Arnold Waldstein's Blog

As Naked Wines CEO Rowan Gormley puts it…”Some businesses just couldn’t exist without social media.”

Certainly Naked Wines is one of those. It’s a refreshingly disruptive idea for the online wine business, creating a community empowered value chain from the vineyard to consumer. The results are large discounts, next day convenience and a true partnership with the winemakers.

Most social commerce solutions today are global brands or e-businesses layering in a social component, usually through Facebook to add traffic to an established business model. Interesting, but a bolt-on and rarely social at their core. Naked is decidedly different.

Naked Wines DNA is social by design

Naked Wines uses social media as an intrinsic design element to create something new and unique to the needs of wine buyers. There are Facebook fans and Twitter followers aplenty, but this is not an add-on to the big social networks. It’s an open web community with a referral-based economy and customer funded investments in their own supply chain of mostly artisanal vineyards. Socialization is tied to the commerce model itself, not an extension of Facebook ‘Likes’.

What wine consumers want, and what Naked Wines seems to have tapped into, is a community that is based on personal referrals, a social relationship with the producers themselves, resulting in significant discounts and a sense of control. They’ve skirted the legacy wine distribution and ratings system hierarchy by creating their own customer-driven system.

Most online wine clubs are based on discounts and remainder sales. Naked Wines is different. It starts with the concept of community that bridges both consumer and winemaker. The community chooses the wines, invests in the winemakers and sets the discount sales price. All with a bias towards the artisanal winemaker.

It started with a decision do something completely different

Per Rowan, CEO of Naked Wines, back in 2008, a group of 12 friends left Virgin Wines in the UK to do something brand new in the wine business. They had three guiding principals which are still the keys to decision-making today:

1. Create a virtuous circle, where customers helped winemakers who in return helped the customers
2. Be “Naked”–Be completely transparent (beyond the point of comfort) to the customers and the winemakers.
3. Have the fastest cheapest delivery in the UK (£4.99 for next day)

The Naked Wines concept

The service is remarkably simple as a general concept.

Invest in independent wine makers and get preferential treatment. Commit to buy early and get better prices. Then wrap these two age-old concepts in a social community, with complete transparency and you start to get Naked’s social commerce model.

How it works

Angels are ‘investors’ and the core of the model. It’s a really simple process. They ‘invest’ only £20 a month. In exchange, they get a 33% discount off list price plus next day delivery. Angels also choose the wines that get sold—through tastings, something seen or heard about and as part of a ratings group.

Kind of like a democratic inventory control by club members and very close to a pure referral-based model. You don’t have to be an Angel to purchase from Naked, but discounts are not as steep.

Angels today invest between £600k and £800k a month. This supports the winemakers that sell wine through Naked. The funds are multipurpose–from a salary for the winemaker to purchasing grapes and barrels to covering the winery and dry goods costs. The Angel fund is the currency for the model and acts as a community bank for the entire chain of supply and demand.

Wine economics are messy and ripe for a change

Approximately 30% of the cost of a bottle is for making the wine. As much for taxes and the remaining big chunk for marketing and distribution. By pre-buying the wine before production, 25% to 65% of the cost is removed. This is where the margin for the business and the discounts or the customers comes from.

The winemaker is bankrolled to produce the wine, guaranteed a per bottle price, profitable at a lower cost and motivated to socialize with the buyers on the site to stimulate sales. At it’s best, wine is made and sold at a profit with little or no risk.

A smart twist is that the winemaker can sell the same product through traditional markets. The higher price by comparison with Naked’s price, further accentuates the value of Naked’s community model. Clever marketing at its best.

Community basics

Naked Wines website intertwines community and commerce. Social referral systems and reviews, ‘those who liked that, liked this’, access to the winemakers, and an open discussion on quality, likes and appraisals. Where else do you see a return policy that says…if you don’t like it, just return it. And if you have less than five bottles of the order left, just give it away at no charge. Wallmart this isn’t!

Marketing to date has been almost entirely “STL” or Share the Love. No cost viral loops through word-of-mouth, Facebook and Twitter.

Check out their online community. I would join for certain if I lived in the UK.

Some business metrics

Rowan shared some general numbers with me. Since launch, just less than two years they’ve recruited 100,000 new customers in the UK. They are on track to do about 1.7 million orders bringing in £9m sales in 2010. Their goal is triple in size in three years. Really impressive stats.

Many web apps would be happy to simply have 100,000 active users, not to mention paying customers in that time frame.

I really like this model. Bold. Unique. Socially powered at its core. Born out of a love of wine, a belief in the small winemaker and a leap to give the community control. A simple idea but not trivial to pull off. It’s never easy to take a big principal and make it executionally natural and easy-to-use. Naked Wines is on to something here and the economics speak for themselves.

