Polygraph Media Blog

The Origins of Polygraph Facebook Data Mining Analytics

First a quick thanks to all of you who visited the blog yesterday.  Our blog traffic exploded yesterday, which means I'll be writing here frequently. :-)

Today, I thought I'd talk about where we got the idea for Polygraph and the feedback we heard from the marketplace in the 9 months preceding our launch.

As some of you may know, our company's origins came from the couponing world.  Our first product was a couponing system that businesses could use to publish coupons on the Web, Facebook, Twitter, and to e-mail lists.  We built this as a DIY system for local businesses and brands, and as such talked with a bunch of customers.

The feedback we got was that couponing really needed to be conditional for businesses to get really fired up about it.  Businesses pay significant $$ for new customers, but treat existing customers as people from which the ARPU (average revenue per user) must be raised.  So if you offer say a 20% coupon to anyone who would take it, the business might get some new customers but it is much more likely to be giving a discount to the very people who will be a customer anyway. 

Businesses market to existing customers differently than they market to new customers, and so if couponing is going to deliver a real ROI, as a tactic it has to become "intelligent".  (Incidentally, I think this is a problem that Groupon and LivingSocial have today.)

So we went back to the drawing board and asked "are there any ways for us to get an idea of if someone is a customer?"  And we turned to Facebook and said "well, Facebook Pages might be an interesting proxy for loyalty."  If someone is associated with a Facebook Page, they are probably a customer of that business in some way.  And hence, Polygraph was born.

We took our core technology to brands and agencies, and surprisingly (to us at least) heard a number of other related requests.  The core of the feedback was that Facebook Insights (or any existing analytics provider) did not adequately explain cause & effect on Facebook.  For example,

• I post something, what happens?
• I don't post something today or for a week, what are the implications?
• I use a particular agency to manage my pages, are they doing what I want?
• I think my competitor is beating me, how can I tell?
• What goals should I set for my team/consultant/self?
• What are the right metrics?
• Are we winning?
• Are we getting closer to something resembling a ROI?

The problem was that social metrics had not "grown up" to answer basic questions about marketing and the competitive landscape.  The ones that had existed were almost all built using Facebook Insights data, which is incomplete, confusing, and does not give you any information on your competitors.

So we applied the same data mining techniques we used to determine Fan activity to all the analytics a marketer would/should care about.  This is probably our #1 differentiator.  We record every social interaction on a page and discard absolutely nothing.

Take for example the illustration below, from the Healthy Choice Facebook Page.  This one User Post was written by Julez, liked by Jennifer, responded to by the Healthy Choice Page 4 hours later, commented on by Tim, and both the comments were liked by someone.  Apply this rigor to any Facebook Page, and you can learn some truly insightful things.  Apply it across multiple pages, and you can learn a lot about a competitive market, an industry, or how people are interacting with Pages on Facebook as a whole.

Polygraph is the only product that dives deep into the available data and makes sense of it for marketers.  We think there is a ton of knowledge trapped in this publicly available data, and we're unlocking it using data mining, data science, and world-class analytics.

More to come as we go along -- examples, how people are using the information we provide, creative uses of Polygraph, and where we're going in the future -- but now you know how we conceived of Polygraph!

Polygraph Facebook Data Mining, Analytics Launch!!

Howdy everyone.  Today is an exciting day for us at Polygraph -- we've released our first product into the marketplace!

First of all, congratulations to our team.  We ran hard to the deadline, and released something that I'm very proud of, especially for a v1.  Now everyone is pretty much exhausted, but I suppose that's par for the course.

We're excited about our mission to democratize access to social data -- and make it easy for marketers to truly understand the competitive landscape on Facebook.  There are a lot of companies doing deep analytics on Twitter, but not very many doing it for Facebook.  We think Polygraph is a great innovation and a step to help people better understand cause & effect on Facebook as well as ROI.

We are unique in the marketplace because we treat the problem of analytics as a data mining problem.  Every social interaction for a brand is an important, discrete event that must be captured, recorded, and presented to marketers in a way that is actionable.  Facebook Insights is a good start, but doesn't provide enough for genius left-brained marketers.  And, of course, you can't get competitor data out of Facebook Insights either.  Polygraph gives you both.

We will turn our attention to customer feedback now -- and rapidly iterate to improve the product.  As with any launch, we have some things that we want to immediately improve.  We have a long feature request list from early adopters and friends that we want to tackle as well.  We will work with a handful of selected big brands, technology partners, and agencies to work on advanced applications/uses of the data as well.

