Rodney Rumford, Editor & Publisher of FaceReviews.com, speaks about how use Facebook for branding. The audience is large with 66 million people and 16,000 applications. People are spending 20 minutes on site.

Rodney views it s frictionless WOMA, facilitates customer acquisition and drive low cost customer acquisition with specific demographic targeted marketing.

He describes how Facebook can be used for Lead Generation, brand extension, exposure and loyalty.

Suggests that marketers start experimenting.

8 ways to market on Facebook: Apps, groups, paid groups, tarted ads, newsfeed ad buys pages, beacon, and guerilla.

Scrabolous is the new golf - a new way to micro-touch and communicate. Where I’ve Been - good example of how a brand can sponsor an app and is aligned with Orbitz. Firefox group is an example of sponsored group. Facebook Ads is a self service ad solution that allows you to target demographics networks Social Ads with personal relevancy. CTR is low(my experience with CTR is 0.02%). Pages are another way to market. What’s the difference between groups and pages. News feed $100k to buy the banner. 1 ad per page. Third party ad networks like Cubics and Zynga (game network) have emerged to advertise on applications.

Rodney describes steps to success that include a clarity about end goals and a willingness to experiment.

Questions:

What about forced invite numbers? Tested forced invites with greeting card application - forced invites worked, but now growth remains.

Technorati Tags: gspwest08, graphing social, facebook marketing

BJ Fogg presented about how the student’s of BJ’s Facebook class developed 50+ amazing apps, 10 million installs, and 1 million daily users.

They start by running through the background to the class and the founders of the class. They call it the Stanford Facebook Class and describe how they were making it up as they went. They thought they were going to have each student make 3 apps each, which may have been over ambitious.

Thought they would get 20 students, and 120 showed up for the class. They ended up with 80 students. BJ, Dave McClure and the TA’s aught 2 classes per week.

Four or five applications were really successful, such as KissMe. They got lots of press coverage, some of which was good, some not so good.

Students independently set up a Sunday group meeting that is still going on. The final was an open expo with over 500 people attending to see demo’s of the applications. You can find the student presentations at bayCHI

$500,000-$1,000,000 revenue generated by class, three companies formed, 2 companies acquired, lots of job offers and a few drop outs.

Phase 2 - 2 month experience to try again eg Oregon Trail (sp?)

Takeaways:

• Never too late to build new app
• Simple apps won
• Speed and iteration matter
• Community cooperation leads to success - more sharing, more success
• Individual opinions are worthless, need the crowd to judge
• Copying success is cheap/fast way to succeed
• Metrics matter, but today’s tools are weak - had to build their own
• This is a learnable skill
• Success comes from chaos/control cycle
• Mass interpersonal persuasion is finaly here

Technorati Tags: gspwest08, graphing social, Stanford Facebook Class

Ben Ling, director of Platform Product Marketing at Facebook, speaks about Facebook’s platform. Ben starts by telling a story about a dinner with folks from Flixter talking about changes in Facebook platform.

The focus is on creating long term value. He says their strategy has three parts: frictionless platform, leverage social graph, and world class applications.

Frictionless Platform

What they want in terms of making the platform frictionless for users

• Helping users communicate
• Meaningful activity
• Valuable information
• User trust

He describes the changes on the site’s experience an enhanced wall, profiles profile boxs, profile action links that increase application uses.

He says they also want to make it frictionless for developers. Shared reusable technology, core infrastructure, and viral distribution of applications are all parts of this strategy. They are licensing the technology to others like Bebo. They are also have a marketplace for developer resources that connect marketers to developers.

Ben discusses how they had users suggest translations and vote on results which resulted in a very scalable translation/localization process. He says that this can be used by developers to localize their applications.

Leveraging the social graph

Ben describes the power of Facebook as an asynchronous conversation with your friends. You update everyone efficiently about what’s going on. He describes the example of the Causes application and their Photo application, which is the largest photo application in the world.

