To support electric vehicles like the Leaf, which will be available in Houston toward year's end, the city and Reliant are working to create an infrastructure that places charging stations in convenient locations. Reliant will also be developing a system of support, including home assessments, for people installing home charging stations. The stations will be compatible with other plug-in vehicles as well.

Dallas Lawrence is Chair of the Social and Digital Media Practice at Levick Strategic Communications, the nation's top crisis communications firm. He blogs on emerging digital media trends and best practices for social media engagement on Bulletproof Blog. Connect with him on Twitter @dallaslawrence.

Social networks have truly come of age in the last year. No longer viewed as lonely outposts for youthful college slackers, the reach of these platforms has grown exponentially. Today, more than two-thirds of the world's Internet users visit the social networking sites that reel in billions of eyeballs every 24 hours.

Yet, despite the staggering growth of social networking, determining how to monetize social media platforms remains a tough code to crack for even the savviest of companies. As such, identifying new revenue models will be instrumental in kicking off the next cycle of the social networking phenomenon in 2010.

If Anyone Can Do It, Facebook Can

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Facebook, social networking's acknowledged leader, has surpassed every platform on the market today, corralling more than 350 million unique users globally. If any social network is poised to design a winning formula for successful revenue streams in 2010, it's Facebook. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has set an aggressive agenda for the company, publically stating that he expects social networks to become as essential as web browsers and operating systems, and he has set the lofty yet entirely realistic goal of 1 billion users worldwide.

In the less than five years since it expanded beyond scholastic audiences, Facebook has not only grabbed the lion's share of users, it has engaged them like no other platform on the Internet. The average Facebook user visits the site at least once a day and spends an astounding 55 minutes engaging friends and family - statistics that another Zucker (Jeff) would probably kill for over at NBC.

While translating such popularity into dollars and cents isn't easy - especially in an industry whose users have grown accustomed to getting something for nothing - Facebook could potentially provide a monetization template that would revolutionize social networking as we know it.

The Next Level of Advertising Revenue

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Advertising has traditionally provided the simplest means of generating revenue. PricewaterhouseCoopers reported in October that Internet advertising revenues totaled $10.9 billion for the first half of 2009. It's been estimated that Facebook alone took in $435 million of that total. But for a site with nearly half a billion users, a quarter of which spend more time within the network than watching television, these numbers represent just the beginning potential.

First, Facebook needs to admit to itself that it is in the business of selling ads. By better managing its advertising network, intelligently expanding its marketing options, and developing workable social ads that leverage the branding power of friends and connections, Facebook can begin to capture its rightful share of online ad revenues. The final piece is to increase awareness and understanding of Facebook ads among corporate decision makers.

For example, every executive in America today understands the value of purchasing Google ads - and that didn't happen by accident. Google understood that what caused it to dominate online search wasn't going to ultimately position the company as a global corporate powerhouse valued at nearly $200 billion. Google's aggressive marketing, communications, and lobbying shops have worked to ensure every ad buyer, political campaign, marketing executive, and public relations flack knows the value of the service and has direct and easy access to account executives who explain the much worshiped ROI Google ads provide.

Today, Facebook stands on the precipice Google inhabited just before it became a top money-maker. By taking a page from the Google playbook, and aggressively marketing and explaining its power to influence buying decisions, Facebook ads could become as essential to 21st Century marketing as the yellow pages were in the 20th Century.

E-Commerce Stop Sending Customers Away

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The launch of Facebook as a true e-commerce site holds immense potential as a business solution and could forever change the way we shop. Online purchases through the first three quarters of 2009 totaled $98.3 billion according to the Department of Commerce. For the majority of companies selling products online who are also engaged on Facebook, opening Facebook fully to direct e-commerce transactions will dramatically change how businesses advertise and how consumers buy goods online.

Consumers and companies would flock to a Facebook storefront for one simple reason: We do everything else there. Imagine an integrated, one-click solution whereby your friends see your recent purchases (because you were incentivized by the brand to share your information) in their feed and are able to simply point, click, and purchase the same item.