This first release of Polygraph is the beginning of big things for us.  We'd love you to join us for the ride.  Visit http://www.polygraphmedia.com/free-stuff for access to some samples and to create a free account.  You can also order your own Polygraph Reports from the web site.  

Later this week, we'll start to publish some analysis on this blog as we find things in the data that are simply fascinating!

 

 

On the Facebook IPO

Lots of thoughts on this... let me try to be brief.  And my opinions on this should not be considered as investment advice, but rather my observations following up on my interview with WebProNews earlier this year.  I am a marketer and practitioner, not an investment professional. 

• The Facebook IPO is the apex of this cycle.  Finally, we can all buy & sell shares of the world's dominant social property.  Woohoo!
• The Facebook price range was increased today, which will value the company at roughly $100b when it begins trading.  Unreal -- although this was inline with where the company was valued in the private markets six months ago.  So no real surprise there.
• If you're going into $FB as a "trader"... i.e. you will be playing the daily or even less frequent idiosyncracies of how the market views the stock.  Godspeed.
• But if you're going into it as an investor, you're banking on Facebook taking more & more advantage of the 900 million users that it has at its disposal.  You're betting that it is critical infrastructure that is more or less here to stay.  Fatigue, competitors, legal issues, lack of real ads progress on mobile, the higher proportion of Facebook users from mobile devices, advertising effectiveness, etc. be damned.  And you're betting that Facebook will increase the ARPU (average revenue per user) from the paltry few bucks per person that it makes today.  Again, Godspeed.
• Finally, let's keep in mind that Facebook's user growth has significantly slowed.  It used to announce the next hundred million users on a quarterly cadence.  Now, the law of large numbers has taken hold... and it might crack 1 billion in 2012.  Nonetheless, Facebook still has amongst its user base about 45% of the world's Internet population.

All of that said, it's still the gold standard of social media -- and is not likely to be supplanted by any of its rivals anytime soon.

Facebook will emerge from this with a massive cash hoard along with stock -- both sets of currency available for acquisitions, product development, hires, etc.  That's going to prove to be remarkably powerful and will shape the latter stages of the post-social era.

I'll be too busy launching Polygraph to pay close attention to the play-by-play on CNBC later this week.  If you decide to play, good luck!

Big Social Data & the Peak of Rick Santorum

February 8th was a watershed day in the US Presidential campaign of Rick Santorum.  The Pennsylvania conservative picked up a sweep of somewhat unexpected wins in Colorado, Minnesota, and Missouri.  Pundits and news sources called the outcome "devastating" for the Mitt Romney campaign and a "shot in the arm" for Rick Santorum.  Romney went on the offensive, launching attacks against his Republican rival weeks after the event.

All of this would be great, with the exception that February 8th was actually the statistical peak of the Rick Santorum campaign.  We can prove this by mining social data.

A few charts below from our Polygraph™ Reports, which launch later this month.  First, let's look at the daily engagement on the Rick Santorum Facebook Page.  The chart below demonstrates the natural excitement and social chatter that took place on the Facebook Page in & around the three state sweep.  Maybe voters were mobilized.  Maybe it is a function of additional ad spend... maybe a function of real grassroots momentum.  The chart below is what you want to see -- ramping up of interest, engagement, and momentum for the big day.

But then, something interesting happened.  Excitement tailed off -- JUST the opposite of what you'd expect from a campaign that just had a landmark victory.  It's kinda like a basketball team achieving the dream of getting to the Final Four, but then laying an egg once they get there.  Something about "happy to be there".  

But joking aside, there may be a lot of reasons for this -- the campaign spent its available resources on the three state win and had no more to spend.  Maybe there was a dropoff in advertising.  Maybe people just lost their enthusiasm for the candidate and the campaign.  Experts in the field would certainly know better than us and would be able to add color to things the data reveal.  

All we know is that (in this case) the data suggests that the 2012 Rick Santorum Presidential campaign peaked on February 8th, 2012.  We confirmed this trend as early as February 15th, almost a week before Mitt Romney continued his attacks on Santorum.  He could've just left well enough alone and saved the additional $$ spent on attack ads and messaging on an effectively dying candidate.

Interestingly, this data was confirmed just this morning by Henry Blodget.  And check out the Intrade chart below.  Intrade futures say more or less the same thing -- Santorum peaked on Feburary 8th.  