Wrapping up

Naked’s business model becomes more efficient and more profitable as it scales. To meet their goal of tripling in size means supercharging the viral loop. Funding advertising I bet as well. And increasing the pool of vineyards and Angels multiple fold.

The challenge for Naked will be getting larger and still being community driven. Scale is the unchartered territory of all community commerce plays and no-one knows how big a community can get and still function. But they certainly have lots of room to grow.

My completely unverified crystal ball says that niche geographical communities or a franchise model with central warehouses and next day deliveries are coming in other areas and countries. There is no shortage of areas that would relish having community-driven commerce around artisanal wines.

If I’m right…and who knows…I hope that NYC is next.

I love big ideas that deliver value, disrupt the status quo and put power and choice in the hands of the consumer. And I really love the idea of ordering discounted wines from artisanal vineyards recommended by friends that show up with no fuss on my doorstep, the next day.

Social media has changed the face of how we do business…no question, and dramatically so.

At one level social media and its impact is easy to understand.

Take the age-old ideas of earned media and community dynamics…add to that the requisite poise of corporate and personal transparency and you have the outlines of the core social media building blocks. Very few rules and seemingly simple.

The bigger and more defining idea for businesses is the reversal of power…the change of center from the corporation to the consumer. This democratization of control turns traditional business models and the world on its head.

This power shift gives people like ourselves, with our blogs and Facebook Walls and Twitter feeds and a Yelp-ish world view, a global network for our thoughts and likes and dislikes. If you think that Nike or Nordstrom or Best Buy is in control…not at all. The customer is, more than ever before. And this is a key building block…maybe more so, the overriding superset of the core elements of a social web reality.

This social landscape coupled with a global marketplace puts the consumer very much at the center of their world and more in control than at any other time in history. Their opinion really matters because of the network effect and with unlimited purchasing venues to choose from, they are the alpha customer. They don’t like a company’s politics? CLICK… Find the shopping process too difficult? CLICK… The typo on the catalog page really annoys them?  CLICK…and gone.

This is transformational. One happy and connected customer can start a spiraling of praise which can hyper accelerate building a global brand. And one maligned (or maladjusted) unhappy customer can put the breaks on a multi-million dollar campaign and bring pain to a huge company.

Social media is over analyzed yet often misunderstood and reduced to a list mania of ‘do’s and don’ts’. In actuality, it is difficult to articulate its import and relationship to a business building a brand in language that is not too high in the stratosphere to become abstract nor too detailed where it becomes trivialized and often incorrect.

The power of the social tools and platforms themselves are confounding.

We all remember “The medium is the message” refrain from Marshall McLuhan. Marketers especially have confused the eras. We hear often that the answer is in the tools like blogs or Facebook pages themselves. The ‘Build it and they will come’ mantra.

Not so. These tools, powerful as they are, are the channels–vanilla envelopes demanding personality and message and personae that will spur the broader community conversations. Twitter streams. Facebook pages. Blogs. Tumbleblogs and more. Wildly disruptive tools in the right hands. But remarkably hollow and empty until the spark of a personality or a company voice is found.

We’ve all been through this experiment.

Build and launch the blog…and sit back and wonder, why no traffic? Bring in tried and true traffic aggregaters using scientific SEM techniques. Traffic comes then bounces and is gone.

Start over…find your voice. Find a personal or company point of view and post and post and post…and build credibility and reputation and traffic comes and hangs around. Add scientific methods to the traffic mix, maybe some public speaking by the ‘expert’ or Meet Ups with your fans on top of this and poof…maybe you have a brand in the brewing.

Tools are present galore but just mixing these with a few social building blocks usually amounts to naught. No surprise…look around and you’ll find that what is obvious for success, is also rare. Go to a bunch of websites. Most I bet will be brochureware or raw catalogs with commentless blogs or one-sided twitter feeds and sparsely ‘liked’ fan pages hanging off the site like unused appendages.

For brands this social change appears remarkably difficult to understand…and even harder to execute on.

“Build a community.”“Establish trust.” “Listen to your customers as if they are the company.” “Be interesting”….Non trivial endeavors. And they sound so general and basic they appear wrong. And herein lies the crux why a social approach is so difficult for businesses–because while there are basic building blocks there are no predetermined models nor templates or roadmaps. This is a relationship between a brand and its community of individuals. Each solution is unique…built of like materials but personal and dynamic at its core.

This conversation about community and the customer/company power shift is the start of every meeting at every company, little or big when they begin to think about how social media needs to be part of who they are, how they relate to their customer and how this impacts traffic and commerce and an enthusiast community.

