“If they turn on advanced search tools, this can threaten Google.com. All this social aggregated content will yield a powerful database of what you and your friends like, the precursor to customized web experiences and social advertising.” ~ Jeremiah Owyang, an internet analyst with the Altimeter Group

Welcome to the opportunity to create your own planet. Starting with your Facebook page and then adding a Flickr account, a YouTube channel, a SecondLife avatar, a Last.fm channel, a Twitter profile, a StumbleUpon or Digg profile, a Wordpress, Tumblr or Blogger blog, you can assemble your own tribe, create your own advertising, monitor the traffic within your world and be its leader. Find intelligence from leading sources. Ready your rocket and leave planet earth for your own planet, fellow Human. Earth is Chalmun’s Cantina. Come and visit when you like, especially when you need a tactile experience with flesh, sand, forest, and fellow friends, easily found through services like MeetUp.

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Facebook’s ambition
by ROBERT SCOBLE on APRIL 22, 2010

1. It gets Facebook plastered all over the web. Already Facebook likes are on many many sites and I’d expect to see Facebook’s new social features to show up on at least 30% of the web’s most popular sites within a month.

2. It lets us apply our social graph “fingerprint” to sites we visit. You do this by adding social plugins to your site, which is pretty easy to do.

3. It lets us apply our behavior “fingerprint” to sites we visit. Again, by adding social plugins onto your sites.

4. Facebook gets to study everything we touch now and will bring a much more complete stream back to the mother ship. This lets them build new analytics features for publishers, too, as All Facebook’s Nick O’Neill writes, but now Facebook will have the best data on the web for advertisers to study.

5. Facebook gets us to keep our profile data up to date. Marketer Ed Dale nailed why this is such a big deal.

6. Facebook gets to overlay a commerce system, called Credits, on top of all this. Justin Smith of Inside Facebook writes about that.

7. Facebook has opened up to enable all this stuff to flow back and forth and has removed the 24-hour limitation on storing data gained from its API. This is probably the biggest deal for developers, Inside Facebook writes about that, but they’ve also made their API more granular so that sites can ask for, and get, very specific data instead of getting everything stored on a user. We’ll be talking about this for a while, because it actually has good implications for privacy.

8. All this new data will enable Facebook to build new kinds of search experiences, as All Facebook hints at in a post where they say Facebook is trying to build a version fo the semantic web. Search Engine Land goes further in detail about what these changes will mean.

9. It lets Facebook minimize the need for a “public” fan page, like mine. Inside Facebook explains more in detail why this is true. Mostly because they’ll spit all those bits over onto my blog, if I add the code to my blog (which I’m pretty sure I will).

10. Finally a stream of focused bits for the people who are actually visiting your page can be pushed back out to you, as Inside Facebook demonstrates.

11. They made the API much simpler and shipped a powerful graph API so more developers can build apps for Facebook (this has been one of the advantages of Twitter, for instance, because Twitter’s API was simple to figure out). Heck, you can even hit it from a web browser to see what it returns. Here is what it returns for http://graph.facebook.com/scobleizer (if you want to try it yourself, just include your Facebook name instead of mine).

(full article, including many great videos of the F8 conference, here)

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by Matt Silverman (source)

So your business is on Facebook, and brand engagement is up thanks to some savvy social media strategy. You may even be interested in further distinguishing your brand by building a custom landing page for your account.

But what kind of value does a custom Facebook Fan Page offer? What are your fans looking for on a social network that they can’t get from your business website? For some insight, let’s check out how some big-name brands have stepped up their engagement by investing a little more TLC into their Facebook presence.

Interactivity

Social networks are not passive, so your Facebook landing page shouldn’t be either. It’s nice to have a great looking “Welcome” splash, but users are going to want to do something when they arrive.

Facebook is all about sharing, and The Gap has an ingenious promotion on the Baby Gap tab of their Fan Page. The simple splash image has a link to one of their photo albums where fans can upload pictures of their babies wearing their favorite Gap denim gear.

This kind of campaign provides a wealth of free, user-generated content that displays Gap products, and best of all, the functionality of photo uploading is already built into Facebook — no development necessary. This is an interactive idea that any small business could implement.

