Category — facebook

Just as marketers are finally figuring out what the heck facebook is and why they should be embracing the platform as a way of reaching & engaging their customers and potential customers, there is a new trend developing that may impact facebook and other social mediums…

Enter social aggregators.

Aggregators won’t replace facebook - but much like RSS feeds have supplemented users visting websites directly, social aggregator services could mean marketers looking to reach and engage people through social media sites like facebook will find a smaller direct audience to engage with.

I’ve signed up with socialthing and others are raving about feedfriend. Both do about the same thing - they take updates from all your social media sites like flickr, facebook, twitter, yelp, linkedin and stream them as one interface in something called a “lifestream.”

The idea is great - instead of checking for updates on multiple sites, you can get them all at once - much like how i use Netvibes or Protopage to aggregate all my RSS feeds.

Personally I get everything I need from Netvibes. 

I can add twitter or facebook status updates to Netvibes… and i don’t really care for the extra features social aggregators include such as comments on the different feeds. When I also consider the fact that most of my friends aren’t as geeked out as I am on ‘web 2.0′, it makes even less sense. Just getting my friends on facebook was a monumental task.

Having said that, the mobile interface for Socialthing is a thing of beauty.

They also have an optimized interface for the iphone which makes checking out lifestreams on the go a pleasant experience.

I have a hard enough time keeping up with my RSS feeds (270 currently) - I’m not sure I have enough time (or care enough) to follow the lifestream of every person i know. Having said that, it could be really useful if you are stalking following a few choice people…

How can marketers get in on this?

Websites got around a similar issue when RSS feeds became popular by not including all the content in the feed - so users who liked the lead content were driven back to the site… where sponsored ads could be displayed in all their glory.

One suggestion - build your own branded social aggregator…. and include your own relevant content as one of the feeds.

I could see this working really well for Automotive, Financial, Pharma, Retail… well pretty much any brand looking to participate in & influence a person’s lifestream.

A few months ago I blogged about the impact of facebook on traditional print media. 

Many promoters had stopped printing flyers and started leveraging the power of the social graph available through facebook in order to reach and promote their events.

As reported by Yahoo last week, Yahoo is poised for hundreds of layoffs this week as advertising revenue has dropped significantly. 

Social Media sites have become everything Yahoo used to be - but simpler.  And easier. And more open.

Marketers have followed consumers to popular social media sites such as Facebook and MySpace. It would appear that facebook has moved on from eating the print shop’s lunch to eating the lunch of Web 1.0 sites.

Who’s next?

As reported in mocoNews.net, Nokia is in talks with facebook to both port their platform to Nokia and to potentially buy a share. With around 40% of the world hand set market, Nokia could significantly increase facebook’s exposure in Europe.

This proves that just because you build it, it doesn’t mean they will come.

Partnering with facebook to get their mobile platform on every Nokia device could mean their own mobile social network Mosh will never make it out of beta as it has not been successful in capturing significant mind share. This follows another mobile social networking flop from 2007 - the Sprite yellow yard.

Looking at the failure of mobile-centric social networks just re-enforces my point of view that mobile can’t be treated as a stand-alone channel. It’s a natural extension of interactive (web & email) and works best when supported by a multi-channel marketing plan.

This will almost certainly remain true until the mobile web catches up to the “desktop” web in terms of consumer usage and adoption.

Here are the latest stats from facebook as noted from last week’s Toronto breakfast on their enhanced marketing platform:

1. 1 in 4 Canadians (or 8 million) are now active users. There are 57 million active users worldwide
2. 65,000 new users in Canada added each day on average
3. 12 billion page views on facebook in Canada every month
4. Average Canadian views 62 pages on facebook on each visit
5. 65% of Canadians go to the site at least once a day - compared to 54% in the rest of the world

Other interesting tid bits…

1. It took the ilike application 4 days to get 1 million users to install their application on facebook. This demonstrates the power and reach of building an application that is relevant to users
2. There are now over 80 applications with at least 1 million users
3. Applications are not advertised - people find out about them through the mini-feed

Currently facebook insights (their marketing dashboard page), beacon, pages, and social ads are not supported on their mobile platform. Look for updates to the mobile platform to incorporate these new services in 2008.

The biggest complaint I had about the facebook Ad / flyer program was the inability to target specific user attributes beyond their subscribed network.  Metrics were weak and performance was well below industry standard for banner ads.

Enter Social Ads. Launched last month, marketers can now target users very specifically - or on pretty much any attribute found in their profile.  Expect clickthrough rates to improve.

Social Ads are also a bit controversial. Your social actions are now fair game.  Now when you create a facebook beacon on blockbuster for example, facebook could serve an Ad that matches your social action. The Ad is published in your newsfeed and therefore will be visible to your entire social network of friends, family, and vague acquaintances.

What makes this controversial is that you now appear to be an advocate or  spokesperson for the brand, product, or service that appears in your newsfeed.

Call it the celebrity effect.

