And in the Beginning there was Porn, In the End we ALL Profited?

by | Oct 3, 2010 | Andrew Conru, Christopher Mallick, eCommerce, Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, Serial Entrepreneur, Social Influencers, Social Media, Steven Chen

Middlemen and The Social Network, 2 Movies, 2 Eras Intertwined

 

Two movies have recently come to theaters, The Social Network and Middlemen. Both films depict, with a slight bit of Hollywood embellishments the rise, fall, and rise again of two businesses: internet porn and social networking.

For acting and overall entertainment, I would have to give my vote to “The Social Network”. However, for the importance of making the internet profitable for all “Christopher Mallick”, portrayed by Luke Wilson in the Movie Middle Men, connected the two most important dots in making the internet a profitable medium, ecommerce. He was one of the first innovators to combine engaging content and commerce on the internet. This single act, of making content profitable, gave birth not only to the world of online pornography, but more importantly it acted as a catalyst for the proliferation of internet technologies such as Affiliate Networks, Online Advertising, Video Chat, Virtual Worlds, Digital Rights Management, Content Management, Cascade Billing, Mobile Billing, Mobile Content Delivery, and yes even Social Networks.

Do I believe that porn created or began many of these technologies that later became commercialized? Actually I do, because once mainstream companies commercialized on their success, they had a much broader appeal to a global audience, investors, and media outlets. This adult to mainstream paradigm shift has made the internet not only profitable, but socially acceptable. I know this for a fact when I say Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook was not the creator of social media, just as Steven Chen, co-founder of YouTube, did not create video sharing. Their profitable, but not social accepted predecessors could be tracked back to adult innovators such as Andrew Conru, Friend Finder 1997, and Co-Founders Rick Latonia and Mark Womack, Consumption Junction in 1999. Thus from the loins of adult media, mainstream has flourished.

Today, over 30% of the US population is connected through social media sites such as FaceBook, Twitter, YouTube, with currently thousands of social networks to choose from, with dozens surfacing daily. So take some time and give thanks or curse the adult industry and its supporting internet culture for its influence and catalyst that have exponentially grew internet and electronic commerce to what we know today.

In the end, social media, built on a somewhat seedy past of Middlemen, has given a new gold rush to electronic media. Capitalistically, social media has opened a free flow of ideas into commercial ventures that redefines how we as a global civilization engage and interact. Moralistically, our definition of decency as the conforming to the standards of today’s newly socialized culture is subjective at best. Thus, our personal views have now become fluid and malleable based upon the external influences  social consensus, pop culture trends, and even mainstream media.

IBM’s End Game, Making Better Decisions in-Real Time, but what about forecasting future events?

by | Oct 1, 2010 | Brand Strategy, Fortune 500, Internet Marketing, Media Convergence, Social Media, Social Mobilization

Can Social Listening Make Consumer Behavior Predictive?


Over the past few years, I have been using a hodgepodge of analytic tools in to monitor, engage, and in some cases change the course of consumer behavior through a variety of engagement strategies. Given that my first few ventures included running a few thousand dating, gaming sites, and entertainment websites, I thought that among my peers what I was doing was common place. I was recently invited to speak at Goizueta Business, Emory University’s MBA program, and had the unique opportunity to interact with both business leaders and the brands that they represented. As part of my introduction, Dr. Benn Konsynski (former Yahoo and Netscape adviser), played the following video, which was more of an eduction my me than the attendees for my presentation.

In the above video, IBM is using data grouping and analysis in real time to make better decisions.



In my experience real time data is a small part of a much larger picture. Yet, what if you could  process real time data of not only current events, but project forward that data into a fairly accurate forecast. Now let's take this one step further, if you understand the yin and yang, the cause and effect that relates to changing behavior patterns, and you selectively engaged those which influence the mass opinion, could you change the attitudes, behaviors, and perception of those which influence others? If you captured the sentiment of those socially influencing others, would you actually cause a ripple effect in which human behavior of those following be altered to a probable outcome? My name is John Cataldi, and I am an entrepreneur.