Social Networks

Every morning, I go to my RSS reader and pull out a few tasty chunks of content: usually about ten out of 500 or so items. I open each in a tab in my browser, then I go through the list and decide what to do with each of them.

This morning, three of my nine tasty content chunks were about Facebook. And I decided that I should post them here:

• Jeremiah Owyang comments on Wal-Mart’s sinking Facebook strategy and offers some sage recommendations for how to turn things around. Basically, he says they should rise to a new level of facilitated conversation.
• Wired’s Kendall Black has some tips from a Facebook native to share. Among her pearls of wisdom, “poke frequently.” I couldn’t agree more.
• Marketing Pilgrin’s Jordan McCollum has some great insights on using Facebook for B2B relationships and for being a Facebook entrepreneur.

Update: Whoops! I forgot to list Dave McClure’s insight: it’s the feed, stupid!

Jeremiah Owyang asked his Twitter network this late last night.

I’d like to be able to import RSS feeds and post items to a group’s page. Sharing content with people who share your interests is one of the best features of Facebook and it should be extended to interest groups.

What features do you think Facebook should add to groups?

When I was first getting into social networks, I noticed that a lot of people I knew had hundreds, even thousands of “friends.” I asked one girlfriend about how she knew all those people and she explained that a lot of them were just random strangers. This was especially true on MySpace.

Apparently, the number of people you count as cyber “friends” is a metric of your popularity. For many, it’s a manifestation of the same phenomenon that leads people to conduct smear campaigns before prom court is announced in high school.

Having never been terribly popular in school — hard to believe, I know, but true — I was pretty much oblivious to this phenomenon. Until recently, the only people I was friends with on Facebook were folks that I had met in real life. Since then, Robert Scoble has convinced me that it’s alright to friend — it’s a verb now — all comers. It’s a good way to reach out to your readers. Robert uses his Facebook as a hub to organize the copious content he produces all over the Web.

This raises a lot of questions about privacy and control over personal information. But those issues aside, it also brings us back to the hyper-friending phenomenon:

How many friends do you really need? Don’t the quality relationships matter more?
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The Sydney Morning Herald proudly proclaims Facebook to be an office time-waster that costs Australian business $5bn annually:

Richard Cullen of SurfControl, an internet filtering company, estimates the site may be costing Australian businesses $5 billion a year. “Our analysis shows that Facebook is the new, and costly, time-waster,” he said.

The report calculates that if an employee spends an hour each day on Facebook, it costs the company more than $6200 a year. There are about 800,000 workplaces in Australia.

Needless to say, that’s playing fast and loose with the numbers. Of course the article goes on to quote Office Space-like employees who “averaged about 15 minutes of work per day,” (though, interestingly enough, this particular person doesn’t credit Facebook for her off-time).

Internet time-wasting is no doubt something that’s here, and should be kept in check, but this story smells a little bit like hyperbole to me.

Yes, there’s unproductive time spent on Facebook. Of all the social networks, it is the most college-oriented, and college is famous for nothing if not procrastination. But experiments have shown that a little bit of time spent engaging on Facebook can lead to some incredible ROI, or some great community and awareness building.

If you’re in the business of having customers (get it? that’s everyone), don’t be so quick to write Facebook off as the devil. If your team is on Facebook, chances are your customers are, too. Don’t throw that connection away if you don’t have to.

If you’ve ever spent some constructive time on Facebook, leave a story or a link in the comments (I know you’ve got at least one, Jeremiah).

Both Dave Winer and Fred Wilson are celebrating the first signs of an open Facebook: feeds that let you subscribe to Facebook content from “the outside.”

As people have wisely cautioned, however, a little access to feeds doesn’t mean that the platform is “open” yet, nor is it likely to be as open as some would like in the near future. But it is a sign that the people running Facebook are still trying to make something that people can use, instead of something that traps them into it.