With a few adjustments, companies can make timely offers of birthday gifts for friends, travel arrangements for event items, or the latest music from favorite artists - and make the sale without forcing the user to leave Facebook or put in new login information.

Rather than driving their 350 million users away from the platform to close the deal with retailers and purchase the item on an external platform, Facebook could benefit financially by charging companies a percentage of sales, a fixed rate to have a storefront, or from increased advertising opportunities.

Premium Subscription Options

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Finally, whether users like it or not, Facebook will do itself a long term disservice if it does not consider premium subscription options. Users (whether they are corporations or teenagers) are amenable to paying for even the simplest features and functionality, as evidenced by the success of Facebook gifts.

Nothing good in life is free. It's a stark, mature reality that Facebook (and its users) need to face in 2010. By leveraging economies of scale, Facebook can churn a sizable profit without alienating users. Would you pay one dollar a month to share higher-resolution photos or upload higher-quality or longer videos? Last month, 2.5 billion photos were uploaded to Facebook. Even if only a quarter of the site's active users opted for premium options, this one change would generate more than $1 billion in annual revenues.

Improving advertising, developing an e-commerce platform, and adding subscription services will not only generate the revenue necessary to make the transition from highly adopted to highly profitable, it will open revenue streams as Google did before for the next generation of digital developments.

More business resources from Mashable:

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- Social Media Marketing: How Pepsi Got It Right
- 5 Ways Small Businesses Can Avoid Social Media Panic
- HOW TO: Take Advantage of Social Media in Your E-mail Marketing
- HOW TO: Implement a Social Media Business Strategy
- 18 Online Productivity Tools for Your Business

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, peterspiro

Tags: advertising, business, e-commerce, facebook, MARKETING, monetization, monetizing, money, social media, social networks

At the end of a failed 15-year experiment in giving away its product, the press (newspapers and magazines) has begun to renounce free. It's slow in starting, because of the inertia of this decade and a half, but the New York Times announced recently that it would begin charging for its Website, and others are sure to follow.... But payment for Websites alone won't be enough to change newspapers' and magazines' bottom lines from red to black. Apple's tablet, however, will.

It's time for free to end. Newspapers and magazines made the mistake, in the early days of the Web, of giving away their content for free, in exchange for revenue from Web advertising.

In the past few years, tens of thousands of jobs have been lost, and newspapers and magazines are cutting back and folding all across the U.S.... Yet we need the press: the fourth estate is a necessary check for our government and business. As long as free thrives, the press can't do its job correctly. Free may be good for freeloaders, but it's bad for society. Those who want things to be free forget that there are still people doing the work they get for nothing, and those people need to be paid. As the old saw goes, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

What news agencies can't do is the added-value reporting, the analysis, opinion and in-depth reporting that we want to read to better understand, and that we need for society to thrive. It may be a coincidence, but in recent years, investigative journalism was severely lacking at a time when it was needed the most. Only when people pay for news can we have quality reporting.

To those who protest that "no one will pay for a newspaper on the Web", consider some very successful experiments in paid online content. The Wall Street Journal charges around $100 a year for full access to its Website, and plenty of businesspeople pay for this. This is because the Journal provides the kind of news that is not plentiful; people pay for the quality of the business news and analysis that they can't find elsewhere, as well as its timeliness.

I'm betting that Apple will get it right, as far as features, interface and usability are concerned. It will also be an excellent tool for reading the news. Newspapers and magazines will be able to package their content in multimedia bundles (either as apps or something similar to the iTunes LP) that will be designed for reading on a portable screen; this won't simply be web pages viewed on a smaller screen.

The key to hardware being successful is the software that supports it. One of the main advantages to Apple's tablet, as far as the press is concerned, is the iTunes Store. Since Apple already has this platform to sell and deliver that content, even on a subscription basis, readers will be able to easily buy their favorite newspapers and magazines and get them delivered instantly. They'll be cheaper than the print versions, and they'll be a lot greener too. And the iTunes Store will be able to provide a better selection than readers can find by going to individual Websites. Whether by subscription or by single issue, it'll be extremely simple to buy newspapers and magazines to read on the Apple tablet.