The Home Depot has built a bit on the shareability of Facebook actions with their DIY Gifts app. From Home Depot’s Fan Page, you can grant the app access to share your gift purchases with the recipient and your friends. While this approach may not work for everyone, it’s a step toward increasing consumer visibility on Facebook — a growing trend.

A Full Website Experience Within Facebook

Some companies go all out when it comes to their Facebook presence, integrating fully fledged mini-websites right into their Fan Pages. Adidas sneakers is a good example. They’ve added a multimedia content hub under the tab “Your Area” that offers photos, videos, and events based on your region. The site is built entirely in Flash and isn’t all that interactive, but it offers a rich media experience without ever leaving the boundaries of Facebook.

Dell’s Design Studio page is another example of a full-tilt Flash site inside Facebook. This one lets you browse and tweak custom artwork for your new laptop before linking you over to the corporate site to complete the purchase. You can also share your design choices with friends, all without connecting a single Facebook app to your account.

Deals!

The key to Facebook, and any social network, is to keep pushing out content that your fans are interested in. Many businesses do a great job keeping their fans apprised of deals and discounts through status updates.

Another great way to keep content fresh and visual within Facebook is to promote special offers on a custom tab. This may be something new visitors see when they land on your Fan Page, or a rich destination you can link back to in a post.

Walgreens does it very simply. Their landing page is a nice branded splash image that simply touts their “Exclusive Offers for Our Facebook Fans.” Their promotions are in their updates, but this simple, static custom page encourages users to become fans without any bells or whistles. They leave the deals to the built-in functionality of Facebook, and your business can too.

By simply changing the image on your custom page, you can call attention to a new product or promotion that your fans will see whenever they land there. It’s an easy way to keep your page looking fresh, in addition to regular updates.

Conclusion

These examples have been built for large companies that probably have more web development resources than the average small business. But if you’re serious about your commitment to Facebook engagement, consider taking some inspiration from these examples and exploring the possibilities that custom pages and apps can offer your business.

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Minister reacts to Facebook expulsion

Education Minister Anna Diamantopoulou attempted yesterday to defuse a row that has broken out over the expulsion of a junior high school pupil who criticized her principal on the Internet, although the government official accepted that Greece needs to update its laws to deal with such incidents.

Diamantopoulou issued a statement after the girl, who was not named, was forced to leave her school in Hania, Crete, after starting a page on the Facebook social networking site under the title “I hate the principal at Chrysopigi [high school].”

“The need for young people to express themselves and to vent their feelings is not only a given but is something that should be encouraged,” said Diamantopoulou. “But this should happen within a framework of respect for people and the smooth running of schools.”

The minister chose her words carefully after an apparent groundswell of support for the expelled teenager both in the media and on the Internet. Following the announcement of the girl’s dismissal on Thursday, another Facebook page was launched, this time demanding that she be readmitted to Chrysopigi school. By last night, the page had close to 10,000 members.

This came after the Hania school inspector, Nikos Vestakis, said that the school should have invited the pupil and her parents for talks and not expelled her.

Diamantopoulou did not indicate whether she thought the school was right to dismiss the teenager but made it clear that Greece needs to update its laws to keep up with technology. “The rapid developments in technology and in communication and the need to modernize our rules mean that we have to approach new challenges with seriousness and responsibility.”

(source)

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Marian Salzman travels the world spotting media trends. The top futurologist gives her predictions on how we’ll live and work in 2010.

By Ian Burrell

You have to hand it to Marian Salzman. For someone known internationally as a media futurist it takes some self-confidence to confess that you thought Facebook was just a pointless student fad, and that your initial reaction to Twitter was that it was “a ridiculous thing”.

But Salzman, writer, advertising executive, global public relations guru, has every faith in her judgement, having spent her career spotting trends invisible to most of us until she gave them a name. She is the author of books with titles such as Next, Now and Buzz and The Future of Men and has championed such new breeds as the “Wigger” (suburban whites infatuated with black urban culture) and the “Metrosexual” (the sensitive, city-dwelling modern male).

(read more)

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Despite Facebook privacy changes and serious cases of Twitter Fail Whale, social media use has increased astronomically since this time last year: During December 2009, global users spent an average of five hours on social networking sites, up from three hours in December 2008. That’s an 82% increase.

