View from 30,000 feet

This is a great article that clearly defines how to manage Facebook Places, a solid read for anyone who uses the platform.

It has come from MacLife and Florence Ion, but I thought I would post the entire article.

How To Turn Off Facebook Places | Mac|Life

Facebook Places has us a little bit paranoid. After all, the idea of our friends checking us in at the yogurt shop isn’t something that we want leaking out. We’re yogurt fanatics and we wouldn’t want the word to get out to our friends and loved ones. So, if you’re wondering how to turn off Facebook Places and keep your friends from outing your addiction to frozen treats, read on.

Restrict access in “Things I share”

Under the Privacy settings, go to Custom and “Customise settings.” This will take you to the page that will allow you to select what other friends can see. We set this to “Friends Only,” but you might be okay with letting “Friends of Friends” know where you are.

Keep others from mentioning you under “Things others share”

Keep your friends from being able to check you in with them by
disabling “Friends can check me in to places.” Your friends might be
annoyed with your decision, but remember this it is your privacy. You
can still be tagged in status updates, however.

Change the settings under “Applications and website”

This one is tricky and took us a few clicks to find. Scroll to the
bottom of the privacy page, and under “Applications and websites,” edit
“Info accessible to your friends” so that “Current location” and “Places
I’ve visited” are not checked off. This will ensure that your
information is not shared with any of the applications, games and
websites that you and your friends might use.

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Facebook just announced Location Based Services integration, with Facebook Places. This is required viewing for any marketer or agency professional, or just about any entrepreneur. But from a marketing perspective this is going to require those who are looking at retail, ooh, POS or any environmental marketing to consider the social media, mobile and digital impact of what they do.

From a user perspective now you can not only provide your status update but incorporate the location, context and ideally the people around you.

But this is very significant for our business, while LBS isn’t new (its been around for years – the wireless company I started was one of the first to create Location Based Services – 1999), this is the first time its available at scale.  While Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp and others have been in place the scale has never really been there. Now that Facebook has integrated LBS into its platform 500m+ people have access to this tool’s capability and over 150m people using Facebook mobile can begin to be using it directly. Users can now share where they are, see which friends are in the local area, and discover new places by following where others from their social network have checked in.

Some interesting things to think about:

• Retail, POS, OOH, Experiential have a new requirement and that is mobile and the digital/social experience.  How do you want your audiences to engage with your experience on the mobile platform while they are there and what will they be talking about?
• How will you reward customer loyalty? Provide customers a reason to keep coming back and “checking in” to places, as well as share that with their networks
• Places will be a wonderful tool for promoting business and experiential marketing as well as providing special offers.
• APIs and data of facebook places will be a great resource for applications, start thinking about how to leverage this resource of information – Marketers should be thinking about this as well as entrepreneurs.

There is a Facebook Places FAQ for Advertisers here http://www.facebook.com/help/?topic=places#!/help/?page=1159

As well as a user guide for Facebook places here: http://www.facebook.com/help/?topic=places

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Congratulations to Judy Hu, Linda Boff and all of GE for taking this big risk.  They reached out to the community and asked the consumer to not only participate, but create the next campaign for the brand. What a wonderful way to create brand advocates and brand loyalty, it also takes such a huge brand and connects it directly to consumers (where it has typically been a very B2B business).

This is not only a very forward thinking move by GE Marketing, but it is also a true justification that real brands are looking at the crowdsourced model as a potentially viable way for sourcing creative ideas. . .

The proof will be in the execution. . .

Btw if you read here it says that the program is open to advertising industry professionals or startups as a way to win GE’s business. . .

GE + YOU = AWESOME – Google Moderator

GE + YOU = AWESOME
Let’s face it – when large companies enter the digital space, they are not always met with the warmest reception. (Translation: they tend to blunder in, mess it up, and get torn a new one.)

To make sure GE continues to succeed in new media, we’re going straight to the experts – you.

We want your best ideas for how to engage an online audience. Got a great idea for an ad campaign? A creative concept for a killer contest? A truly innovative social media program? With your help, we can avoid the lame and embrace the awesome.

Enter your suggestions for the next great new media initiative in the space below, or email us directly at ad.ideas@ge.com.

Before you post, please take a quick look at our submission guidelines at http://www.ge.com/adideas_terms/.

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An interesting article from Harvard Business review that compares “popularity” with “influence” on Twitter.  The article illustrates that follower count is not a sufficient metric in defining influence.  This is very important for marketers who are looking to reach “influencers” and are thereby focusing on finding those with the most followers for which to engage a strategy or leverage the ability of said user to sway the opinions of there followers. In actuality followers only shows how popular the user is (i.e., the size of her audience).

It does state a bit of the obvious that marketers/businesses, rather than trying to put emphasis on the follower count, could try to increase audience responsiveness and level of engagement by creating “conversations” around topics.