Just as people are influenced by their favorite sports hero or movie actor, facebook assumes that you have your own celebrity status within your social network. It’s like adding spam to word of mouth marketing. I can’t imagine that tasting very good.  This type of non-endorsed sponsorship is bound to turn some facebook users concerned about privacy into badvocates.   

Now here’s a nifty idea - pay your facebook celebrities.  

Treat users like the celebrities that they are within their social network and pay them a nominal fee each time a social ad is served in their newsfeed. It would be just like adding Google ad sense to your blog or website. Its only made Google a few billion dollars - so that model is already proven.

Here’s another nifty idea - instead of paying cash, reward users with points.

Reward facebook users with points for being advocates and spokespeople and allow them to redeem for merchandise from sponsors…or for invitations to special events… or special applications or status within facebook. Or how about redeeming those points for travel? Who needs Air Miles now! 

If the loyalty program is designed correctly, facebook could have the most powerful loyalty program in the world overnight.

I would be an advocate of that program.

A month ago I presented an overview of social networking as a marketing platform to a Canadian Bank as way for them to reach different customers differently. 

In Canada that conversation will almost always become a conversation about facebook….which it was.

Last week I was invited to attend a morning presentation in downtown Toronto for an overview of facebook’s improved marketing platform.  Suddenly 50% of my last presentation was out of date.  It’s a good thing I took notes… notes that I will share with you this week.

If you’ve been underwelmed at the flexibility, reporting, and performance of facebook ads (flyers) and sponsored groups, I’ve got great news for you - four new marketing tools from facebook look promising with new relevance, insight, and flexibility unseen before in a social networking site.      

Like the facebook newsfeed when it launched a year ago, the new beacon product has generated a lot of discussion in the blogsphere and in the general media over the past few weeks over it’s interpretation of consumer privacy. 

Newsfeed is the most important tool on facebook for creating and maintaining the social graph. Beacon has the potential to have a greater impact. With beacon, you will now know what your friends are up to…outside of facebook.

It works like this - you go to your favorite website not named facebook and do something. That something can now get posted to your facebook newsfeed. For example, if you were to post an item on ebay for auction, that action and item with a link back to ebay will appear in your newsfeed. Now your entire social network knows you have an item posted on ebay.  

There’s only been one problem.

facebook made this “feature” opt-out.  Having an opt-out policy is marketing code for “we can SPAM you or what you do until you tell us to stop.” Since you actually asked for it, you are in fact sending a steady diet of facebook bacn to your facebook social network.  

Since most of us have short attention spans and rarely read or notice opt-out clauses, you end up broadcasting things you probably didn’t want broadcasted - like when your mother notices that you are selling last year’s Christmas present on ebay. Ooops.  Should we call that re-gifting 2.0? I’ll leave that one alone.

This past Friday, facebook updated the rules around beacon to “opt-in” - meaning you need to click to give facebook permission to publish that action in your newsfeed. This change aligns beacon with accepted practices employed today in other channels such as email.  

Marketers managing consumer brands take note - it’s super easy to add beacons to your existing web properties. It’s as easy as adding three lines of code to enable your product or service to be promoted virally through the social graph on facebook.  Want more info? Do a google search or start here.

facebook Social ads go a step further.   That will be the topic of my next article.

The term “creeping” is fondly used to describe friends in your social network (like facebook) who don’t actually communicate directly with you, but who know everything about you.  

This is because they have been checking out your profile page, looking at your last set of vacation pictures, comparing their social calendar with your event page and looking at the newest applications you’ve installed on your profile. They’re also creeping your friend list and seeing what others are saying about you. Your current “status” is also super helpful - espeically now that you’ve linked it with your Twitter account.

The future of social networking, even the future of marketing is also looking creepy thanks to new tools and applications that extend interactions beyond your desktop to your mobile device through location based services (LBS).

Leveraging device GPS or using radiolocation and trilateration based on signal strength from local cell towers, marketers face the real possibility of delivering just in time messaging to influence consumer behavior as they prance from location to location.

Before LBS can go mainstream in Canada, there are three barriers that have to be overcome:

1. Not many devices come with built-in GPS – although my fancy Blackberry 8800 has it..as does all their new devices (Curve and Pearl included)
2. Carriers charges to access cell-tower data for LBS is cost-prohibitive for any marketer looking to go beyond GPS
3. Data-plans in Canada for consumers need to be fixed and affordable across ALL carriers

It’s also naïve to think that consumers are going to rush to sign-up for location based services on their mobile device when it does become feasible on a large scale. Today’s consumer has been trained to ignore marketing messages. They simply don’t trust the brands….or the people marketing the brands.

They trust their friends and family though.

Imagine you just discovered a little restaurant with the best wine list ever. Like tagging a website in delicious, you can tag or bookmark the location on your mobile device. The GPS coordinates are then saved. When friends in your network come within a prescribed radius of that restaurant, they will get a text messaging saying “Great wine list at blah blah blah restaurant, and you should like totally go there right now. I mean NOW.” Location based messaging is now a trusted exchange that leverages the social graph of your existing social network. Now that’s got potential.