Nielsen just released a report on its blog detailing increased social media use, and the results are impressive, while not exactly shocking. Some highlights:

- Social networking sites are the most popular online destinations globally (based on the amount of time people spent there in December), with games and instant messaging coming in second and third, respectively. (Side note: As gaming becomes more popular on sites like Facebook, it will be interesting to see how this affects time spent.) (read more)

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7 Takeaways From #BDI: Social Media As a Marketing, Branding & Service Platform

by Sarah Caminker

This week, I had the pleasure of attending a seminar in New York City on Social Integration: Harmonizing Social Channels into the Marketing, Communications & Service Platform. The Business Development Institute put on this fantastic event that included case studies and roundtables for social media marketing, PR and communication professionals. Top-notch speakers included:

Michael Mendenhall: CMO, HP
Joshua Karpf: Digital Communication Manager, PepsiCo
David Patton: VP & EIC, Waggener Edstrom Worldwide
Brian Kenny: CMO & CCO, Harvard Business School
Lynn Mann: Director of External Communications, Michelin
Richard Pesce: Social Media & Digital Communications, Sprint
Michael DiLorenzo: Director of Corporate Communications, National Hockey League

They all stressed the importance of not seeing social media as a separate entity, rather viewing it as an integrated part of your marketing, branding and customer service. The list below details the top 7 takeaways that were discussed during the seminar.

*Note #BDI stands for Business Development Institute and is the event’s hashtag on Twitter that you can search for real-time insight from attendees.

1. Technology is NOT Social. People Are!
Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and other social media sites are just tools. They are only *SOCIAL* if you engage and interact with people on them. Technology is great, but it is about the relationships. Note: these tools are intended for two-way communication and not as a megaphone for your next sales pitch.

2. Feeding the Beast: An Insatiable Appetite for Content
The beauty of the social mediasphere is that anyone can publish, edit or distribute content. We are going through a renaissance of how consumption of information and content is being managed and distributed. Social media has enabled a constant mobility meaning that people expect to receive information 24/7. There is a never-ending hunger for quality content, hence the expression “feeding the beast.”

3. The Era of the Advocate
Mass communication is dead, rather it’s about building personal connections with consumers. The more you serve and support your customers, the more likely they are to recommend your brand to their network (both offline and online). It’s more credible to have an outsider toot your own horn than to have the CMO do it. Remember to thank your “advocates” and make sure they know you appreciate them taking the time to support you and your brand.

4. Digital Newsrooms Are No Longer a Resource For Just the Media
We’re all content creators, and it’s unrealistic to assume that journalists are the only ones seeing your content. Company and industry news needs to be integrated, aggregated and curated for a broader audience. Press releases are just the tip of the iceberg. Begin incorporating multimedia like podcasts and videos and re-purpose content (in the form of white papers, E-books, articles) to tell your story.

5. Transparency and Authenticity is the Only Way to Go
Whether you’re a small business owner, entrepreneur or marketing professional you must communicate who you are, what you do and who you serve right off the bat. It’s also critical that you are upfront and transparent about the content and advice you are giving. If not, people will see right through you, run screaming in the other direction and land on your competitor’s virtual doorstep.

6. Social Media as a Listening Tool to Feed Innovation
Take a step back and listen. Whether that’s monitoring a dialogue on Twitter, following a blogger in your industry to see what conversation they’re sparking or hosting a focus group, you never know when you might get the next big break from just LISTENING to your fans/customers. The #NHLTweetUp is a perfect example. Guess how they got that idea??? By listening to their followers on Twitter! Bottom Line…. Stop, Look and Listen. Then Respond.

7. Crossover From Online to Face-to-Face
Twitter and Facebook are excellent relationship building tools, but there’s something to say about in-person communication that makes that connection even stronger. Take the time to go to industry events, conferences and networking groups to put a face to the avatar. On the business end of the stick, host tweet-ups in different cities, so your can connect with your followers.

I’m interested to hear your feedback and any trends/topics you think could be added to this list. …read more

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Facebook Memology: Top Status Trends of 2009

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http://www.thesocializers.com/eHoliday_Oct_2009.pdf

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Facebook’s Big Changes: Action Items for Marketers
Social-Media Site Streamlines Apps Before Fanning Across the Web

Facebook’s latest round of updates announced this week will affect everyone: marketers, developers, publishers, consumers and anyone else remotely connected to their site and platform. And some of the changes will especially impact marketers.

