Every content network has walked this rope at least once – ad inventory optimization. Direct sales team can only sell 40-50% of your ad inventory at any given time. The rest is filled with different ad networks, big and small. The math is very simple; push those ad networks which pay you higher CPM all the time. However, the truth is, no single ad network pays highest CPM all the time. It varies a lot depending on geography, time, page/site context, readers, etc. And to top it all, with strict frequency capping and default ads deployed, ad networks leave you playing with pennies.

Indirect sales can result in 30-40% of total ad revenue for any mid-size to large publisher. Today, for any smart publisher it’s must to optimize their indirect sales channel to boost the revenue. This becomes more challenging as almost all ad networks are closed wall and have not (neither have intentions to) come out with APIs giving power to publishers.

Frequency capping
According to Wikipedia, Frequency capping is a term in advertising that means restricting (capping) the amount of times (frequency) a specific visitor to a website is shown a particular advertisement. This restriction applies to all websites that serve ads from the same advertising network.

In a competitive market where marketers are demanding more accountability, it’s obvious that ad networks have to optimize their ad delivery to boost CTR. However, this turns the balance in favor of ad networks. Publishers have little or no insight of how the pricing is structured for low CPM ads, and it converts into revenue loss.

Defaults
Nothing frustrates publishers more than defaults. Just like it’s impossible for you to sell your 100% ad inventory in direct sales, so is for the ad networks as well. Even Google Adsense, which today has the biggest pool of advertisers, can fill your ad inventory up to a certain limit.

Most ad networks allow you to specify tags from different ad networks to serve ads in case they don’t have any for your users. Publishers deploy static chains of ad networks pushing ads from other ad networks in case one defaults. These static chains are cumbersome to deploy or change. Publishers have no or little power to use their real time data to modify the chain whenever they want.

Some ad optimization networks like Pubmatic are offering dynamic daisy chains to publishers where default ad impressions are collected and then routed to the highest paying ad network.

Real time optimization
“Yesterday’s home runs don’t win today’s games.” Babe Ruth

The goal of optimization is to maximize the yield of ad networks in real time. As pointed out earlier, this becomes daunting as ad networks are not ready to come out with their APIs. Yes, even the self-proclaimed “Don’t be Evil” giant shield its Adsense reports behind its own walls. You need either some grease-monkey script or advance data mining techniques to get into their systems and let you evaluate their performance based on CPM, click-through, conversions, defaults, etc. in real time and serve ads from best performing ad network for that case.

Segmentation
This for once, I will admit, Adsense is much better than any other ad network. They let you segment your ad zones very precisely. Their multiple-channel and url-channel tracking put publisher in driving seats; helping him optimize his inventory to any level. But again, the real challenge is to optimize Adsense with other ad newtorks and push an ad network only if it’s supposed to yield maximum output.

Ad optimization networks like Yield Build and Pubmatic helps you to some extent, but they are also tied with few ad networks only. Moreover, their system is best build for publishers doing 25 million and above pageviews per month leaving out small to mid-size publishers.

Monetizing international traffic is also a gem in the rough. Identify top countries sending you traffic and tie up with local ad networks to serve ads in those regions. No matter how good your current sets of ad networks are, they can never beat the local players.

Website targeting v/s page targeting – It’s no brainer that niche verticals pays you higher CPM (no I am not talking about sites dedicated to celebs). Every ad network identifies the page it’s serving ads on basis of context of the page, website or the user its showing ads for. If you have a large website divided into different channels, it’s worth finding out which ad networks are performing best of which sections or channels. Targeting the ad networks to the niche group will be instrumental in pulling higher eCPM than large, broad and general segment.

Short tail vs long tail
Thanks to Internet, today, life cycle of a content piece is more than few days. A content piece can continue to make money for anything between 12-18 months even after it’s published. Many contextual ad networks performed (both in terms of CPM and CTR) much better than others when they receive traffic from search engines or various links pointing to your site.

Control

Who has the control between you and networks? Irrespective of what your account manager has told you, the truth is that you are standing on sidelines. Remember, no APIs means no control. If you really want to be in driving seat, you need to crash their ad network walls and get the reports in real time and make them compete with each other for every single ad impression.

