Facebook

It is an ongoing question, highlighted earlier this week by both Blogspotting and Adweek. Social technologies have always had trouble finding good advertising schemes.

One of the big issues with advertising in online social networks is, as both posts point out, a lack of reliable metrics. Adweek points out that MySpace is working hard to bring new variables to the table when talking with advertisers about value of their ad dollar:

Instead of only measuring ad exposures and clicks, MySpace is gathering data on visits to community pages, time spent there, whether visitors watched a video or embedded a piece of content in their page. What’s more, it is then tracking the pass-along rate for pieces of portable content, currently to one degree but soon beyond that. It is also tracking demographic and psychographic information for “friends” a brand has accrued.

MySpace is right to try to move beyond the limited CPM and CPC models that have dominated Web advertising for most of its existence. There are so many other factors in evaluating the effectiveness of an ad campaign.

Advertisers should probably be looking at comments, wall posts, or even posts in the blogosphere to see what is being said in response to their product and their campaign. To really evaluate impact in social networks and on the internet, you have to look at reactions not only from multiple people or through multiple feedback mechanisms, but in multiple places.

If you run an ad on Facebook and someone disagrees, they just might blog it instead responding in the network.

In the end, I don’t think there exists currently a metric that accurately represents the value an advertiser is buying in social networks. But I think it’s a very important question to be asking.

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Facebook has launched a new feature that shows users who they might be friends with based on their existing connections. Based on my connections, Facebook has recommended 26 new friends. Of those, I actually know four and could appropriately consider being “Facebook friends” with another three.

I’m curious, how accurate has your friend offering been thus far?

I just ran across one of Brian Clark’s posts on Copyblogger from last July titled Blogging is Dead (Long Live Value Blogging). I think I got there from Paul Chaney’s monster size post about what change is afoot in the social blogomediasphere.

Brain put his finger on something in that post that has been in the back of my mind for a while, but that I hadn’t really been able to articulate. He did it first, so here it is in his words:

And you’ll find that the migration of pure social chatter off of blogs and onto social networking applications is a good thing for the rest of us who are looking to build businesses powered in whole or in part by blogs.

The migration of pure social chatter off of blogs and onto social networking applications is exactly what I’ve been noticing. We’re creating dedicated social channels for different levels of communication.

Here’s my handy-dandy chart breaking it down:

OK so some of that may be more satire than dead-on analysis, but the bottom line is that I think we are creating channels for our attention online, where we can adjust the dial as it suits our mood or our goals. And I think that is great.

I made a video this morning that details how Facebook’s new Friend List Privacy feature works. It’s a really cool way to customize the experience your friends have of your Facebook presence depending on how well you know them.

In the long view, anything that makes the Facebook user experience better is good for everyone involved, including marketers who are using the site to engage with potential customers. But in the short run, the newly announced privacy improvements present some new challenge for marketers and community builders.

Up until this point in its development — and with a few notable exceptions such as limited profiles — Facebook content has been available to just about anyone with whom a user has established a connection. Because of its roots as a college network, it didn’t really need to segregate who could see a particular photo album. But when Facebook opened its doors to all comers, the requirements changed.

Starting tonight, users will have access to a tool called “Friend Lists Privacy,” which will enable them to use the friend lists feature launched in mid-December to assign permissions to different chunks of content within the site.

Those of you for whom user-generated content and content sharing is a major word-of-mouth marketing vehicle will need to be aware of these changes, which could potentially limit the viral opportunity for any particular chunk of content within the site.

Furthermore, the soon-to-be rolled out tabbed profile interface will further allow users to customize their profile experience. Visibility of content will be more customizable.

More user control is a good thing. It also means that marketers and community builders will have to develop more useful tools to stay front-and-center. That’s why building a useful application for your user base is more important now than ever.

As we’ve said many times before, the cardinal rule of social media marketing is “be useful.” Think honestly about what might be useful to your core audience, then roll it out quickly and iterate as needed.

