by Josh Bernoff

I got a nice email from Jennifer McClure, Executive Director of the Society for New Communications Research. They're doing a survey on Customer Care and Brand Reputation in the Age Of Social Media.

Go ahead, take it yourself. They'll send you a free copy of the research.

While you're taking the survey, you might want to take a close look at question 30, which caught our eye. Here it is.

If this looks familiar to you, it may be that you saw something very like it in our research or right here on this blog. It's highly compatible with the Social Technographics ladder that we use to classify consumers.

Does this make our classification some kind of a standard?

We'll look forward to seeing the results of the research at their Forum April 22-25 in Sonoma.

by Josh Bernoff

ZDNet is holding a live Webcast Wednesday about how your company can use the social world to improve product innovation. It's free with registration.

Here are the details:

Date: 2/27/2008
Time: 2 eastern, 11 pacific
Participants: yours truly along with Colby Dyess, Product Manager from Endeca

For my portion, I'll be talking about how companies are engaging with their customers to improve product development, with examples from Del Monte Pet Products, salesforce.com, the Swiss mobile operator Swisscom, the French bank Credit Mutuel, and the Canadian retailer Loblaw.

The event is sponsored by Optaros, which was a finalist for a Forrester Groundswell award with its Swisscom Mobile Labs application.

by Josh Bernoff

When Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht invited me to watch their live Diggnation podcast recording in St. Louis (we were both there to connect with some of Anheuser Busch's marketing staff) here's what I imagined: a camera set up in a bar with two guys talking, and patrons walking by and wondering what was up.

Boy was I wrong. Here's what it was really like:

300 rowdy, screaming people crammed into a performance space, cheering, interrupting, and grooving on being in the same room with somebody they admire. Love. Are into. Kevin and Alex got a treatment that wouldn't have seemed unusual for Sacha Baron Cohen or Jennifer Jessica Simpson.

Who are these guys?

Kevin was an on-air personality on TechTV and created Digg, the site where people vote on the news stories they consider most worth reading. The Diggnation podcast is an outgrowth of that site, an on-air review of the stories that matter to Digg members. It's part of a lineup of shows put on by Revision3, run by Kevin's ex-TechTV crony Jim Louderback.

But what it really is, is two guys on a couch, drinking and shooting the bull with the tens of thousands of people they know care about the same things as them -- which means tech, but also other news. Among the stories Kevin and Alex highlighted this week were the new Indiana Jones trailer, the death of the HD DVD format, and . . . Castro's retirement. Yup. They think a new government in Cuba is cool. Not as cool as Indiana Jones, but close.

Flush your idea of digg's audience down the toilet. First, all they had to do was announce they were coming to Saint Louis and hordes of people people showed up. I met or heard about people who drove all the way from Kansas City (four hours) and Minneapolis (more like ten). The audience was about 25% women. And while it was dominated by 21-30 year olds, you would be hard pressed to call these folks technogeeks. These were just people who enjoyed being part of an idea -- the idea of a guy on the net saying and doing whatever he feels like.

Diggnation's sales manager told me they charge $16K for a sponsorship. Kevin and Alex talk about the sponsors on air, like Johnny Carson used to do, but with a lot more profanity (and real enthusiasm). There is no focus group. There is just a guy who knows what his audience wants -- because, after all, he has a Web site where they vote on it.

Do you think big media can really get their heads around this? Any of it? I don't think so.

Note: I'm embedding last week's podcast since this week's isn't edited yet. When it comes out I'll replace it. Now you can see what I saw (below). Profanity included.

by Josh Bernoff

Forrester's interactive marketing group is research attitudes among marketers towards different marketing channels. We'd love to hear from you. If you or one of your colleagues is involved with interactive channels (e.g. email marketing, search marketing, display ads, social networking, blogs, widgets, mobile) take the survey here. 

We’ll send you a copy of the research when it becomes available. And the results will be quite a bit more definitive than our Super Bowl research.

Thanks for your help.

by Josh Bernoff

What does the groundswell of social technology mean for management? That's the question we had to ask ourselves when MIT Sloan Management Review invited us to write up the research in Groundswell.

I'm delighted to report that  you can now read the results. MIT Sloan Management Review has published our article, "Harnessing the Power of Social Applications." And while most of the articles in MIT SMR are behind a paywall, they are making this one available for free. [Note: as of April 1 the article is no longer available for free -- the link will send you to an excerpt.] Thank you, MIT SMR!