Facebook is the biggest and most interesting self-contributory database the world has ever seen.  You can use it to spot trends and adjust your marketing/branding/positioning in real-time. Contact us for information to put this kind of power at your fingertips.

SXSW Interactive 2012 Observations

Some thoughts following the blur that was SXSW Interactive 2012:

• I very much agree with the sentiment that "nobody won SXSW" this year, but I also don't think you can expect that every year.  Twitter "won" the conference in 2007.  4sq arguably stole the show in 2009.  GroupMe "won" in 2011.  In my mind, the latter won it only because the tech press had to give the title to *someone*.  But also look at the years... in the even years nobody "won" at all per se.  You don't have a  "press-designated" winner every year and this year was no different.
• Location-based services proved again that their primary use case is in places where a lot of people are in the same place at the same time.
• Interesting to me that Facebook, Apple, Twitter, and Square... amongst others... had little/no presence at SXSW.  A few folks wandering around but no "presence".
• Again, the action for startups was in the hallways and backroom meetings, small group VIP events, etc.  The action for enterprise folks remains in the sessions and in the private parties, where basic education takes place.  I don't mean that to sound bad, but it's almost two different shows depending on why you're there.

Looking forward to a great show in 2013!

Snap Reactions to February 29 Facebook Announcements - Ads & Pages

Some quick snap reactions to the February 29 announcements today at the Facebook Marketing Conference:

• The Timeline for Pages features seem to be a matter of both give and take.  Pages get Timeline functionality, which is now the standard view of both Pages and Profiles.  Users can interact with local businesses, brands, non-profits, and people using the same look & feel.
• This is a huge investment in this new structure... Facebook will be very motivated to (over time) make Timeline the default structure for all Pages & Profiles, whereas it is a choice right now.  It's just easier to manage with a single data & UI structure.
• Default landing pages are no more -- this only impacts pages of 5,000 Fans or more.  But the default view is now the Timeline.  Custom tabs are still available, but only four will be immediately visible on the Page.  A user will have to click to see more custom tabs.  The concept of custom tabs has been on the decline for awhile, and this will only accelerate the trend.
• Fans can send private messages to Pages.  Another step in the homogenizing of the Page/Profile experience.  To my knowledge, it doesn't yet work the other way around.
• Sticky posts on Fan Pages -- you can give your Fans an extra incentive to post to your Wall by making the best posts from your Fans persistent.  This is similar to what happens in Forums and is a very nice new feature for Page Admins.
• Timeline is optimized around your *friends* interactions with a Brand or Company.  So it's a way to see only relevant information to you as it relates to a Page.  This will really force marketers to optimize around good feedback from people -- because that's what their friends will see when they visit the Page.
• Maps will have prominent real estate on the new Pages, which will be a benefit for local businesses.  It will actually bring Facebook local business listings closer to parity with Yelp listings and Google Local Business listings -- and that will be interesting as local/SMB competition intensifies.
• Facebook Offers will be made available to Fans, which in my opinion will revolutionize loyalty.  Facebook has created the largest contributory database in the world, and with it a huge % of the world's population.  Offers to Fans will drive a huge amount of commerce to participating businesses.  In so doing, it will also crush a lot of startups working on this very problem.
• Facebook is introducing Logout Ads to brands, unlocking ad space for the 37 million people per day who actually log out.  It's revolutionary because someone will be forced to see an ad, watch a video, or perform some task before logging out.  Yes, it's a captive audience -- but it's less than 5% of the total Facebook audience.  And it may just annoy people more than it unlocks value.  
• Speaking of, Facebook is now allowing ad units to sit in the News Feed alongside real News Feed stories as a premium ad unit.  I can't help but think this is a short-sighted move -- if the feature is opened up to everyone.  But I'm guessing this will be sold to brands who desperately want News Feed placement -- and will be willing to pay to guarantee it.  Even so, how this is executed will be key.  It's an art, not a science.
• Facebook will allow you to target mobile users -- iPad, iPhone, Android -- and will put these ads in the News Feed.  This is a good development that puts it at parity with Google's Adwords offering.

All told, ads are about to get much more prominent in the Facebook experience.  In the past, Users have briefly complained about major changes but have come to accept them.  We'll see what happens this time.

