Facebook Is All About Sharing

Posted on May 5, 2009 by Paul

From my weekly newsletter. To subscribe, just fill out the short form to the right.

This week I continue my series on marketing opportunities with social networks with a profile of the largest and most tantalizing network of them all: Facebook.

Over the past two years, Facebook has raced ahead of its predecessor, MySpace, to become the gathering place of choice for young adults. With membership of over 200 million, the population of Facebook now exceeds all but the six largest countries in the world, making it a compelling choice for companies that want to spread a message far and wide.

Facebook succeeded in accomplishing something that countless entrepreneurs and billions of investment dollars failed to do during the first decade of the Web: it got people to give up personal information. Lots of it. Facebook members share details about their lives, loves and passions to a stunning degree. The catch is that this valuable data is locked up in personal profiles, which are shared only selectively by members with their friends. The only way to broadcast a general message to Facebook members is by buying advertising.

Facebook’s core audience is college students, more than 85% of whom are members. However, the site is catching fire with the older crowd as well. In fact, the over-35 crowd is the fastest growing demographic group. Most people are captivated by their initial Facebook experience: filling out a profile reveals dozens of former friends and long-lost classmates who are already members.

A Culture of Sharing

“Friending,” a concept popularized by MySpace, requires a mutual agreement between two members to share information. Members can control to some degree how much access to grant their friends. Facebook also has several popular features built on this concept, including a public message space called the Wall, a changeable status message and photo albums that friends can see and comment upon.

The Twitter-like “News Feed” is a recently added feature that provides a constant stream of information about friends’ activities and recommendations. For active users, it is increasingly becoming an alternative to services traditionally provided by news outlets.

Facebook has millions of groups about every conceivable topic ranging from egg-lovers to people who believe in the Loch Ness monster. It’s ridiculously easy to start a group on Facebook, which is one reason why so few of them are active. For marketers who want to build a fan base, however, Facebook groups are an appealing way to reach a large number of people quickly. The trick is to convince members to recruit each other. Spam mail is prohibited on Facebook, so group organizers must create compelling outposts that members will want to recommend to each other. Among the examples of successful commercial groups are Nike, Victoria’s Secret, The Chris Moyles Show, Pink Floyd, The State of Texas and Harley Davidson. The secret: be memorable, shareable and fun. Here’s a list of some of the largest Facebook fan pages.

Facebook’s entire model is predicated on sharing. Since early 2008, the site has allowed third-parties to create applications that members can share with each other. Nearly all of the successful titles, such as Flixter and iLike, employ features that let members compare their preferences to their friends’ or to give virtual gifts.

Some people think Facebook is strictly a consumer gathering spot, but there are plenty of groups devoted to professional topics, with marketing and sales leading the way. While the thrust of the site is consumer, businesses shouldn’t rule out Facebook as a low-cost means to find constituents who are hard to reach elsewhere, particularly if they are under 30.

Why People Love Social Networks

Posted on April 28, 2009 by Paul

From my weekly newsletter. To subscribe, just fill out the short form to the right.

Social networks are so popular these days that many marketers and small business owners may feel compelled to use them regardless of whether they make sense or not for the business. I’ve recently been helping some clients to make these decisions, which can be expensive if poorly considered, and I find that many people still have some very basic questions. So I’ll devote a few posts to practical advice that may help clear up the confusion.

Why all the hype?

Online communities have been around since the earliest days of the Internet and in commercial services like CompuServe and The Well. So what’s different today? In 1998, a site called Classmates.com, which is still thriving, introduced the concept of “profiles” and “friends.” While this nation seems second nature today, it was revolutionary at the time.

The profile is a person’s (or business’) home base. It not only contains personal information about a wide range of topics, but it also keeps track of a member’s activity within the community. This is important, because as members accumulate friends, joins groups and help other members, all of those activities and relationships are captured in their profiles. The more they contribute, the more valuable they are to the community and the more their personal status grows.

