October 2007

I am reminded of the movie Man of the Year, where Robin Williams plays a comedian (what? really?) who runs for President and wins.

It’s a little more complicated than that, sure, but I remember thinking as I watched the movie that it resonated on a certain level with a sentiment I’ve seen more and more often ever since: the presidential race is so hopelessly out of control that we might as well elect a comedian.

I’m serious. People are pretty damn close to really believing that.

Since Stephen Colbert announced his bid for presidency (is he serious?) the Facebook group, 1,000,000 strong for Stephen T Colbert has grown with astounding rapidity. It is now over 1 million strong.

I remember sitting in front of the group page with my friend last weekend and refreshing every time it loaded. 20 more people. 24 more people. 18 more people. 35 more people.

Mónica Guzmán at the PI’s Big Blog asked members of the group why they were joining, and the responses are varied and interesting - and often eerily serious. People are making real political statements here.

Does that surprise you?

The group is also comedic, too. It’s home to probably one of the most hilarious threads I’ve ever seen on Facebook, a good 7,000 responses long.

And while Rana at AllFacebook is probably correct that Colbert’s “presidential campaign” is likely to be “all sizzle and no steak,” but this whole thing does prove two very important points:

1. People on Facebook do care about politics.
2. The “legit” politicians desperately need to engage on Facebook in a meaningful way.

We’re talking about directly engaging with over 1 million people here, across all borders. As a politician, how can you ignore that?

I’ll be doing a solo presentation called The Power of Facebook at Webcom Montreal this November. For those of you who don’t read French, here’s the English translation of my session description:

Facebook is one of the most powerful tools for personal branding, online community building and human networking ever to exist. But as a former college-only network, it has many idiosyncrasies, limitations and conventions that professionals may be unfamiliar with.

In this session, Facebook addict and relationship technologist Teresa Valdez Klein will deliver:

• A brief overview of Facebook basics for those in the room that have never used the site.
• Some practical tips for using Facebook’s built in features: events, groups, photo sharing and posted items to start your online community
• Guidelines for building the best profile for your goals on Facebook
• An overview of professional etiquette for Facebook
• Tips and tricks for building a vibrant Facebook community and using it to drive traffic to your Web properties.
• Using applications to reach your audience.

If you plan to be there, please drop me a note here and we’ll grab a bite.

There’s a large and predictable amount of skepticism around the announcement yesterday that Microsoft’s investment in Facebook values the burgeoning social utility at $15 billion. Most people thought that $10 billion was absurd enough. Lee Lorenzen of Altura Ventures seems to think that Facebook is actually worth $100 billion.

As enthused as I am about Facebook — remember, I convinced my boss to do a Facebook conference — I’m tentatively weighing in on the side of the skeptics. Facebook in its current form is not worth even $10 billion, let along $15. But it does have potential that may make Lorenzen’s valuation look reasonable.

That potential revolves in part around feature revisions that will accomplish two key business goals for Facebook: (1) keep the growing user base daily and active, and (2) improve the click through rate on their advertising.

[click to continue...]

• Facebook - is it worth $10 billion?
  Charlene Li from Forrester explains why the MS deal at the MS price makes numerical sense, among other things
  (tags: facebook Microsoft socialnetworking social_media)
• Facebook worth $15 billion, accepts $240 million from Microsoft
  Brian Solis covers the MS-Facebook investment. WSJ quote + Press release.
  (tags: facebook microsoft social_media valuation)

There’s been a lot of buzz today regarding a rumored deal between Microsoft and Facebook that would value the company at $15 billion.

We can’t comment on the valuation part, but we are in a position to confirm that Hank Vigil, SVP of Consumer Strategy and Partnerships was indeed back in Palo Alto yesterday.

Update: Maybe we should ask Hank to speak at our Seattle Facebook conference this December. What do you guys think?

Social Media guru Josh Hallet posted on 10/21 that he was at the PRSA show and was investigating blog monitoring tools.

“There are a number of firms that all ’say’ they can automate the monitoring of blogs (social media) and provide metrics, tonality, sentiment analysis, etc. It should be noted that a number of these services cost a pretty good amount of $$$.

What’s interesting about the search is the I have long said (as have many of the colleagues in this industry that I know/trust/respect) that the free tools and a trained staffer can do the same thing.”

I totally agree that many expensive services offer the same functionality that can be achieved with a staffer, but I don’t agree that sentiment analysis is a slam dunk. There is no free service offering that except ours (while in testing.) True, a staffer can do it, but an automated system can shave many hours that staffers would spend down to almost zero. We can easily process hundreds of posts in minutes.

This just went up on Facebook’s In the Works page. I think the coolest feature from a community building standpoint is by far the last one. Being able to see what’s going in my groups in my news feed will make me a better group participant and a better community manager.

Update: The foreign language thing is also really huge. Back in September, I wrote about how language barriers were creating major international growth issues for Facebook, even though their most populous network is now London.

Radio is one of the most endangered of the traditional media. More and more, listeners are looking online for their news. So how’s a radio station to compete? NPR has done so quite successfully under the supervision of chief executive Ken Stern. He shared five great tips with the Wall Street Journal today:

1. Speed up. The pace of innovation has increased immeasurably.
2. While new times call for new products and new ways of doing business, remember that your values never change.
3. Invest in your employees: challenge them and train them for new opportunities.
4. Embrace new partnerships and new alliances.
5. Never forget your core business; for us, producing great radio programs for great radio stations.