A quick aside. MIT and Harvard have a vigorous intellectual rivalry here in Boston (culturally, it resembles Red Sox/Yankees) -- many of the local professionals are alumni of one or the other. I went to MIT as a Ph.D. student way back when; Charlene, of course, earned her MBA from Harvard Business School. So having our book published by Harvard Business Press, and then getting an article into MIT Sloan Management Review, is a pretty sweet twofer.

While the article is was free, MIT SMR hasn't give us the right to copy it, so I can tell you about the article but not include excerpts. That said, here are some of the ideas we explored in the article, which jumps off from where Groundswell ended.

The article includes mini-case studies include CBS/Jericho, salesforce.com's IdeaExchange, the Chevy Aveo Livin' Large Campus Challenge, Fiskars' fiskateers.com community, Dell's community forum, and Best Buy's Blue Shirt Nation social network for its employees. (Some of these are also in the book, some are unique to the article.) But we stick to our central framework -- you choose your application based on your objectives -- an idea we debuted on this blog half a year ago and which remains at the heart of our analysis.

The article also includes data on use of social technologies across countries, and which applications are best for which departments within companies. Plus little tidbits of advice for the kind of managers who read MIT SMR (e.g. Line up executive backing, smart small and then expand). But our main point is that the cultural transformation that comes from embracing social applications is the best way to once again get the customer at the heart of decisions in the corporation.

I've seen a lot of advice for companies in the blogosphere, much of it really useful if mostly tactical. We tried to look bigger, at what really happens as medium and large size companies make social apps part of the way they do business. I'd love to hear whether you think we're on target. Go read the article and let us know.

by Josh Bernoff

Jake offered a paean to Cluetrain. Read my description -- see how many Cluetrain ideas you can see.

Jake McKee told us the incredible story of what Lego was like before engaging with AFOLs (adult fans of Lego), and how it changed as a result of his introduction of those fans to the company.

Jake explained that when he started there, Lego tried not to listen to its consumers: "we don't accept unsolicited ideas".

But an engaged kid spends about $25 per year. AFOLs spend on average $2000. Fans are weird. But their events attract lots of kids, and even media.

So, time for a culture shift. Jake began to evangelize the idea that "Lego is a creative medium" -- the AFOL's central idea.

First step: don't respect the hierarchy.

Second: use tenacity and get air cover (he got that from Tormod Askildsen, who's in our book).

Third: get the company to come down from its ivory tower. He proved that the fans new more about Lego than the people at the company. He invited fans in to look at a set of new products (Lego trains) -- which they rejected. Result: the designers redesigned the sets based on the fans' feedback.

Fourth: there are no secrets. Jake released information about bricks for the fans, which created an internal uproar -- until he proved that the "secret" wasn't much of a secret. And Jake repeats (and I agree) -- skip the NDA. NDAs inhibit conversation. (For the record, I respect NDAs, but I find them frustrating.) Lawyers want to reduce risk to zero -- but that is not what business is about.

Fifth: don't hold your breath.  Change takes time. "A big part of my job was to get people out of the office to visit" events -- see what's happening out there. Jake tells an incredible story of how after exposing some marketing people to a Lego event, he had to explain why people engage in hobbies.

Sixth: the answers are not within the company. AFOLs had built their own tools where they shared everything from the contents of Lego sets to photo sharing. "There were so many tools, I didn't have to build anything." Lesson here: don't build tools if your community already has them.

Summation: "Success by 1000 paper cuts." Don't start with a huge program, build small piece by small piece. "Your company has a fan club" -- go for it.

Listening to Jake's story, I heard a lot of echoes of themes we talk about in the book -- getting cover, starting small, reaching out to customers, letting them take charge. If Lego can do it, so can you!

by Josh Bernoff

Doc Searls started his talk at the Cluetrain @ 10 event talking about the genesis of The Cluetrain Manifesto. This was fascinating to me. He started with reflections of the overblown 90's (Push, Pointcast). "Customers treated as plankton." A reaction to the overblown venture investments in "capturing eyeballs" in the 90s.