So…what’s the why of this?

Never has the upside for companies been greater, market building economics less prohibitive and the potential to build true brand value and dynamic communities as within reach. The examples are all around us. From large social platforms to innovations in social commerce to an ocean of new start-ups popping up out of the crowd daily.

Companies often act as if the openness of social media–especially between company and customers–is messy and unnatural. Actually, it is just the opposite.

In the proverbial hometown brick and mortar world of shops and customers, successful businesses were built on relationships with the community. They supported their communities, listened face-to-face to feedback and in turn the community supported them with loyalty and their patronage. A two-way street.

Connections between companies and communities is nothing unnatural. It just went missing. Online businesses lost the sense of local, community and connection with customer when they became just a click. Social media is local on a global basis and community dynamics on steroids. Not unnatural, but hyper real in its intensity and ability to impact brand, reach and economic success. Core human and business values on a global and local and real-time stage.

Social media certainly adds a new layer of tools and capabilities but even more, it’s a change of perspective that is not at all subtle. For businesses, it requires that they put a face or a human voice behind their URL. It requires that they listen and respond and host their communities with a place they can interact with other customers and the company itself. The power of conversations and loyalty of a community can’t be underestimated.

Building a brand is hard work. Always has been.

Now it’s easier actually–brick and mortar businesses need to find that tie-in of their value to a real-time connected, often geolocated world. Online businesses need to find a voice, if not a person, who can talk to their customers and create that reality that an online community is not comprised of clicks…but of customers and people.

Community and communications are two parts of a social whole.

The Facebook and Skype merger rumors are a perfect backdrop to relook at the Facebook community paradigm and how it will change with Skype as a partner.

To hundreds of millions of people, Facebook is the web. The first place they go in the morning and their principal source of news information. What’s remarkable is that while Facebook has defined social, you can’t really have a conversation there. Share of course; talk not much. This has been a missing link.

Today, on Facebook, we can post and comment but real conversations are not possible. Comment strings get moved to email or blog posts or a phone call or to a coffee shop for a meeting. Facebook is a check-in portal to see what’s going on. To do anything beyond sharing, you need to leave.

Facebook wants “To mesh communications and community more tightly together and add more tools to allow users to do so.” According to Kara Swisher who broke the merger story. Adding deeper communications capabilities in voice, text, and video are naturally the next step for Facebook and an evolving need for the ever growing group of people who run their lives from their profile pages.

Facebook fulfils that unique promise of a place to hang out at the intersection of our off and online lives where you share…and to many, create your life.  It is the ‘homepage’ to the global and flattened mass market, the news source of reference to most, and fast becoming a merchant mall to most global brands. Google is where you go to work and look stuff up. Facebook is where you share it.

The merger would add a communications layer (Skype) to Facebook’s community network that makes sense on at least three levels:

1. Voice and text

Voice communications is a ‘gimme’ for the social graph. It’s been overdue in arriving.

Why say “I’ll call you”, jump off of Facebook…rather than make that call immediately? Having an integrated phone book built off of Facebook membership seems like a no brainer. Skype is great alone. Integrated without an extraneous Skype phonebook is considerably better.

No one likes the phone company. If we can make calls from our social homepage…we will. And since many of the Skype calls we make are international, this feature has the added benefit of accelerating international expansion to the Facebook network. And to the members, the more people on the network, the more useful it is.

Texting is an obvious missing link

Most notices from Facebook and my blog communities come through text.  Texts are our rapid alert system from our networks.…”At the store.” “Meet you at the movies.” “Sign on to Facebook to chat.” Why have a one-way text pipe? On Facebook, on my phone…I would simply send text from within my profile…so would hundreds of millions more.

With Skype integrated, this issue is resolved…and of course, from a single Facebook address book.  The sub 25 year-old, mini-millennium generation, would jump on this en masse as text on the phones is their principal communications jargon.

And with Skype’s partnership with Avaya (think VoIP PBS) it is possible to conceptualize a fan page as a business center with conference calling and call analytics. Powerful in its possibilities. Your fan page could become the portal into your VoIP-based, Facebook centric global BBS system.

2. Video chat and social video are the big promises that just haven’t materialized

Social video has been stumbling forward in fits and starts. I expected it sooner, but it has eluded the mass market’s momentum…so far that is.

Creative startups like Vpype, and even Facebook with video wall posts have tried to make it easy to use video as a new social form of communications. They’ve succeeded in making it easy; they’ve been unsuccessful so far in making this a mass market need…or want for that matter. All the pieces are there…cams, free usage, address books, but human behavior hasn’t made the leap.