Friending is essentially the process of sharing personal information with others. When two people become friends, they exchange glimpses into each other’s lives, much as we create and nurture real-life friendships. Friends relationships are very strong, whether real or electronic. The chance to build and solidify relationships with our friends is one of the greatest appeals of social networks.

There’s also utility in these online relationships. Social networks are great contact managers. Instead of maintaining our own address books, it’s easy to let the network keep track of where people are, what companies they work for, who they’re dating, etc. They also make it easy for us to capture fleeting relationships. Once we friend someone we’ve met at a conference or football game, we never need to lose touch with that person again.

Groups are a natural outgrowth of profiles and friends. Social networks keep track of information that can be used to find other people with whom we share common interests. While most networks don’t allow members to mass-mail other people based upon their interests, they do enable sponsors to buy targeted advertising and people to form relationships within the groups they join. The advantage of starting a group on Facebook, for example, is that Facebook already has information about a vast community of people. Group organizers can take advantage of this information to quickly grow their membership without starting from the ground up.

Profiles, groups and friends — these are the essential elements of social networks. Next we’ll look at how they’re applied on three of the most popular networks: Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Mars Deserves Praise for Innovative Skittles Initiative

Posted on March 5, 2009 by Paul

Early this week, candy maker Skittles rocked the media by giving over its entire home page to a list of Twitter postings labeled with the #skittles hash tag. The experiment initially provoked excitement, then doubt and finally alarm as pranksters used the opportunity to post all manner of negative and even obscene comments that had very little to do with the fruit candy.

As the volume of trash talk swelled, Mars Snackfood US pulled down the Twitter search page and replaced it with a Facebook profile. Today the site features a Wikipedia entry. Skittles’ branding consists of an overlay window that links to various references to the product in social media outposts. Basically, Mars reconfigured the brand’s website as a package of consumer-generated content.

A lot of people are trashing Mars for this bold experiment. “Disastrous” says Apryl Duncan on About.com. “Gimmicky” says VentureBeat. “Humiliating disaster” says SmartCompany. While some people are praising Mars for originality, the early consensus is that this campaign is not a good idea for the Skittles brand.

Bold Move

I beg to differ. While Mars certainly could have better anticipated the frat-boy efforts to undermine the program, the Skittles experiment is a bold statement about where the company is taking its marketing tactics. Full disclosure: I’ve had the opportunity to work with some of the Mars marketers on a paid basis over the past year. Unlike many other corporations I’ve encountered, these people get it. Sure, they’re still feeling their way through the process of working with uncensored customer conversations, but they’re on the right track and they’re taking the right risks.

In January, Mars held a day-long offsite meeting with more than 100 of its global marketers to talk about word-of-mouth marketing. I was there, along with many of the company’s agency and branding partners. I was impressed with the commitment the company is making to understanding and working with social media. While many of their peers still regard online forums with a mixture of suspicion and disgust, the Mars marketers see it as an opportunity. They’re also fully aware of the risks. One breakout session at the meeting was devoted almost entirely to an analysis of Johnson & Johnson’s Motrin Moms fiasco.

There’s no question Mars could have thought through this experiment somewhat better. Twitter was a bad place to start and under the circumstances, some filtering would have been appropriate. However, the whole concept of giving over the Skittles Web presence to customer conversations is daring and innovative. It’s unfortunate that some of the same people who trash brands for not being more hip to social media are now trashing Mars for almost being too hip.

Proof in the Pudding

Also, look at the coverage this story has generated: The Wall Street Journal, LA Times, Fast Company, CNET and the list goes on and on. If you believe Oscar Wilde’s theory that “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about,” then this campaign is a hit. If Skittles sales don’t jump 15% in the next month, I’ll eat a bag of the candy, including the bag.