The genesis of a lot of those ideas as he described (e.g. 95 theses, "markets are conversations") sounds as if it wasn't all that thoughtful. And didn't take that long to write. But what made these ideas so fresh and powerful (my opinion here) is that it was obvious to them long before anyone else was even thinking about it. The cluetrain authors were unafraid to talk about it frankly. And -- this is important -- they had each other to bounce things off of.

Does it hold up after 10 years? Rereading it -- and listening to Doc -- it does. The strident tone seems a bit "of its time" -- that is, they were screaming about things you don't have to scream about any more. But the content seems as true as it did when it was written.

But Doc has remained way out in front of what's happening, rather than consolidating the gains we made in getting to the Cluetrain world.

I love Doc's take on Web 2.0. He implies that O'Reilly's emphasis on the software is misplaced -- and wants to know why he uses advertising as his first example. I concur. The real change is about people and how they relate to business -- software is the enabler. Fascinating, as Doc points out, that Google search "Web 2.0" search yields ads about Advertising.

He's still got a problem with advertisers and advertising -- including on Facebook. Searls' updated theses (numbering is not a mistake -- he skipped a few)

1. Advertising as we know it will die.

2. Herding people into walled gardens and guessing about what makes them "social" will seem as absurd as it actually is. (Facebook is his example.)

3. We will realize that the most important producers are what we used to call consumers. (Yup.)

4. The value chain will be replaced by the value constellation. (Many connections.)

5. "What's your business model?" will no longer be asked of everything. (What's the business model for your kids?)

6. We will make money by maximizing "because effects". ("Because effects" are what happen when you make more money because of something than with it.) E.g. search and blogging.

8. We will be able to manage vendors at least as well as they manage us. (Agreements between companies and customers shouldn't be skewed in favor of the companies.) At Harvard Law they call this VRM -- vendor relationship management -- which is what Searls is working on (projectvrm.org).

10. We'll marry the live web to the value constellation. (The Live Web isn't just about stars. Relationships of anybody to anybody.)

Examples: The personal RFP -- find me what I need (driven by buyer not seller) I should be able to manage my own health care data. I should be able to inquire and relate to whole markets on the fly.

Here's my take on all this. I am pleased that Doc is still rattling cages. And I think he makes a lot of good points.

Respectfully: I think this is still a little naive about companies and how they behave. "Companies should" statements don't typically get companies to go along. So I wish there was more engaging with companies in this speech.

As the cluetrain audience here will hear from me in a few hours, I think Doc is still a radical -- a bomb-thrower, a provocateur. But to create real change, you have to be a revolutionary -- someone who engages with the powers that be to create major change. We need radicals. But we need revolutionaries too.

by Josh Bernoff

I got a fair amount of pickup on my recession post, including articles in AdWeek and MediaPost, and mentions a bunch of blogs including Logic+Emotion, Web Strategist (my colleague Jeremiah), Micropersuasion, ZDNet, and even Techmeme. There was also this interesting post from Bernard Lunn at ReadWriteWeb, "This is not our bubble," which looks at how the recession will affect entrepreneurs and venture investments.

There was plenty of cheering from the social sphere, along with some jeering, too. But I think some people missed the point (or more likely, I wasn't clear enough about what the point was).

I say social applications and not social media for a reason. People will want to boost word of mouth in a recession. This is great news if you're selling community apps to companies. It's also good news for Facebook community applications and groups. You're a company and you want to charge up your citizen marketers about your product -- you can build your own application or climb on board an existing network and work within it.

This is not good news for plain old banner ads, or any other form of CPM-based, brand-based advertising. That includes banner ads in Facebook. Raw monetization of traffic won't be worth any more in a recession -- it will be worth less, since awareness-building will be less important.

What does this mean?

First of all, it means that Facebook, Myspace, et. al need to continue to work harder on innovative ways to create social advertising opportunities that are more creative and less intrusive than Beacon v1. Is the recession good or bad for the big social networking sites? Depends on how soon they can get those ad formats working.

Second, it means all those me-too, social-network with a twist startups who don't have a monetization plan, or whose plan is dependent on traffic=advertising, are in trouble. This is social media -- media being defined as ways to turn traffic into advertising. Not a good place to be sitting in a recession, when marketers are looking for scale and interaction and persuasion, not just impressions.

by Josh Bernoff

I am delighted to be part of a series of events looking at the Cluetrain Manifesto ten years later.