For developers, we want social applications for Collaborative authoring and design, multi-player games, sharing experiences

World class applications

They see applications progressing to other industries and to productivity. Sports, health, religion are all attractive segments. He also describes how they will be providing commerce functionality with developer APIs, secure purchasing and new types of application monetization models.

Ben discusses how they want to increase user control. He describes the problem of having to invite 15 friends to get the results. They are now adding ability for users to complain. He says that they want to support applications that users support. He is looking for positive user value loops. He describes Bookshelf, Dogbook, and Quizer as positive examples.

Questions:

How do you see social driving ecommerce? A variety of experiences are inherently social and that will lead to new applications. Who’s going to do something, join them. (Sounds like MatchActivity.com)

What is timeframe for ecommerce? Later this year will take credit cards.

Who else has licensed the Facebook platform? Involved in a number of discussions - no announcements

Why limit number of invites? Want invites to be quality invites. Need to balance quantity with relevance.

Technorati Tags: gspwest08, Graphing Social, Facebook, Ben LIng

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

Charlene Li of Forrester presents on the Future of Social Networking. Charlene speaks about her kids and how they are setting up online playdates. Meet at such and such a site at this time etc. I know this too. My son does exactly this on Runescape.

Social networks will be like air, she says. It will no longer be a list of destinations and multiple identities, but will be universal id. What will it be. My email, my phone number etc. The ID will be federated like OpenID, with a few major players serving as focal points.

The big guys are beginnig to talk - Data Portability Group.

She encourages us to think about the Bill of Rights for the Social Web.

We publicly assert that all users of the social web are entitled to certain fundamental rights, specifically:

* Ownership of their own personal information, including:
o their own profile data
o the list of people they are connected to
o the activity stream of content they create;
* Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others; and
* Freedom to grant persistent access to their personal information to trusted external sites.

Sites supporting these rights shall:

* Allow their users to syndicate their own profile data, their friends list, and the data that’s shared with them via the service, using a persistent URL or API token and open data formats;
* Allow their users to syndicate their own stream of activity outside the site;
* Allow their users to link from their profile pages to external identifiers in a public way; and
* Allow their users to discover who else they know is also on their site, using the same external identifiers made available for lookup within the service.

The graphic flat graph does not work, but is really much more complex and multi-dimensional. There a lots of places and lots of invites. This is a real problem.

Charlene thinks there will be some real opportunities here. The Portal players, Yahoo, Google, AOL are well positioned for this.

What people are doing on social networks. It’s about social, friends, games, movie sharing. She says what’s missing is shopping. Charlene takes us through an example of how Amazon could connect to friends’ reviews of books. Connect via the universal ID to bring in the content to where the user is.

She goes on to describe an example of how yahoo could incorporate my friends input into search, stories, stock portfolios, who has bought what’s being advertised, etc.

The under-rated value of networks should be recognized. It depends on the authority your networks interest and their authority on the topic, and the trust level among your network.

Charlene focus on the value of what Digital Podcast calls Super Fans. She says that marketers will pay to reach and influence valuable influentials, that each person will have their own personal CPM, and social networks will compete to have the best experience for high-influence individuals. Think of the power of Super Fans.

She projects 2008-2009 to be the era data portability and 2013 to be the timing of the ubiquitous social networks. Technology will not be the barrier, trust will be the barrier.

Her recommendations:

• Create linkages between services based on individually controlled identity federation.
• Compete on creating the most compelling social experience, not social graph lock in.
• Develop social applications that have meaning.
• Integrate social networks into existing activities
• Design business models that reflect the value created by people’s social networks

Questions:

What about the average Joe - will they have influence? Yes, depends on Joe’s social graph. Within it he will have influence.

What should people not on social web do to build network? Look to your email contact list. It will become automatic at some point.

UPDATE: Slides

| View | Upload your own

Technorati Tags: gspwest08, Graphing Social Patterns, Charlene Li, Forrester

I’m here at Graphing Social West in San Diego. The guys from O’Reilly were kind enough to extend me a press pass so I get to see/hear what’s going on. The agenda looks good with presentations from analysts and company executives.

