social media

The two most common pieces of advice you’ll hear about developing a Facebook app are probably:

1. Viral ideas are like half-cooked spaghetti; some of the stick to the wall, but you have to throw a bunch of noodles to find out which
2. Launch you app before it’s “finished,” and develop it over time as new features occur to you

I call this strategy of developing apps over time “baby step development,” because it relies significantly on incrementalism, or taking baby steps with your product.

Why is this important in social media?

Because what you’re looking for is engagement. Facebook highlighted this when they introduced the idea of “daily active users” for an app, instead of just counting the number of people who have installed an app.

And what better way to keep people coming back to your app than to keep adding new features and responding to user requests?

From that standpoint, it’s important that you look at any Facebook or OpenSocial app spec as something to provide a trajectory, not just a product.

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A few days ago Nick O’Neill posted on AllFacebook about some ad numbers that Justin Smith came up with regarding Facebook CPMs.

Basically, the numbers are low and probably going to get lower. This gets at an issue that I’ve been harping on for some time (although, unfortunately, I can’t seem to find the post that best expresses it): the best approach to Facebook applications is not as a business in and of itself (make apps, then sell ads), but as tool to reach a social media audience with your brand.

If social media were a movie theater, Facebook apps would be the previews, not the feature presentation.

The real winners in the Facebook app space are the companies that take a chunk of their ad budget and dedicate it to creating and maintaining an engaging, well-branded application, not those who try to use an application as a vehicle for making money.

I’m increasingly convinced that social media is a “no-buy, no-sell” zone in a lot of people’s minds. What you really want to do is build relationships in social media. You can sell them somewhere else when the time and place are right.

A lot of the recent buzz in the tech sector has been about unsuccessful efforts to monetize online social tools via advertising. Google is losing money on their advertising deal with MySpace. User sentiment suggests that demographic targeting doesn’t raise the relevance of advertising, and clickthrough rates are low across the board.

It’s not that social networks aren’t playing a role in business transactions. Blogger Charles Hudson wrote that he routinely makes transactions whose impetus has been a recommendation from friends through an online social network:

Judging by the activity I see within my own network, there are a lot of my friends using social networks as social Q&A systems to get input, advice, and recommendations in addition to just letting folks know what they’re up to at the moment.

But that activity doesn’t translate into revenue for the networks, and advertisers aren’t seeing the conversions like they do with Google’s AdWords service. So what’s a marketer to do?

A few suggestions:

1. If you’re doing targeted, self-serve advertising on Facebook, get as specific as you can. Avoid stereotyping your potential customers, all women are not interested in weight loss. Many men are not interested in having sex thrown at them all day long.
2. Think about ways of rounding out your campaign to encourage echo chamber behavior. Everyone is after conversions these days rather than brand awareness, so be sure to link your ad to a landing page that drives conversions and also enables social sharing of product recommendations. Even if the user who clicks through to your site doesn’t wind up becoming a customer, you want to enable him to encourage his friends to visit via social mechanisms such as embedding a video in his MySpace page or sharing your landing page on Facebook because it contains interesting content.
3. Consider building something useful — like an embeddable widget or a Facebook application that lets your customers connect with their friends in a way that involves your brand.

It’s pretty hard to screw up in social media if you’re being honest. As long as you’re upfront about what you’re trying to accomplish, ask permission to engage with people, and generally act like you would act in person, you’re going to be OK.

Which is why I’m always surprised at the number of people who decide that bad ideas are good ideas.

All Facebook wrote about fake application reviews yesterday, and how they’re effectively screwing up the system:

Duncan Riley wrote a post earlier today about Slide posting fake positive reviews on their own application. This has become a standard practice nowadays by companies. This problem happens time and time again when you set up any sort of review system. Even on this blog, I have application reviews. It’s pretty obvious who’s voting when immediately after I post an application review and there are suddenly 5 perfect reviews within minutes.

Here’s the thing about fake reviews: they’re deceitful.

We (noisy, blogging) consumers don’t want to be deceived.* And it makes us angry when we see companies trying to pull a fast one on us.

Every time this happens, a little bit of trust in the medium goes away. Right now, social media has this great, wonderful, high level of trust and personal contact because as a whole people are being very genuine. Let’s not waste it.

——
* Outside of, say, a magic show.

I see people becoming increasingly worried about monetizing social networks. Case in point: Nick O’Neill’s post on the Social Times this morning.

It reminded me of Battelle’s post from a few days ago that I started chewing on yesterday. I still think that the best way to look at social media monetization is to see it as a vehicle for promoting your business. Trying to build at profitable business based entirely in social media is, for now, an extremely difficult task.

But if you must try, I think that focusing on building your brand is the best way to do it. Engagement, as an undefined metric, is the most important thing you can generate.

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.

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.

