Social Media has really evolved over the last 12 months. 

Arguably it started when facebook opened up their platform to developers.  

The number of applications went from 8 to hundreds within weeks and the level of user engagement increased and accelerated.  

Many other major social media sites followed facebook’s lead and announced plans to open up their platform too… most notably Google’s Open Social announcement near the end of the year which had the promise of portability of applications and widgets across multiple platforms.

Many other sites that were struggling to match the pace of facebook’s growth declared that they would also join Open Social so that collectively they could change the landscape of social media once again (maybe this time in their favour).  

There was just one major barrier 

facebook’s social graph meant that people would not easily or quickly leave facebook for another platform - not after investing so much time and effort into creating networks and connecting to friends, family and colleagues. 

As blogged on this site (see links below), it’s unlikely that consumers will abandon or share their online social media time with facebook until their data assets built within facebook became portable to other sites. 

Enter dataportability.org 

Their philosophy is that you own your own data - so you should have the right to do with it as you see fit…like export or port it to another platform, tool, or application. Check out their mission statement here. 

As of now, the group is no more than a round table of smart people looking for a way to materialize a vision…. but what’s interesting is who has joined the round table discussion.  As of today, key people from LinkedIn, Flickr, SixApart, Google, facebook and Twitter have joined the conversation.

If this turns out to be more than a PR stunt, this has the potential to be the biggest story of 2008 as true identity portability means we can take our social equity and use it however we see fit - and where ever.

That’s what I’d call Social Media 2.0

Or Identity 2.0

Whatever you want to call it - this is a significant signal that the digital social media space will continue to evolve at a rapid pace this year and we all stand to benefit from this.  

Need to catch up on the conversation? Here are links to some of my previous articles that referenced portability of identity and identity 2.0:  

• Identity 2.0 - where does it begin?
• Open Social not cause for open celebreation….yet

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.

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.

There should be nothing more important to you than how your online identify is managed and protected. Mashable has a great overview of the top 25 ways you can manage your online profile including tools to manage your reputation, officically sign documents, aggregate your profiles and other cool stuff.

I’m not sure how well this works yet, but there certainly appears to be momentum building for the universal profile / avatar concept discussed previously in this blog.

What do you think? How are you managing your online identity… have you consolidated to one main account or do you continue to manage multiple but similar profiles?

I’ve also now created a seperate category around identity 2.0 to track trends and noise in this space. Also thanks to my friend David from Ottawa for finding the great cartoon!

As reported by Michael Garrett at profy, LinkedIn plans to release a developer API platform that would allow people to create new widgets or applications for LinkedIn - similar to what facebook did this year and what other sites such as MySpace and Friendster have announced they will do in order to slow down user migration to other social networking sites.  Although there are some great potential outcomes of this announcement, there are a few reasons why I believe their strategy needs further evaluation: 

1) Creating a walled garden within a walled garden. Applications developed on the new API platform must first get reviewed and approved before they can be made available to the community. This will stifle innovation. Let developers build what they want and let the community of LinkedIn users decide what is relevant or not.  

2) Developers will have to share revenue with LinkedIn…which is the opposite of where the industry is going. Given the user migration to facebook from other platforms in the last 8 months (LinkedIn included), why would a developer focus energy on a restrictive environment when they can create professional based applications and reap all the benefits from it on facebook? facebook is not just about sending electronic hamburgers… it’s increasingly also about professionals connecting in a simple, user-friendly environment where they make their own decisions on what is relevant or not.  Developers should be rewarded for their innovation.  

3) LinkedIn is not about engagement. Or community. As quoted on profy, they are not trying to get users to come back to the site multiple times a day. If you’re not trying to create engagement you aren’t going to increase your social graph. Isn’t social networking about engagement? If you are marketing a product or service, would you rather integrate it within a community like facebook that sees nearly 50% of their users return every day for at least 20 minutes, or with a site like LinkedIn that doesn’t care if you come back with any regular or predicted frequency?

4) Charging for premium services. Information should be free. LinkedIn still charges for their premium services. Free is a business model.  People are making money by giving stuff away and profiting from the engagement created.  Mitch Joel highlighted this in a recent post here.

