Jennifer's blog

Marketers trying to keep pace with Twitter and Facebook may want to check out another emerging social media platform: Tumblr.

At first blush, Tumblr, described as a “blogging platform,” which aggregates online content on a particular theme (like, say, skateboarding), doesn’t seem to have an obvious marketing application. But IBM, EMI and Universal Music have all discovered that creating a tumbleblog (a term that preceded the two-year-old Tumblr’s existence) is a good way to help control the message online, reward fans and, in IBM’s case, position oneself as a thought leader on a given topic.

IBM began using Tumblr last fall as part of its Smarter Planet initiative, which was based on a November 2008 speech by CEO Sam Palmisano that posited that in an interconnected world, smarter solutions to problems like wasted energy, gridlocked cities and our antiquated healthcare system will come easier.

IBM ran TV ads from Ogilvy & Mather, New York, on the Smarter Planet theme, but it also has a blog and a tumbleblog related to the idea. The tumbleblog aggregates content from news sources like Information Week and The Wall Street Journal. A heading for “smarter healthcare,” for instance, includes a link to a Boston Globe story on a device developed in South Africa that can help prevent Sudden Infant Death Syndome by monitoring a baby’s movements—if it doesn’t detect any in 15 seconds it vibrates and then, if the baby hasn’t responded, it sounds an alarm.

Marketers can provide such links via blogs, but Tumblr makes it easier to aggregate content like news articles and video. Like Twitter, you can also “follow” a tumbleblog you like. Users can also hit a “like” button or reblog the post onto their own Tumblr page, making the blog items more viral. Adam Christensen, social media manager for IBM, said the idea is to drive online conversation. “It certainly raises awareness for the kinds of things that IBM is working on,” he said. “We don’t want it to be just about IBM, and Tumblr gives us a holistic view.”

At the same time, though, Tumblr can also help a marketer like IBM control its message online in ways that aren’t possible via Facebook and Twitter. Tumblr CEO David Karp said that music artists like Katy Perry and Lenny Kravitz were the first to embrace the platform, and earlier this year labels EMI and Universal Music followed suit. Karp said that marketers who go on Twitter, for instance, find that they are “having weird conversations with the public” and using the platform to short circuit public relations disasters.

In contrast, he said, Tumblr is a way to both control the message and to reward your most loyal consumers by offering them a platform via aggregating their blog posts. “You can find the most positive voices in the community and link to them,” he said. “You can vindicate them and turn yourself into a positive force.”

Michael Arauz, a strategist at Undercurrent, a digital shop in New York, said he believes Tumblr opens up the possibility of letting a marketer present itself as a curator on the Web. He suggests, though, that brands pick a specific issue like IBM did, rather than try to merely reflect its brand personality via Tumblr. “Pick something specific,” he said. “It’s really about showing what’s important to your brand.”

After the 2002 launch of Friendster, several eUniverse employees with Friendster accounts saw its potential and decided to mimic the more popular features of the social networking website, in August 2003. Within 10 days, the first version of Myspace was ready for launch. A complete infrastructure of finance, human resources, technical expertise, bandwidth, and server capacity was available for the site, right out of the gate, so the Myspace team wasn’t distracted with typical start-up issues. The project was overseen by Brad Greenspan (eUniverse's Founder, Chairman, CEO), who managed Chris DeWolfe (MySpace's starting CEO), Josh Berman, Tom Anderson (MySpace's starting president), and a team of programmers and resources provided by eUniverse.

The very first Myspace users were eUniverse employees. The company held contests to see who could sign up the most users. The company then used its resources to push Myspace to the masses. eUniverse used its 20 million users and e-mail subscribers to quickly breathe life into MySpace, and move it to the head of the pack of social networking websites. A key architect was tech expert Toan Nguyen who helped stabilize the Myspace platform when Brad Greenspan asked him to join the team.

The origin of the MySpace.com domain was a site owned by YourZ.com, Inc. It was intended to be a leading online data storage and sharing site up until 2002. By 2004, Myspace and MySpace.com, which existed as a brand associated with YourZ.com, had made the transition from a virtual storage site to a social networking site. This is the natural connection to Chris DeWolfe and a friend, who reminded him he had earlier bought the URL domain, MySpace.com, intending it to be used as a web hosting site, since both worked at one time in the virtual data storage business, which itself was a casualty of the "dot bomb" era.