Cluetrain was ahead of its time. It changed everything. A lot of what they said was prescient, given how little evidence there was to back it up at the time. Now that we are living in the cluetrain world, what's the right way to think about it? That's what I'll be talking about.

The first event, called "There's a New Conversation," is in New York on next Wednesday afternoon, February 13. You can still sign up.

Speakers include:

• Doc Searls, co-author of "The Cluetrain Manifesto" and fellow at Harvard's Berkman Institute
• Peter Hirshberg, Chairman of the Executive Committee of Technorati and Chairman and Partner at The Conversation Group
• Ted Shelton, partner at The Conversation Group
• Thor Muller, CEO of Get Satisfaction
• Jake McKee, Principal at Ant's Eye View, and past Global Community Relations Specialist for the LEGO Company
• And me, of course . . .

Location: SAP Customer Center, 95 Morton Street, New York, NY. Price: $76.50. Sign up: Here.

I hope to see you there. Should be an interesting conversation.

by Josh Bernoff

Is a recession coming? Don't ask me -- I'm not an economist, and even the economists don't really know. But if it's anything like the last recession, advertising will plummet and experimental media will crater. (In the 2001 recession, US advertising dropped 9% and Internet advertising plummeted 27%, according to Veronis Suhler Stevenson.)

But do not panic. Things are different this time.

Here's what smart marketers should know:

• It's not a tech bubble. The last recession was caused by the dot-com bubble and the terrorist attacks. There was a lot of ignorant money out there chasing illusory opportunity, and companies had overinvested in technology. This time, the precipitating event is a housing bubble, and technology spending is not irrational.

• Awareness ads will lose effectiveness. Advertising (or as we often call it, "shouting") is mostly about generating awareness and reinforcing brands. In a recession, ordinary consumers like you and me aren't as willing to spend. Sure, we'll be aware of the product, but that doesn't make so much difference when you're worried about your future. Advertising is expensive and is a lot easier to cut than headcount. Many are predicting ad spending will hold up; I'm not so sure.

• But social applications are about consideration, not awareness. Blogs, word of mouth, social networks . . . they're about people connecting with other people. You may resist advertising if your finances are tight, but if your bud tells you that new movie is really worth seeing or that the Gap has the cutest new tops, that's more persuasive than advertising. Basically, in a recession, the consideration phase is more important than awareness -- and that's where advertising flops and social applications succeed.

• It's cheap. Social applications can be nearly free (think blogs, Ning.com, facebook pages) and even more sophisticated communities are typically $30K to $200K -- a lot cheaper than a significant sized ad campaign. After our last post, all the responses were positive. One interactive marketer from a highly cyclical company told us this:

"Budgets are tight in light of the economic conditions as you surmise, but [the budget for social applications] has not been impacted. We are still keen to move forward with our trial and have support….at this point anyway.  Interactive in general has been more protected than other comms areas and saw an increase."

• It's measurable. If your social application doesn't have a measurable output, you'd better get one. But if it does -- if it generates leads, or conversions, or buzz, or something useful -- then you can prove it's working. beinggirl.com is four times as effective as TV ads, Procter & Gamble told us. That won't get cut in a recession.

These same arguments apply to some other forms of online marketing, including search ads and email marketing. Those are going to be good investments in a recession. If you're smart, you'll position yourself now with proof your apps are working. Then when the ad dollars get tight, you'll be in good shape.

Click here to see what we wrote for our clients (we've made this piece of research free for everyone).

Also on this topic, see also David Armano's post on 10 ways digital can help you thrive in a recession. And an earlier Paul LaMonica post (CNN Money) featuring my old colleague Jim Nail.

Finally: I'm anticipating this topic might get some currency around the blogosphere and the mediasphere . . . if you want to follow the reactions, tune in to my twitter feed at twitter.com/jbernoff

by Josh Bernoff

My colleague Jeremiah Owyang created twitter.com/superbowlads so we could all rate the Super Bowl ads live. Twitter.com/superbowlads received over 2500 tweets during the game. As Jeremiah pointed out in his blog post, it was incredible to be a part of this, but a bit unwieldy to figure out what happened.

Since there is an empty spot in my soul in the wake of the Patriots' historic choke, I thought I would try to fill it by analyzing all those tweets. Wrangling 2500 tweets into categories and making rankings out of them took some ingenuity and I still don't claim to have a definitive analysis, but by making some reasonable assumptions (see end of post for details) I not only could make sense of what actually happened, but gain some insight into people's reactions to the ads.