Having said all of the above, there is great potential for LinkedIn to create something special and of value by allowing developers to create LinkedIn widgets that can be exported to other websites (even to facebook) with no restrictions, review processes, or threat of revenue sharing.

The future of social networking includes the idea of portability of identity - to other mediums (like mobile) and to other communities. Creating easy to export widgets that go beyond linking to somebody’s profile page on LinkedIn and creates true engagement based on permissions and profiling could create a massive increase in LinkedIn’s social graph….which they can profit from without taxing developers or their commmunity users. 

Understanding that LinkedIn has some specific goals with their new platform, they can still achieve them more transparently by offering rewards or incentives to developers for applications or widgets that meet specific criteria or goals in line with what they think people want.

Image credit: Pulse2.0 

The announcement of Google buying Jaiku is making waves in the industry. Imran Ali at Mobile Messaging 2.0 is calling it the most significant acquisition ever by Google. I’m calling it the continuation of a cold war arms race between Nokia and Google for world domination. Well World Mobile domination (the new WMD?) anyway.

From the East (or near-East… or near-near-East) there is Nokia. They are already world leaders in the mobile device space and have a neat mobile social network called MOSH. With their acquisition of Enpocket they now have a best in class mobile ad-delivery platform. With their acquisition of NAVTEQ they now have a best in class GPS-based mapping system to compete in the location based services (LBS) space.  With the Gartner Group forecasting that GPS based handsets will grow to around 40% by 2011 from 13% in 2007, clearly GPS or LBS could become the next killer mobile application. With all these acquisitions in the social networking / content space, Nokia is starting to look a lot like Google… 

From the West we have Google. They own search world wide and have become a massive advertising power with their Google AdWords platform…. a platform that is now being offered for free for mobile for a limited time.  Some have speculated that a mobile AdWords platform could subsidize carrier costs for the eventual release of a Google phone into the marketplace. Imagine a 3G phone loaded with Google widgets that costs little to nothing for the consumer. The g-phone could be an i-phone killer… or anything Nokia killer.

Combine the Google acquisition of Jaiku with the other recent announcement that Google also purchased Zingku - a mobile social utility tool that is web and SMS based and we have the makings of a mobile social networking platform that will rival all others.  Consider that Google already has a great installed base with Orkut (which is more popular than facebook in some parts of the world), it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that they’ll be playing in the mobile social networking space very soon. With all these acquisitions and developments, Google is starting to look a lot like Nokia…

Who will win this cold war…or will one buy the other eventually? One thing is for sure, following the mobile space is going to be very interesting over the next 18 months!

UPDATE 10/11: Nokia is also going into mobile search - check out this article on mobile semantic search!

Your investment in time and / or expense in Omniture or Google Analystics are safe…but you need to ensure that visitor frequency and advocacy are placed near the top of your dashboard as they are leading indicators on engagement.

Measuring frequency should go beyond how many return visitors you have. Take a longer term view (not just the day or week the campaign hit) and measure time between visits and length of visits - and whether or not each is getting shorter or longer. When you have a high percentage of users returning every day, you know you’ve got engagement. facebook for example gets over 50% return visitors every day and users spend on average 20 minutes on each visit! If you are not sure what is good or bad engagement…start by figuring out a consistent process for you to measure it. Once you have your baseline number you can start tracking net gain / decreases.

Measuring advocacy is a little less tangible. Although a frequent visitor is a leading indicator that you may have an advocate…. that visitor has to go from lurking on your site to contributing to your site…or telling others about your site. Advocates will link to your site by blogging and / or tweeting about you, your post, or your site. To figure out how many advocates you have, start by googling your website URL, brand name, product or service and see how many sites are linking to yours. You may be surprised at what you find! Also search social bookmarking / media sites to see if people are tagging your content on Del.ici.ous, Stumble Upon, Digg, Technorati, and through RSS subscriptions.

Traditional marketing campaigns often use the cost of customer acquisition as part of their return on investment (ROI) assessment.  To provide better insight in today’s web 2.0 digital environments, look at your cost of engagement and your return on engagement (ROE).

Which campaign would you rather invest in - the one that drives one time traffic to your site, or the one that creates customers, advocates and longer term awareness, affinity or loyalty to your brand?