Justin Smith (Product Manager, Watercooler), Andrew Chen (Futuristic Play), Blake Commagere (Mogad.com), David Gentzel (SocialMedia), Jia Shen (RockYou) spoke on a panel today about designing viral applications.

Andrew started the conversation by describing viral marketing as a marketing system where your customers sell your next generation of customers. Jia pointed out that the time frame now has been collapsed by the social networks so there is an accelerated viral opportunity.

There’s been a long evolution of viral from word of mouth, through email and other tools that have been turned into features of the social networks. Now instead of starting with the product, you can start from the customer and work back through the social networks as distribution channels.

Jai pointed out that early on Facebook did not put much restraint on how many invitations could be sent which created a gold rush effect that allowed an eco-system to grow as developers chased the growth. Now Facebook has put constraints on viral marketing tools which will make it much harder for new players to grow. The newer APIs are also being more conservative and that means they may have more difficulty building the same kind of ecosystem.

The differences in functionality across sites drives difference in application strategy. For example, on MySpace the focus will be more on applications that are self-expression, canvas oriented and less the viral, messaging applications.

Andrew highlighted that you can learn a lot from games in helping to make applications more successful. Things like reward schedules can drive use.

If you can build something that catches on you will know after the first couple of thousand users. If it’s successful with this group you can be confident that you can grow the applications penetration. Less viral applications will take marketing money to grow.

Being viral is not all it takes. If you’re getting lots of visitors and trials, and are not converting them into active users you are missing the opportunity. You need to make sure you’re measuring retention and repeat use of different visitor cohorts to ensure long term success.

It takes both viral growth and engagement to be successful.

Technorati Tags: gspwest08, graphing social, viral applications, viral marketing

Amit Kapur from MySpace speaks about MySpace as a platform. He is talking about how MySpace looks at it’s developer platform and how it fits into their business model.

Starts by focusing on how they think about the internet. Internet becoming more personal, more portable, and more collaborative.

Myspace core business is driven by two key engines and enablement platform( tools to create your own experience as a user and developer tools) and a connectivity platform (the MySpace social graph). MySpace wants to use these core engines to drive change in the internet.

Launched a developer platform on February 5. Phase 1 is developer only (30 day head start). Phase 2 will go live to users and launch an application directory. Phase 3 layer in an additional services for developers.

What it to be a democratic process to give developers a voice and level playing field.

The platform will be based on open standards, eg, Open Social.

Amit states that there is a commitment to keeping MySpace safe and a commitment to monetization.

Five surfaces for an application

• directory listing
• profile
• canvas pages
• embeds on profiles
• embeds on home pages

API to public profile data
authenticate user
access friends list
public information
photos
videos
status mood

Amit focuses on the business of social platforms
Its been hard to monetize because traditional approaches don’t work. He says they are “laser focused” on solving this problem.

• 300 people in sales class 1 branded sales, class 2 perfromance sales, class 3 network ads
• 150 engineers and product managers focused on monetization technology
• all inventory runs off of one ad server and we can yield optimize every single impression

The philosophy - sell people not pages. Need to go beyond keywords to learn about what images, blog posts and unstructured data to create hyper targeted interest groups.

He shows an example of Brad - the sports and music fan. He then goes on to do a comparison of hypertargeting vs traditional web proxies. He shows the range of data that MySpace knows about it’s users and examples of how detailed they can get with people’s interest data. Southern Girl example is a marathon runner with a count down to the next marathon - imagine what you can do with that information.

He says they are seeing 300% improvement in click through for 150 initial advertisers using hyper-targeting.

He says they have developed a self-serve advertising system for MySpace that will open up the advertising possibilities for small business marketers.

He sees this as just the beginning of scratching the surface. They will continue to focus on smart monetization technology to unlock value in social media.

Questions

How much does hyper-targeting pull in? - Pulls in a lot of un-structured data. Uses smart machine learning technology - points to 300% improvement as evidence.

How will developers make money? Help facilitate with marketing. They will be developing their own ad network to help monetize this.

Where do you see engagement going? A few things that are important to consider, what are the metrics of a advertising system, what works at scale for advertisers, tie ins to new applications people are developing. Things will become more customized in terms of user/advertiser engagement

When will third party apps go live? Very soon, over the next few weeks.

Technorati Tags: gspwest08, graphing social, Graphing Social Patterns, Amit Kapur, MySpace

It’s good to see brand marketers are working to produce some interesting work that ties TV together with online social communities. This post from Dave Deal titled Listening through communities shows off efforts by Levi and Kraft Crystal Light.

It’s great to see marketers start to understand why community matters, and it’s why we’re seeing investment in sites like these. Both are nicely designed sites that offer the promise of community.

The problem is that huge brands like these need to be attracting the attention of large audiences to make their marketing efficient, and trying to create large, new communities from scratch is both high cost and high risk.

In the physical world, you don’t try to create another shopping mall so people can come to your store, you take your store to the existing shopping mall so you can tap into an existing community. The mall shoppers are not going to go to a remote store in large numbers because it’s too much hassle.

By that logic, brands should not expect people to leave where they are now to travel to these new spaces. If the people are hanging out in MySpace and Facebook, why not build community there, or at least make that a major part of the your community building effort?

I looked, but could not find ways these sites link into MySpace/Facebook. If they are not built to connect to these huge social networks then they are making a mistake. Perhaps they are, but I couldn’t find out how. It would be interesting to find out if they have plans to connect into these communities.

I looked to see what others thought about the build versus join question. The question has been asked and debated in some depth. While there seems to be a strong leaning towards “it depends”, I think you have to go with the economics of community building.

Building large communities from scratch is hard, costly and risky. Anything you can do to lower the cost (hassle, time, etc) of connection and participation is incredibly important to building community. A well thought out strategy that makes it easy for people to connect to these new spaces from their existing hang outs will reduce the cost and risk of community building.

The social web is a distributed community with people in lots of places and increasingly they expect the content to come to them. RSS, embeddable players, and Facebook apps are training people that they can get what they want, wherever they want it. And that place is where they hang out now. Start there, and then give them a good reason to come visit your place.

If brand marketers don’t start getting this, they will spend lots of money and end up with lots of disappointments.

Technorati Tags: brands, community, social marketing, Levi, Krystal Light, Razor Fish