By Senior Editor Kris Smith (@croncast)

Beyond joining the cool kids at the table again, Facebook is ready to begin stepping on the toes of its biggest competitors, Google and Twitter. And they are positioning themselves to put more nails in the MySpace coffin.

Facebook has been rejuvenated by the release of new products, interface improvements and acquisition of FriendFeed. A service much loved by brand name nerds that were able to grok the arcane interface and discussion method.

Facebook is now positioned (with some tweaks) to stunt Twitter's growth, enter real time search as the dominate player and extend its platform much further than Google or Twitter through its API.

Stunting Twitter's Growth

Facebook and its audience are maturing. And this maturation makes it more tolerable for the cool kids to come back to the service. Cool kids in this case being those that were first to jump on board and when the unwashed digital masses began showing up they jumped ship to avoid those newbies getting Dooced for moronic updates.

The audience maturation shouldn't overshadow the growth of Facebook as a more robust platform for messaging. With changes in chat, fan pages, the release of Facebook Lite and snatching up FriendFeed they are acting on a strategy to better control ads that provide a higher ROI for advertisers, removing excess interface components to run a lean set of products like Lite and integrating the core of an API that can power a massive real time search engine.

All of these capitalize on growing an audience by word of mouth and new services build on top of the Facebook platform. With both this combined maturation it will be harder for Twitter to justify the lack of features that it offers as a core service. No payloads of video or audio, chat or multiple user pages for the same account. Today's users expect these features and more like social search.

Real time Social Search

Facebook has done a great job of making recommendations of people to friend and groups to join. They track every bit of activity that you perform on the site, analyze it and then offer up customized recommendations. Add the FriendFeed engine to this and you have an extremely powerful real time social search utility.

Users on Facebook are heading to the front lines, where the cool kids have been for years, to fight the battle against an ever expanding delta of information. The best weapon to use in this battle is created by harnessing the power of each users friend base to narrow incoming river of information . . . to begin with. By using this select group of trusted confidants the delta begins to shallow and offer more valuable focused results.

When users are selecting who they are friends with, they have assigned trust of some varying level in the individual and the type information that they will be sharing. Many times friends or colleagues or members of other hobby groups will share information accordingly to their interests in updates and on their account pages. Real time social search depends on this trust to deliver the most relevant items to a searcher. Facebook has this built in as a core feature.

The I/O of Data, Ads and Opportunity

It is hard to know where to begin. Facebook recently updated their Connect feature which simplified their API somewhat but it still relies on Facebook Markup Language (FBML) a proprietry list of namespaces and commands that interact with Facebook's platform.

I fully expect that Facebook will be releasing a version of their API that conform with the ease of use that existed with FriendFeed's. The FriendFeed API was more akin to that of Twitter than their own. The Twitter API is simple to use, open very powerful.

The release of a simpler API that delivers data in JSON or XML to satisfy developers on different platforms would strengthen all third party tools. It could open Facebook's platform to a greater influx of user generated data to power robust social search and ad inventory. Which is what will keep the ship afloat.

There has been some discussion recently about charging for API usage versus paying developers for using your API. Evidence suggests that the latter is the winning choice to build a strong developer network. Facebook is in a position to drive this type of revenue stream and turn it into the AdSense of the developer world.

Conclusion

Facebook is in a position like no other company to capitalize on paying developers a slice of the advertising pie for including targeted ads in their applications. And if they can be delivered with the content that Facebook is sending developers in a way that allows devs to enhance or choose better, more targeted ads for their applications audience, Facebook would be walking into El Dorado with a smelter the size of the Rhode Island on their back.

For now they have the ability to step on some toes, be it pretty hard. In the coming months and long-term, look for them to begin breaking backs by acquiring properties to freeze out competitors and adding new features for social search.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Facebook Ready To Step On Toes is a post from: TechStartups.com

By Senior Editor Kris Smith

Are you a VIP? Did you pay for access?