Charlene Li, from Forester, kicks things off with a presentation on the future of social networks, then Amit Kapur from MySpace speaks about MySpace as a platform. After that, there’s lots more on the agenda.

The event focuses on social networking with a heavy dose of MySpace and Facebook. I will do my best to pick up the high points of the show and report them throughout the day on my CinchCast, where I call in to Blog Talk Radio’s Cinch service and record a short audio about what’s going on.

Technorati Tags: Graphing Social, gspwest08, social networking

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

I believe that a lot of money will be wasted on social media initiatives and to make sure we don’t waste too much I think we need to build a framework for managing performance on the social web. I hope this podcast can be the start of a conversation about online performance measures and management as it relates to social media.

The hype and growth surrounding the space means that everyone is rushing in to connect with the huge audiences that are possible with successful social networks. Budweiser, Coke, Fast Company and many other brands have been deploying big new social networking initiatives. Facebook applications are being built right and left. Open Social means that even more social applications will be built for the other big networks as well.

However, while social networks like Flickr and cool Facebook apps are fun and social they may not generate significant commercial returns. Leading media and brand marketers know they need to be embracing social media, but risk falling into the same trap if they don’t focus on success and doing it in a way that makes sense for the social web.

My conversations with digital media executives lead me to believe that forward thinkers know they need to be managing distributed media across the social web and that they need more than just embeddable video players. They tell me they need guidance about what works beyond the BS they hear from vendors, how to measure performance and how to embed that into development processes so that future projects benefit from what’s already been learned.

There is lots of good thinking going on about how to measure performance on the web and some are even thinking about measurement in the social web. However, many are still stuck using traditional broadcasting or Web 1.0 models to define success and those measurement models are not going to be adequate for defining success and driving performance on the social web.

We need to rethink performance measures and the way we collect data from the social web.

 

 Digital Podcast 40 [12:53m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (682)

I thought it would be useful to provide some opening thoughts about how measures for the social web might be different and appreciate any feedback. To start, we need to identify what’s different about the social web.

From a long list of things that are different a few stand out to me as really important.

• User Contributions - On the social web, we have users producing content right and left. In addition, they are providing insight. Insight into themselves and insight into what is popular. This means that content with potential can, with some skill, be filtered and identified much more effectively.
• Distributed social media - The paradigm has changed from users seeking content to content seeking users. We see this new paradigm everywhere with downloadable media, embeddable videos and widgets that deliver content, services and more to users in a highly distributed way.
• Expectations that everything is free - The huge surge of low cost content supply means that users are willing to pay less and expect more to be free.
• Shifting business models - We are seeing the beginning of a major shift in business models from those that are based upon the economics of impressions to ones based upon the economics of community.

I believe that these changes shift performance measurement from being rather linear in nature to something that is more recursive in nature. By recursive, I mean that we are measuring a repetitious cycle where a change in one measure drives changes in other measures and is thus much more difficult to pin down. If we are not careful and discrete about measuring this kind of process the Heisenberg uncertainty principle applies as well - the mere act of observing a phenomenon changes its nature.

Below is a simple illustration of what I’m talking about (note this is just illustrative and not all inclusive). In the impression based business model of broadcast, revenue was driven by linear function of reach multiplied by frequency and by CPM (cost per thousand impressions). That same business model was largely the model that drove Web 1.0 business models which were based upon uniques, page views and CPM models. This same model can be extended to commerce based businesses as well by adding click through rates, conversion rates and price per purchase.

In the social web, I think there is a recursive process of users, engagement, user contribution, viral impact, visitors, and conversion spawning more users as the cycle continues over and over again in a recursive manner. In addition, I think that the units of revenue measurement will shift from CPM to RPU (revenue per user) because we are now not just getting paid for advertising, but also for lead generation, potential direct sales and other ways of monetizing users.