Deploying an ad optimization engine is like passing away your control from one demon to another. This needs to be an in-house deployment giving you powers to tweak even the smallest things.

Not defying the credentials of Ad Optimization Networks
By voicing out these points, I am not defying the credentials of the already running ad-optimization platforms, if they work well for you nothing like that, I have heard great stories from people who use them but as the saying goes, one size never fits for all.

Disclaimer: At Instablogs, we are also working on our ad-optimization engine to help maximize our revenue.

In my recent visit to Vienna, met a lot of interesting people from Norway. My initial impression of Norway’s online market was that of a small and passive market with few clones of popular global sites like Facebook, Digg, Craigslist catering to the local audience. But after interacting with my Norwegian friends, I realized not only Norway has a mature online marketplace but have aggressive online players pushing for audience share. Norway also has one of the highest ad spend per user of around US$207.

Comparison with US

The market size both in terms of online users and advertisement of Norway is extremely small in comparison, and one might dismiss it at a single glance. But on analyzing it closely, one can see few brownies embedded here and there.

Strong online presence by newspapers

While in most other countries newspapers take away very little share of total online time spent, Norwegian story is entirely different. Top newspapers sites of Norway like Vg.no, Dagbladet.no , Nettavisen.no, e24.no, Aftenposten.no etc constitutes a huge portion of total online spent by Norwegian users. Norwegian newspapers have been extremely aggressive from pre-Google era in building their online presence. Dagbladet.no and Startsiden have been publishing news online from early 1995 and 1996 respectively.

Norway also has the highest newspaper readership in the world and most of its top online media properties are owned by big media players like Schibsted, Eddy Media etc giving them ample space to push content to their existing offline readers.

Top online sites in Norway

VG Nett
Online site charges around $30,000 for a day long banner on its homepage - which is more than a full-page color ad in its printed paper.

E24
Launched in mid 2006, the site started making serious money within few weeks. Today it makes more than $5million from only banner sales.

Finn.no
Popular Norwegian classified portal generates as much as 30-35% of revenue that its parent company Schibsted does from its offline channel, but profit margin is around 65% high.

Design

One unique aspect of most of the sites in Norway is their use of big pictures, bold headlines and long pages. In average it will take 7-10 scroll to reach bottom of the page. Mobile sites are also very functional, maybe because Norway is the birth place of Nokia.

Counterparts of popular global sites in Norwegian

1. Facebook, Myspace
Nettby, founded in late 2006 is the second largest Internet-based community in Norway (after Facebook) with more than 1 million users and profiles.

2. Digg
MSN Reporter was launched only in three markets, the Netherlands, Belgium and Norway. MSN Reporter more or less works like Digg where news gets promoted to the frontpage via ‘Diggs’. On MSN Reporter you have to “Kick” or “Dump” an article. But, unlike Digg, you do not need to be registered with MSN Reporter to start voting.

3. Yahoo
There are numerous portal trying the Yahoo act, but the most closest is Startsiden.

4. News aggregator
Overblikk

5. Craigslist
Finn

6. Weather Channel
Yr.no

7. Blogger/Wordpress
blogg.no

Ad Networks

Since most of the large media sites are owned by big media houses, these sites employ their direct market sales team. But few ad networks have been successful for catering to small to medium sites or filling up unsold inventories for big groups. Adpower.no owned by Edda Media, powers over 50 publishers and is a leader in the contextual space (after Google) in Norway. Another company NetAd SA was acquired by Germany’s 1&1 Ad Network.

All in all Norway has a small but mature online ad market. For a foreign publisher to establish itself will mean taking away share from already present media sites. Most of the big sites targets a general audience and there is definitely room for niche verticals.

High-res image

Most of the start-ups as well as established companies in internet space primarily targets US audience. This is understandable as US Online Advertising market stands at a whopping USD 24 billion and is at least four times bigger than the second largest market that of UK.

In developing countries, it’s a rarity if an internet company gets funded, and most of the start-up visionaries here are not very bullish when it comes to internet space. Countries like China, Brazil or India might lead in number of internet users with around 33% of total online traffic, but their online advertising market is less than USD 2 billion. Though China has some exceptional online players but nothing close to US.