In a rare move for any company, Facebook not only announced what changes will take place, but it publicly offered a timeline for when it will happen. Of course, the timeline may shift, and some specifics have yet to be ironed out — I’ve found in consulting both with Facebook executives and analysts covering the announcements that, many of the details aren’t yet known and a number of important questions cannot yet be fully answered. However, marketers should still appreciate the wealth of information Facebook has provided on these changes, including a gallery of screen shots. …Read more

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http://siteanalytics.compete.com/facebook.com+twitter.com/

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Charles Nelson, president of Sprinkles Cupcakes, doesn’t have a Facebook profile. Nelson, who works seven days a week, has no time for chatting online with Facebook friends.

But Nelson is logged on to Facebook all the time. That’s because more than 70,000 people have declared themselves fans of Sprinkles’ Facebook page, which is at facebook.com/sprinkles.

Each day on the site, Sprinkles announces a secret word, such as “ganache” or “bunny,” and the first 25 or 50 people to show up at any of its five stores around the country and whisper that word get a free cupcake.

“On Facebook, we can ask our customers what’s the next location they want,” Nelson said. “What do they think of our next flavor? It’s an amazing way to communicate with our fans.”

Facebook is not just for friends anymore. The free social networking site — blocked in some workplaces as a potential time-waster — is increasingly becoming an inexpensive marketing tool for small businesses.

Sprinkles is among a growing number of small businesses taking advantage of a relatively new program on Facebook, one that allows them to claim their name, become visible even to folks who aren’t on the site, and stay in close contact with their customers. The business, in effect, can act like any other person on Facebook, posting status updates and seeing what its fans are doing. …read more here–>

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Facebook is clearly on a roll and is knocking on Google’s door as the biggest site on the web. Will it continue to dominate or see its lead slip? Here are two potential outcomes. …read more

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Jane’s video below demonstrates some important possibilities in SMM:

1. If you have a niche, begin marketing to it via short, punchy, informative videos NOW.
2. Don’t wait to get it perfect. You are already an “expert” in something. Get yourself out there.

Watch Jane here for inspiration: http://bit.ly/video_converts_to_fans

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http://bit.ly/facebook_best_source_traffic

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Howard Brown of Circle Builders attended a presentation last evening from the Midwest director of ad-sales for Facbook – Tom Chisholm

He covers 5 Midwest states and accounts for advertising like 3 autos, PG, Kellogg’s, Compuware, Quicken Loans

Social graph (you at center then family, college, work) of connection, sharing and conversations:

•92% of ALL college students have a FB account
•1 million new registered user a DAY (1/3 US / 2/3rds International)
•74 languages (more native tongues on the way
•324 million total users up 100m this year (1/3 US / 2/3rds International) (intense infrastructure to handle this never been done before bandwidth, storage, processing power…)
•70 million photos posted a day (largest photo sharing site in the world – all others combined do not equal FB)
•4 times the amount of events than evite
•Avg stay time (stickiness) 19.6 minutes
•Analytics – 200 data points per user profile (data is Trojan horse to revenue with advertisers)
•40% of all user profiles public ally list cell phone #
•FB connect has been a game changer
•Best advertisers – Virgin, Addidas, Starbucks
•No plans to charge users – FB will monetize by acting as ad agency:

national accounts
regional / small biz
online

FB considers:
Web 1.0 = static
Web 2.0 = interactive
Web 3.0 = sharing

Just became cash flow positive last month

FB is content to become the worlds largest monopoly / utility

Popularity: 7% [?]

Check out their website: http://www.skittles.com. They get where the web is headed AND where people are congregating on the web.

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What Exodus? Facebook Trumps Top 20 Sites in Time Spent
Length of User Experience Can Help Media Buyers Gauge Influence, and Soc-Net Is at the Top of the Pack

by Abbey Klaassen
Published: September 07, 2009

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — How many visitors a website gets matters, but so does the amount of time people spend on the website. And in that category, Facebook is smoking the rest of the big guns.

