ari Emanuel, the co-chief executive of William Morris Endeavor. “We all use all the tools we have.”

If you were wondering how Rihanna was cast in “Battleship,” it was lost on no one at Universal that she came with 26 million Twitter followers.

Ultimately, Mr. Emanuel and others look at social media networks as a new type of cable channel, and theAudience is helping celebrities to program theirs. Consider it as the Web equivalent of OWN, Oprah Winfrey’s channel; she maintains control of what goes on it, but she hires people to make it happen.

“The real value of these networks is in programming,” says Mr. Parker, the Napster founder who also played a big role in Facebook’s world domination. “If you can aggregate effectively, you can start to imagine social media a little bit more like traditional media.”

Mr. Luckett has a long history with start-ups, including Revver, a video sharing site that was precursor to YouTube. He says theAudience recently obtained $20 million in an additional round of financing from Guggenheim Partners; Intertainment Media; Participant Media; the Founders Fund, which is Mr. Parker’s investment company; and the Capricorn Investment Group, the investment arm of Jeffrey Skoll, the first president of eBay.

“A lot of celebrities are overwhelmed with the demands of social media, and theAudience, which has some extremely smart executives, is one of the companies filling the void,” said Danielle De Palma, senior vice president for digital marketing at Lionsgate, which hired Mr. Luckett to work on “The Hunger Games.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/11/business/oliver-luckett-of-theaudience-building-online-fan-bases.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Pictures From the Week in Business

October 13, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Dick Costolo, the chief of Twitter, on the rooftop garden of the company’s new global headquarters in San Francisco. Long before the Twitter revolution and his ascent to the heights of social media, Mr. Costolo was a professional comedian. And he’s still doing improv — only it’s the business kind. He’ll wax on about growth and revenue like the next C.E.O. But then he’ll dig out a joke and do something that might hurt his business — and miff his investors — because, well, he thinks that something is the right thing to do.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2012/10/13/business/weekly-business-photos.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Bits Blog: A Hacker Brings Down GoDaddy

September 11, 2012 by Leave a Comment

7:48 p.m. | Updated

A supporter of Anonymous, the loose confederation of rogue hackers, claimed responsibility on Monday for an attack that brought down GoDaddy, a Web hosting service, and its customers.

GoDaddy’s site was out for several hours Monday afternoon, as were many of the Web sites belonging to its 10.5 million customers, like the fantasy sports site Draftday and eBaum’s World, a humor site.

“We’re aware of the issues affecting our site,” Elizabeth Driscoll, a GoDaddy spokeswoman, said. “We’re still working to figure out what happened and determine the number of Web sites impacted.”

The person behind the Twitter account @AnonymousOwn3r took responsibility for the attack and said all of GoDaddy’s servers were knocked out with what is known as a distributed denial of service attack, or DDoS attack, in which a site is flooded with traffic until it collapses under the load.

“When I do some DDoS attack, I like to let it down by many days,” the person claiming responsibility said on Twitter. “It can last one hour or one month.”

This person said that he had conducted the attack alone and that it was not part of a broader Anonymous campaign. GoDaddy briefly became an target of Anonymous last December for its initial support of the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, a Congressional bill that would have made it possible for copyright owners to seek court orders to take sites offline for practicing or aiding piracy. GoDaddy withdrew its support of the bill after customers began transferring their Web sites to its competitors and hackers threatened to attack it.

But one of the Twitter accounts most frequently associated with Anonymous, @AnonyOps, distanced the group from Monday’s attack and said it was the work of one individual. “He’s either a newbie to activism and cutting his teeth by doing this, which is misguided, or he’s trying to give Anons a bad reputation,” the Twitter post said.

Rich Miller, the editor in chief of Data Center Knowledge, an online publication that tracks the data center industry, said a shutdown at GoDaddy had widespread repercussions for the Internet.

“This is potentially the largest kind of problem you could have on the Internet,” Mr. Miller said. “GoDaddy is the largest company in the domain industry thanks to its colorful Super Bowl commercials.”

Mr. Miller estimated that GoDaddy managed 52 million domain names and hosted about 5 million Web sites on its servers. Its sheer size has made the company a ripe target for hackers, he said.

GoDaddy was previously the target of two notable DDoS attacks, one in 2007 and another in 2009.