Shortly after launching the site, team member Chris DeWolfe suggested that they start charging a fee for the basic Myspace service. Brad Greenspan nixed the idea, believing that keeping Myspace free and open was necessary to make it a large and successful community.

Some employees of Myspace including DeWolfe and Berman were later able to purchase equity in the property before MySpace, and its parent company eUniverse (now renamed Intermix Media) was bought in July 2005 for US$580 million by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation (the parent company of Fox Broadcasting and other media enterprises). Of this amount, approximately US$327 million has been attributed to the value of Myspace according to the financial adviser fairness opinion.

Oxfam America President Raymond C. Offenheiser, Wendi Deng, and Rupert Murdoch with MySpace co-founders Anderson and DeWolfe at the 2006 Oxfam/MySpace Rock for Darfur event

In January 2006, Fox announced plans to launch a UK version of Myspace in a bid to "tap into the UK music scene" which they have since done. They also released a version in China and have since launched similar versions in other countries.

The 100 millionth account was created on August 9, 2006, in the Netherlands.

The corporate history of Myspace as well as the status of Tom Anderson as a Myspace founder has been a matter of some public dispute.

On November 1, 2007, Myspace and Bebo joined the Google-led OpenSocial alliance, which already includes Friendster, Hi5, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Ning and SixApart. OpenSocial was to promote a common set of standards for software developers to write programs for social networks. Facebook however remained independent. Google had been unsuccessful in building its own social networking site (Orkut was succeeding in Brazil but struggling in the U.S.) and was using the alliance to present a counterweight to Facebook.

By late 2007 into 2008, Myspace was considered the leading social networking site, and consistently beat out main competitor Facebook in traffic. At its peak, when News Corp attempted to merge it with Yahoo! in 2007, Myspace was valued at $12 billion.
Decline

Since 2008, Myspace has been in in a continuing loss of membership, and there are several suggestions for its decline. Some said that Myspace failed to innovate and stuck to a "portal strategy" of building an audience around entertainment and music, whereas Facebook and Twitter continually launched new features to improve the social-networking experience. A former Myspace executive suggested that the US$900 million three year advertisement deal with Google, while being a short-term cash windfall was a handicap in the long run. That deal required Myspace to place even more ads on its already-heavy advertised space, made the site difficult to use and reduced flexibility, as Myspace could not experiment with its own site without forfeiting revenue, while rival Facebook was rolling out a clean and easily-understood site design. These have been cited as factors why users, who as teens were Myspace's strongest audience in 2006 and 2007, have been migrating to Facebook; Facebook which started strong with the 18-to-24 group (mostly college students) has been much more successful than Myspace at attracting older users.

On April 19, 2008, Facebook overtook Myspace in the Alexa rankings. The site ranking of Myspace as of March 2011[update] was 69, as opposed to the number 2 position held by Facebook.

Former AOL executive Jonathan Miller, who joined News Corp in charge of the digital media business, was in the job for three weeks when he shuffled Myspace's executive team in early 2009. Myspace President Tom Anderson stepped down while Chris DeWolfe was replaced as Myspace CEO by former Facebook COO Owen Van Natta. News Corp. Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch was said to be frustrated that Myspace never met expectations, as a distribution outlet for Fox studio content, and missing the US$1 billion mark in total revenues.

Myspace has attempted to redefine itself as a social entertainment website, with more of a focus on music, movies, celebrities and TV, instead of a social networking website. Myspace also developed a linkup with Facebook that would allow musicians and bands to manage their Facebook profiles. CEO Mike Jones was quoted as saying that Myspace now is a "complementary offer" to Facebook Inc., which is "not a rival anymore."

In March 2011, market research figures released by comScore suggested that Myspace had lost 10 million users between January and February 2011, and that it had fallen from 95 million to 63 million unique users during the previous twelve months. Myspace registered its sharpest audience declines in the month of February 2011, as traffic fell 44% from a year earlier to 37.7 million unique U.S. visitors. Advertisers have been reported as unwilling to commit to long term deals with the site.