On the internet, being able to use something means being able to pair it with as many of the hundreds of other services out there. Facebook status messages and Twitter. Facebook tags, Technorati Tags, FlickR search. The list goes on.

I’m interested to see what happens as Facebook grows more and more into a platform within the web (the web OS?), but in the meantime, I’m going to go subscribe to some feeds.

The social utility Facebook anounced today that iPhone users can quickly flip through their Facebook contacts in an EDGE-compatible, easy-view application at iPhone.Facebook.com.

The “geeky, soon-to-be-loaded executives of Facebook” — as Steven Levy so aptly called them in this week’s Newsweek cover story — may not always listen to their users. But with this newest development, they have hit a home run.

This move reveals the big strategy in Facebook’s effort to remain eternally relevant. They are trying to become the “Facebook Killer” rather than letting a new service come along and siphon off all their early adopters. To keep those early adopters — a.k.a. people who use Facebook and would spend $650 on a 1.0 phone from Apple — happy, they’ve launched a widget that will keep us engaged with Facebook longer.

Bravo!

Update: Here are some other sites with great insight on the Facebook for iPhone:

• Profy.com
• Inside Facebook
• Laughing Squid
• TechCrunch
• CrunchGear

We’ve got a “blogging for talent” session coming up at the conference this September. Social media and recruitment is a huge deal, but it goes way beyond blogging.

Here’s a great idea from ZDNet’s Dennis Howlett about how companies can use Facebook’s platform as a recruiting mechanism.

Cool stuff!

Over the past week and a half, Steve and I have given several PRWeb sponsored Webinars on monitoring the online buzz via RSS. Toward the end of our latter two talks, I got into how you can bring your Google Reader shared items feed into Facebook with this nifty little widget by Mario Romero.

As soon as I started showing the inside of Facebook, a bunch of questions came in from participants who wanted to know all about the difference between Facebook and MySpace. I told them that they’d drilled down into one of my big biases, which is namely that Facebook kicks MySpace’s patoot.

It seems like every marketer and their mama wants to understand social networking systems. This is the main theme of the commentary on Sean Bonner’s great article responding to danah boyd’s article on the class differences between Facebook and MySpace.

[Please note that Bonner's article may not be entirely safe for work, or even open behind some office firewalls. This is because it's hosted at SuicideGirls.com, which purveys high-art pornographic images alongside social commentary and discussion.]

My short answer to our webinar attendees was that marketers are remiss not to have profiles on both sites. But I think that Facebook is stronger overall for business networking.

What do you think? Have you used MySpace or Facebook for business? What have the results been?

There’s an article (I almost called it a post - silly me) about Mark Zuckerberg, the guy who started Facebook, at the Economist.com that Teresa kindly pointed me to this morning. It’s an interesting summary of the Facebook phenomenon, if you’re not familiar with it.

But the part that caught my attention was one line right near the end:

Advertising, the obvious business model, does not seem to work well on Facebook, perhaps because people go there to socialise, not to shop.

Which raises two important questions:

1. How will Facebook make (more) money?
2. How do you advertise on Facebook?

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We’ve added some new features to our BlogTips Facebook application:

1) Users can now submit tips from the application page as well as on their profiles.
2) We’ve provided an archive of past tips and the people that submitted them.

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It’s becoming rapidly apparent that integrating online applications and services with Facebook is more benefit than detriment. It looks as though Facebook is contributing directly to the growth of online services.

This raises some important questions for companies contemplating online community-building initiatives. Should you roll your own social network on your site? Or should you reach out to existing communities through an application?

Given the stats that show Pareto efficiency when existing services build themselves into Facebook and add value, perhaps the best decision is to do both.

My prediction: the first company to build software for DIY social network building that comes pre-integrated with Facebook will quickly rise to the top of the heap.

