UGC Viral Loop And Social Networks

I just Googled ‘ugc viral loop’ - the first result was this a) new, and b) not especially insightful article - so I figured the topic warranted a post . . .

This post is about a few things: The viral loop of user generated content - ugc, where this fits into the larger virality constellation and the importance of ugc, and seo - its companion, in the user acquisition picture for up and coming social networks outside of the big two.

The three kinds of virality:
1. Straight up word of mouth virality - no additional sharing, invite, embed, or bookmarking mechanism needed - if an article is good enough, or a video funny enough - your friend will drop the link in an email to you - and you’ll do the same for someone else. The takeaway here is great product/content - word of mouth is built in.

2. Engineered virality - this starts with the base case of a generic social network site where the value to any one user goes up with each friend invited, but these days the most interesting developments are happening in Facebook apps on the F8 platform where the metrics-focused discipline from the world of conversion to click/form submission/purchase is being applied to optimizing the user actions of ‘invite 20 friends’ et cetera.

3. UGC viral loop - while Facebook app user-growth rocketship trajectories garner the bulk of conversation, both sycophantic and skeptical - the established, inexorable virtuous cycle of user generated content feeding seo footprint is building sustainable businesses with interesting scale and growth stories. One user contributes a first piece of content, that content gets indexed, shows up on a search results page and brings in a second user organically.

Music social networks provide a great example of the under-appreciated power of ugc and seo compared to F8 as a user acquisition method. Here is the Compete.com traffic comparison for iLike, a launch partner and poster child for Facebook Platform, and iMeem, a social music site with very strong seo and playlist widget stories - which one looks easier to sell ads on?

L'Hydroptere - Extreme Sailing

Sailing - it's not all boat shoes, sundowners and bad life decisions, sometimes it's crazy French guys - witness L'Hydroptere - 87.5 km/h:

Cellfire: Avoiding Local Fragmentation

Chris posted yesterday about some local online lessons learned, which reminded me of local/coupon company that is finding at least a little momentum. Cellfire delivers coupons to for local stores over your cell phone, and have been plugging away for a few years now. As of summer 2008, they are up to around 30 employees and growing. Cellfire has gotten around two of the principal problems in the local online space - getting to a large inventory, and broad distribution, basically by avoiding them - their coupon inventory is all national chains, and their distribution is all from getting into the fairly limited service stack on wireless carriers. To a great extent, Cellfire has chosen to limit down the scope of their business, but they have definitely avoided intractable nationwide local market fragmentation.

Piecing It Together

Late Friday afternoon in Seattle, we had a glass or two of wine in the office - and the next thing I remember is waking up at 4am in Nevada - on Monday. I'm still trying to piece it all together with the help of a cryptic set of polaroids :)

VC Strategy: Get The Inside Track On A Recap

Because it's Friday afternoon, I was thinking about Jobster's $7M recap news from last month - of course, existing investors participated. Then I free associated Andy's Kefta post series (which is awesome). It might work out pretty well for a seed investor to bring in a large subsequent round from a strategic and then pump more cash into a recap if you were able to cram it down enough. Even if the prior money wasn't spent in the most efficient way possible, there's certainly going to be some amount of value that was created to buy at a strong discount.

Conspiracy? BFeld, MLund, Bluehat Cold & Dark

Lately, three of my favorite bloggers have been cold & dark: Brad Feld, Morten Lund, and Eli from Bluehatseo - I want to believe that they are all heads down conspiring on some super secret deal together.

In reality, Feldologists (you know, like Kremlinologists) know there are two options: it's either off-the-grid week, or there will be imminent, interesting news. Morten Lund news is the sale of Zyb to Vodaphone today - although no doubt there are all kinds of crazy ideas/deals/news in the pipeline. Bluehatseo tends to humorously manipulate the readership for several reasons, like selling interesting webmaster tools.

Brightqube: Stunning UI + $650K

A little fundraising news from Brightqube yesterday - the video - in addition to having awesome intro music shows how cool the brightqube UI is - coincidentally, I got a demo of the Brightqube UI a couple of days ago and found it very compelling. Right now they are an affiliate pass through for photo agencies that own actual photo inventory, but look for Brightqube to use this as a stepping stone to building their own, proprietary stock photo inventory over time.