Video Skype calling to friends and for business is already a well accepted behavior. Integrating this capability within the social graph from a branded and trusted provider like Skype could possibly push behavioral usage to fruition. Maybe we needed a communications brand to kick start this.

My sense is that if you add video Skype calling into the social ecosystem of Facebook, the dream of party-line video calling, interactive video presentations and distance learning just might take off. Social video may go from a good idea to an explosive reality…and drag along the work of start-ups who are verticalizing the video pipe for all of us, with apps from entertainment to business.

3. The Facebook social TV channel

Live conferences from Facebook corporate are streamed frequently, and free. Boring stuff but there is already the concept of TV within Facebook. It works pretty well actually on the small screen.

TV, the holy grail of home entertainment is a living room paradigm. Skype and Facebook are already built into millions of connected TVs and DVRs coming out this holiday season. Add Facebook Connect, Skype’s SDK, a connected TV broad footprint and Facebook may be the network for content consumption, including TV as a social medium. I’ve blogged on this here.

“Facebook is the equivalent for us to what TV was for marketers back in the 1960s. It’s an integral part of what we do now.” This comes from Davide Grasso, CMO from Nike. Facebook could well become the new social TV platform, where people watch and share video content in a brand new way.

A Skype and Facebook merger or partnership makes sense to me. Check out Om Malik’s piece on GigaOm for a positive view and Rick Aristotle Munarriz in The Motley Fool for an aggressive anti-merger point of view.

Regardless of the outcome of the Skype/Facebook saga, integration of community with communications will occur in the Facebook network and deepen a whole social reality that is greater than the sum of its community and communications parts.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my mother lately.

She’s 91 years old. Healthy. Spunky with a large extended family of kids, grand kids and great grand kids. There are people all around in her retirement community. In spite of this she appears lonely and bored…achingly so at times.

I sense she feels isolated from her past and trapped in an ever-shrinking present. Not abandoned certainly–but friendships and networks outside of immediate family that come to visit are just not there. And there is little productive to do.

Her communities, once very large, are evaporating. Connections outside of the family are gone mostly. And to someone whose father drove a horse drawn cab in NYC at her birth, computers are just not truly a part of who she is.

And she is not unique, but an example of many who live between the extended family structure of the immigrant family and the social reality of a networked world that many of us inhabit.

For most of us, social networks have flattened the world and community has taken on new forms, providing a huge umbrella of support. We have Facebook walls, niche interest groups, blog communities, and offline/online connections. We have numerous lingering touch points with contacts and friends in a way that my mother never had.

This is not about richness of life…my mother’s life has been very rich. It’s about something new and extraordinary that the social web has empowered. This ability to create community as a hedge against location, a hedge against aging to some degree and certainly…a hedge against isolation as it engenders friendships in new ways.

My mother’s world has been one of astonishing change…world wars, the great depression, air travel, empowered middle class, electric powered everything, but for her, it stopped at the networked world. We spring off where she stopped and nothing is more compelling or revolutionary that what the social web empowers around people and friendships and community.

My mother sends (some) emails. Plays computer solitaire…so it is not simply technology where we spring beyond her generation. It’s networks and the social possibilities that are the great chasm here. And while we understand intellectually the power of social and community, my sense is that it is just beginning and its power is just getting tapped.

Maybe when I’m my mother’s age…when the baby boomers succumb to old age…the body will not hold us back as much. And will not create isolation or lack of productivity as our physical reality becomes less limber and more confined.

Science has extended our lives and made the middle of life longer, more productive and not much different from the decades preceding. I’m thinking that a networked and community driven, intertwined off and online world, will extend that even further, enabling connections, productivity and support for an even longer, richer period.

Add the science of health aging to the empowerment of community and socialization in a connected world, and we have something new and powerful. Technology usually evolves from one thing to another. The social web and community is a revolution in how we live better…for far longer.

I’m a big fan of Gilt Groupe.

Even if you are not a shopper or a luxury brand aficionado…join Gilt.com buyer’s club and follow along. There is a lot to be learned from their perfect sense of brand definition.

It’s really refreshing to see a new brand spring up that just gets the relationship between what the company is providing and the needs of its customers. That’s why while at its mechanical core Gilt.com is a discount store; it is already a $400M business that feels like a 5th avenue boutique that never gets stale.

Gilt understands the viral loop and social commerce certainly…but that is not their pure play, as it is with Groupon and others.

Groupon and the group buying services take value, scarcity, group buying and geographical location and smartly shake them up…and capture the fun of treating yourself to something special, often with friends. Groupon’s brand is about the daily deal and the fun of buying…it’s an impulse not a luxury goods positioning. When done perfectly, as Groupon does, its magic…but it’s different from shopping for a Tory Burch handbag or an Armani overcoat.