Europe has a mature market in terms of internet penetration with Norway, Sweden, Netherlands, and Denmark having more than 85% penetration. Online advertising spend has already taken over TV ad spend in UK and Denmark. Owning to the mature market (higher online penetration) ad spend per person in Europe is quiet healthy. Marketers in Europe are not shy to experiment with online properties. Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft and other large players have already explored Europe and have decent revenue coming out of Europe. Many young internet start-ups emerging from Europe have made big globally. European start-ups are at advantage of having a decent domestic online market letting them establish themselves here first and then becoming more aggressive when taking on a global audience (primarily US). Skype, Bebo, Netvibes, Joost are some of the start-ups having roots in Europe.

So let’s analyse two key components; ad spend per person and internet penetration rate. India’s online spend per person stands at shameful USD 5 and that of Norway is USD 207. That means an online content portal operating in India can bring in 40 times more revenue if it’s to be run in Norway. Of course there are many other factors involved like cost of operation is comparatively less in India, no of online users are small in Norway etc but my point is making money in Norway for an internet start-up is easier than in India.

The other factor is internet penetration rate. Internet penetration rate is defined as the percentage of Internet users divided by populations for each country. An Internet user is defined as being over 16 years old and uses the Internet on a regular or occasional basis in businesses and homes. Higher the penetration, mature is the market. Marketers are at ease as they can target a larger audience.

Online Media companies which started in US or have targeted US can easily expand globally by exploring some of these markets with higher internet penetration and ad spend per person. Many successful content sites like Engadget, Techcrunch, Asylum are already having their presence in local versions. Most of these sites started targeting the US ad pie, but riding their brand presence have emerged as strong players in various local markets.

This list is entirely based on my personal experience, and can vary according to your spouse or girlfriend. So no guarantee that your geek wife would be as geeky as mine, but I can assure you that you will definitely have lots of fun having one.

10. She is smart.

She will always have some interesting news, which you have missed. Your conversations can be long and interesting, and you can talk about WoW, Jedis, Diggers,web two-oh, and the new Star Trek Movie.

9. Can be easily motivated to turn their hobbies into full blown cash machine.

For example, if she likes shopping (name a girl who doesn’t) she can be be easily convinced and motivate to build a blog/site/portal around it. And you be assured that she will leave no stone unturned to convert it into a financial hub.

8. You can distract her easily in fights

Whenever you get into a fight, you can start talking about latest trends, technology and all other geeky stuff. She will in no time, will either start searching for it on her iPhone or on the next closest workstation in her vicinity; completely forgetting the reason why the fight started.

7. Great sense of humor

Geeks are witty and have a great sense of humor. She can make techie jokes around everything. Being around a geek is always fun.

6. Geeks are excellent parents.

Firstly because your geeky wife will pass her “smart genes” to your kid. Secondly she is always innovative in raising her. So don’t be surpised to see your 18 months old kid handling iPhone or your laptop perfectly.

5. New ways to communicate.

You will always have a new way to communicate with her; Gtalk, Twitter, Facebook, SMS, Email. So there will never be an communication issue.

4. Engaging

Geeks can be engaged in meanigful discussion like why Star Trek themed Home Theater is better than Terminator themed home theater. They will always have enough information to discuss on most of the stuff relevant to you.

3. Movies.

You can watch Transformers, Ocean Series, Simpsons with her anyday. You can even watch Star Trek and Star Wars multiple times without being called out childish.

2. She knows technology.

She will spends hours with you unlocking and jailbreaking the new iPhone version and enjoy every moment of it.

1. She is respected in the community

She will be interviewed and acknowledged by her peers and will occasionally win few awards for her work and knowledge. You will share some of her accolades as being identified as their better half.

Most of you know that we operate from Shimla. A small city by comparison with Silicon cities of India. Its very tough to find experienced or highly skilled people in these beautiful mountains. So we had no option but to build a powerful, aggressive and intense training system which can train freshers (with an aptitude) to be converted into marines.