Some of the moves are IMO justifiable -- Facebook ad CTRs are very low.  Some of these changes are designed to address poor CTR performance.  I'm glad to see they are doing that, although I think this will bring about increased ad costs for advertisers -- sooner rather than later.  Advertisers will get more clicks for their money, however, so it isn't without a tradeoff.

It should be noted that Facebook is doing this at the same time it is preparing for its IPO.  I don't think that's a coincidence. Facebook is under pressure to not just nail their projected ads revenue numbers, but dramatically exceed them.  That's what happens when you get a 20x revenue multiple the day you IPO, and it might end up higher than that.

Unfortunately, the story is not over by any means.  Many of these changes will roll out over the next 2-3 months.  We don't know the full impacts on workflows, costs, and marketing campaigns for awhile.  We also won't know how all of this impacts the type of ads that we see -- whether smaller businesses will be able to effectively use Facebook or if they'll be drowned out by big brands. 

To me, the big question is whether or not Facebook can pull off this ambitious set of changes elegantly.  My hunch is that you'll see Facebook increasingly littered with corporate ads/promotions, and User outcry will be loud.  Will it be enough for people to migrate away?  Zuck's bet is a resounding "no".  We shall see.

The Future of News is Now, and it's Tiger Teams

News media has always been an interest to me going back to my time as sports editor of my high school newspaper, The Northwestern, in 1991.  I was deeply involved, maybe even instrumental, in converting Stratfor from a consulting business to a web publisher in 1999.  And our first go-to-market strategy for Notice Technologies in 2009-2010 was to partner with local newspapers and the families that owned them.  So I have a professional curiousity about local media that I can't quite shake, even if it isn't the best business decision.

The other day, I read an update posted by my friend, Scott McKay, Publisher of The Hayride -- a Louisiana-based conservative blog that covers Louisiana & national politics.  Scott was updating his audience on traffic that The Hayride has earned, relative to its major media competitors in Louisiana.  You can check out his post here... it's fascinating.

Scott has gone from nothing to being the #2 most read media property in Louisiana in just two years.  Let that sink in for a moment.

From nothing to being #2 in his market in two years.

Some of you might say, well... I'm sure some Conservative think tank is funding Scott and his efforts.  Nope, think again.

Growth of The Hayride has been ENTIRELY organic, driven by a small tiger team of people insanely focused on developing content interesting to its audience.  And it really hasn't made significant adjustments to its original editorial voice or content.  They've stuck to it, and in turn developed a large, growing, and apparently loyal voice.

Looking around the media landscape, The Hayride is not at all an anomaly.  This era has been more or less defined by the emergence of either bootstrapped or modestly funded (initially) entities that have grown their audiences.  The Drudge Report was probably the original -- one guy curating content for the world's edification has turned into a profitable powerhouse.  Stratfor was one in the late 1990s and continues to thrive despite its recent hacking attack.  The Huffington Post and Breitbart emerged in the middle of the last decade and continue to roll.  Mashable is doing the job today in the tech/social media space.  Henry Blodget's Business Insider is reporting on business and stock market issues, but with a far smaller staff than say CNBC.  At the local level, we're seeing companies like Culturemap, The Magic City Post (Birmingham), Buffalo Rising, The Texas Tribune, and countless others challenge incumbents.  In traditional media, even the venerable Seattle P-I has moved entirely to a Web model and streamlined their team several years ago.

What's the lesson here?  Traditional media reporting is tough, labor intensive, and expensive. Opinion and analysis, on the other hand, can be a lot more inexpensive.  It doesnt' require travel, developing relationships, covering a "beat", or doing deep investigative reporting in person.  It is, however, very tough to do on a consistent basis.  Those properties who have a supremely talented Publisher/Editor who can pump out 5-7 articles per day *and stick to it* are the future winners.  We've seen it time and time again, and we shouldn't be surprised when it happens again.

And if anything, we're in an era where, counterintuitively, less money provides better outcomes for winning niche markets.  The future is being built from the ground up by tiger teams.  It's a long term play.  But if I were building the media conglomerate of the future, I'd find a way to align with or acquire a network of emergent local and vertical blogs.

What Will Win in the 2nd Great Tech Boom

I spent a lot of part I of my thoughts on 2011 & beyond in our industry focusing on what I don't think will work.  This blog post will be markedly more positive, at least for those companies that I think are going to make it after all.  Thinking about it, though, I think some commonalities are emerging.