Bratz vs. Barbie has proven to be the seminal war in the rapidly changing toy industry. Today’s kids are more sophisticated. The toy industry must now compete with consumer electronics, fashion and entertainment purchases. The tarted-up look of MGA Entertainment’s Bratz dolls is a direct response to that demand. By contrast, Mattel’s Barbie seems positively wholesome.

Today’s WSJ reports on the latest front in this war: the Web. Both Mattel and MGA Entertainment are in the process of launching online social networking sites aimed at their 6-13 year-old market. Mattel has a social network in beta, while MGA’s site is yet to launch.
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Nick O’Neill of AllFacebook.com thinks that our Facebook application is cool. We’re pretty proud of BlogTips and we’re really glad that Nick thinks it will make a successful Facebook marketing effort.

We’ve got 55 users so far, and a number of excellent tips have been submitted. I’ll be posting some of them later on this week.

UPDATE: Steve has asked me to add to this post that we can conceive and develop Facebook applications for clients as well. If you’re interested, contact Kim Larsen at (425)-556-1941 or by e-mail.

I got into a debate with Robert Scoble on my personal blog a couple of weeks ago. I pointed out the vast difference in the ways that we were using the online social network, Facebook. I even called him silly.

The truth is, in the past few weeks I’ve started to use Facebook the same way Scoble does. I’ve friended (and been friended by) a number of professional contacts. I even removed a few photos that I wasn’t sure people would take the right way. Robert doesn’t think those photos would have been a problem, but Wall Street Journal columnist Jared Sandberg seems to think differently. So do a number of the people he interviewed for his most recent column.

But “coolest self” photos are only part of the problem. As UCI anthropology professor Tom Boellstorff told Sandberg, “All these social relationships — apples and oranges — are getting crammed into one category of friends.”

I’ve always maintained that Facebook should allow people to create different profiles to display to the different categories of people in their lives. Rather than having different social networks for different parts of my life, I’d rather connect with all of my contacts in one place, but with a different emphasis depending on the type of contact.

I’m curious, how are you all using your social networking profiles? Professionally? Personally? Something in the middle?

And how do you judge professional contacts who share their personal photos on their social network profiles?

Jeremiah Owyang pointed this video out on Twitter this morning. I’m passing it along to our readership because I think it explains a concept that some are still getting to know in very easy terms.

If you want to understand the radical shift taking place in online advertising, you need look no further than two recent Wall Street Journal articles. The first cites research showing that kids don’t like it when social network sites include advertising in their profiles without their permission. But 20% of them do post advertising and marketing material on their own profiles when it aligns with their needs or interests. The second discusses the fact that people across the age spectrum have developed selective blindness when it comes to banner ads.

We’ve been paying attention to these developments, and we’re factoring them into our marketing strategy for the upcoming conference. We realize that it’s much better to add value for people than to pander to them.

That’s why we’ve spent some time over the past few weeks developing an application for Facebook platform that we hope to roll out in beta form later this week. It’s our first attempt at an app, so it’s functions are limited. But the goal here is to build on the community of blogging experts currently using Facebook to spread the word about what makes a great blog and to hopefully drive some traffic to the conference.

So what’s our application called, and what does it do? It’s called BlogTips and it…

• …displays a user-submitted “blogging tip of the day” each day with a link to the tipster’s Facebook profile.
• …allows users to submit their blogging tips right from a friend’s Facebook profile.

Each day, we’ll go through all the submitted tips and select the next day’s tip. Then, on August 17th, we’ll have our speakers vote on the best tip. The top tipster gets a free pass to the three-day Blog Business Summit this September.

Yes, we’re shamelessly self-promoting. We spent the time and money to develop this widget to drive traffic to our conference. But we know that this application won’t take off unless people find it legitimately useful. And we think it’s a contribution to our community that goes beyond a marketing initiative.

Personally, I was thrilled to manage the development of this application because it gave me the opportunity to witness the new Facebook API in action. I have a million new ideas for applications that I would build if only we had unlimited time and resources. Some of them might even add value for our clients, both existing and potential.

