A few weeks ago, Boston Innovation released an infographic called Social Media is NOT as Popular as You Think.  The point of the article is to remind people not to get lost in the bubble of thinking everyone in the country is a Facebook & Twitter expert.  This is very true.  If you’re a technical person, it’s important to remember that most people are not you.  If you run a business and use social media, it’s important to remember that you are probably not your customer.

While it’s important to keep that in mind, I couldn’t help but laugh when I read the article’s assertion that ONLY 52% of Americans have a profile on a social media site; that ONLY 30% of companies use Facebook.

ONLY?

Facebook is 7 years old.  Twitter is 5.  Can you think of any other technology in human history that has been adopted so quickly?

It took almost 90 years for the telephone to go from the labs of Antonio Meucci to having a 30% market penetration in households. [1]

Social media is exploding, and it’s application to personal relationships, business processes, and the intersection of the two is just barely beginning to be understood.  Those who keep their pulse on this intersection, and pay attention to how to effectively leverage social media to understand and engage with consumers authentically have a big pay day ahead of them.

[1] http://www.hamill.co.uk/pdfs/dwompa__.pdf

Wondering what our name means?

When you look at website traffic, visitors can be placed into one of three segments:

1. People that convert — These are the people that buy your stuff, sign up for your service.  You know who they are.  The two of you engaged in a transaction.  Everyone is happy.
2. People that bounce — Someone came to the site by accident and left immediately.  These people will probably never be your customers.
3. Everybody else

When you look at “everybody else”, we can reasonably assume there is a spectrum of interest across them.  At one end, you have people that clicked around, read a little bit, and decided “this is not for me.  I am not interested.”

At the other end of the spectrum, you have people that are very interested.  They are almost sold on your product, except perhaps for one more question or bit of research they want to do.  We all know these people.  We’ve seen them operate.  These are the people that paste links to Twitter and Facebook or send emails asking their friends for advice.  At FourthSegment, we call these people Fencers.  They are the 4th segment of web traffic.

The goal of FourthSegment is to provide a way for businesses to learn about this 4th segment and answer the following questions:

• Who are they?
• What are they thinking about our product?
• What are their friends saying about our product?
• What are they really in the market for?
• Do they understand our messaging?
• How do our products stack up to our competitors?

If you’re interested in FourthSegment, contact us, or ask your friends what they think about us.

When designing a product that sits atop the social communication layer, it’s tempting to “pull an AddThis” and support every network.  Facebook & Twitter are obvious players, but with incremental effort an application could easily support LinkedIn, Quora, MySpace, Orkut, Beebo, Reddit, QQ, Tumblr, Buzz, and so on….

You should be careful though.  While “pulling an AddThis” is fine if you are AddThis, recent research suggests it probably won’t help you all that much.

The Social Habit 2011 by Edison Research

This slideshow from Edison Research — specifically slide 13 — indicates that while 51% of Americans over the age of 12 use Facebook, only 1/3 of that (17%) use MySpace, and only 8% use Twitter.

When it comes to designing on top of the social communication layer, Facebook is King, and everything you do should be optimized for that experience first.

Last Sunday, Jonathan saw Brad Feld retweet this:

It didn’t take us long to respond.  Glue is a 2 day technology conference.

Glue is about all of the bits and pieces, APIs and meta-data, standards and connectors that will help us to glue together the varying applications of a post-cloud world. If you’re a developer, architect, designer or implementer that’s living in this world, or just new to exploring it, Gluecon is the place for you.

To some people, it may seem odd that FourthSegment — a company that is on the surface all about social media and e-commerce — is spending time at a conference that deals with web infrastructure and APIs. But the issues we deal with under the covers at FourthSegment put the Gluecon topics right in our wheelhouse.

Social media is very much a part of the next generation of web infrastructure.  There is a world of technology hidden under the facade of tweets and Facebook posts that appear so easily in our streams and feeds. To be a real player in this new world, companies in the ‘social media’ space need to go beyond simply reading and writing statues from and to Facebook & Twitter.  They are going to need to take advantage of — and innovate in — the latest technology in fields like:

• graph databases for understanding relationships
• high volume real time event storage and processing
• open APIs for allowing others to innovate on their technology

Now that the problems of large scale social network messaging have been virtually solved, our next challenge as technologists is to make social media more useful.  There are lots of people building on top of social media, but I think at its core the idea of making social media more useful can be distilled down to a simple idea: helping people find what they need, whatever it may be.