Gilt really gets brand and e-commerce marketing and selling. They understand deeply the appeal of the brands they sell, represent them with glam and imagination and represent the why and how of their customers desire to buy…and the atmosphere they like to shop in. They are courteous rather than pushy, focusing on value rather than cost and always…brand appeal and how important it is to their customer.

There is scarcity and referral in their model but they eschew the freneticsm of a threshold pushed sale and feel more like a high-end rack runway at great value than a push-and-shove sample sale of a thousand folks grabbing at designer t-shirts.

If you believe in the value of luxury brands and feel good about owning or wearing or using them…this is the place. Value with no discount bin feel. Selection without the sense of buying seconds. Clarity of a luxury story at a price that you can afford.

There is no cookie cutter marketing or business model here. Only a great study of a company that understands the value add of brokering brands to brand conscious customers at pricing they can afford, without price being the major selling point.

Take a look at this marketing analysis of Gilt Groupe’s studied approach to finding customers and keeping them happy and returning and loyal. It’s a workable list that all business marketers should pay attention to. Every business and brand model is different (as it should be) but there is value to learn from those that figure it out…and Gilt certainly has for their audience.

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Thanks to @robinharper for sending the background post my way.

When I blogged on Groupon and the social buying model, I was blown away by the newness and inventiveness of this smartly social approach to commerce.

I’ve been wondering where the company goes now that they’ve conquered the major cities of US and Europe (over 50 by their count) and have brand recognition far and above the hundreds of imitators. ‘Groupons’ are so well known and commonly acknowledged that they have become a new noun.

Do they go vertical and build Groupons for highly targeted groups like women’s sports, or golf or art aficionados?

Do they white label or co-brand their hosted offering and offer it out to newspapers and businesses as a new type of merchandise and a new coupon currency?

Do they move to behavioral targeting of the opt-in subscribers to personalize each offer ala a Facebook approach?

Do they go true local like Foursquare and target neighborhood by neighborhood rather than city by city?

The recent G-team announcement from Groupon, still mostly under the radar, is making me wonder whether they are moving to make possible more than the current two-deals-per-day-per-neighborhood. Logically, the more they can push the limits of scarcity, the more deals they have per-day-per-place, the more revenue they can generate.

To understand G-team in Groupon’s words, click here. They position it as a return to their roots and a way for causes to use their coupon currency model. I don’t question their altruism but these folks are as smart social marketers and business people I’ve seen anywhere and I’m thinking there is a clue to a broader business change in the play.

It appears (and the information is really vague) that causes or ‘fun activities’ are given the nod by Groupon as acceptable and then the Groupon machine is brought in…infrastructure to host, launch and manage the promotion. A vast vendor base to match a deal with a cause.

I see this as the beginning of a new commerce structure based on social coupons for the business world. And it will solve a major growth hurdle for them.

Besides gobbling up every city on the globe (which they are), they are a bit cuffed by the need to maintain scarcity of deals and a social buying core. My take is that G-team is the beginnings of their attempt to move more and more targeted deals into areas. That’s the clearest way to get more customers and drive more revenue.

So maybe what G-team is about is a beginning of a bunch of changes and expansions:

1. Provide the Groupon coupon currency machine to causes or businesses so that more deals can be addressed daily through niche and socially inspired community fundraising or events.

Maybe the niche is not moms or racquetball players, but people who support animal rescue or clean-up-the-river or parks for kids. People will tolerate more deals with specific targets if they are causes for good. Revenue splits aside this is logical.

2. Vertically segment the opt-in list. People who believe or chose various causes are both a subset of their massive database and an expansion. One of the ‘can’t do’s’ for Groupon is to thin out the audience so thresholds don’t get tipped and filled.

3. Behaviorally target the deal recipient. What Facebook can do with advertising, Groupon can figure out for behavioral matching of a deal with a personal profile. They have a lot of customer data now; probably enough. Or they can partner with (or sell to) Facebook to make this happen.

4. Redefine local as proximity as Foursquare has and figure out how to localize from city to neighborhood based on subscriber density per location.

5. Move to hard goods not just services. They can move from services like a dinner to goods like TVs or computers or clothing with a slight twist to their methodology.

I’m fascinated with social commerce and the simple breakaway model that Groupon defined and owns today. But they will get to the point where they’ve blanketed all the cities, then the larger towns on the planet where the model can work.

Then what? How do they grow when they have everyone as a subscriber and only two deals a day?

I think G-team is a clue and some variation of my list of five above will happen…and happen soon.