Disclaimers: 1. This is a summary of tweets from about 70 people who are not representative of ANYTHING. They're more interested in media and advertising than the average person, but that's about all I can say. 2. My classification system is the best I could do, but classifying random tweets is not perfect, especially when people who tweeted aren't always clear about what ads they were referring to. Did the best I could. 3. I didn't include any ads with less than 9 tweets, but I DID include the FOX promos since a bunch of people rated them.

Here's a table showing the results of my analysis. What's interesting is that many, many ads generated both positive AND negative sentiment. This table is sorted by what I call "Net Positive" which is percent who rated 4 or higher, minus percent who rated 2 or lower -- sort of like a net promoter score. (The instructions called for a 5-point scale -- I accepted fractional scores and zeros, too.) More insights below the table.

Some insights from reviewing these tweets:

• Coke scored two of the top three spots, FedEx got the other. The coke ads also scored high on USA Today's Ad Meter, but not as high as here. The twitterati loved the positive messages in the Coke ads. FedEx's silly pigeon got the other top spot. Both will "build the brand" but there's no real call to action.
• Amazingly, the NFL's own ad about the oboe playing Chester Pitts got a huge score. Apparently you like warm, uplifting stories. None of the other NFL ads even got enough tweets to score them.
• Salesgenie scored two of the bottom four spots. Many twitterati found these animated spots racist. I wonder if salesgenie will actually benefit from desperate salespeople who want the leads they are promising, or if the racist backlash will hurt them. That's a nearly $5 million gamble. Amazingly, one Salesgenie ad scored an average of 0.78 on a scale of 1 to 5 -- indicating the scoring range didn't go low enough to account for viewers' disdain. The lowest-scoring Bud Light ad, about immigrants picking up women, was also cited as racist by several.
• Claritin, Ford, and Sunsilk left people unmoved. These three ads, like Salesgenie's scored not a single 4 or 5 rating, but only moved 9 or 11 people to rank them at all. In contrast to Salesgenie, the reaction was boredom, not a negative reaction. Why spend so much on an an avail and then create a lackluster spot?
• The commentary was interesting, revealed more than numbers. Jeremiah is onto something here.  I participated in Nielsen's "Hey Nielsen" polling but couldn't write free-form text. These twitter commenters, by contrast, told us that they would have been happier if Richard Simmons got run over (Bridgestone), that they forgot the name of the product in the dancing lizards commercial (it's Ice Breakers), and that they enjoy seeing Justin Timberlake get hit in the crotch with a mailbox (Pepsi).

Obviously, a superbowl ad is like a Hail-Mary pass -- it's great if you connect, but costly if you don't. And what's the value of an ad like the Toyota Corolla badger ad, which got many positives but just as many negatives? I know all of you marketers have tested these ads to an infinite degree before spending all this money -- but then why do so many of them leave people cold?

Do you think any were designed to provoke?

Finally, ask yourself this. Imagine that it is August 1, 6 months from now. Which of these ads will have made a positive impact on their company's sales? How will you quantify that? And could you have made that impact more cheaply? How?

I look forward to your comments.

Final notes:

Here are links to Google Spreadsheets with all the comments summarized and sorted by commercial. It's fascinating to see the range of comments on some of these commercials. (Some spaces, commas, and other special characters have been deleted due to the way I did the analysis.)

Ratings summary (table above)
Comments on brands A-C
Comments on brands D-N
Comments on brands P-Z

How I did the analysis:

• Sorted comments alphabetically to identify brands.
• Where comments on multiple brands, created duplicates
• Where comments on multiple commercials, identified which one based on time stamp, comments
• Assigned a numerical value based on comment. Scores above 5 scored as 5. Negative scores scored as zero
• Put comments for each ad on a separate page
• Removed duplicate comments from same individual (except promos, which aired multiple times)
• Sorted from highest to lowest score
• Computed statistics for each ad
• Ads with less than 9 comments were put into miscellaneous category. This includes some promos, lots of local ads, and a few national ads.

by Charlene Li

Microsoft made an unsolicited bid to acquire Yahoo! for $44.6 billion, a 62% premium over the current stock value of the company. Yahoo’s board is looking at the deal. When rumors surfaced last May, Yahoo! quickly pushed back and said that it wasn't interested in being acquired. Things have changed a bit, to say the least.  Yahoo! had a change in leadership that hasn't resulted in a significant turnaround and recently announced large lay-offs.