So if you’re interested in engaging with Facebook’s users via an application, give us a buzz at (206)-229-9335 or an e-mail and we’ll chat.

Shel Israel asked an interesting question on his Facebook profile today, “What trends to you see happening in social media?”

My response was that in Web 2.0, companies started blogs when they wanted to engage with their customers. In Web 3.0, they will launch social networks.

It’s funny that Shel’s question came along when it did, because I’ve been spending a lot of time recently gathering information that has a great deal to do with the answer I offered. It turns out that businesses are launching social networks right and left. And a number of tools have emerged in the past couple of years that enable companies to do just that. So I thought I’d take a quick look-see at two very similar business organizations using two different platforms and get a sense of how the space is shaping up.

The National Hockey League launched NHL Connect to great fanfare last year using Cisco’s Five Across platform. I spoke to NHL Vice President Rich Libero on the phone yesterday about how the NHL is doing with its public beta.

NHL fans are more technologically savvy than the fans of any other sport, and “MySpace became a huge player in fan affinity.” Libero told me that Hockey “wanted to apply the same model to the passionate group of fans that happen to follow the NHL.” The goal was to build a “be-all end-all community tool” that would give fans, “yet another opportunity to share their experiences and their love of the sport.”

So far, they’ve been very pleased with the results of their efforts. The site has added 10,000 users between March and May. “That may not seem like much in the grand scheme of things,” said Libero, “but we’re very excited to see the traction we’ve gotten from a beta level product.”

And indeed, the site is pretty beta. The interface is clean but confusing in places. For example, signing up was tricky because the system didn’t notify me that I would need to confirm my registration by clicking on a link sent to my e-mail account before I could log in to the system. When I did try to log in, the site told me that my password was wrong.

It was only after I happened to open a new browser window and see that I had an e-mail from NHL connect that I realized e-mail confirmation was required.

The privacy settings are relatively limited as well. Libero told me that the only real control users have over their privacy is the option to make their posts public or private. Thankfully, the community has been great about policing inappropriate behavior. And there hasn’t even been that much of it, according to Libero. And they do plan to offer more granular privacy settings when the next generation Five Across software comes out later this year.

Still, for a beta product, the site has some very passionate participants. One user I came across belonged to dozens of groups and had hundreds of friends. If the NHL aimed to create a network that channeled the passion of hockey fans into an online environment, they’ve certainly succeeded. I’m anxious to see the next generation of technology associated with this network.

From a technological standpoint, the Arena Football League’s MyAFL network is clearly out of beta. The interface — built with KickApps — is closer to what I’m used to in an online social network, although signing up was tricky simply because the sign up link is buried in a huge hunk of text on the MyAFL home page.

The customizable profile pages reminded me a lot of MySpace’s most popular feature, but without the messiness that sometimes occurs in MySpace code. The site also allows users to import outside RSS feeds, which makes MyAFL more of a portal for centralized interaction, rather than just one more site that needs to be checked every day.

The privacy options on MyAFL were just as limited as those on NHL Connect.

I asked KickApps Marketing Director David Hertog whether more granular privacy settings were in the works. He told me in an e-mail that, “these types of privacy features are on our product roadmap and will be added in the coming months. Although there are certain types of communities that will benefit directly from them, we built KickApps primarily as a platform to build open, public-facing communities.”

I’ve always contended that the privacy settings on sites like Facebook are the gold standard precisely because profiles are not necessarily public-facing to all users. Robust and customizable privacy settings allow users to be more comfortable posting information about themselves. Perhaps I’m wrong on this, but I anticipate that both networks will see a lot more growth and passion from their users if they provide custom privacy settings in the next technological iterations of their respective networks.

Aside from privacy, KickApps shines as a robust application for online community building. The interface was familiar and instantly usable and content was more readily cross-referenced. Given the endless supply of new stuff to look at, I would imagine that MyAFL has a longer average user session than NHL Connect. The only major interface drawback was the prevalence of massive white spaces between the user profiles and the site navigation that appears in some browsers, but not in others.