But let's step back and review some concepts from Part I.  I spent a lot of time on the concept of economic viability as judged by two simple concepts -- customer acquisition costs and lifetime value (LTV).  Simply put, if your LTV after churn exceeds your fully loaded customer acquisition costs, you're a moneymaker.  If not, you're a failure.  There are lots of ways to analyze businesses, but if you comprehensively and accurately know marketing costs and LTV in what is of course an uncertain business environment, you're doing better than most.  That's easier said than done.

Now hold that thought for a moment.

I would argue to you that there is overwhelming evidence that we're in a mini-bubble, a lower-rent, better justified version of the first one (1997-2000).  There are a lot of sure signs -- new businesses getting huge valuations even in public markets, investors in those businesses trying to convince people that those valuations are indeed rational, the huddled masses listening in violent agreement (amazingly enough), venture capital raising huge new funds, and billions of dollars going into startups worldwide again.

And to repeat before I go too far, I don't think this is a terrible or irrational thing.  Social media, location services, smartphones, tablets, local/SMB services, and other sectors are getting turned on their heads a bit -- and the uncertainty/disruption creates opportunity for investors.  So please don't put words into my mouth that I'm opposed to what is happening or think it's insane, because I am decidedly *not* there.  I'm discerning, and that's fair.

Anyway, as we are at least in a mini-bubble, a lot of businesses have been created in a short period of time.  All have one thing in common: they are fighting like hell for market share.  They're fighting for attention alongside others in the startup community.  Enterprise startups need enterprise validation -- and fight for enterprises and/or agencies to adopt, promote, and pitch their products and services to decision makers.

And so what that creates is hypercompetitive frenzy, where there are probably at least 1-2 startups and often more for any opportunity you may perceive to exist in the world.  Tech is one of the most competitive markets in the world because barriers to entry are relatively low (no PP&E in the era of Amazon Web Services) and you can win with your brains, a good idea, and great sales execution.  Thus, the market is incredibly efficient at finding every glimmer of opportunity and taking advantage of it.  So you get a ton of startups seeking attention.

These startups fall into three categories in my mind, and I'm sure there are more.

• Destinations -- places that consumers and businesses are expected to visit repeatedly. Branding is critical, otherwise you're out of sight/out of mind.  Think modernized traditional media (Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, Techcrunch, Huffington Post) but also the hundreds of thousands of applications on the iPhone and Android (Gowalla, 4sq), game publishers, daily deals providers (currently), apps like Pandora, etc.  If you're a destination, you're only as good as your branding + your last trick.  Don't rest, because you can't.
• Service businesses -- organizations that provide human capital to solve specific problems for clients.  What's critical in these is to not be a commodity.  If you are providing a commodity service, you're racing to $0 margin.  If you have some competency that makes you among the best in the world, you're probably OK.
• Enablers -- groups that deliver a product, service, or data that fundamentally makes people more productive.  This can be a tangible time savings benefit, a cost savings benefit, or ideally both.  It can also be a "data benefit" -- removing barriers to data can be a huge enabler.  Think of Amazon Web Services -- it's a genius bet on the need for developers to quickly conjure processing and storage cycles to develop, run, and scale applications.  Same goes for the Apple App Store, Windows Azure, Facebook with social plug-ins that have now become ubiquitous and of course the Facebook APIs, LinkedIn for resumes and employment/employee data, arguably Twitter for media publishing and content discovery, local Austin startups Infochimps (data) and Famigo (publishing child-friendly content), and my favorite new startup, Twine.  All of these companies, in their own way and perhaps by accident, enable people to conduct business and be more efficient.

Not that all the destination business examples I listed are fads, but a vast majority will be nothing more than that because they're currently capitalizing on something that is presently *hot*.  Mashable is great and a must-read, but would it get 20m+ monthly unique visitors if tech was not hot?  We just saw Gowalla deadpool because it took advantage of the hot LBS market, but could not expand beyond that.  Arguably Groupon has cooled off because daily deals just stopped being compelling, and now as a result, they're dealing with the customer acquisition cost/LTV problem albeit as a public company.  Ouch.  Destination businesses have to grow rapidly and find ways to be essential and build brand, or they're ultimately dead.  The ones that go the VC route therefore raise a ton of cash but they're a lot more uncertain than they appear and are under a ton of pressure.

I'll defer a broader discussion of service businesses to 1Q 2012 for now.  My point today is more about disruptive technology providers anyhow.