Experimentation is central to new media marketing and negative reactions to bold ideas are nothing to be feared. Nearly three years ago, General Motors invited visitors to stitch together their own video ads for the Chevrolet Tahoe SUV. About 15% of the videos people created were negative, prompting critics to call the campaign a disaster. But inside General Motors the project was considered an unqualified success. The Tahoe hit 30% market share shortly after the Web promotion began, outpacing its closest competitor two to one.

The Skittles campaign is outside-the-box thinking. Despite its shortcomings, it deserves praise.

How to Get Started With Social Media

Posted on January 22, 2009 by Paul

The Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council held an informative seminar at Communispace this morning entitled “Getting Started with Social Media — Lessons from the Front Lines.” I took notes of the comments by the four speakers and pulled out a few highlights to share:

Perry Allison (left), Vice President of Social Marketing Innovation at Eons.com talked about the value of gathering detailed feedback from a small number of people. Referring to a project that Eons conducted with Quaker Oats, she said she was initially concerned that only 80 members of the baby clothes site offered comments. “I thought Quaker wouldn’t be excited about 80 members, because this is a company that advertises on baby items on television to millions. But the brand manager was ecstatic because of the feedback and insight they were getting.” The main thing they advertise is this brand of baby clothes.

It’s the engagement that gets clients energized, she said. “Advertising currently drives more revenue, but what gets brands most excited is engagement marketing.”

Allison offered a list of common mistakes that companies make in creating online communities: “Overloading people with information, not having a clear concept of the goals, not defining a clear value proposition, using marketing speak, and viewing the destination as a thing rather than a process.” That last point is particularly important. Markers have been taught to treat campaigns as projects with defined beginnings and ends. But customer communities, if well managed, can last for years. The value is in the process, not the deliverable.

A couple of the panelists commented on the dilemma facing mainstream media organizations today as their power is eroded by the influence of new sources.

Pam Johnston (left), Vice President of Member Experience at Gather.com, brought an interesting background to the discussion. She spent more than 15 years in television news before joining Gather, which means she understands the mainstream media mindset. The most disruptive force in social media is its ability to define new trusted sources, she said. “People are looking for a trusted source and it may not be the Boston Globe. It may be your neighbor.

“I can tell you from experience that traditional media don’t want to be a hub,” she said. “They have a top-down mentality: ‘If you want it, you have to come to my site to get it.'”

Dan Kennedy, Assistant Professor at the Northeastern School Of Journalism and author of the Media Nation blog, was even more blunt about the challenges facing mainstream media. “The question of how news organizations are going to monetize anything they’re doing is the question facing the industry right now. The Boston Globe may have the largest audience its’ ever had and it’s losing $1 million a week,” he said.

Brian Halligan, CEO of HubSpot, offered a five-step approach to getting started with social media:

1. Start a blog. It’s a living breathing thing.

2. Create interesting content. If you do that, people will link to you.

3. Publish everywhere: Use Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed and any other channel you have available.

4. Optimize for search engines. If you’ve got a good pithy title (Top 10 Tips, anyone?), then publicize it. Make it easy for people to post your content right to Twitter, Digg, Facebook and other destinations.

5. Measure it. Look at your traffic, page views, unique visitors, time spent on site. That’s how you know whether your hard work is paying off.

Sound easy? Creating remarkable content isn’t instinctive for everyone. That’s why Gather’s Johnston was dismayed when Burger King backed down last week on its audacious “Whopper Sacrifice” campaign on Facebook. The program got lots of attention for originality, even if its premise – members “unfriended” others in exchange for free hamburgers – was controversial. Burger King yanked the campaign last week over complaints that it was encouraging antisocial behavior.

“It was probably the most successful campaign Facebook has ever done,” she said. “I thought it was funny and memorable. It got people talking and those are important qualities for a memorable campaign.”

On the always popular issue of return on investment, Halligan had this to say: “Most of our customers create a LinkedIn group or Facebook page and see, on average, a 13% month-over-month growth in leads. I’d advise jumping into this. You don’t need venture backing to start a Twitter account. If you’ve got time and energy and something to say, then do it.”