At the start of 2011, there was media speculation that Myspace Corp. will be auctioned during the year. If Myspace were to be sold, it is estimated to be worth $50–200 million. Losses from last quarter of 2010 were $156 million, over double of the previous year.

The one thing you can say for certain about Twitter is that it makes a terrible first impression. You hear about this new service that lets you send 140-character updates to your "followers," and you think, Why does the world need this, exactly? It's not as if we were all sitting around four years ago scratching our heads and saying, "If only there were a technology that would allow me to send a message to my 50 friends, alerting them in real time about my choice of breakfast cereal."

I, too, was skeptical at first. I had met Evan Williams, Twitter's co-creator, a couple of times in the dotcom '90s when he was launching Blogger.com. Back then, what people worried about was the threat that blogging posed to our attention span, with telegraphic, two-paragraph blog posts replacing long-format articles and books. With Twitter, Williams was launching a communications platform that limited you to a couple of sentences at most. What was next? Software that let you send a single punctuation mark to describe your mood? (See the top 10 ways Twitter will change American business.)

And yet as millions of devotees have discovered, Twitter turns out to have unsuspected depth. In part this is because hearing about what your friends had for breakfast is actually more interesting than it sounds. The technology writer Clive Thompson calls this "ambient awareness": by following these quick, abbreviated status reports from members of your extended social network, you get a strangely satisfying glimpse of their daily routines. We don't think it at all moronic to start a phone call with a friend by asking how her day is going. Twitter gives you the same information without your even having to ask.

The social warmth of all those stray details shouldn't be taken lightly. But I think there is something even more profound in what has happened to Twitter over the past two years, something that says more about the culture that has embraced and expanded Twitter at such extraordinary speed. Yes, the breakfast-status updates turned out to be more interesting than we thought. But the key development with Twitter is how we've jury-rigged the system to do things that its creators never dreamed of.

In short, the most fascinating thing about Twitter is not what it's doing to us. It's what we're doing to it.

The Open Conversation
Earlier this year I attended a daylong conference in Manhattan devoted to education reform. Called Hacking Education, it was a small, private affair: 40-odd educators, entrepreneurs, scholars, philanthropists and venture capitalists, all engaged in a sprawling six-hour conversation about the future of schools. Twenty years ago, the ideas exchanged in that conversation would have been confined to the minds of the participants. Ten years ago, a transcript might have been published weeks or months later on the Web. Five years ago, a handful of participants might have blogged about their experiences after the fact. (See the top 10 celebrity Twitter feeds.)

But this event was happening in 2009, so trailing behind the real-time, real-world conversation was an equally real-time conversation on Twitter. At the outset of the conference, our hosts announced that anyone who wanted to post live commentary about the event via Twitter should include the word #hackedu in his 140 characters. In the room, a large display screen showed a running feed of tweets. Then we all started talking, and as we did, a shadow conversation unfolded on the screen: summaries of someone's argument, the occasional joke, suggested links for further reading. At one point, a brief argument flared up between two participants in the room — a tense back-and-forth that transpired silently on the screen as the rest of us conversed in friendly tones.

At first, all these tweets came from inside the room and were created exclusively by conference participants tapping away on their laptops or BlackBerrys. But within half an hour or so, word began to seep out into the Twittersphere that an interesting conversation about the future of schools was happening at #hackedu. A few tweets appeared on the screen from strangers announcing that they were following the #hackedu thread. Then others joined the conversation, adding their observations or proposing topics for further exploration. A few experts grumbled publicly about how they hadn't been invited to the conference. Back in the room, we pulled interesting ideas and questions from the screen and integrated them into our face-to-face conversation.

When the conference wrapped up at the end of the day, there was a public record of hundreds of tweets documenting the conversation. And the conversation continued — if you search Twitter for #hackedu, you'll find dozens of new comments posted over the past few weeks, even though the conference happened in early March.