GoDaddy customers vented their frustration on Twitter and elsewhere. Bob de Luna, a director of public information at the United Hospital Fund, a nonprofit health organization, said four domain names it had registered with GoDaddy had been down for several hours. He said that when he contacted GoDaddy’s customer service line, a representative told him 750 people were waiting in line behind him. The representative told him that during service failures, a typical wait list was 20 people.

GoDaddy’s Web site was still down Monday evening, and the company said it would provide updates through its Twitter and Facebook accounts.

Article source: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/10/member-of-anonymous-takes-credit-for-godaddy-attack/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Media Decoder Blog: Twitter Backpedals on Reporter’s Post

July 31, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Twitter has become the default for people when they have a complaint. Even when that complaint is about Twitter.

The company found itself at the center of a Twitter firestorm when it suspended on Sunday the account of Guy Adams, a British newspaper reporter for The Independent, after he had posted complaints about NBC’s tape-delayed Olympics coverage. The posts included the e-mail address of Gary Zenkel, the head of NBC Sports.

On Tuesday, both Twitter and NBC backpedaled. While Twitter officials stress that the company generally does not monitor content, Alex Macgillivray, Twitter’s general counsel, admitted in a statement on Tuesday that Twitter “did proactively identify a Tweet that was in violation of the Twitter rules and encouraged them” — NBC — “to file a support ticket with our Trust and Safety team to report the violation.”

Chloe Sladden, vice president for media at Twitter, personally apologized on her Twitter feed for the mistake. NBC also issued a statement apologizing for having the reporter’s account suspended. Twitter then reactivated the reporter’s account.

“Our interest was in protecting our executive, not suspending the user from Twitter,” an NBC spokesman said in a statement. “We didn’t initially understand the repercussions of our complaint, but now that we do, we have rescinded it.”

But the initial suspension already put both companies out of favor with many Twitter faithful. Out of solidarity for Mr. Adams, supporters also started posting the e-mail address of Mr. Zenkel, the NBC executive. They paired the hashtags #guyadams with #NBCfail. They called the incident a “watershed moment” for social media and accused Twitter executives of censoring Mr. Adams’s account “to cater to corporate whim.”

They also went for the jugular by threatening not to tune in to NBC’s Olympics coverage. Mr. Adams gained several thousand new followers after Twitter reinstated his account.

“Thanks to @NBCOlympics behavior wrt @GuyAdams I won’t be watching any more Olympics. Sorry, London.” wrote one follower.

Twitter has always enjoyed an extraordinary amount of good will from its users in part because it does not require them to sign in under their own names (unlike Facebook) and it allows almost unlimited free speech. The suspension of Mr. Adams’s account seemed like an exception to Twitter rules based on a corporate relationship.

Last month, Twitter and NBC announced a partnership to share their Olympics coverage across both of their platforms. NBC would promote Twitter’s Olympic event page through on-air graphics and Twitter would include NBC commentators on its Olympic events page.

The problems started on Friday evening when Mr. Adams, who is based in Los Angeles, started posting on Twitter how frustrated he was that NBC was delaying television coverage until prime time. He wrote, “Am I alone in wondering why NBColympics think its acceptable to pretend this road race is being broadcast live?” As his frustration grew, he filed a post to Twitter that was heard throughout social media.

“The man responsible for NBC pretending the Olympics haven’t started yet is Gary Zenkel. Tell him what u think!” He ended his post with the work e-mail address of Mr. Zenkel. Soon he was retweeted and some angry followers added the hashtag #NBCFAIL.

That’s when Twitter officials abandoned their usual stance and contacted NBC employees they knew through their Olympics partnership. They told them about the post and advised them on how to suspend Mr. Adams’s account. Writing in The Independent, Mr. Adams said he discovered that his account had been suspended “for posting an individual’s private information such as private e-mail address.” But he stressed, “I do not wish Mr. Zenkel any harm.”

Jillian C. York, director for international freedom of expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group, said that the incident was a departure from Twitter’s generally strong reputation as a supporter of free speech.

“Twitter has a pretty strong history in defending free speech. They’ve stood up for users in court. They’ve publicly written about their dedication to free expression,” said Ms. York. “Twitter needs to do more work this time around to make people trust them again.”

Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/31/twitter-gets-a-backlash-of-its-own-over-adams-suspension/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Bits Blog: Betaworks Buys What’s Left of Social News Site Digg

July 13, 2012 by Leave a Comment

7:21 p.m. | Updated Adding additional price information.

10:11 p.m. | Updated Adding details of the deal.

For a while, Digg, the social news site, was one of the hottest things on the Web. But then it fell on hard times as services like Twitter and Facebook emerged and captured the Web’s attention.

Digg’s founders fled to greener pastures, and it seemed the service was headed for the technology boneyard. But on Thursday the site’s saga got a fresh twist: Betaworks, a technology incubator in New York, said it had acquired Digg.

Betaworks paid $500,000 for Digg’s assets, including the site and its technology, and Digg shareholders received equity in a new Betaworks unit that will use those assets, according to a person involved in the deal. That equity was worth something in the “single-digit millions,” this person said.

The precise value of the deal was not clear, but it was no doubt far less than what Digg was once worth. An investment round in 2008 valued it at more than $150 million, and at one point Google was said to have been interested in buying the site for around $200 million.

Betaworks invests in technology services and also creates them, having spawned Bit.ly, the link-shortening service, and News.me, an iPad-based news aggregator developed in collaboration with The New York Times Company. The new unit will combine the Digg assets and News.me, and John Borthwick, the founder of Betaworks, will become chief executive of Digg. Betaworks plans to create a new version of Digg that will be a complement to News.me’s iPhone and iPad applications.

Matt Williams, Digg’s chief executive, will become an entrepreneur in residence at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz when the deal closes. In an interview, Mr. Williams said Digg had spent a significant amount of time looking for the right buyer, zeroing in on technology incubators that were interested in news-related start-ups. “Betaworks seemed like a great fit,” Mr. Williams said. “They want to reinvent Digg, and that’s exactly what they will do.”

Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg, said he had always been a fan of Mr. Borthwick and the companies he had nurtured at Betaworks.

“John understands the real-time nature of the Web and how to capture and surface trends as they occur,” said Mr. Rose, in a blog post on Digg’s Web site. “Given his experience with Bit.ly, News.me and Chartbeat, I can’t wait to see what he does with Digg.”

Mr. Rose is now at Google’s venture capital fund, and The Washington Post hired 15 employees away from Digg in May. No Digg employees will be making the move to Betaworks.

Article source: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/12/betaworks-buys-whats-left-of-social-news-site-digg/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Global Business Tagged With: , ,

Site Analysis: The Difference Between a Good Web Site and a Great Web Site

January 26, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Sam Mogannam plans to make some changes.Jed Jacobsohn for The New York TimesSam Mogannam plans to make some changes.

Site Analysis

What’s wrong with this Web site?

In last week’s post, we featured the Web site of Bi-Rite Market, an extremely popular San Francisco grocery. One year ago, Sam Mogannam, the market’s owner, redesigned the site and upgraded its social media efforts as part of an overall branding program. Mr. Mogannam reported that he believed the redesign of the site — which promotes the store but does not sell products online — resulted in a steep increase in visitors to the site and a 20 percent increase in the store’s sales.

We asked readers to take a look at the site and at Bi-Rite’s social media efforts. Here’s what you had to say, along with my take and Mr. Mogannam’s response.

A good home page, I believe, should act as a gateway to all of the information on a site. It should offer a core business message — what makes you different from and better than your competition — and then provide easy navigation to pages that address specific interests or needs. Readers felt the Bi-Rite homepage did not do a great job of accomplishing this. The big problem, they said, is that the Bi-Rite blog is too dominant on the home page.

“A blog on the home page is kind of weird,” wrote artalacarte from Connecticut. “A home page should be a quick introduction to the whole Web site. Who you are, what you do, what you can do for ME …”

PW from Texas agreed: “The home page doesn’t make me want to go much further because it doesn’t make me hungry. Blogs and Twitter posts are great additions to a Web site but I don’t expect them to be their main features.”

What might replace the blog on the home page? Several readers mentioned a video produced by the Bi-Rite team that is  professional, entertaining and informative — but buried in a link on the bottom right side of the home page. In the video, Mr. Mogannam speaks passionately about food and Bi-Rite’s commitment to service.

“I love the video about the market that’s attached to the Bi-Rite Book,” wrote Eric Marcus from New York. “Glad I clicked on it because it’s terrific! Now I can’t wait to visit the store the next time I’m in San Francisco. If it were my site, I’d put that video front and center.”