It is a shame though, and much like many academic research programs – which must have a very focused/limited thesis, the article only focuses on debunking the “influence vs popularity myth” vs creating a quantifiable answer to the real question of “how should one measure influence?”

Here is a kicker though, of the 52 million twitter accounts only 6 million are active. . .

On Twitter, Followers Don’t Equal Influence – Research – Harvard Business Review

On Twitter, Followers Don’t Equal Influence

9:30 AM Friday May 7, 2010
by Scott Berinato

It could be that Twitter research is popular because Twitter data is free and so accessible. That’s okay. Gift horses are just as good for riding.

The best, latest entry in Twitter research is the handiwork of Meeyoung Cha from the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Germany. (Co-authors are: Hamed Haddadi, Royal Veterinary College, University of London; Fabricio Benevenuto, Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil and Krishna P. Bummadi, also from Max Planck Institute.)

Cha called her paper, “The Million Follower Fallacy,” a term that comes from work by Adi Avnit. Avnit posited that the number of followers of a Tweeter is largely meaningless, and Cha, after looking at data from all 52 million Twitter accounts (and, more closely, at the 6 million “active users”) seems to have proven Avnit right. “Popular users who have a high indegree [number of followers] are not necessarily influential in terms of spawning retweets or mentions,” she writes.

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I just started following Mike Arauz on Twitter @mikearauz, and while browsing some presentations on social media, I came upon his chart:

which refers to the spectrum of online friendship.  I think this is a very interesting chart as it creates a quanitifiable way of looking at the relationships between people online and ultimately how they evolve.  Now mind you, I do not see this as an absolute since it doesn’t factor in many aspects of “online friendships” and it does look at the primary relationships in somewhat of a vacuum, ie I stumble upon a site/feed/microblog/etc and begin to take even a cursory view of the content, and then become immersed into a relationship with the author, and if we keep that as the thesis, then the chart makes a lot of sense, and we can then apply it to a relationship with a brand and thus becomes another evolution of the standard marketing funnel.

Now I wouldn’t take the spectrum of friendship as the be all and end all of social media relationships to CRM, but you can derive a considerable amount of strategic influence from such doc.  I created a starting point for you to consider. Though not ideal, when you begin to look at social media as marketing it take a bit of the mystification away from it

Below is Mike’s blog post in deeper details, also please note the caveots on the bottom of his post, very relevant.

Mike Arauz: Spectrum of Online Friendship

Blog: Stream of Thoughts
Spectrum of Online Friendship
Update: Part 2, responses to comments here.

“What is a friend?” This question is constantly echoing across the internet. But, digital relationships (just like non-digtal ones) are not absolute. They are fluid. And online friendship is better described along a spectrum defined by the actions people take and how we feel about them. The more useful question for individuals and brands who are interested in cultivating online friendships is How do I move my friends from acquaintanceship to “best friendliness”? (as I called them on my Friend For Hire flyer PDF)

Last week I wrote about how online friendships are different from what we’ve traditionally called friendships. Digital technology has affected the number of relationships you can maintain, and the intimacy of those relationships, effectively enabling us to create fans who feel like friends.

I wasn’t finished thinking about the nature of online friendship, though.

Click for full size image

Mike Arauz Diagram

Passive Interest
This is the easiest level of engagement. It asks the least of your friends, and achieves the least commitment from us. But, it’s the crucial starting point. I follow my curiosity to you, I’m interested in what I find, and I choose to pay attention. e.g. repeat visits, blog readers, fans, followers, etc.

Active Interest
This is when I care enough to let you know that I care (in a nice way, not in a stalker way . It’s a small step, but a big opportunity for you to identify key members of your audience who are candidates to move along the spectrum. We don’t yet expect a response, we’re just letting you know that we’re listening. e.g. people who leave comments on your blog, wall comments, @replies on Twitter, etc.

Sharing
At this point the audience member starts to become a fan. You and your work become part of my identity as I use it to talk to my own friends about what interests me (remember that we share content for social reasons). I also have made myself more valuable, because I am now partly responsible for the spread of your ideas. e.g. social bookmarking, retweeting links, posting links and content to my own sites and profiles, etc.

Public Dialogue
This is the first phase that requires action on your part. I have either demonstrated an Active Interest or have Shared your work with my own friends. You foster a relationship by responding to my interest in a public forum. By doing so, you make the rest of your friends aware of my existence, and welcome me to the group. e.g. public @replies, referrals in a blog post, and references posted to our various sites and profiles, etc.

Private Dialogue
At this step, we begin to transform mutual interest into mutual trust. We are willing to share thoughts, ideas, experiences with each other directly. We trust each other with direct access, which has increasing value in an increasingly always-on world. e.g. exchanging email, TXT messages, IM, and direct messages on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, etc.