In this post I'm going to talk about 1) the acquisition; 2) why this more than about search; and 3) the implications for the industry. 

The Acquisition

Back in May, I posted why a deal like this makes sense on paper and some of the challenges of a merger. I still stand by those thoughts, but wanted to expand on them a bit. My colleague Shar VanBoskirk has also posted about what this means specifically for interactive marketing.

- The synergies to compete -- against Google and MySpace. MSFT laid out the four areas of advantage, namely 1) scale economics of audience and advertisers; 2) R&D capacity; 3) operational efficiencies; and 4) emerging platforms like mobile, video, and social computing. These are very similar to the strengths that I laid out in May, but most interestingly, the area where they really need to catch up on is emerging areas like social computing. Despite early acquisitions like Flickr and del.icio.us by Yahoo!, and efforts like Windows Live Spaces, both players are woefully lacking in this area. They would have a beachhead with MSFT's investment in Facebook, but that is still just a strategic relationship - for now. A combined MSFT/Yahoo/Facebook deal at some point in the future could be the media company of the future.

- The messy reality of mergers. MSFT says in the letter that it tried to form a number of partnerships with Yahoo! which were rejected, meaning that they only way they could realize these synergies is through outright acquisition. But acquisitions are messy, ranging from trying to consolidate advertisers on one platform to figuring out what to do about competing brands like Yahoo!, MSN.com, and Windows Live. Cultural differences, geographic distances, and different technology platforms will also muck up things, making a merger highly distracting to an organization that needs to be focused on a highly competitive marketplace. And of course, Google won't be standing still and instead, will capitalize on advertiser and user confusion.

- Yahoo! will look for a savior -- like Google. Yahoo! is famously independent and as an organization, has held looked at Microsoft with disdain. We believe that they will do *everything* possible to avoid being acquired. Their most likely savior would be Google, in that Yahoo! would turn over all of its search advertising to Google in exchange for a guarantee. If Google was willing to pay $900 million for MySpace's search advertising, Yahoo! would get a huge premium. That would be enough cash to bolster Yahoo!'s efforts to reposition its efforts as a portal and display advertising powerhouse.

It's About More Than Search

Microsoft's long-standing interest in search -- and obsession with Google's dominance in it -- is the foundation for the acquisition. But we think that it's much more than that. Microsoft is interested in search because it provides a beachhead into businesses -- especially small and medium-sized ones who don't have a direct relationship with Microsoft.

That's Google real threat -- the ability to leverage today's search relationship into Google Domains and eventually, software as a service that could undermine Microsoft's long-term position -- and as Kyle McNabb and Rob Kplowitz point out, at risk is Microsoft Office's current dominant position. To that end, Microsoft is buying significant share with Yahoo!, not only from search users, but also search advertisers and other relationships via Yahoo! Store.

Second, it's the big, bad world of branding and display advertising that is clearly Microsoft/Yahoo!'s forte. Together, they have worked with the top brands online for more than a decade and have won the confidence of interactive agencies. They own top ad networks and Yahoo! has built relationships with publishers. As Shar points out, having scale allows them to delve deep into customer data and provides better targeting.

Implications Of An Acquisition For The Industry

I define industry pretty broadly, ranging from the media/advertising space to emerging platforms. A few thoughts:

- Technology redefines media. If the acquisition goes through, the two leading media companies online will be Microsoft and Google -- and at their heart, they are technology companies. I've long believed that the media business is about connecting marketers and to their audiences. And in this day and age, you need to have outstanding technology to do that. Where does that leave original content producers? Well, they need to take a hard look at their business and 1) make sure that they can create an audience with their content -- as well as aggregated content; and 2) trade-off the costs of fielding their own online ad sales force versus outsourcing it to ad networks that are likely better at aggregating and targeting ads to specific audiences.

- Social computing loves scale too. People go where their friends are -- note that MySpace and Facebook grew because of the network effect. With a combined audience, and the potential of leveraging their base of email and instant messaging users, they could overnight create one of the largest socially connected audiences online and become the foundation for an "open" social graph. And as I mentioned above, the acquisition of Yahoo! could well position Microsoft to make a bid for the darling of the moment, Facebook.