With the Hulu and GoogleTV announcements, the promise of WebTV on the big screen seems within grasp of most TV watchers…which is basically everyone.

I’m in the market to buy a really big screen, connected with web apps so I searched on Amazon, the discount sites and made a trip to Best Buy.

Oy!

The promise is there but the mess of misinformation, lack of clarity, fear of buying proprietary hardware and overall feeling that this is still a geek’s dream, unfortunately seems still true.

I jotted down my Commandments as a guideline to help make this convergence a mass-market love fest with the least amount of pain. This is my wish list.

Six Commandments for a better connected TV world

1. Make it easy

It’s just not easy to display what you see on your laptop on your big screen TV. Even with GoogleTV, that need is not going away as to get real access, cabling to your laptop or desktop will still be necessary.

TV manufacturers are still somewhat clueless and shopping for a solution today is as confusing as home theater has been for a decade.

2. Make it multi-screen

Laptop. iPad. Smartphone. Big screen. All need to work together and share content streams from the big content cloud in the sky.

We need to be able to seamlessly move from TV to laptop to iPad to phone to watch a synced, stored, time-shifted program.

We need to be able to do different things on different screens around the same content.

3. Content is king; networks are history

The web is the metaphor for connected TV, not the other way around.

I want to watch True Blood and Entourage, not be forced to buy HBO. Being muscled to purchase network packages is TV legacy; being able to acquire content I want is the promise of the web.

I think that most of us will pay for value as long as we are in control. This is the iTunes learning. I will buy individual songs even if they add up to more than the original album…and be happy because it is my choice.

4. Search is a given

Searching for video content needs to be as simple as searching for info on the web.

We are almost ten years into the world Google powered and it is part of our nature. We demand information overload and search efficiency for video content for everything from TV shows to movies to YouTube to cam clips.

5. Community and social are essential

Friend referrals. Intelligent Facebook info streams. Checking in. Sharing.

The first screen most people use every morning to check on the day is Facebook. And we share our experience on our Facebook walls, Twitter streams, Foursquare friend lists, Disqus comments, Tumblr communities.

This needs to extend to the content we watch. If access to the open web is there, smart startups like Tunerfish are already figuring this out. Facebook will certainly play here even if FacebookTV doesn’t become a reality.

6. Every hardware purchase needs to feel good

We are going to have to buy things:

-We need to feel good about buying hardware…you know, like the iPad. Costs a bit but empowers and enriches life.

-We don’t want to worry about buying the wrong platform. The Betacam/VHS conundrum is just not acceptable as a rerun.

There are certainly other asks but this is my wish list of ‘must haves’.

This is a work in progress…what would you add?

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For additional blog posts on social and connected TV, please click here and here.

Everyone is abuzz over GoogleTV creating a paradigm shift in entertainment…. myself included.

What could be bad? All digital. Surfing from the couch. Social check ins. An easy-to-use time-shifted TV viewing reality.

I’m ready…but for those of us willing to live in the small laptop screen or geeky enough to hardwire the pieces together we have not all…but most of the promised goodness on WebTV today.

WebTV is well beyond its early stage already. With movies, TV shows, great new web content like ThisWeekIn… The web is fast becoming a digital video and TV frontier.

Whether you are on your laptop, wired from your Mac Mini to your large screen with Boxee, using Hulu…this is no longer a small niche by any standard.

New numbers on WebTV and TV watching online from eMarketer are enlightening:

• 33% of the US Internet population watches full-length TV programs today; growing to 39% by years’ end
• Hulu alone has 38.7 million unique monthly visitors. Largest video streaming site on the internet after YouTube.
• 14.6 million-web devices that can run TV applications shipped in last 12 months, increasing to 83.4 million in 2014
• 50% of everyone who watches any video online, will watch a full-length TV show

Mind-boggling actually…in the US, one in three connected people watch network TV shows online and one in two who use video in any way do some portion of their TV watching from the web.

In Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm way of thinking, we are just this side of an Early Majority position with WebTV and the chasm-crossing leap is only a holiday season away.

So with GoogleTV and the Boxee Box and every TV for sale with an HDMI plug, what’s the difference between now and…then, when these solutions launch?

The obvious changes will be:

1. It will be easy and inexpensive to purchase and install for everyone
2. More big screens will drive more content
3. Some built in widgets (apps) like YouTube, maybe Facebook and IMDB
4. Browsing and searching via Google from the couch position

Honestly, this is great but not a revolution. The iPad was a revolution, this is a big iteration pushing the web to the big screen WebTV experience. I like easy. I like larger displays. I like apps. We need search. But I want what I can’t imagine which is more than just the webification of the big screen.