For more coverage of Facebook’s new features:

• WSJ
• TechCrunch
• AllFacebook

Aspiring iPhone developers are getting rejection letters by the thousands. Meanwhile, developers who have made it into the beta program are reporting that the shallow integration leaves next to no opportunity to build anything meaningful. Update: Developer Craig Hockenberry has a very interesting perspective on one of the major issues at stake in the debate.

A few months ago at Community Next, Mitch Kapor was bemoaning a similar problem with regard to the Facebook platform. It appears that at first pass, most developers are going to be dissatisfied with the options available to them on any platform.

This is symptomatic of one of the fundamental tensions Kapor described in his talk: platforms want to open up slowly and test the waters. Developers want to do everything right away. In the end, smart people usually find a way to work around platform limitations and go on to build cool stuff.

That said, there is a right way and a wrong way to engage with developer communities, and it’s safe to say that Apple isn’t doing a great job. At the risk of driving everyone nuts with another Mark Zuckerberg / SXSW post, I’d like to hold the Facebook team up as an example of how to start doing things right.

After his much-lambasted keynote interview, Zuckerberg made the decision to appear at the Facebook developer garage the following afternoon. During the Q&A, I noticed that he was more at ease onstage than we’ve ever seen him. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that he was in his element chatting informally with geeks.

Whatever the cause, he was positively ebullient — by Zuckerbergian standards, anyway. Afterwards, he made himself extremely accessible. And since then, he’s been giving out interviews left and right, which has earned him some — IMHO, undeserved — scorn from Valleywag.

If Facebook keeps this up, they’re going to become a poster child for how to interact with developers. Of course, I don’t expect Zuckerberg to pull a Steve Ballmer anytime soon. Running up and down a stage screaming “Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!” doesn’t really strike me as his style.

But as we watched his eyes light up while answering our questions about the site he has built from the ground up, many of us in the room gained a deeper understanding of his passion for and commitment to the platform. As I told him afterwards, that was the moment when a many of us decided, “this Zuckerberg guy isn’t evil.”

At base, what this really means it that for platform owners to maximize developer engagement and productivity, they need to overcommunicate, demonstrate passion, and offer inspiration. That doesn’t mean that they need to tell developers what to do.

Zuckerberg — rightly, I think — demonstrated great reluctance to tell people what kinds of applications to build. But platform owners need to say, “Together, we are going to build something amazing! What’s more, it’s going to be fun! Developers of the world, to me! Now, here’s how this is going to work…”

Apple has every right to take baby steps with the nascent developer community forming around the iPhone. But in the process, they can make the road less bumpy for themselves by offering an unprecedented opening of the kimono.

I’m not holding my breath — it is Apple, after all. But even a statement as simple as, “we want to take it slowly because of x, y, and z,” would be sufficient.

I read Nick O’Neill’s post about SocialAds earlier today with some curiosity. After all, SocialAds have proven themselves to be somewhat underwhelming since the announcement from Facebook on November 6th.

Nick is right that what SocialAds taps into is the online version of Word of Mouth Marketing, plus a bit of measurement as to a particular mouth’s influence. And he’s right that this is cool, and in concept, revolutionary.

But I haven’t seen it work so far.

It might revolutionize advertising, if it starts working.

But it needs to work first. Has Google revolutionized advertising with AdSense? Indisputably. Did Overture think of the concept first? Yep.

I guess that’s my point.

Sebastien Provencher proclaimed last week that Twitter is the new Facebook. I can’t say that I think he’s that far off.

I’ve already explained how I think that Facebook is not going anywhere, especially for it’s core user base. But the tech group needs something new to feed on. In Sebastien’s words:

Industry pundits are looking for utility and, for a while, it certainly felt like Facebook was IT. But not anymore. Has something replaced it? Yes. Today, I’d like to say it’s Twitter. It’s all anecdotal, mind you, based on my brain filtering a massive quantity of articles and blog posts I read every day. You’ll have to trust me on this. Should you still care about Facebook? A resounding YES!