These days we are training a new team. A team of freshers, from different educational backgrounds; commerce, science, MBA, mass-com etc. This team will be helping the content network move more aggressively. You might be surprised by our choice of team members, you might even argue on our decision of putting them in a single team. But we only hire on the basis of aptitude, not on experience or educational background. All of them might have different educational backgrounds; but they have lots of common things like hunger to learn, work under any pressure, no compromise for quality and a killer attitude.

All-Girls Marine

This new team is also an all-girls team. (We inducted few guys, but had to let them go in a week after failing to cope with the pressure). These girls from the day one, have been given tough assignments and a limited time to complete them. Yesterday, many of them felt that the tasks are very tough owing to the limited time. They required more time as they didn’t wanted to compromise on the quality.

Tough assignment is a sign of respect

My argument to the All-Girls Marine team was that the tough assignment is a sign of respect. I would never ask our office cook to do this assignment. Not because I don’t respect our cook, I respect him deeply for his contributions, but I don’t trust him doing content assignments. The toughness of the task is proportional to the respect you command. I don’t expect everyone to pass the training, and few might leave in between, which is actually fine, and I totally respect that. My father used to say, not every peak is a Mt.Everest. Every hill, mountain range has its own peak.

Flashback

One of the reasons, Instablogs has reached to this level (we still have miles to go), is that we had limited funds when we started. $1000 in cash and another $2000 in credit cards. Failure was not an option. We had extreme pressure to become profitable in next 3 months or go out of the business. I was a first time entrepreneur and had no knowledge of VC industry at that time. So to grow the business, the only option was to become profitable and nothing else.

Fortunately, we had limited funds.

This line of thinking may go against popular thoughts, but I feel that if we had good funds, lets say $50,000 or $100,000 at the time of start, we had a higher chance of going out of the business in few months. It was that pressure of limited resources, which forced us to think out of the box. I still remember the pilot team working at a stretch for 48 hours to launch the site on time. We were sleeping for 3-5 hours those days. One of the readers even suggested a new name for us– ROBN - Reverse Order Blog Network. We were anything but normal.

Fortunately, we had limited funds. Fortunately, we had limited time. Fortunately it was tough to do. If it was easy, everybody would have been doing it. Today I believe that limited funds at that time was a sign of respect by god to us, and one of the primary reason for whatever success we have today.

So next time you face a challenge, consider it as a sign of respect by god. A diamond is a chunk of coal that is made good under pressure. Its only those who are fortunate enough are bestowed with pressure of tough times.

P.S.: New team is working with full throttle again. Why? Because, fortunately, this is tough to do. :)

During my college days, I took a small course in mountaineering. The lessons I took from there, have been the guiding force of my life.

Mr. Negi

We had a teacher Mr. Negi. I don`t know his full name, never asked, and never felt to do so.

Mr. Negi was a guy in mid forties with short height, thin moustaches and cold eyes. His rules were very simple – you can’t complain, and you can’t say no. He never told us about his rules, but we understood them in few interactions with him. If you asked him for rest, he will say – “Bahut acha kiya jo bata diya, ab yeh exercise aadhe ghante aur karo, jab tak fresh na ho jao”. (“Very good, I really appreciate your telling me, now please do this exercise for another half an hour, until you start feeling fresh.”) And if you told him about back pain, he will award you a dozen of back exercise. Similarly if you ask about lunch or dinner time, you are surely to skip that.

Once I was carrying a heavy rucksack, during one of the trekking trails. I was sweating profoundly, when he asked me if bag was heavy. Before realizing any consequence I told him, yes it was. He smiled very calmly and repeated the famous phrase. “Bahut acha kiya jo bata diya, ab yeh pathar utha lo, aur bag me daal do, halka ho jaayega”. (Very good, I really appreciate your telling me, now please pick these stones and rocks and put in your bag, your luggage will feel light.)

I tried very hard explaining that I spoke unintentionally and I never meant to complain. But it was too late; Mr. Negi has always treated all of us equal when awarding his famous remedies.

From that day, subconsciously I developed a feeling – that I can’t complain. Whatever happens, I can’t complain.

Forward a few years. Now I am running a startup.