The part that caught my attention most in our pal Matt Mullenweg’s post about snarfing up BuddyPress is this bit here (emphasis added):

It’s clear that the future is social. Connections are key. WordPress MU is a platform which has shown itself to be able to operate at Internet-scale and with BuddyPress we can make it friendlier. Someday, perhaps, the world will have a truly Free and Open Source alternative to the walled gardens and open-only-in-API platforms that currently dominate our social landscape.

OK, so I quoted the whole last paragraph. But you needed the context.

For those of you who aren’t up on the news, Automattic is hiring Andy Pealting, the guy behind BuddyPress, which you might call the “Social Network Total Conversion” for WordPress MU. See it in action at ChickSpeak if you’re curious.

Not too long ago I blogged about FriendFeed opening up functionality to the web that has traditionally (can I really use that word when talking about social media?) been the property of closed social networks.

I’m glad that the newsfeed concept is jumping into the unfiltered internet. I think it is the core social concept that will allow the inherently disparate blogosphere to build real social connections.

I’m also glad that Matt is thinking about making WordPress more social. To date, WordPress has been the most useful, adaptable, and stable CMS I’ve worked with. Giving it the tools (BuddyPress) to act as a social network infrastructure opens up platform possibilities for smaller organizations that can’t afford to develop expensive, in-house systems.

In short, I’m excited to see how it integrates.

According to both Mashable and The Social Times today, MySpace has finally announced that they’re going to be launching their own developer platform on February 5th. From Mashable:

Earlier this evening, I spoke with Amit Kapur, who the company is also announcing has been promoted to Chief Operating Officer and will oversee the platform. While MySpace may be a little late to the platform party, it’s clear that they have been closely watching developments in the space and will be addressing many of the growing pains that chief rival Facebook has dealt with from the get-go; most notably privacy, monetization, and data ownership.

And additionally:

This means that unlike Facebook, where we have dozens of ad networks competing for inventory on applications, MySpace may play an active role, presumably utilizing its large ad sales force to help developers get premium revenue.

I think that MySpace is being really smart in their approach to the platform. It’s clear they’re not the first players in this game, but they’ve really paid a lot of attention to where Facebook is fumbling, and it seems like they’ve keyed in on the issues with monetization, assuming that they can attract developers with simpler (and they hope more effective) revenue models.

That’s true in a lot of cases, but I think that development on all of these social platforms going forward—Myspace, Facebook, and Open Social—will see a rise in applications designed less to be standalone, moneymaking ventures and designed more to replace the advertising and exposure that are already trending down in TV and other traditional media.

In other words, I’m not sure that application developers going forward will be looking first to monetize their apps. It may be something that they choose to do, but I think a forward-looking platform should design tools to help maximize brand exposure.

Chris Brogan is one of my favorite thinkers in the social media space, and I’m very fortunate to have met him on a couple of occasions. Last week, he posted a great article entitled “Marketing is NOT Social Media-Social Media is NOT Marketing.”

In it — and I paraphrase here — Chris argues that marketers who screw up in the social media space are often confusing the medium with the practice. Marketing is a discipline that is all about shaping and controlling a message. Social media are tools that allow ordinary people — or at least geekier-than-average ordinary people — to create and distribute content themselves.

In short, social media enables the little guy to make his voice heard.

Marketers should turn to social media the same way the little guy does — to connect. Self-expression and connection with other human beings are the bedrock reason why people are drawn to YouTube and Facebook and WordPress.  If you use those tools as just another distribution channel for the same message you’ve been sending down a thousand other channels — radio, TV, print — they’ll fail to translate nine times out of ten.

The result is that you look ham-handed, desperate and spammy.

Working from Chris’ central thesis, these are my recommendations for marketers:

1. If you want to understand social media, start using it as an individual first before you use it on behalf of a client. Pick a passion that has nothing to do with work and explore its presence on the tools you’re curious about. Hint: try using Google’s search within a site function — type “keyword site:twitter.com” into Google — to seek keywords within Twitter.com. That’s a great way to find people to follow. You can do this for other sites as well, like YouTube.
2. Observe what people do, then jump in and try your hand at commenting, leaving a video response, tweeting a bit, etc.
3. Eventually, you’ll start to feel a sense of investment in whatever community you are participating in. Once you’ve reached that level, you have the necessary understanding to apply the practice to your marketing life.
4. Pick one of the social media tools you’ve explored and see if you can find either a community of your client’s stakeholders or conversations about your client. Now, think back to your personal online community and ask yourself, “if a marketer came into our community and wanted to talk about their client, what would I want from them?”

Mark Collier at Marketing Profs reports on a study that indicated over one billion people will be using social media sites like Facebok and Myspace by the year 2012:

A new report by Strategy Analytics claims that roughly one out of every 6 people on the face of the earth will be using social media in 5 years. The report also adds that there are currently approximately 373 million people using social media.