So basically, he agrees with me. So I like him.

Twitter is, like most of the more interesting web services that are up and coming, more of an infrastructure than a service. Look at the things that have been built on top of it: twitterific (monetized with ads in the feed - which is likely for Twitter itself), Snitter, Tweeterboard, StrawPoll and so on.

Like RSS, it’s a push-based community technology. I think that’s exciting.

Today’s Facebook developer garage was a lot more satisfying than yesterday’s very scripted conversation between CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Business Week reporter Sarah Lacy. Zuckerberg took the stage for a good 45 minutes to take questions from the crowd.

He wasn’t as open as I would have liked, but I did get more of a sense of who he is and what his vision will be. During a question from a gentleman who wanted to know why there is no network for Palestine, he revealed that Facebook will one day move away from top-down dictated networks and instead, allow users to build their own networks.

He also talked about Facebook’s concerns with regard to moving their service into China as they continue to internationalize.

Yesterday, I wrote that the problem with the Zuckerberg keynote wasn’t Sarah Lacy. The “conversation” between the two of them felt scripted because it was scripted. I stand by most of what I wrote, although I have to say that given his response to the Q&A today, I’d say that Zuckerberg may not love his bubble as much as I thought he did.

I had a lot of impressions throughout Zuckerberg’s talk, and I tweeted each of them. Here are my tweets — and the relevant tweets of my friends — in chronological order:

• Me: Zuckerberg is taking questions from this developer audience. I asked him what he’d like to see developers build that would patch some holes
• Me: Zuckerberg gave me kind of a non-answer. I want to know what he would like to see developers build that would really add value to his vision
• Me: Still, even though he’s still being a closed book. I do appreciate the fact that he’s here and talking to us.
• Eston Bond: @tetesegehen what holes? product holes or feature holes?
• Me: @eston feature holes, like privacy stuff we were talking about last night. Or not being able to hold onto content that people share
• Eston: @tetesegehen you couldn’t fix that kind of stuff through platform anyway. that’d be like trying to patch a windows feature by installin word
• Me: @eston did you see what the drop.io guys were talking about?
• @eston They’re building a private place within Facebook to share and permission information. That strikes me as a stopgap measure.
• Me: What is the view on sharing information with the government? Good question!
• Me: I’m really glad that Facebook is taking the China and privacy issue seriously.
• Me: I love this Q&A, I have much more of a sense of who Zuckerberg is than from the keynote. His eyes light up when he talks about geekery.
• Me: @scobleizer is asking Zuckerberg some very tough questions about people getting kicked off.
• Me: Zuckerberg says that there’s a standard appeals process, he doesn’t think it’s true that people can’t get back into the site.
• Me: Zuckerberg says that they’re going to allow users to create their own networks in the future. “Facebook Curmudgeons” network, anyone?

What I really got out of this talk — apart from all the geeky insights — is that Facebook is more open that it first appears. They really do care about reaching out to the developer community. The problem is that they are not yet reaching out beyond the developers.

Ordinary users — like some of my friends who are still in college, or older people — are fed up with all the application invites, multiple inputs and user interface conventions they don’t understand. Those are the issues that Facebook will need to increasingly connect with users over.

Think you could do better running a platform than those slobs over at Facebook? If you’re in the area, you could get a chance to tell them face to face.

About an hour ago Facebook posted on their official Developers Blog that they’re going to start hosting Developer Roundtables to get feedback on their platform and to discuss “developing Platform applications, best practices, and monetization strategies.”

Getting yourself signed up to the roundtable means sending an e-mail to roundtable@facebook.com with your street cred (company, app(s), active users, etc). The list is in their post.