Startups are also like Mr. Negi, they don’t accept complaints. You can’t negotiate. They don’t tell you the rules. You have to understand them. Whatever they give you, you have to take that. You can’t talk to them back. You just smile and appreciate whatever comes your way.

Pain is good.

Somebody once told me – running a startup is like testing your ability to bear the pain. But pain is good, as Mr. Negi would have put that. Pain tells you that your muscles are strengthening, and if you want to be a skilled mountaineer, this is what it takes. So when you feel that pain running your startup , smile. Because your startup is telling you that your venture is strengthening, and to be good entrepreneur, this is what it takes.

Mr. Negi, used to remind us that mountaineering is not something which you can buy in a market like your Nike shoes. You have to earn that. Running a startup is also a skill which no MBA school can teach you (yes, I am aware of all those new entrepreneurial courses), but you have to go through that cycle of pain, to earn it. I am still learning that art, but have started enjoying the pain.

Remember, pain is good. Pain tells you, that you are growing.

In India, our financial year ends 31st March. This might sound a bit odd to our Americans friends, but remember we are more British than you.

Last academic year has been a roller coaster ride. We got funded, launched some cool new features, expanded our team, then had a 10-15% salaries cut in Q4 2008, also let go off few of our consultants and took the recession monster head on. But overall, I believe we managed to put on a great show. This would have been impossible without the great team we have, highly supportive investors, very energetic advisors and great friends in the industry.

Like any other media company, pageviews are our bread earner. We saw a plunge in CPM rates from November, but we compensated the low CPM rates and unsold inventory losses by nearly tripling our pageviews.

Here’s our page views graph from Statcounter.

Today we have over 50,000 registered members, 600 Citizen Journalists, 75 bloggers, 15 country editors, full time staff of over 40 people in 15 different countries and readership of around 6 million pageviews per month.

How recession affected us

1. CPM rates

Most of the Ad networks saw CPM dropped to 30-40% of their pre-recession prices. And a few networks who refused to lower their CPM, saw their unsold inventories going up to 60% in many cases.

2. Losing old clients, partnerships and deals

Some of our old clients started asking discounts or cutting down their ad budget. In few worst cases we saw even some of our wealthy clients going out of business. I was in the US, as an exhibitor for Instablogs at BlogWorldExpo, when Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy. Dozens of partnerships and ad deals which we were able to sign up there, ended up getting postponed or even canceled. Some of our successful partnerships which stayed, were later canceled as their parent companies went out of business or merged with others. One advertiser who committed us a huge deal for Christmas later canceled it entirely in November.

3. New Ad Sales Team didn’t work

And worse of all, the new sales team we built was not able to perform. We suffered a drop in revenues in the last quarter of 2008.

Counter Attack

1. Letting go off our consultants
We also took some preemptive measures for recession, by letting go off all our consultants. It was a tough decision but we ensured that it didn`t hurt the team morale too much - as we retained all our full-time staff.

2. Salary Cuts
A salary cut of 10-15% was done across all our departments, and as a CEO, I took a 100% pay cut and decided not to withdraw any salary till we as a company got to positive revenues. We were looking to save as much cash as we can.

3. Renegotiated all our lease
We renegotiated all our lease from hosting, utilities, rent to ISP. If people were not able to give discounts, we asked them to chip something extra, for e.g, we got a dedicated load-balancer from our hosting and increased our monthly bandwidth usage free of cost. We were also successful in negotiating and reducing our monthly office rent cost by nearly 30%.

4. New strategy
After a close door discussion with our advisors and our VCs, we realized that we had enough cash to survive with the same revenues for the next 18 months, and there was no need to press any red buttons at the moment. Now we decided to go offensive in these hard times. The plan was plain and simple, when everyone was cutting their staff, reducing content and compromising on quality, we would just do the opposite.

5. Art of War: Offensive and Defensive
We built two teams for our content network – the old team who would concentrate on holding the fort, ensuring that we don’t lose any ground or in other words will remain defensive. A new team - who has been trained to go for the kill, to go offensive. The new team was in charge of churning out more innovative articles, featured discussions, in-depth coverage and multimedia stories.

6. Concentrating on few things, and giving our 100%
We slowed down few projects, like our video network and content syndication. But overall by concentrating on few things and thus putting most of our resources on its execution, we waged the recession bullet easily.