Here’s the graphic that charts the 373m to 1bn path. Note all numbers are in millions:

This is:

• Awesome news for social media app (widget) developers
• Good news for the internet
• Good news for social media sites like Facebook and Myspace
• News for the media industry - how they react will determine whether it is a boon or not
• Bad news for old school PR and Marketing

These are two related—but different—questions. Jeff Jarvis today ponders the role of the news media in communities:

But I argued that the real question is, what is the role of the journalistic institution in its community? Is it merely to inform or is it also to organize (which, not coincidentally, is the advice of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg: bring your community elegant organization)?

I agree with Jarvis’s challenge (and with Zuckerberg), there is a key element of community organization that goes into a newspaper, especially those that are focused more locally than nationally. There’s an element of that in magazines, too (Goings On in the New Yorker?).

Is Journalism news or is it community?

It’s both (cop out!). But the larger point is that it includes an element of community. Up until recently, writing a good letter to the editor was one of the better ways to make your opinion heard locally. Now…why not blog it or put it on Facebook?

Which brings us to Is the NYT competing with Facebook?

Yes. The same way they’re competing with craigslist. A lot of the community functions that, up until five or ten years ago, were best provided by newspapers are quickly being replaced by online functionality, that is free, interactive, and often shiny. And we as a species love shiny objects.

This may be one of the reasons that newspapers are finding themselves in so much trouble; maybe just reporting the news isn’t enough to give life to a paper. Maybe there needs to be a real sense of community.

Side question: Are newspapers screwed?

My answer: No.

I was pointed to this post by Wade Rockett, one of the attendees at next week’s Web Community Forum: Community Building in the Age of Facebook. I know it’s from October (in blogging terms, this is like bringing up a conversation topic from the mesozoic era), but it outlines a really interesting aspect of Facebook for business use:

I was burning the midnight oil recently, starting to write an important piece that was due in a couple of days. It didn’t take long for me to realize that the job ahead of me would be much harder than I’d thought. Frankly, at that moment it seemed impossible that I could deliver quality work in such a short time. (Panic is often an essential part of the writing process.)

Feeling the need to vent in some small way, I updated my Facebook status to read, “Wade is deeply, DEEPLY unsettled.” Then I got to work.

The next morning I had an e-mail waiting for me from Geoff Bilbrough, my overboss in London. The subject line of his message read, “Is deeply unsettled.” In it was a simple question: Is there anything I should know or can do?

What happened here seems pretty straightforward: Geoff must have noticed Wade’s Facebook status, and was paying enough attention to want to offer help if it was needed. I think that this kind of apparent omniscience definitely qualifies as a “minor superpower.” Ten points to Facebook.

While a lot of people are probably going to feel unsettled knowing their boss could reading their Facebook statuses, I think that on the whole it is something that will end up giving companies (especially large ones where one boss may be in London and an employee in another country entirely) far more comfort and culture.

One of the reasons that I love working here at Parnassus Group is that we’ve got a relatively tight-night group. By virtue of the fact that we’re all connected through blogs, twitter, facebook, and on occasion, yes, real life too, our boss usually has a good handle on how we’re doing, and has even been known to bring Popsicles to sick employees.

My point is not to brag (yes it is). My point is that as managers and employees start interacting on social platforms like Facebook, especially when they live far away from each other, two things are going to happen:

1. Management will “mellow out” about personal expression - as “employees” turn into “people” AND as management gets younger, setting your Friday night Facebook status to “drunk dialing college buddies if I could find my phone” will probably not be grounds for a lecture.
2. Employees will have the opportunity to develop much better relationships with their bosses, especially if the communication is two way (think about your boss Twittering “At a wine and cheese party. Too much wine, not enough cheese.”)

One of our speakers, Connie Bensen, wrote a post yesterday about some of the creative uses of social media that are popping up in various places.

There are restaurants now, like Papa Johns, that allow customers to text in an order. Not too shabby. And now there’s apparently a service called gomobo.com that facilitates this kind of text-message ordering for restaurants that choose to sign up for the service.

The ad campaign that Connie points to (”ask restaurants in your area to join gomobo”) reminds me a lot of the way that Facebook initially spread to other universities (”ask your administration to add support for thefacebook.com”). It seems to work well, at least for Facebook.

At the moment, it often feels like social media outlets such as Twitter and Facebook are fairly disconnected from the “real world.” Why can’t we use Twitter to check the hours on a local store? Why can’t we use Facebook to check the price differences between the local Target and the local Best Buy?

These types of apps are already beginning to surface on Facebook, and it’s only a matter of time before these two worlds become more interconnected. I’m curious to see how that happens.

Our buddy and conference-partner Nick O’Neill yesterday launched a brand new site called The Social Times, which is covering—you guessed it—pretty much everything in the social media space.

If you’ve been paying any attention recently to Nick’s original blog, Allfacebook, you already know that Nick’s got the know-how and the gumption to really cover the space. They’ve already written about some interesting statistics about social network usage and Friendster’s launch of a Chinese version of their site.

Be sure to add it to your list of places to check out when you’re surfing the social sphere.