Finally, Halligan got my vote for best quote with this one: “”Marketers are lions looking for elephants in the jungle. But the elephants have all left the jungle and they’re at watering holes out on the savannah. Those watering holes are called Google and Facebook and Twitter and Gather and Eons.”

So get your tail out of the jungle.

FAQ, Part Deux

Posted on December 11, 2008 by Paul

I’ve recently conducted a couple of online seminars about social media topics. The Q&A sessions at these events are almost always too short to get to the issues that are on people’s minds. So over the next few issues of this newsletter, I’ll run down a few of the best questions I didn’t get to. For a good, free webcast on this topic, check out the recent event sponsored by Listrak.

To subscribe to my weekly newsletter, just fill out the short form to the right.

Q: What can millennials best teach us about social networking?

A: How to infuse it into everyday life. There’s a myth about millennials that the group is completely tuned in to the use of social media tools. In fact, I find that most young people are active users of Facebook, instant messaging and text messaging, but not much else. They don’t blog, rarely listen to podcasts and don’t use Twitter. What’s more, they don’t have much perspective on the value of these tools beyond their usefulness in everyday life. They’ll learn those things through experience and training, just like everyone else. But they’re not really as social media-savvy as they’re often given credit for.

What they are exceptionally good at doing it is managing relationships online. They don’t have any more close friends than their parents did at the same age, but they have a much larger number of casual acquaintances that they keep alive through occasional and indirect communication. I think that’s something we can all learn from.

Q: Have you found that social media outlets are used by particular age demographics or does it apply to all age ranges?

A: Nearly all age groups use a media, though there are variations. If you want to go into detail, get Groundswell by Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li. Their top-line observations are that the most active users are the under-25 group, but that usage is quite consistent between 25-and 55-year olds. It drops off rather sharply after that. However, there are significant variations by media and industry. For example, under-25s are more inclined to use instant messaging, text messaging and online video while podcasting and blogging are more popular with older age groups. It’s also interesting that the percentage of people under 25 who prefer instant messaging over e-mail is nearly the exact inverse of people over 25.

Q: How does the Google “Link:” command work?

A: In the Google search bar, type “link:www.gillin.com” substituting whatever URL you want. You can also access this command from Google’s advanced search page. This will give you a list of all webpages in Google’s search index that link to the specified domain or page.

Q: What’s the best way to convert your audience to make an actual purchase using social media?

A: There are many ways to do this, so I’ll give you an example of a direct and an indirect approach. A direct approach might be to offer a discount coupon to people who join your social network, fill out a form or respond to a contest. Or you might ask people to view a short video to get an access code that they could redeem on a website. The coupon could be delivered electronically as a thank-you message when visitors submit the form.

And indirect approach might be to set up an informational blog that educates visitors about your company or your area of expertise. You can then surround this educational content with promotions or offers.

Social Network Wars are Over; Now the Fun Begins

Posted on March 13, 2008 by Paul

If you’re sitting on the sidelines waiting for the market to pick winners in the social network race, you can stand up now. Hitwise data for 2007 shows that MySpace and Facebook together accounted for 88% of all visits to social network sites. The next closest competitor, Bebo , got a little more than 1% of the traffic.

There simply is no more competition in the general-purpose social network market. Other social media winners include LinkedIn (which wasn’t included in the Hitwise data), YouTube and Flickr. If you’re a big brand pursuing a broad strategy, you can safely place your bets on these services. For the next year or two, the also-rans will be busy finding buyers and merger partners.

Now is when it really gets interesting, because now the action shifts to vertical market sites. For many marketers, this is where the more interesting opportunity lies. For example, in the area of health, there’s CarePages.com, Wellsphere, Patientslikeme, RevolutionHealth.com and iMedix. Seniors can choose from Elder Wisdom Circle, Grandparents.com, Eons, TeeBeeDee and Multiply. Mothers can sign up for Cafemom, MothersGroups.com, MomJunction and MothersClick, among others.