Enablers, in my view, are where I'd focus dollars if I were an investor.  First of all, they're differentiated by their ambitions.  They are not trying to change the world, but rather to provide a useful service that other people can some way build upon -- be it technology, revenue, knowledge, data.    Ergo, their bet is on the opportunities they see more broadly.  They focus their efforts on the utility of and the benefits of the product/service they're offering *to other people*.  Some of those will win, some will lose.  But enough will win to make access and all the hard work that entails a worthwhile pursuit.  There is less direct interaction with the end customers, but rather tons of interaction with modern-day "channel partners" who can offer products and services to hundreds, thousands, or more end customers.  But the Enabler is not invested in any one per se -- it's a "portfolio theory" approach.

The one thing I think winners will ultimately have in common in the 2nd Great Tech Boom is precisely what winners of other eras have realized.  Infrastructure stands a greater chance of winning than apps, destinations, and other properties that are by definition perhaps more "opportunity" plays than "sector" plays.  It's not to say that all Destinations will fail and all Enablers will succeed.  But I'd make a pretty big bet that we'll think of Destinations fondly as relics of a past gone by, and that Enablers will as a group have much more lasting power.

The Dot-com bubble, the 2nd Great Tech Boom & Economic Viability

I suppose we are three years into the boom of this cycle in tech, and 2011 has finally given us a few IPOs -- Groupon, Zynga, Pandora, Angie's List, and LinkedIn.  Others like Facebook, Twitter, and Yelp reportedly intend to go public in 2012.  Investment continues to pour into startups, although there are signs that early stage investments are dropping slightly in favor of Series B and Series C investments into companies that are scaling to grow and eventually reach a liquidity event of their own.  Some startups like Gowalla have hit the deadpool.  Others like Hunch and ReadWriteWeb have modestly exited.  And a wide array of others are fighting for their place in the world.

If you've read this blog for awhile or seen some of my posts on Mashable and other publications, you know that I've been critical of a vast majority of new products and services that have been invented in this cycle.  But it isn't because I don't like the companies or their founders.  Quite the contrary -- I've interacted with many and like just about all of them personally.

The problem is that they all face the same underlying economic problem -- for many, customer acquisition costs are significant but there is little/no lockin.  At the end of the day, all of these businesses will have to face that core economic reality.  If it looks like there is not a chance these business can overcome the customer acquisition problem and become economically viable, I get skeptical.

Interestingly, almost all the local/SMB plays have heinous customer acquisition metrics as reported by their S-1s and other financial statements.  It's why Wall Street has not been kind to Groupon, Angie's List, et al.

As it happens in every boom cycle, a vast majority of us get intoxicated by the possibilities for both startups and newly-minted, publicly traded companies.  But those very possibilities dominate our thinking -- and we underestimate the risks and/or the costs associated with building audiences of loyal customers who won't migrate.  From a purely economic standpoint, the migration/churn problem is just as bad as the acquisition problem.

I had an exchange with Robert Scoble yesterday on Google+ where we briefly debated this very issue.  Robert is one of the better pundits out there, but in my view he's a tad optimistic because he thinks of the possibilities far more than the risks, alternatives, and customer acquisition costs.

I am perhaps the opposite -- I think in economic terms and am influenced by the last tech bubble.  People said the same thing about Priceline, vertical web sites like Pets.com and Living.com, Webvan, eBay, Amazon, etc.  The economically viable ones survived.  Those that were not died.  Optimists and pessimists were both correct, as I'm sure they are now.

When projecting ahead and thinking of the survivors of this cycle, ask yourselves which properties are truly economically viable in the long-term.  That's the only filter that matters.

It's why I continue to be bullish on Facebook -- they're mainstream and habitual.  Can they screw up?  Of course.  But the collective community of friends on Facebook makes it a part of our lives that is more or less impossible for us to leave.  Path can challenge Facebook as it is more about "close friends", but they still have an uphill battle to climb to gain mass mainstream adoption.

In the 2nd part of this blog post, which I'll release in a few days, I'll talk about other winners I foresee... and the thing that I think all will have in common when it's all over.

Polygraph Media - Adventures in Big Social Data

Sorry we've been so quiet lately - have been hard at work taking a product to the marketplace.  We are jumping into the big social data business feet first.  You can sign up for our private beta at http://www.polygraphmedia.com.

In addition, Tommy Perkins (who traveled with me to Denver) made some great observations in his blog post yesterday.  I encourage you to check it out.

All told, we are very excited about these new opportunities and we see a lot of potential in big social data.