From a technology standpoint, the NHL will want to focus future efforts on building a smoother interface and a user experience that is more consistent across browsers. The AFL will want to work on improving privacy settings and streamlining some browser-specific design issues.

From a community-building standpoint, both sites are very exciting. It’s clear that while technology is very important, having a passionate user base and engaging with them in a human way are much more important. The NHL community is so robust despite the beta nature of the site because its two nearly full-time moderators and the community of 10,000 are so passionate about hockey. They respect the sport, therefore they respect the community.

Just as with other social media, having a snazzy social network on your company’s site won’t do anything to jazz up a bad product or a poor customer service ethos. The best way to engage with users continues to be genuine enthusiasm for them, their lives, and what they care about. By that standard, both the NHL and the AFL are leading the pack.

Michael Arrington has independent confirmation of yesterday’s rumors that Yahoo! may be looking to buy the Jerry Yang has been named Yahoo’s new CEO. Yang, who founded the company while still in business school, was once thought to be too inexperienced to guide the company. Investors wanted a seasoned executive at the helm. So Yang served in the non-traditional role of “Chief Yahoo.”

The decision on MySpace will be a test of Yang’s strength as a CEO and of his savvy in the fast-changing world of social networks. Many signs point to MySpace’s day in the sun as largely over. The meteoric rise of Facebook, and its recent launch of an “insanely viral” platform for applications makes it unlikely that MySpace can continue to succeed in its current form.

Perhaps an acquisition by Yahoo! and a complete overhaul by longtime Web professionals with a new perspective will put MySpace on top of the social network heap once again. But if I were Yang, I would steer clear.

I’ve been spending a lot of time playing with Facebook’s new “platform” feature. Basically, it allows developers to build neat little widgets that extend the social network in a number of ways. Users can now play games with their friends, share their favorite drink recipes, post songs to their profiles. And cool new applications keep showing up every day.

It’s not as though they’re the first social network to open the kimono to third party value-adds. When Friendster allowed seven developers to work on the network late last year, they experienced a 17.76% jump in unique visitors. It’s clear that users like the creativity that third-party developers bring to the table.

So what makes Facebook’s third-party offering compelling and relevant to businesses? The fact that advertising is no longer the only way to reach Facebook’s more than 16 million users. Companies and organizations can build applications that users find useful. This is a great new way to introduce folks to a new brand or reinforce loyalty to one that’s been around for a while.

For example, US Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign was the first political candidacy to create an application for Facebook. The app serves all the most recent Obama video and news onto users’ profiles and enables them to identify and share Obama materials with friends who live in early primary states.

While I think it’s cool that Obama’s campaign has launched an application on Facebook, I think they could do a better job of adding value for users. Folks who already support Obama will be more than happy to use this application, but what about those who are still making up their minds? It would be really cool to see an application that lets users answer political questions to determine how closely their values and priorities align with those of Senator Obama. They key to creating an application that wins hearts and minds is how useful and interesting it is, not how well it serves the organization’s one-sided interests.

In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m a big believer in Facebook. I think it’s an awesome social network. I use it to communicate with my friends more than I use traditional e-mail.

One of the coolest features of Facebook is the one that allows you to share content with your friends. You can simply post an interesting article on your profile, or you can push, or “spit” it to friends who might find it interesting.

When Facebook sucks in outside content, it grabs images that are associated with the content in question. Sometimes, the image grabber sucks in an ad rather than a news image. (See the image at left for an illustration).

I wonder whether Ford paid CNet an additional premium to make sure that their ad was sucked into Facebook, or if they just got lucky. Will ad placements like this eventually garner additional revenues for content providers? And what about the distribution mechanism? Might companies pay social networks with sharing features a premium to ensure that their ads (tagged with an ID code) are sucked in with shared content?