Jeremiah Owyang has posted some great insight about the fundamental tensions facing big brands who want to engage on the Facebook platform. The money quote:

In the presentation from BJ Fogg who co-ran the Facebook class at Stanford, they developed applications, that they estimated totaled $500,000 in revenue from the students efforts in advertising. They give out a list of learnings on what made them successful, often it included being flexible, quickly iterating, not listening to individual opinions or getting approvals, just launching them, and experimentation. It was very clear to me that that behavior is the opposite of large brands, who want safety, low risk, and pre-written plans.

Jeremiah suggests that businesses outsource application development, which might be effective. But I think it’s more important long term that all businesses learn how to take more calculated risks online.

What do you guys think?

I’m just assuming that since Facebook is talking at Graphing Social Patterns today, and that since everyone is there tweeting about it (including Teresa), that this tweet from Jeremiah is already everywhere:

“applications to accept credit cards is to come very soon” says Facebook.

Ding! Winner!

As I’m sure I’ve said before (but I’m too lazy to find a link. See? it’s the ‘search is re-find‘ problem), building in PayPal solves the monetization problem for everyone.

How? What changes?

1. Application developers can build apps that can rely on something other than ads to make money (I have complete confidence in the ingenuity of FB app develoeprs).
2. Facebook can play PayPal for their 200,000 developers…heellloooo pocket change.

Watch it happen.

I’m listening to Facebook’s Ben Ling presenting about the opportunities of the Facebook platform right now. He’s saying that Facebook will prohibit the very frustrating forced invitations that have plagued platform users. Ben is calling this tactic by application developers very shortsighted. Facebook wants developers to take a more long-term approach to gaining users and committing to the health of the platform.

Users will soon be able to report applications that force invitations and remove them automatically. This is definitely a step in the right direction for the platform.

As I was preparing for the Webinar I gave last week, I began thinking about how overwhelming monitoring the online conversation can be. After all, what you really have are chunks of content flying around the Web, taking any number of increasingly convoluted paths. For example, a blog post can be propagated via RSS to Facebook, then published as a note in the news feed. And at each step of the process, these chunks of content can start conversations. Add all the possible permutations into te mix and you begin to realize how very challenging online conversations are to track.

If all you do is track keywords or monitor the top bloggers in the space via RSS, you may be missing out on the growing conversation happening inside walled gardens like Facebook or on community news sites like Digg.

So in my presentation, I proposed an idea that’s worth exploring: follow individual attention streams rather than keywords.  Here’s how you do it:

1. Take that list of prominent bloggers that you were planning to e-mail about your latest product.
2. Search for each one of them here, here and here add them to your list of friends with the intent that you will follow what they’re interested in and participate in the conversations they find interesting.
3. Meet and follow other people whose names you see repeatedly mentioned or involved in conversations that matter to your area of expertise.
4. Repeat steps 2-3 as needed.

The point of this exercise is that the passionate, intelligent people in your space are aware of the best conversations. They tend to be friends, or at least online acquaintances with other people who are having those conversations. If you take this approach to following the conversation, you’ll not only monitor the buzz effectively, you’ll also meet and make friends with all those influential people you want to reach out to.

Yes, this approach is a lot more cumbersome and time consuming than typing a few keywords into Technorati and monitoring the result in your Google Reader, but you get out of it what you put in.

I’m certainly guilty of clutter. There are plenty of apps that I’ve added to my profile and subsequently ignored. It’s not really worth the effort for me to uninstall them, so I just don’t use them.

The result? A profile full of applications I don’t use.

The extended profile was step one in reducing the “clutter” of unused or unwanted applications.

The new tabbed profiles will also, undoubtedly make users more conscious of the app display choices they make.

It will also encourage app developers to build applications that rely less on being seen (look at my profile box!) and more on the utility or metaphor they provide in social interaction (I poked someone). This is where the value to the user has been all along, of course, with profile badges mostly acting like “bling.”

I think this will be good for the platform overall. App developers should start thinking now about how they’re going to adjust for profile redeployment in the spring.