These are the questions that will drive the next web, the version beyond 2.0. A trend towards exclusivity is one that appears to be gaining momentum as business models are coming apart at the seams.

The most prominent of these business models, revenue by CPM from advertising dollars, was the first to begin unraveling over last few years. As the economy tanked many sites relying on this revenue stream couldn't afford to keep the lights on.

Those that have survived are looking to premium content to supplement their income or even stay afloat. Premium meaning exclusive pay for content. And as the great Janis Joplin sang, Exclusive's just another word for nothing left to lose.

That's close right?

Don't take my tone the wrong way. I am bullish about the next web and view exclusivity as a viable method to generate revenue that can sustain a business. Many publishers, for years, played the hunch that simply building audience would lead to revenue. Much in the form of advertising dollars and we can see where that has put them. They're ready to earn.

I recently spoke with Tim Bourquin, the founder of New Media Expo. Tim was a leader in creating a community from the diaspora of global podcasters. But as Tim found out, along with others, there was no sustainable revenue stream to produce your own content. If someone wanted to make money in the medium they would need to produce shows for other people.

This is the category that I fall into. For the last 5 years I have been podcasting a free show at the rate on average of 2 episodes a week. We've done over 500 episodes and are the proud owners of an artist page in iTunes. Over that time, all but one month, I paid $200 for the server to host the show. Simple math will put my costs of production over $10,000. And that doesn't include the time to produce the shows, gear or facility (though it was my home).

We were never able to monetize our show with an audience of over 2,500 regular listeners. We looked at advertising, sponsorships and pitching our show for television. None of them were viable as our audience was too small. It was filled with the right people, just not enough of them. The only money that I have made from podcasting came from performing contract work for advertising agencies.

Bourquin is now charging for his content and building a community from and exclusive set listeners that are paying him with their attentions as well. It does change the dynamic as a publisher to have a financial obligation to an audience. In this model, every player has a vested interest in the content having value.

Exclusive purple ropes are a coming necessity for online businesses to grow from the passions of artists, publishers and regular folks. The next web will be filled with independent publishers mixing their content with that of today's mainstream media.

The difference will be that it will be paid for. Think exclusivity through micropayments and the bundling of content like a cable television provider under the umbrella of larger publishers. Both of these models rely on the new web's ability to syndicate and track content effectively.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/4

Post from: TechStartups.com

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NEW YORK A New York finance company that lent celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz $24 million has filed a lawsuit charging that she reneged on the deal.

Manhattan-based Art Capital Group says Leibovitz borrowed the money last year because she was in dire financial straits due to unpaid bills, mortgage payments and tax liens.

The breach of contract lawsuit, filed Wednesday in Manhattan state Supreme Court, says that in return Leibovitz granted Art Capital the right to sell all of her photographs, plus her homes in Manhattan and upstate New York.

The lawsuit says Leibovitz and her associates are now trying to ignore their obligations.

A spokesman for Leibovitz denies the allegations.

Matthew Hiltzik says the suit is part of Art Capital's "continued harassment."

Are we finally ready to embrace paying for APIs? It seems so, as long as the value is there for developers.

Spinvox announced they've signed up 600 developers in five months. The API (our Spinvox API profile) brings the power of voice transcription to an application.

And developers are apparently willing to pay for that power. Spinvox charges 35 cents to create text from a half-minute message.

Using a computer to convert speech to text has been long promised, but poorly executed over the years. Spinvox uses a combination of methods, including sometimes falling back on humans to do the work.

There is a real cost to the company to provide the service, but there's also an undeniable value to its output. Yet there are worries that Spinvox has grown too fast after a deal to serve Telefonica's 125 million customers in Latin America. The company may be paying staff with stock, which leaves questions for developers building a business on top of Spinvox.

This is all fuel to an argument for Spinvox charging for its service. If enough developers payand they seem to be open to itthe service should remain reliable. The same cannot always be said for those APIs without a clear revenue stream, as we've seen recently with Google's Mashup Editor and Microsoft's PopFly mashup tool.

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