At times, this tenant can be at odds with itself.  For example, an advertiser getting what they want might mean finding out every webpage a consumer visits; while a consumer getting what they want might mean being able to browse the web without such privacy violations.  In both cases, however, the idea of sharing the right information at the right time to allow all parties to find what they need in an efficient manner is the key.

Finding a middle ground in this world is going to be the great challenge of the next five years on the internet.

FourthSegment is working to help build this world.  And we’re wicked psyched about it.

A couple days ago, we released our bookmarklet.  You should go use it.

“What’s a bookmarklet?” you say?  A bookmarklet looks like a plain old bookmark in your browser, but when you click it, instead of taking you to a page, it does special things.

Bookmarklets are used by companies like Instapaper, Bnter, Read It Later & Let’s Freckle to help people like you use the internet better.

So what does our bookmarklet do?  Well, FourthSegment is all about helping businesses gain consumer insights and discover leads via social media.  A website will (eventually) put our widget on their pages.  You’ll click it, ask a question, and get responses from your friends on social networks.

One day we thought to ourselves: “This is pretty neat.  But why should the ability to quickly ask a question across all your social networks w/ a short URL be limited to specific websites?”

So we took a few hours to adapt our widget technology into a bookmarklet.  The bookmarklet will sit in your bookmarks bar like any other bookmark.  It will always be there, no matter what page you go to.  It doesn’t track what sites you visit.  It sits there dormant until you click it.

Let’s say you’re browsing the net and you come across a page that you want to ask a question about.  As an example, lets say you want to know what people think of this Threadless t-shirt.  With the bookmarklet, it’s easy.  You just click the bookmarklet.  A popup window will appear.  You type in a question, select which social networks to share on, click ‘Ask!’, and you’re done.

If you have any questions or feedback, let us know!

Word is officially out: We’ll be demoing at Boulder Beta 3.0!

BoulderBeta 3.0 – 8 demos to knock your socks off!

We’re back just in time for a summer edition of BoulderBeta, and we can’t wait to show you the companies our great community has to offer this time around…

In case you’ve somehow missed the first two, BoulderBeta is a fantastic event put on by Tim Falls — take eight parts local companies, one part trade-show atmosphere, two parts live demos, shake well in a cocktail mixer, and you’ve got BoulderBeta.

BoulderBeta 3.0 will be at Absinthe House on June 14th. Register for the event here, and drop by our booth to see what we’ve got brewing at FourthSegment.

Hi,

I’m Ryan Angilly, and I, along with my business partner Jonathan Woodard, want to welcome you to the blog for our new company, FourthSegment.

Back in November, Jonathan and I started to ask ourselves: What’s the next big thing?  What’s coming down the pipe that is going to change the way people use the internet?  Over the next several months, several less-than-stellar ideas, and 2 or 3 verbal punches in the mouth from people we respect immensely, the idea for FourthSegment emerged.

The idea itself didn’t strike us like a bolt of lightening.  What started off as a little add-on feature to a previous idea slowly meandered from one thing to another, and the next thing we knew we were staring a monster in the face.

If you want to get a peek at what we’re getting ourselves into, it’s no secret.  Just check out our homepage at fourthsegment.com.

Jonathan and I wanted to take a minute to set the tone for this blog.  This blog is about the company we are starting.  In true Tumblr fashion, it will be a mix of things.  We will use this blog to:

1. Update you on the progress of the product
2. Write original content about the evolution of our internet startup from an entrepreneurial point of view
3. Share content that we find & think is relevant to the space — in this case social media, e-commerce, sharing and the lazyweb
4. Produce interesting material on what we find in our data.  Think OkCupid’s tech blog, but for how businesses and people interact at the intersection of e-commerce, social media, design and marketing

We are really excited for what’s coming.  Talk to you soon!

-Ryan & Jonathan