Readers were also hungry for more photographs of the food. “Too much to read and not enough to look at,” wrote PW. “If you want to catch the attention and interest of your visitors, you should focus more on visual appeal. You can portray your commitment to your community with pictures as much as with words.”

Several readers pointed out how well the site presented critical information. “Hours and contact info are posted prominently on each page,” wrote Julie B. from McHenry, Ill. “So simple, yet so important! Nothing worse than hunting around on a small-business Web site for 10 minutes just to find out if they’re open.” But readers also noted that there are several typos in the copy, something they felt made the site look unprofessional.

For a market that does a good job of engaging visitors to its store, readers felt that it could do a better job engaging visitors online. “The site, and the Facebook page, which I looked at, are very one-way,” wrote Friend from New England. “The Web experience could be much more interactive and create a community atmosphere online to complement what it seems happens at the store. Maybe Facebook is the best place to do this so people don’t have to make a special visit to the store page. I think Bi-Rite could do a lot more to involve customers. ASK about what they buy, what they cook, what they want to buy, where they eat, etc.”

Friend used the example of Georgetown Cupcake as a company that does an excellent job of interacting with customers on its Facebook page. A great way to create user interaction is to have visitors provide user-generated content. “I feel that there is room here for a greater store-home connection,” Jen from New York wrote. “They have some recipes on the blog. Why not list the ingredients, perhaps even by store location/aisle? Make it easy for a consumer to print out the recipe, and to find, buy, bring home, use the items for a special dish.”

My Take

While I agree with many of the reader criticisms, I also want to say “Bravo!” to Mr. Mogannam and his team. This is a business that takes its online presence and marketing seriously, and it has paid off. Bi-Rite made a relatively small investment and increased both its site traffic and the store’s sales. In all likelihood, the store recouped its investment almost immediately.

That said, there are plenty of ways the site can still be improved, and I agree with the readers on its main flaws. I think it’s a mistake to let the blog dominate the home page. It’s great to have a blog, of course, especially one that is informative and well written, but it should be a secondary feature. Let visitors know you have a blog, tease them with a small amount of content, and then get them to click onto the blog page if they’re interested in reading more. I also agree with the comments about the video, which gives a real feel for the market’s culture. It should be prominently displayed on the home page; in fact, it should be the centerpiece.

The points made about recipes and engaging the audience were also on the mark. Get your customers sharing recipes with each other. This not only builds community, it gives visitors reason to come back to your store and to your site. This kind of “stickiness” goes a long way to enhancing your brand.

Finally, while Mr. Mogannam has chosen not to be a full-service e-commerce site, there might be more things he could be doing online to improve sales and customer relations. It might be great for business, for example, if you could place an order online either for pick-up or delivery. This might also work for the catering services.

Sam Mogannam Responds

Mr. Mogannam said he agreed with some comments but not with others. His biggest disagreement was about the placement of the blog on the home page. “Our blog posts are most demonstrative of who we are,” he said. “They tell the deeper story behind our food and the people who produce it. Nothing we’d rather have our audience see than that — assuming the nitty gritty info like store location, hours, etc. are easy to find — which the comments indicate they are.”

Mr. Mogannam said that the most helpful advice was to offer more images and less writing. “We’ve heard it once, we’ve heard it a million times,” he said, “that people don’t have the patience to read much these days, and a picture says a thousand words. As interesting as we think a story about cheese making or teaching kids to plant their own food is, it will be lost if not shown through images to accompany the written word.”

Mr. Mogannam said he is taking many of the suggestions to heart and will make a number of changes, including:

  • Working on promoting more social media interaction, engaging the audience in conversation.
  • Putting video front and center.
  • Adding more photos of food to the recipe, catering, and deli pages.
  • Using spell check “religiously”

Would you like to have your business’s Web site or mobile app reviewed? This is an opportunity for companies looking for an honest (and free) appraisal of their online presence and marketing efforts.

To be considered, please tell me about your experiences — why you started your site, what works, what doesn’t, and why you would like to have the site reviewed — in an e-mail to youretheboss@bluefountainmedia.com.

Gabriel Shaoolian is the founder and chief executive of Blue Fountain Media, a Web design, development and marketing company based in New York.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=b753c365d59d95844d7522978bd03d31

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