Mike Murphy, VP-global sales, Facebook
Users spent an average of five hours and 12 minutes on the site in July, according to Nielsen — that’s up from just one hour and 30 minutes a year ago. The next-closest of the giant web properties: Yahoo, at three hours, 23 minutes; followed by AOL (two hours, 36 minutes); Fox Interactive (two hours, 19 minutes); and MSN (two hours, eight minutes). Who ever said portals were dead?
One explanation for the growth: The network effect. As Facebook’s audience has ballooned, there are more people on the site for any given user to connect to, play games with and comment on, making it more useful and entertaining and increasing the amount of time each user spends on it. It also helps that Facebook has managed to maintain frequency of use.

“A couple years ago, about half of our users logged onto Facebook every day, and as we’ve grown to 250 million worldwide users, that number hasn’t changed,” said Mike Murphy, VP-global sales at Facebook. “It makes it more engaging from a user standpoint and we get more minutes spent, which means we have more opportunities to show more people an ad message in a given day.”

That, he said, has allowed the site to expand the number of big advertisers it works with. Right now, 83 of Ad Age’s 100 Leading National Advertisers are on Facebook.

Influential metric
Time spent is increasingly important as a site saturates the online audience. The law of large numbers means it gets harder to grow by just adding new users, so it’s important to grow the amount of time spent and mind share among existing users. Today, Facebook is the fourth-largest property in terms of unique visitors, with just shy of 97 million monthly unique visitors, behind Google, Yahoo and MSN/Windows Live.

Time spent is an increasingly important way for media buyers and planners to gauge a site’s importance and influence on people, said Rachel Ooms, VP-group media director at Moxie Interactive.

“Buying media is about targeting mass audiences and it’s about where people are flocking. If people are there, we want to be there,” she said.

Added Rick Gardinier, chief digital officer of Brunner: “Unique visitors or banner-ad click-throughs are just one piece to the puzzle. We’re starting to look at engagement and time spent in rich media or in specific content areas. Those are sometimes more important.” However, he cautioned, just because people spend a lot of time on a site doesn’t mean they’re in prime ad-reception mode. And that can occur with social networks.

Still, from Facebook’s standpoint, the more time people are on it, the more time they will have to see its homepage ad, which is a key part of its monetization strategy. That equation — more time on a website equals more opportunity for exposure — has inspired some web sellers to recast their sales models to sell on time-based metrics. Betawave, under CEO Matt Freeman’s direction, is aggregating sites that command attention, using time as a proxy. And VideoEgg has been marketing its network based on the idea that attention to an ad is what really matters. Time is an essential component of that.

Time suck
“Most brand-building environments have historically been about taking discrete pieces of consumer’s time,” said Videoegg Chief Marketing Officer Troy Young. “So how do we make internet advertising less about traffic generation and navigation and more about time?”

Incidentally, Facebook commands a lot of time — the most of the 20 largest sites — but it’s not the biggest time suck on the web, according to Nielsen. Among sites with more than a half-million unique visitors, Blizzard Entertainment is tops, with almost 24 hours a month, followed by an array of other mostly gaming-related sites. Facebook ranks eighth.

Not every site wants people to hang around. Google, for example, has for years talked about its goal to get people to what they’re looking for fast. In fact, Google’s Marisa Mayer has said a page-load delay of 400 milliseconds can translate into a 1% drop in search query volume.

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Companies Crave Corporate Versions of Twitter and Facebook.

How should companies embrace social media? Twitter co-founder Biz Stone ticked off examples of corporations and small businesses using Twitter as a tool to reach customers, but many Brainstorm participants said they need social networks for internal collaboration. Diane Bryant, chief information officer of Intel, extolled the virtues of sites like Facebook: the engagement, the constant feedback, and the ability to quickly discover what your “friends” find interesting and important — all information that would be valuable in a working group. “Why isn’t there a social media application for the enterprise?” Bryant demanded. Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn’s executive chairman, later described an emerging service, CompanyGroups, that might be the answer Bryant seeks. The tool serves as a sort of online back channel for workers to chat and share information. Hoffman explained that many individuals now use LinkedIn to ask their associates or advice on, say, the best way to stay abreast of industry news. Now, he says, “you’ll be able to do that within a company.” Sounds as if Intel might soon be one of those companies.

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