Advocacy
At first glance, Advocacy looks a lot like Sharing. But, the crucial difference is that Advocacy means that I am making an explicit recommendation of you to my friends. It’s too easy now to simply share, all it takes is one click on your bookmark tool bar. Choosing to actually say, “This is important. It’s worth my friends’ time. And I’m willing to risk my own reputation to convince my friends to check it out.” e.g. same tools as Sharing, but different language; usually entails recommending the person or brand, and not just a specific piece of content

Investment
The brass ring of online friendship. This is the most difficult achievement to recognize or quantify. But it’s the most important because it represents the willingness of your friends to take action on your behalf. In the words of former Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, “I know it when I see it.” e.g. Your wins are my wins.

The last tier, Investment, became clear to me in the wake of well-wishes deservedly showered on David Armano after his announcement last Friday of his move to the Dachis Corporation. I was one of those well-wishers myself, and was genuinely proud and excited to hear about his new gig.

When I think about people (or brands, or people-brands) who have had success at moving their audience from one end of this spectrum to the other, Armano is one of the first examples that comes to mind. This is why he was able to raise over $15,000 in one night for a friend in trouble. And it’s why thousands of people offered up congratulations when they heard he had taken this new job.

Look at what most brands are measuring in this space. It rarely goes much farther than the first tier, Passive Interest. We count visits, friends, fans, followers, etc. Unfortunately the reasons for these limited metrics have more to do with efficiency than efficacy. These metrics are the easiest thing to measure and they return the biggest numbers. But, as you can see there’s so much more value to be had as we move beyond those basic actions.

Your online ambitions can only be as grand as the quality of the relationships you foster. What would you like to accomplish online? As you move your audience from Passive Interest to Investment the possibilities grow.

Caveats:

* In the digital world, none of these behaviors, even dialogue, requires a reciprocal feeling of friendship on your part. I can be your friend without you being my friend.

* These phases are not absolute gateways. It is possible occasionally to skip over one action or another and to advance to the next phase.

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This is a great blog posting about the people behind the most popular social networks.  A great resource of data and stats!

Social Network Statistics | Brian Solis – PR 2.0

Revealing the People Defining Social Networks

Social Networks are among the most powerful examples of socialized media. They create a dynamic ecosystem that incubates and nurtures relationships between people and the content they create and share.

As these communities permeate and reshape our lifestyle and how we communicate with one another, we’re involuntarily forcing advertisers and marketers to rapidly evolve how they vie for our attention.

Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Yelp, and other online communities transformed the regimen and practice of marketing “at” people into an opportunity to engage and interact with us – on our terms. It is the zeitgeist of socialized media and it’s manifesting into an obsession for branding, advertising, “viral,” marketing, and communications experts and professionals worldwide.

But, the people who define each network are reticent to the hollow attempts of faceless friending and in-network marketing. Many businesses are building social channels to broadcast messages in a one to many, top-down practice that not only prevents relationship building, but impedes any hope of cultivating communities and empowering brand ambassadors.

As marketers, it’s your responsibility to peel back the layers of each network to observe and eventually interact with the very people you wish to reach. Each network possesses a vibrant culture and ecosystem that is powered by context and connected by influential social graphs.

While nothing beats anthropological fieldwork and observation, let’s take a look at numbers behind the top social networks to get a better picture of network engagement and user demographics

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Great stuff here about the fluctuating and evolving facebook valuation.
Facebook’s valuation: The cheat sheet | The Social – CNET News

Seriously, how much is Facebook worth? It’s been an enigma in tech gossip for years now, as the social-networking company grows bigger and bigger and yet remains privately held. And some of Facebook’s most rapid growth has taken place in the midst of a stormy economic climate that could batter any company’s balance sheet. So here’s a rundown of what tech blogs, news outlets, investors, and Valley gadflies have said thus far about just how much Facebook is worth.

Are all these numbers accurate? In a word, no. Some of them were rumors (albeit decently strong ones, as we’ve omitted some of the more ridiculous ones), and others refer to Facebook’s preferred-stock valuation, which as we learned during its legal tiff with onetime rival ConnectU, that isn’t necessarily anywhere close to the company’s paper valuation.

One thing that’s interesting: Take a look at the trajectory. Facebook’s perceived valuation keeps climbing and climbing and climbing right up to its $240 million investment by Microsoft. Then, once the hype dies down (and the market starts to sputter) it tanks. It’s not until, perhaps not coincidentally, the departure of chief financial officer Gideon Yu and the stronger likelihood of a new investment round that Facebook’s valuation starts to climb again.

