Facebook deserves marketers' attention

Posted on July 31, 2007 by Paul

We’re still in the first inning of the social media game, yet the urge to pick winners is strong. Anyone who’s trying to make sense of all the activity right now is being whipsawed. A year ago, MySpace was all the rage, then YouTube took center stage last fall. Early this year, everyone was atwitter about Twitter and now Facebook is growing like kudzu to the applause of investors and the press.

While there will no doubt be other market darlings, I think Facebook is the first of these nascent communities to deserve serious attention from b-to-b marketers. If you haven’t been paying much attention, you might still think of Facebook as the social network for college students. In fact, as recently as last fall, a personal still needed a “.edu” e-mail address to join.

All that changed last late year when Facebook made two critical decisions: it opened membership to anybody who wanted to join and it permitted third-party software developers to build applications specific to the Facebook platform.

The results have been astonishing. Membership has doubled since the first of the year, eclipsing 30 million in early July. What’s more interesting to marketers is that the demographics of this member base are intriguing. As Rodney Rumford points out in this analysis, members over 25 years of age now account for half of Facebook traffic. That’s remarkable when you consider that most of those members couldn’t even get to the site 10 months ago.

An even more telling statistic is audience engagement. According to Comscore, 93% of Facebook members log on at least once a month and 60% use the site daily. Those are impressive figures for even a small community site; for one with 30 million members, they’re mind-blowing.

If you register on both MySpace and Facebook, the differences will whack you in the face. MySpace’s heritage as a music site makes it feel at times like a giant virtual nosh pit. Member pages are festooned with graphics and music plays helter-skelter. In the year I’ve been a MySpace member, I don’t think I’ve received a single message from someone I knew.

In contrast, when I registered for Facebook, I was flooded by invitations to become friends (social network lingo for establishing a connection) with dozens of current and past colleagues. Facebook allows you to monitor some of the activities of your friends, and it’s an impressive display to watch. People I know are busily exchanging software applications to recommend books, movies, travel destination and professional web sites. The Society for New Communications Research, of which I am a member, chose Facebook as the community of choice for its professional members. And I continue to get “friends” request from actual friends almost daily.

If it keeps up this momentum, Facebook has the chance to succeed where earlier professional networks like LinkedIn didn’t. While LinkedIn has some valuable professional networking features, it has the feeling of a software application more than a community. Facebook’s approach to the market is proving to be more effective: it started as a community site and then added networking features. Its roots as a gathering place for college students has helped it to continue to attract the kind of members that marketers want to reach. If it continues to grow at its current rate for another year, it will reach the status among adult professionals that MySpace enjoys among teenagers: you simply have to be there.

This is not to say that Facebook is perfect. Its closed e-mail application doesn’t sit well with people like me, who live in their inboxes. Some of its distinctive metaphors — like writing graffiti on someone’s wall — can be confusing to new members. The process of creating a new group can also be somewhat cumbersome and confusing. And while its applications are impressive, Google still delivers better quality and features overall.

Nevertheless, business marketers should become familiar with Facebook. It has a chance to become the gold standard for professional networks. Even if it fumbles the opportunity, the dynamics of what’s going on there are important to understand.

Update: Maggie Fox just passed along this press release from Comscore, showing Facebook traffic up 270% year-over-year, compared to MySpace’s 72%. Of course, MySpace started from a much higher base and is still the leader overall by a wide margin, but Facebook is closing the gap.

Is second life a massive marketing self-deception?

Posted on July 25, 2007 by Paul

Wired has a devastating profile of Second Life today with a title that leaves no question about the magazine’s conclusions: “How Madison Avenue Is Wasting Millions on a Deserted Second Life.”

The gist of the piece is that marketers are marching like lemmings off the Second Life cliff, throwing time and money into building virtual communities that no one visits. The reasons range from the technology limitations of Linden Labs’ servers to a kludgy user interface to the excessive time it takes to find and get to anything in Second Life.

One particularly damning statistic: 85% of people who create avatars have abandoned them, the article says.

I was somewhat relieved to read this piece, because I have been feeling disconnected from the whole Second Life phenomenon. While I created a profile and buzzed around the virtual world for a while, I never got much of a sense that I was part of a bigger group. In fact, I can’t think of a single person who’s told me that he or she spends a significant amount of time in Second Life. If Wired is correct, a lot of people have been engaging in self-deception.

A particularly interesting comment is at the top of the third page of this profile. It proposes that one of the reasons for Second Life’s popularity is that it looks so much like the physical world. This gives marketers a sense of comfort that they don’t have when experimenting with the more effective but less familiar tactics that really do work online. In other words, if we can just recreate familiar surroundings, we’ll be okay.

In reality, I can’t think of a successful virtual reality product that isn’t a computer game. People have been experimenting with online analogies to physical experiences since the earliest days of the Internet. One of the first ambitious business-to-business projects I can remember, in fact, was a virtual tradeshow that had visitors wandering around an exhibit hall floor and looking at products and collateral. I don’t remember who put on the show, but I do remember that the experience was notable for its lack of participants. It was never repeated.

Perhaps virtual worlds to have a future, but this article may go a long way toward ensuring that Second Life doesn’t.