7. Using recession as a team building tool
To some extent, I also owe some of our success to this recession; this recession grouped us more vigorously as a team and filled us with more energy than ever before. The vision of every team member became crystal clear, just like those summer blue skies having no patches of clouds. I am indebted to every single member of our team, who not only took a cut in their pay cheque but performed harder and made us emerge as winner.

8. Better bonding with investors and advisors
I am also very thankful to our investors, who not for even a second lost their faith in us. Vishal and Samir with their positive attitude lifted our energy on so many occasions, that I have stopped keeping a count. Our advisors, Sameer and Nandini not only helped us in being focused, but also kept on guiding us on various fronts.

But Recession is far from over

I do understand that this recession is far from over. We are still months away from seeing the bottom. Things can become more tough, and ad CPMs can take even a more deeper plunge. So we have to be more prepared, agile and ready to take any challenges thrown our way. We are cash flow positive at the moment, but we need to move our top-line and bottom-line together upwards north. I am confident that with this great team at Instablogs, we have the ability to emerge as winners in the toughest of times.

Remember: Pressure is a privilege.

(This post was born out of internal discussion that took place in MVP forums. Its jointly written by : Sameer, Ankit, Nandini and Indus)

Bharat Matrimony

Bharat Matrimony (BM) has launched its facial search feature that enables you to upload celebrity (you can also upload your ex-girlfriend’s pics) pictures and BM will find a look-alike.
Check it out here

Though the technology is imperfect the idea is so perfect on so many levels:

1. Viral nature
2. Engagement of users
3. Stickiness of the site
4. Differentiator from other sites
5. Users having fun, part of so many jokes

It totally rocks and its great to see an Indian company leading its way in innovation. On the other hand its disappointing to see so less buzz created by them in the Startup media.

AdaptiveAds

Glam Snaps Up AdaptiveAds. Mumbai based startup AdaptiveAds was acquired by Glam, a leading ad network based in US. This news was covered very well by Techcrunch and and other leading tech blogs of US about a month back, but again coverage in Indian Startup media left a lot wanted.

Adaptiveads, a mumbai based startup, clearly demonstrated that an Indian startup can target the global market very well and it makes a lot of sense for other Indian Companies to tap into borderless economy. When we can serve millions of western companies by being an outsourcing hub, by developing the core technology for them, why cant we guys put together our collectible brains to bring Indian products to whole world.

Startup Media

The current Startup Media in India consists of the leading startup blogs, some newspaper / magazine columns, couple of dedicated magazines and little bit of TV coverage. The main credit for creating the “Startup Media” goes out to the leading startup blogs, they have been at it for few years now and have done quite a good job of covering the news, sharing good practices, aggregating discussions around startups. They have built a strong and sticky community of readers / contributors around them.

Shout ‘em out louder

Though a lot has been done, there is a need to increase and provide regular coverage “towards celebrating / highlighting / sharing the Indian startup ecosystem triumphs”. This post is a request to Startup media to shout louder about the successes. Indian ecosystem is evolving and it definitely requires much needed boosts from media to encourage them. There are quite a few successful Indian startups, may not be to the tune of 10-100 million USD, but still doing pretty good. But, every mention will only encourage and boost the morale of the others to push the bar & succeed!

Some suggestions to the Indian Startup Media:

* Add regular weekly features that bring out startup success stories, backed by research. Bring out the reasons for the success and help others learn and get inspired. This can also be done with some guest writers contributing.

* Missed out on covering the news in time? - not a problem - write enough juice and they’ll quote you on their blog!

* Dig into the development of the startups you have already covered, ask them to keep you updated, monitor their blog feeds for news of successes - followup stories is always a welcome for a reader!

* A lot can happen over coffee - spend more time with startup founders (new & old), listen to their stories - can make for a good copy!

Communication channels are the most important for development of any eco-system (Even Hitler banked on it) - you have the power to influence and help startups imbibe good practices - make the most of it! This will go a long way to also help dispel India’s image “as only copycats, service-based companies and outsourcing hub”. It will encourage the ones who are on the edge and are evaluating doing a startup. Current and potential investors will see the successes and increase the financial participation towards Indian startups.