Injecting Twitter into that conversation fundamentally changed the rules of engagement. It added a second layer of discussion and brought a wider audience into what would have been a private exchange. And it gave the event an afterlife on the Web. Yes, it was built entirely out of 140-character messages, but the sum total of those tweets added up to something truly substantive, like a suspension bridge made of pebbles.

The one thing you can say for certain about Twitter is that it makes a terrible first impression. You hear about this new service that lets you send 140-character updates to your "followers," and you think, Why does the world need this, exactly? It's not as if we were all sitting around four years ago scratching our heads and saying, "If only there were a technology that would allow me to send a message to my 50 friends, alerting them in real time about my choice of breakfast cereal."

I, too, was skeptical at first. I had met Evan Williams, Twitter's co-creator, a couple of times in the dotcom '90s when he was launching Blogger.com. Back then, what people worried about was the threat that blogging posed to our attention span, with telegraphic, two-paragraph blog posts replacing long-format articles and books. With Twitter, Williams was launching a communications platform that limited you to a couple of sentences at most. What was next? Software that let you send a single punctuation mark to describe your mood? (See the top 10 ways Twitter will change American business.)

And yet as millions of devotees have discovered, Twitter turns out to have unsuspected depth. In part this is because hearing about what your friends had for breakfast is actually more interesting than it sounds. The technology writer Clive Thompson calls this "ambient awareness": by following these quick, abbreviated status reports from members of your extended social network, you get a strangely satisfying glimpse of their daily routines. We don't think it at all moronic to start a phone call with a friend by asking how her day is going. Twitter gives you the same information without your even having to ask.

The social warmth of all those stray details shouldn't be taken lightly. But I think there is something even more profound in what has happened to Twitter over the past two years, something that says more about the culture that has embraced and expanded Twitter at such extraordinary speed. Yes, the breakfast-status updates turned out to be more interesting than we thought. But the key development with Twitter is how we've jury-rigged the system to do things that its creators never dreamed of.

In short, the most fascinating thing about Twitter is not what it's doing to us. It's what we're doing to it.

The Open Conversation
Earlier this year I attended a daylong conference in Manhattan devoted to education reform. Called Hacking Education, it was a small, private affair: 40-odd educators, entrepreneurs, scholars, philanthropists and venture capitalists, all engaged in a sprawling six-hour conversation about the future of schools. Twenty years ago, the ideas exchanged in that conversation would have been confined to the minds of the participants. Ten years ago, a transcript might have been published weeks or months later on the Web. Five years ago, a handful of participants might have blogged about their experiences after the fact. (See the top 10 celebrity Twitter feeds.)

But this event was happening in 2009, so trailing behind the real-time, real-world conversation was an equally real-time conversation on Twitter. At the outset of the conference, our hosts announced that anyone who wanted to post live commentary about the event via Twitter should include the word #hackedu in his 140 characters. In the room, a large display screen showed a running feed of tweets. Then we all started talking, and as we did, a shadow conversation unfolded on the screen: summaries of someone's argument, the occasional joke, suggested links for further reading. At one point, a brief argument flared up between two participants in the room — a tense back-and-forth that transpired silently on the screen as the rest of us conversed in friendly tones.

At first, all these tweets came from inside the room and were created exclusively by conference participants tapping away on their laptops or BlackBerrys. But within half an hour or so, word began to seep out into the Twittersphere that an interesting conversation about the future of schools was happening at #hackedu. A few tweets appeared on the screen from strangers announcing that they were following the #hackedu thread. Then others joined the conversation, adding their observations or proposing topics for further exploration. A few experts grumbled publicly about how they hadn't been invited to the conference. Back in the room, we pulled interesting ideas and questions from the screen and integrated them into our face-to-face conversation.

When the conference wrapped up at the end of the day, there was a public record of hundreds of tweets documenting the conversation. And the conversation continued — if you search Twitter for #hackedu, you'll find dozens of new comments posted over the past few weeks, even though the conference happened in early March.

Injecting Twitter into that conversation fundamentally changed the rules of engagement. It added a second layer of discussion and brought a wider audience into what would have been a private exchange. And it gave the event an afterlife on the Web. Yes, it was built entirely out of 140-character messages, but the sum total of those tweets added up to something truly substantive, like a suspension bridge made of pebbles.

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