Richard Kastelein, a friend, blogger and founder of AppMarket.TV believes that one of the big gaps to bridge is ‘lean back interactive in your living room’ versus ‘lean forward at your desk or laptop’. It’s the remote versus the keyboard and the mouse. Content will come. But seamless control of the web interactive elements of search, community and social are the mountains to scale.

Hmmm…So according the industry and folks a lot more in the know than I, the intersection of the widgets on the big screen (like an embedded app), a consistent interface for search, social attributes and some cool device like glidetv for surfing are the formula for the future.

I’m missing something here.

If interface and usability are the kingpins, then why not Apple rather than Google as the architect of the best solution? Steve Jobs, more than anyone gets usability and the mass market. Google is search but certainly they don’t understand GUI or social or consumers.

And I can’t imagine connected TV to be a single screen solution. We are all sitting on our couches with iPads and laptops and phones. This is not going to change. So why isn’t the input one of these devices, like an iPad as the control and with special social content?

Maybe an anecdote might clarify my uneasiness at settling with GoogleTV as the answer.

Recently I was watching ThisWeekInVentureCapital with Mark Suster and Mo Koyfman talking about efficiencies on the web. Mo made a statement that when you take an old industry and bring it online, you don’t just webify it or make it more efficient, you take the core of the old and its value and find something new…something better. This seems right on to me.

So…what is that leap to something new with connected TV?

Maybe it’s just more efficient. Maybe it’s a standard interface with some widgets and open access to a gazillion apps. Maybe it’s a perfect and closed and controlled Apple world of ease-of-use and locked down. Or maybe it’s just what we have today but bigger.

I don’t buy into this.

A year ago, I couldn’t have imagined riding on the subway or sitting in the coffee shop, watching TV and working and tweeting on my iPad. Or building distribution systems for my clients that connected their Facebook fan pages to their e-commerce storefronts.

I’m a video and movie aficionado and ever so ready for connected and social TV. See my post on this.  But the web is still figuring out social video and socialization around WebTV. It’s not necessarily the model to copy. The jump from laptop to big screen is fraught with opportunities for new ways of entertainment and needs more than a redo of the current web reality, retooled for the digital living room.

You agree?

What will make you and the hundreds of millions yet to buy, do so and enjoy in a new and more interesting way?

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Thanks to my friend Jennifer Fader for always finding interesting data before I do.

Everyone wants connected TV.

Whether it’s a Google or Apple solution or both, the upside to connected big screens in our living rooms hold enormous potential for everyone with a television and an internet connection….which is just about everyone, everywhere.

The time is overdue for this to happen. On the web side, video content and programming has exploded in quality and quantity, become easy to find and share, and mostly free to distribute and watch. Web video content is begging for more and larger displays.

On the broadcast TV side, we have great programming, thousands of channels on incredible displays that are locked inside of disconnected networks, frustratingly archaic search methods and a seemingly uncrossable gulf between the TV content on the screen and the laptops and iPads on our laps on the couch.

I’m really anxious and excited about impending connection between the big screen on the wall and the real-time web. It’s a game changer.

And I’m really curious about where social and community is going to play into this whole new  TV paradigm.

I remember early TV and it was distinctly a social experience. In fact, I recall my grandfather’s first TV set in our house. A very small screen with large groups gathering around to watch, chat and connect with each other in front of this early technology with funky programming. And this social activity went on for years!

Now with quality and varied TV programming, huge displays, HD and 3D…the immersion of viewing has gotten movie theatre quality but the experience, at least to me, more solitary and disconnected.

On the web, social platforms and community are the core of how we find and share information and ideas. Even commerce has become a referral-based economy and at its best, is social in nature. The social metaphor is predominant in entertainment, gaming, information networks and business.

So with the TV screen connected to the real-time web and content digitally distributed, at the very least we will be getting  a flood of more content which is easier to find, and finally, friendly and seamless control over what we watch and when. At a minimum.

But will TV as a social experience come full circle?  Will the connected TV experience mirror, with a modern twist, what  it was at its outset way back in the 50s and 60s?

I’m thinking… yes, but in a totally new way of course.

It takes little imagination to see a Facebook iframe on the TV screen to share and chat with friends. And it’s easy to see social commerce with a click to purchase on the TV screen just like a click to purchase on your laptop or phone.

And why not sports book-like communal gambling over a basketball game? Or real-time video chat with friends across the country while watching an episode of True Blood? Or some yet-to-be-invented social game that let’s you Foursquare-like check in and find your friends watching the same show and connect with them?