If you’re already on facebook, check out these location based applications:

1. Friends GPS
2. Brightkite
3. Local updates

If you’re not on facebook (or even if you are), be sure to check out this award winning application from Alcatel called Geopepper. I’ve used the GPS and non-GPS enabled version with some success with friends in my network already.  

Many of the applications / tools I’ve seen that leverage LBS also come with a feature that allows people to manually input their location – so even if they aren’t GPS enabled, they can get messaging specific to their location.

The future of social networking may be creepy, but that’s alright with me.

Last week Google threw a big party after launching their own developer social networking platform called OpenSocial which effectively competes with facebook’s own API developer platform.

Being the nice company that they are, they also invited all other platforms (including facebook) to join them. Many of them (i.e. LinkedIn, Bebo, MySpace, Plaxo, Hi5, Flixster, Salesforce.com) have already excepted the invitation.

This is significant news that is bound to make the social networking space much more interesting in the coming months as developers can now create one application (or widget) and have the ability to easily port them across multiple platforms.  

Before declaring the end of facebook, consider the following:  

1) Portability of applications across multiple sites is a super idea - but what about portability of identities? People would be far more likely to check out (or check back in) to LinkedIn, Friendster, Myspace and other sites if they had one login / identify that worked across the network of sites.  Do the 50 million facebook users really care that applications are now cross-site compatible? Ah no…

2) Although it’s neat that multiple social networking sites have signed up, individual site policies may heavily impact a developer’s ability to be creative and make money. Some (like LinkedIn), will require approval of the application first and then charge the developer a toll or % or revenue. Unlike facebook which is totally open and toll free, developers (and marketers) may find that a common API does not necessarily equal common or consistent access to the network of sites.  Free and open will always trump mostly free and mostly open.

3) Building portable applications will not make Google’s Orkut more popular in English speaking countries or make Canadians switch to MySpace.  Applications can add to the social graph, but they can’t build or enhance what isn’t there. People joined facebook because all their friends were joining. They stayed on facebook because the user experience is simple for all to interact with.  Applications enriched the experience, but it’s not the core reason why 64% of Canadians return to their facebook profile at least once a day for an average of 32 minutes at a time. Facebook is about the community - not whether or not the applications are portable to other platforms.

To actually encourage mass migration from facebook to other platforms, OpenSocial needs to enable a true open social platform where a single user profile and its corresponding social graph can be accessed from anywhere. That’s a party I will RSVP to in a second.

I was catching up on my RSS feeds tonight and came across an update from a live blogging event, where it was announced that in addition to the fantastic iphone specific site, facebook has now released an application for BlackBerry. The application goes beyond the browsing experience and leverage’s the RIM platform. If you have neither an iphone nor BlackBerry (shame on you), you can still have a great mobile browse experience by going to m.facebook.com on your mobile device.

I went fishing for more information on this announcement and came across several announcements of pending platform improvements. Get ready for this - the three top items I’ve blogged about here and elsewhere are coming soon!

1) Newsfeed for your groups! You’ll be able to get content updates on your groups without having to visit them individually. This also likely means we’ll be able to send such updates as an RSS feed to our newsreaders - much like what the current netvibes module does today for your main profile page. I predict group participation and growth to explode as a result of this. 

2) Organize your friends (and colleagues)! Soon you’ll be able to categorize your friends and therefore have more control over what they see and how they interact with you. For those of us who have wished for a separation between personal and professional contacts, this is it. I know a few people who actually have two facebook profiles - one for their friends, and one for their professional network. This move will make it easier for people leverage the social graph for work and play.

3) Mobile platform - facebook Platform for Mobile is here allowing developers to extend their applications to work on mobile phones and devices as well.  I can hardly wait to see how developers and marketers will extend their applications to mobile.

Additionally, multi-language support is coming - which should allow the platform to finally catch on in non-English speaking countries.

Today was also an announcement that Microsoft has invested $240 million in facebook at a valuation of $15 billion (or 2% stake). This extends their existing relationship and  gives Microsoft the rights to sell ads on the facebook platform.  I wonder if they’ll extend the ad serving platform to the Mobile platform too….now that will be interesting!

Will this also give Microsoft the first right to buy facebook next year? Speculation will mount…but in the mean time i’m looking forward to some long-overdue platform updates.

In another sign that facebook has grown up, you can now select “networking” as an option under relationships in your personal profile under “Looking for.” The update is another sign that facebook wants to be taken more seriously as a professional networking tool.  

“Random Play” and “Whatever I can Get” are also no longer options within that profile screen - which were symbols of their adolescent beginnings.

 Cross your fingers that this trend will continue. Maybe they’ll introduce the ability to categorize your network into “friends” and “colleagues” so that you can manage both your personal and professional contacts.