The day is not far when people will be bringing Garam chai and Samosas to your home (riff from people bringing donuts/coffee to Arrington to get covered) . While you make them the stars, they will make you the celebrity!

If you are an active user on social media scene, you must be having different accounts on various platforms; an account on Facebook or Orkut to connect with friends, an account on Flickr to share images, a Linkedin account to network with people in your profession, a Youtube account to share videos. In addition you must be having your blog running via wordpress, typepad, Instablogs or blogger, and would be using twitter for microblogging.

So you are essentially creating your different identities across so many networks, that it is increasingly becoming difficult and to some extent impossible to keep track of. It’s also very difficult to escape this fragmentation, since a part of your network (your friends, peers, colleagues etc) could be active on one social platform while the other part may be on another platform.

Some of the sites like Friendfeed are trying to solve this problem by centralizing all the activity stream of your friends on a single network. Other solutions like data portability can be looked as an attempt to allow users to access their friends and media across all the applications, and social networking into their own systems.

Some thoughts

1. A centralized network of activity stream has its benefits, but there are times when you would prefer decentralization according to your network. It won`t make much sense sharing your Halloween outfit with your business network, or your business presentation with your young cousins.

2. Today most of the sites are fast embracing decentralization. Any activity done on any site can be easily exported to your preferred social networks. For e.g. Instablogs is working on tools which will allow you to port articles or comments posted on Instablogs automatically to your Twitter or Facebook accounts if you desire. Similarly images uploaded can be ported to your Flickr account.

3. Conversations would be taking place across platforms. For e.g a content article you posted on Instablogs could be replied on your Facebook or Twitter networks by your friends, and you can reply them on Instablogs platform. This means conservations around content will become more fragmented in nature.

4. Different opinions, links, articles related to a certain news event can be collected together to increase the context of the news event. You can see how your network and your friends’ network is reacting to it in real time.

5. Many solutions have already been in work which would give users more control over the content they produce on different networks and interconnect them. For e.g Distributed Social Networking” (DiSO) is an idea to move, aggregate and integrate activities, data and social connections built up on sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, Twitter and personal blogs.

In his 2000 book The Tipping Point, author Malcolm Gladwell describes what he calls “The Law of the Few.” According to Gladwell, not all people in a network are equal. He identifies three types of people who are important for the spreading of ideas: Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen.

a.) Connectors are people who know a lot of other people, have a huge acquaintance set, and actively build new connections between people.

b.) Mavens are people who live on information and have the power to influence other people. When they speak, others listen. When they recommend, others believe.

c.) Salesmen are the easiest group to understand. They are people who have the ability to persuade other people.

The ideal chain would then go something like this: Convince the mavens, make sure they talk to the connectors, and have the salesmen spread the idea beyond the initial few. Though Gladwell, didn`t call it, but these people are subsets of the larger group which can called as Evangelists.

Dictionary meaning: Evangelism is about sharing the love of Christ with everyone.

But for you, it’s about sharing the love of your product/site/portal/community with everyone.

How do you build a Network of Evangelists

Tell them a story, and make them a part of that story. A story which they want to share with their friend and peers. A story which they are proud to be a part of. A story they really believe in.

For e.g. Starbucks have build a story of its evangelist seeing it as a place where they can gather, get together, talk, chat and, yes, buy coffee as well. So think what your story would be.

Some steps.

1. Draw an outline of the story. Define a cause. You don`t need to figure out the middle or end.

2. Lose control. Be ready to let the community take over.

3. Set a direction not objectives. Twitter developer never thought that it would have used in its current way. They just laid down the initial rules of 140 characters per message, but the community around is using in all different way what its founders could have imagined. (Source)

4. Make tools which will help your community to spread the word easily, coach new members and invite their peers.

5. Reward and recognize your best evangelists.

6. Help them collaborate and co-produce. Working in a team is more fun.

7. Don’t be afraid to give challenges to your users.

8. Publicize the existence of your evangelist’s network. Your network of evangelists should be the most important part of your showcase.

9. Do realize that they own the effort and content produced. Let them take it anywhere they want.