And the action isn’t limited to consumer markets. Sermo is a social network for physicians, which now boasts more than 50,000 members. Doctors exchange information about serious medical issues and review cases in real time. Pairup connects business travelers for peer advice, networking and assistance. There’s a list of more than 350 social networks here.

Don’t let small membership numbers fool you. Many of these sites may be attractive marketing venues. Scan the groups, discussion topics and participants and look for content profiles that match your market. Prices are generally lower than those of the big social networks and the audience is far more targeted.

Marketing to vertical communities is very different from mass marketing, of course. If you’re interested in building a campaign on Facebook, have a look at what Southwest Airlines and Victoria’s Secret are doing, or the group started by Starbucks fans that has over 60,000 members. There’s nothing particularly high tech about their presence. They mainly provide a place where customers can keep in touch with the brand and have access to special offers and downloads.

When marketing to vertical communities, you need to dig deeply into the expertise in your organization. Members of a health-oriented network, for example, want to speak to people who have lots of expertise in nutrition and treatment. Discounts and promotions won’t work nearly as well in narrow markets as they do in broad ones. If you have articulate, interesting domain experts in your organization, now’s the time to pull them out of the shadows and engage them with knowledgeable communities. Live chats, webcasts and Q&A forums are particularly effective.

Much of the media attention in the last year has focused on the battle for social network supremacy. With that competition now over, the market will subdivide itself in interesting ways. This process will continue for years, presenting an ever-shifting landscape of new marketing opportunities.

Daily reading 01/29/2008

Posted on January 29, 2008 by Paul

Facebook-based apps can now run on other sites – Computerworld, Jan. 28, 2008

Facebook’s apps community is one of its strongest selling points and anything it does to extend that franchise to other networks works to its advantage. It’s hard to say how much of a breakthrough this is, but it’s clearly a blocking tactic aimed at Google.

Daily reading 01/25/2008

Posted on January 25, 2008 by Paul

Scrabulous and the New Social Operating System: How Facebook Gave Birth to an Industry – Knowledge@Wharton

Excepts: As of late January 2008, more than half-a-million Facebook users play Scrabulous daily, with four times that number having added the application to their Facebook profiles. Because third-party developers can keep all the revenue they generate, the Agarwallas are currently pulling in about $25,000 a month from advertising, according to Jayant, resulting in a “decent profit” after expenses like hosting, labor and server costs.

“I know so many venture capitalists and CEOs who play Scrabulous. It’s a new form of golf. Maybe you don’t have time to play nine holes, but you can socially interact and challenge one another via Scrabulous,” says Rumford, CEO of the Solana Beach, Calif.-based Gravitational Media and publisher of Facereviews.com, a review site for Facebook applications.

“The main selling feature of Scrabulous for me is the fact I can play it within Facebook. If it was on an external site, I would have to search for my friends all over again, and I don’t think that would work, and I don’t think people would sign up for it.”

A few major brands have made it big on Facebook, like Red Bull, the energy drink produced by Austria-based Red Bull GmbH, whose Facebook application “Roshambull” offers an online version of the classic children’s game “Rock-Scissors-Paper.”

Online dating is another area where big players are lagging. Like the Agarwalla brothers before the f8 launch, Cliff Lerner ran a website, in his case called Iamfreetonight.com, an online dating site owned by the Manhattan-based eTwine Holdings. After the Zuckerberg announcement in May, Lerner recalls, “We decided to stop working on Iamfreetonight.com for a couple of weeks in order to write a dating application for Facebook.” The result was an application called “Meet New People.” “In no time we had more users on the app than we had on the website. And we didn’t spend a dime on advertising the app — it was all viral.”

paulgillin.com

Social Media and the Open Enterprise

Category Archives: Facebook

Social Network Wars are Over; Now the Fun Begins

Daily reading 01/29/2008

Daily reading 01/25/2008