Some of these measures are new so here’s the short argument for each measure:

• Visitors - Without new visitors there is no growth. Separating visitors into new and returning and identifying where they come from is still important.
• Conversion - if we are shifting from impression based business models to community based business models then we need people to become users or members. This can be a simple measure and extended to capture how much information the new user provides.
• Users - Users do more than visitors. They consume and they produce - which is essential for scaling on the social web. Tracking users usage by signup cohort to understand how sticky the user experience is can provide insight into the durability and scalability of the site. You want to know if people will return and increase their usage over time.
• Engagement - The experience needs to be compelling enough for users to produce good stuff and to return to do it again. Simple measures like time on site, page views and loyalty still matter, but getting deeper into understanding how much of the capability you are providing (both on and offsite) get used and which parts drive engagement becomes important as well.
• User Contribution - The more users contribute, the more the content scales and that drives the potential for viral impact and if they provide insight into themselves or into attractive content that can be leveraged into RPU. There are lots of interesting measures that could be developed her fro both measuring the content the produce and the insight users provide.
• Viral Impact - Who can doubt the ability of viral content to drive trial and traffic. Measures for this are probably different depending up on the nature of the business and include bookmarks, email forwards, trackbacks and the spread of embedded widgets
• RPU - Revenue per User is what matters in a community. We want to look at total revenue whether it comes from impressions, clicks, actions, leads or any other source and the how much we can drive per user will determine how much cost we can absorb to attract and convert visitors into users and realize an attractive ROI.

The list could go on to look at cost drivers and how they are different on the social web, but that will be another discussion.

I believe that once we embrace these kinds of measures and embed them into our management processes we will see social media marketing shift from being a stream of fun (and maybe expensive) experiments into a community based business model that will result in more deeply committed fans, increased brand strength, better sell through, new revenue sources and higher ROI.

If you see good posts about measuring performance, have suggestions or feedback please leave a comment.

Technorati Tags: social media, social web, online performance measurement, measures, measurement, online measures, social media measures

As part of our Super Fan podcast series, we interviewed Jason Feffer, Founder and CEO, of SodaHead. Jason was one of the earliest employees at MySpace and experienced their rapid rise into a major social networking site. After MySpace, Jason founded SodaHead, a company in the Social Answers space. SodaHead allows users to set up opinion polls that users get to vote and comment on. It’s a fun and addictive experience, and well worth trying.

Jason’s discussion of his experience at MySpace illustrates the importance of operational optimization to drive monetization of super fans. In his new company, Jason is putting a lot of what he’s learned to use in creating a new and fun social site. SodaHead has mastered the art of lowering the difficulty and barriers to user generated content. It leads to an experience where its much easier to join in the social mix in a more meaningful way than just asking someone to be your friend. SodaHead is definitely an experience everyone should try.

 

 Digital Podcast 36 [1:06:33m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (726)

Jason Feffer has an exciting eight-year history of Internet startup experience leading up to his most recent startup, SodaHead.com. Mr. Feffer helped start MySpace in 2003, which sold to News Corp for $580M. During his three years at MySpace, Jason served on the executive committee and as Vice President of Operations as the membership grew to 100 million. Mr. Feffer oversaw advertising operations, revenue reporting, policy enforcement, government relations and several other departments at MySpace.

Technorati Tags: Jason Feffer, MySpace, SodaHead, social media, social networking, social media optimization, super fans

Nokia has produced a fun little video that tries to define Web 2.0. Nokia defines Web 2.0 as being all about connecting people. It makes sense coming from Nokia given their focus on mobile communications, but I think they’ve got it right. To much is made of all the technology and not enough about people’s basic desire to connect and know other people.

In a post I made a while back, I think it is all about people communicating with people.

It should be obvious that since the invention of runners to carry messages it’s been about people communicating with people. Mail, telephone, email, IM, texting are all killer apps that have been about people communicating with people.

That’s why social networking is important. It’s not about the documents or what the documents are about, it’s about the people and what the people are all about. And yes, we do need a way to figure out how we are all connected other than telling everybody every time.

Thanks to Gigaom for bringing the video to my attention.

Technorati Tags: Nokia, web 2.0, social networking, video