August 2007

I’ve been getting some emails from people who say that replacing our business blogging events with Facebook conferences is a mistake for a variety of reasons.

First of all, let me say that we’re adding a new event to our portfolio, we’re not abandoning business blogging by any means. Given the right locale, price point, and editorial, we anticipate hosting more Blog Business Summits.

For those that say “Facebook is just one component of a social media strategy, you’re missing the big picture.” I say that when I launched the world’s first Photoshop Conference way back in 1994, some said “you’re limiting yourself, you should be doing a digital imaging conference.” Those critics couldn’t have been more wrong. We sold out a dozen conferences and made a pile of money.

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Also in that article I mentioned earlier, there’s a brief paragraph of the openness of Facebook as a platform, which is what enables all of these applications in the first place.

What Zuckerberg and the Facebook team get, which I really don’t have to tell you (but I’m going to state the obvious anyway), is that all of these applications add value to Facebook.

Letting developers experiment and create useful tools on your service, and then letting them profit from it is a decision that just makes sense. Facebook has it’s own revenue stream, from the things that it has done (which it does better than other networks).

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On the Mediasphere show today, Tris Hussey and I got into a debate today about the definition of “disruptive technologies.”

Which technologies do you consider “disruptive and how do you define the term?

Current topics are:

• The politics of “unfriending”
• The personal/professional boundary on Facebook
• What could Facebook be doing better?

Please join us!

Even though I’m a few days late, I’m going to share my thoughts about a Business 2.0 article I ran across this morning (via Facebook, of course) called The Facebook Economy, which, surprise!, gets into the nitty-gritty of making money as a developer on Facebook, thus: the “Facebook Economy.”

Zuckerberg has turned the MySpace business model upside down: Not only is he giving developers their own real estate within Facebook - both inside users’ profile pages and on piggybacked application pages - but he’s allowing them to make money from their apps any way they can, from ad sales to direct purchases of services and merchandise. For example, download iLike, an app that lets you sample and purchase music, and the developer gets a 5 percent kickback if you end up buying songs from iTunes or Amazon.com

The article goes on to talk about the different strategies that app-makers are using to tap into their audiences on Facebook, ranging from hosting ads (I think this is the least likely to take off), to getting sponsorships, to making apps that have a built-in revenue system (a bit like iLike).

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I’ll be a guest today on Tris Hussey and Jim Turner’s MediaSphere show today at 12pm PST. We’ll be discussing the launch of this new conference, all things Facebook and much else.

Please be sure to call in and grill me relentlessly. The dial-in number is (646)-478-5023.

Update: What a fun time that was! Thanks to our wonderful friends at One By One Media for having me.

Incidentally, we do plan to begin blogging in earnest here very soon. We are still in the process of communicating with people regarding yesterday’s announcement.

Keynote speech by Jeremiah Owyang

Facebook is a media, community and application platform that offers an existing thriving ecosystem, scalable growth, and word-of-mouth marketing. The ability to understand users, their preferences, and networks, helps web applications to quickly segment and rapidly grow. Of course, no system is perfect, as we will understand the challenges with data, privacy and the growing conflict as work and personal lives collide online.

By analyzing users, their profiles, networks and affiliations there’s a tremendous amount of rich data that we’ve not seen displayed so readily. The ability to create a targeted web strategy to meet specific needs of the ‘long tail’ is more accessible than ever before.

Facebook provides targeted advertising unlike we’ve ever seen before, the ability to provide messages segmented by location, gender, and or preference gives the ability to accurately market effectively

The recently launched Application Platform gives the small agile web team the ability to quickly deploy a widget, scale and monetize. We’ll explore what’s worked as these mini-applications are launched on top of an existing community.

We’ll learn:

• Demographics and Trend Data of Facebook
• Word of mouth and viral growth using the Newsfeed and Widgets
• Groups, Sponsored groups and other community features
• Harness Personal and Network information
• Contextual and targeted Advertising opportunities
• Monetizing your efforts
• Case studies of success and failure
• Understanding costs, and strategies to measure ROI

We’ve been thinking long and hard about the process that we started with the Blog Business Summit in 2004. We are now — as we were then — committed to provide a forum that would expand, inform and enhance the incredible community that uses social media to enhance their blended personal and professional lives.

With this new site and event — a Facebook-focused gathering to be hosted in Seattle this December — we move that goal forward in line with the ceaseless evolution of social media. We want to work with individuals and organizations that use today’s most powerful online tools to engage with their core constituencies in a non-invasive, community-focused way.

The goal of the first Web Community Forum gathering will be discuss and propose some tentative best practices for community building for business, political campaigns, marketing, and other professional efforts using Facebook and the Facebook platform. The first 25 people to register can attend the event at our cost: $190.