Overall, I think tip three is the most important. A good company invests in making sure that its employees are responsive to and comfortable with change, rather than blindsided and scared by it.

Jake McKee asked a brilliant question on Linkedin: Answers yesterday. Well, ask a brilliant question, get a brilliant answer (or ten).

Jake’s inquiry:

What kinds of tools, processes, games, and anything else do you give to users and/or moderators to help check large amounts of content? What have you seen or heard about that’s a unique approach to online moderation?

Some of my favorite answers thus far: [click to continue...]

When Facebook first announced its targeted advertising, I thought it was a great idea. I reasoned that if advertisers knew a lot about me, they would be able to show me stuff I’m actually interested in spending my money on. That’s not happening.

If Facebook is really going after the targeted advertising space, then they should treat their ads like Pandora treats music. When I say I like a song, Pandora plays me more songs like it. When I say I don’t like a song, Pandora stops playing it. When I ask Pandora why they’re playing a song for me, they tell me.

For example: I don’t buy weight loss products because I don’t need to lose weight, but I’m seeing a lot of ads for them. I think that I’m getting these ads primarily because I’m female and I list “fitness” as one of my interests. But it could be that they’re just painting with a broad brush and targeting all women on Facebook.

Either way, I’m rather perturbed because even though I’m thrilled with my body — it can climb mountains and do the splits — looking at pictures of tanorexic models with 24 inch waists isn’t good for me. I’d rather see products designed to help me increase lean muscle mass and flexibility, rock climbing gear and yoga products. Those are the kinds of things I’d be more likely to spend my hard-earned cash on.

But Facebook’s advertisers have no way of opting out of showing their ads to people who are unlikely to click on them. They have no way of knowing that I don’t want to see weight loss ads, unless Facebook gives me a way to tell them.

[click to continue...]

Facebook rolled out a new little checkbox in your profile options: looking for “networking.” Some have called it taking a shot at LinkedIn, and undoubtedly Facebook is after the LinkedIn userbase that they haven’t already co-opted, but this is a relatively minor addition.

It’s been my assumption (although I was wrong) that practically everyone on Facebook was looking for “networking” to begin with. So, aside form delineating specifically that some people are looking to make business/social contacts and other people aren’t, this feature hasn’t done much.

What really will be a shot at LinkedIn is when Facebook decides to let me categorize my friends and organize them as “networking contacts” or “personal friends” or who knows what else. But in my mind this is basically a non-feature.

Although it does beg the question, do I have to now say that I’m interested in both Men and Women, if I’m looking for “Networking?”

One of the things I like about the way I can drag different services into Facebook is that when someone comes across my profile, they can find me on those other services pretty easily.

I recently picked up a new comment system on my personal blog (mostly about videogames) that has threaded comments, allows you to vote comments up and down the list, and carries a reputation system for people that create a user account.

It even lets you track the comments that your friends are leaving on other blogs and generally keep up with the “discussion” in a way that I like. It makes me feel more connected with my internet community.

The problem is that it’s one more, disparate profile for everyone to have. I don’t know who has a disqus user account, and if they do, I really have no way to find out what it is except by asking them. The same problem exists for practically every new web service in existence: everyone needs a new account.

I’ve been waiting and waiting, and I’m still waiting, for us to figure out how to be consistent. For myself, I make an effort to always sign up as Jasonp107. That’s my Skype name, Twitter name, Pownce, Disqus, Steam, AIM, Gmail, and probably my name for other things as well. The idea is that if you sign up for something new, and you want to see if I’m on it, chances are all you have to do is search for Jasonp107.

But the process should be a lot simpler than that. Everyone should have one URL or e-mail address (yeah, right), or some kind of global user account that ties in to each new service. It should track your friends on Twitter, or Livejournal (oh yeah, I’m Jasonp107 there, too), and automatically add them to whatever new network you sign up for.

That would be great. It would be painless. I could go in and register all my friend-based accounts (including Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn - whatever), and it would aggregate all of these contacts, and make sure that I carry them with me to whatever new thing I want to sign up with.

Someone should build this.

I’m stealing a really useful link from Scoble this morning, I’d like to point everyone to this list of 13 ways you can get your Facebook account disabled:

1. You didn’t use your real name
Don’t try to use a nickname (or initials)in lieu of the name on your birth certificate, because Facebook will find you and spit you out.

2. You joined too many groups
Remember that the maximum limit is 200 groups per user. More than that just looks desperate, don’t you think?

People are understandably worried about disabled accounts, although as I’ve heard most disabled accounts end up being recovered. Still - it’s like filing your taxes: try not to raise too many red flags.

OK, it is, but not primarily.

Over the weekend Scoble wrote another post explaining why the 5,000 friends limit is ridiculous, and I happen to agree with him. More relevantly, he also says:

“Damn I wish I hadn’t locked my Rolodex in this trunk.”

Rolodex?

I realize that the fundamental purpose behind Facebook is to connect with people, but I’ve primarily used Facebook as a content filter. While I was on Facebook “way back when,” before there were newsfeeds and profiles for people outside of college, I never thought there was that much to do on Facebook. I only really got pulled in after The Feed.

Before then, there wasn’t a whole lot to draw me back on a daily basis. Mostly because my friends were my friends, and I saw them most days anyway. It was a place for pictures and looking up whoever it was that your friend accidentally hooked up with last night.

Now I use it mostly to see what my friends and contacts are reading and sharing and posting. All in one place.

I never thought of it replacing my Address Book. Is that what people are using it for?