Google and Apple and Sony won’t  be the doers here. But game developers, social widget designers, and smart entrepreneurs will be rising everywhere to help us take connectivity from the couch and make it social for those around us in the living room and my friends across the globe.

Social platforms and online communities transformed information sharing  on the social web. Connect it to the big screen and it has the potential to lend its dynamics to the connected TV platform and make watching more active, shopping a bit more collective and natural and entertainment just more fun….with friends.

Move over George Jetson! Your cartoon future may just have started to get real!

I posted on Facebook and privacy the day after Facebook’s F8 Conference as a contrarian to the crowd hysteria.

Since then, I’ve been in numerous heated debates and found myself defending Facebook, then succumbing to annoyance over their adolescent behavior and momentarily siding with the crowd as the cavalier attitude of Facebook management became impossible to ignore.

But today, I still believe firmly as I did just post F8, that if you live in public, your life is just that…open to public record. And that acting responsibly is the coherent poise in a connected world. This responsibility is yours on the street, on Facebook, on blogs…everywhere

A BusinessWeek article lit up some interesting facts about Facebook worth thinking over:

• Traffic is 4.7% higher today than it was on May 1
• Facebook has 519.1M users, compared to 411M in September ‘09
• User activity level is still very high. An average user creates over 70 pcs of content each per month and connects to 60 pages or groups
• Facebook accounts for an astounding 8.5% of all Internet traffic

And as telling:

• The We’re Quiting Facebook campaign scheduled for mass cord cutting on May 31 has only 16,000 (out of 520M) people signed up

So what’s going on?

The blogosphere, the press and common knowledge all point to a semi-repentant Mark Zuckerberg who is hiding behind his youth and bowing to the pressure of US and European governments and a zillion hate posts.

Let’s be clear here…Facebook is acting irresponsibly and toying with its member’s feelings and trust. And there is a grating disconnect for a social network to have such anti-social and anti-transparent management.

So many ostensibly hate them but numbers and activities are increasing dramatically. Something is wrong or at least out-of-whack.

My take on why we can’t love Facebook but can’t imagine not having it

Facebook as the definition of ‘social’ just got it right.

It’s an almost perfect product because it filled a need no one knew they had. And created a situation, like we have today, where not having Facebook is an impossible thought for I bet, hundreds of millions of people. Including myself.

Most of the angst towards Facebook is expressed on Facebook itself. The news we read or videos we see about the privacy issues, rants, ‘how-to’s’ on setting privacy settings, and on and on are all done on our Facebook wall itself. Kind of like hometown politics on the only paper that people read about things that happen on Main Street.

While I support Diaspora and open social development, Facebook is not going away anytime soon. It is not going to stop growing or being an essential part of how we view the world and interact unless Zuckerberg does something truly stupid…and stupid he is most certainly not.

Or till whatever the next iteration of social, maybe unimaginable now, pops up and we migrate with our friends to somewhere else.

Our networks of friends from kindergarten playmates to people we met through our kids or worked with or dated or want to meet will never be erased. Migrated and moved perhaps, but we simply need that Facebook magic touch with friends is now natural and organic and isn’t going away. Thankfully.

What has happened is that we don’t and really can’t love Facebook like many did before. Like many loved Apple or the Mac as a solution or our smart phones when we first got them before they broke the second time.

Facebook, though brilliant and essential and integral to social life, has lost that love cause it trifled with our trust big time. It was like Bill Clinton…Oh so brilliant and oh so flawed as an individual. I would vote for him again in a heartbeat but never be surprised at enormous acts of personal stupidity. We aren’t breaking up but we are suspicious forever.

What’s inspiring to me is that Facebook added something to human social interaction. Yes, it really it has, and that is why from a mass of people in the know and early adopters who are rightfully miffed, there are hundreds of millions and hundreds of thousands joining daily around the world. Some know, some don’t. Some care, some don’t. Doesn’t matter.

And to be clear, I still hold that we need to be responsible for our own images and act responsibly. Facebook didn’t change that and that will grow as we do into a more connected social age. But, and I mean this seriously, Facebook did belittle the very attribute it created. We can forgive this but forget or trust completely…not at all.

What is great is that technology has enabled an extension of community. A new iteration of social for us all. It allowed me and everyone to connect and define relationships in new and fun and empowering and important ways.

Today Facebook is essential to multitudes. What it empowered and created is not going away but Facebook itself may when something new evolves that builds on it and really does respect what it created.

Who cares about Facebook? No one.

But everyone cares about friendship and community and platforms to build that on.

Today, that is Facebook for a global population of over half a billion people. Where those people are in 5 or 10 years, is up in the air. The fact that sharing in communities is important and will persist is undeniable.