Ex MySpacers Moving On: the New Cutting Edge of Social Media?

Once upon a time, MySpace was the most revolutionary thing on the social web (that most people knew about). These days, it’s passé. But several of its former executives are still actively pondering how they can revolutionize social interaction on the Internet—and they’re doing it through a new startup, Gravity.

Led by former MySpacer (then-COO) Amit Kapur, (then-SVP) Steve Pearman and (then-SVP) Jim Benedetto, the company is rethinking forums and groups, online social meetingplaces that haven’t evolved a whole lot since they began. Gravity is bringing forums and groups into the 21st century—and that’s just one of the things they’re working on.

They’ve also looked at the performance indicators and metrics they’re most interested in tracking on these new social meetingplaces—and offering those analytics for any site that hosts conversations (like Twitter, Google Wave, FriendFeed, etc.), free to third parties. Oh, and they’re ready to take all the information they gather about users to great an interest graph, following their conversations to indicate what they’re most passionate about.

Hm. We’ll come back to that one.

The Gravity forums, according to TechCrunch, will be intuitive to anyone familiar with forums, “But their goal is to bring some more recent thinking on data architecture and user interface to the table.” That includes tools that are similar to other popular social sites. Gravity calls their product “conversation engines,” and they’ll be including familiar ways to follow conversations, share information and advertise that you like it, as well as participation incentives. The forums will be based around interests and topics (like most forums) and will be available on the Gravity website—or other websites, through widgets and APIs.

The analytics, Gravity Insight, is even more useful, tracking conversations, posts and topics. It also tracks what posts are most viewed, what threads and users are most active, and the interest areas of the posts. They’ll provide this service free for third parties—to help better collect data for their interest graph.

The Interest Graph is the “religion of the Gravity service.” It examines not only what topics you follow and talk about the most, but the language you use about those topics. It tracks your interest over time (’interest decay’).

All that leads to a interest-based profile of you, which can make it better at bringing you content (and friends?) you’d like. (Kind of like StumbleUpon, I guess, except that it just figures out what you like, or when you’re over your Hannah Montana phase.) I can’t decide whether that’s creepy or cool. (The service, not liking Hannah Montana. Because if you’re over about 20, that’s straight up creepy.)

Gravity is taking sign ups for the private beta at their website now.

What do you think? What is most interesting about these features to you? Which would you most like to try out?

Is This Recession Over Yet?

We appear to be caught in a rut as of late. No one wants to make a definitive statement as to whether or not the recession / slow down / depression / aberration or whatever we call this thing is over or not. Depending on who you talk to we can either be on the edge of a recovery or the edge of a cliff. Is there a way to tell if this dark economic time is seeing some light at the end of the tunnel?

We at Marketing Pilgrim are not analysts and we don’t claim to be. What we can do, however, is tell you about reports that are out there that can provide some insight or at least help us think differently. As marketers we tend to land on the hopeful / optimistic side of news because we want people to buy our stuff, right? Well, if the folks at Millward Brown Optimor which is owned by WPP are right with their BrandZ Portfolio study then there may be indications that at least the strongest of the strong, brandwise, are showing signs of life.

The analysis shows the top 100 brands, which Millward Brown refers to as the BrandZ Portfolio and includes many technology companies like Apple, Vodafone, Microsoft, Nokia, BlackBerry, Intel and others, are recovering from the recession at a faster pace than the market. As the chart above shows, the most valuable global brands have been outperforming the S&P 500 for a number of years now but show a much faster recovery from the recession than the market in recent months.

As noted by Robin Wauters of TechCrunch it’s a relief of sorts to at least see both of the performance indicators showing movement in the positive direction.

So why would big brands show a quicker recovery than the S&P as a whole? Well, who really knows? While this data is interesting it may be a stretch to make this kind of comparison since the ranking of the Top Brands is something that needed to be ‘crafted’. Here is some of the criteria.

The ranking is calculated using a methodology called “Economic Use”, taking into account the role that brands play in purchase decisions and identifying what proportion of the business value can be attributed purely to the brand. Besides inputs from the BrandZ study, the ranking uses financial data from Bloomberg and market and product data from Datamonitor. The ranking takes into account regional variations since even for truly global brands measures of brand contribution might differ substantially across countries.

So we need your thoughts again Pilgrims. Putting aside a larger worldview for a minute what is happening in your neck of the woods? Are you seeing signs of recovery or signs of ‘more of the same’? While it’s interesting to look at studies like this what is really happening at the street level. I see some more activity but I think the activity is more around preparing to spend more at some point in the future rather than getting back into the game right now. What about you?