Panel: The Evolution of Social

Evolution of Social Panelists

Moderator:

Alex Taussig, Principal, Highland Capital Partners

Panelists:

Steve Cheney, Head of Business Development, GroupMe

Julie Farago, Engineering Manager, Google

Brett Martin, Co-Founder & CEO, Sonar

Brad Mauney, Sr. Product Manager - Search & Social Graph, Linked In

Steve Spurgat, Founder/CEO, VYou

Ari Shahdadi, General Counsel and Assisant Secretary, Tumblr

Cyberposium Panel Audience

Topics from this morning's conversation included:

• Verified Identity - how do advertisers think about this?  When is anonymity good?  Tension between quick signup / less info vs. longer signup / more info
• Facebook - how has facebook pushed users beyond their users beyond their comfort level?  
• Privacy - Look under the rocks and see what's there - 10 years ago it would have been crazy to enter your credit card number on the internet.
• Gaining Traction for Small Networks - You need to iterate.  Read Eric Ries' The Lean Startup.
• Monetization - "Cash rules everything around me".  How much is a "like" worth?  What is the lifetime value of a "like"?  EventBrite did a great study on the value of a "share" and tying sharing a post to driving a ticket sale.
• Post-PC World - More connections with strangers - currently leveraging existing communities, but in the future we'll be creating new communities.  Contrarian view: when all you have is a screen, you only want to see the three most relevant updates, and you want to be able to get cross-platform data to get relevancy, which is based on your existing communities.  LinkedIn, for example, has an app that overlays information with your social network to tell you what the most important topics are for you to be reading that day

Want to continue the conversation?  Tweet @cyberposium and the panelists:
@stevecheney, @ataussig, @brett1211, @bradmauney, @spurgat, @arishahdadi