What’s next? Digital Sky Technologies’ investment in Facebook assumed a preferred-stock valuation of $10 billion, and employee stock trades have started at about a $6.5 billion valuation. It’s not yet clear how much more the company’s worth will fluctuate before, at long last, founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his team decide to take it public. That is, of course, assuming that actually happens.

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I felt it was important this week to pay tribute to an icon, an idol, and the man behind many of today’s music, Michael Jackson.  When I think about Michael, I think about my childhood, I think about a music icon who wasn’t just the king of pop, he was an immortal that all admired and all adored.

It was sort of fitting that I write this post about Michael since a few months earlier a friend of mine asked me if I watched the Grammy’s, a friend in the entertainment business and I immediately said, “No, the last time I watched the Grammy’s was when Michael Jackon performed. It used to be about the art, now its about the celebrity.”. . . and that is the focus of my post, a memory of Michael and the evolution of the artist to the celebrity.

I have and always will be a huge fan of MJ, you see as a kid I would watch the thriller video tape over and over, from the beginning of the official full length video through to the entire section about the making of music video.  I would anticipate the excitement of his next album hitting the shelf, knew every word to every song and looked forward to the moment he would be on television, whether in music video or in an interview.

I must have been 9 or ten when I first discovered Michael Jackson, and his music moved me.  I remember first hearing Billie Jean, Thiller, even the Off The Wall songs, and getting a glimpse of his videos, because my dad would record them for me on Friday Night Videos (sometimes I would even be able to stay up late to watch the show hoping to see him dance across the lighted dancefloor talking about someone else’s kid).

I remember the moment that Michael performed the famed Moonwalk on Motown, my dad also recorded it on VHS.  I couldn’t wait to watch the Grammy’s or any other award show in anticipation that this brilliant artist would grace us with an amazing performance. Album after album would drop and I would eagerly purchase: Bad, We Are the World, Dangerous, it didn’t matter, his music was amazing, he was a true artist and that was what moved me to purchase his work.

There was the Pepsi scandal, even the oxygen tank, and Captain Eos, but we didn’t care; he played the Superbowl, the Jacksons’ reunion, and his art shined through. He was an idol, an immortal. We weren’t given access to his personal life, we were just shown the man that created some of the most brilliant music the world had or will ever see.

Media controlled our exposure.  We had only access to Michael through his music, his performances and the press. He stood on high and everyone admired this artist changing the world, even making it a better place through raising money and shining a light on the plight of the people in Africa, but most of all bringing a smile to everyone from Chicago to Cairo.

But eventually the power of the business of media, the access of information and eventually the world of digital, that which I pride most about where the world is going,  would lead to the transformation of an artist to a celebrity and celebrity to mortal.

The same media that now has made Spencer Pratt a household name for doing nothing more than being a putz, that now awards people in the entertainment industry not for what they create and the contribution they provide culture, but for the irresponsible antics in their real life that helps People Magazine sell ads, and gives Perez Hilton a following, has lead the fall of our idols and icons. Icons that populated a generation, including Michael Jackson, Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, Sylvester Stallone and many more.

You see, we eventually got access to the Neverland Ranch, to the man behind the music, the stories, the scandals, and just about every single thing that happened in Michael’s life. Whether it was his breakfast or his bowel movements, it was no longer delivered to us through the filter of his Music, the industry, his performances or his publicists. Michael was eventually exposed for who he was, and that was a person, albeit a person raised in a rough world, without ever being given a childhood and forever lost in the confusion of battling for who the world wanted him to be and the man who he really was. It eventually became less about his music and more about his exploits, and we watched our idol fall from grace.

But what I find most interesting wasn’t that the media exposed our icon, pulled the curtain from the wizard, but that the same evolution that has been occurring in media that gave us access to Michael and allowed him to no longer be immortal, allowed us to collectively share in the sadness in our loss. You see in the past we might have found out about someone like Michael passing through the news or press, maybe a friend or colleague, but now it was a giant movement through social media that shared this knowledge immediately, and it is through that same channel that we are able to know the scale of the shock and sadness across the world. The mourning of Michael’s loss like his personal life has become more public than private: Google servers were overloaded and over 30% of all tweets on twitter were about Michael Jackson and the sadness of our loss.

Michael will be remembered not for what he did as a person, but what he gave us as an idol and a humanitarian,  and most of all as an artist as his music will play in our hearts forever. And the role of social media as a platform will be changed forever.

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So here is the challenge that marketers must own up to.  An ad campaign, or even marketing buzz, before a product doesn’t make a lot of sense.

The truth is, I am a fan of the guys in Seattle, for not only making solid products, but for making sure that there is always a marketplace, for OS software, Search, Game Consoles, and even browers. These guys are fighting battles on so many fronts, its amazing how well they can deliver solid products that continue to gain or maintain market share.

You see I was in the trenches fighting the browser battle back when Microsoft was waging a full on assault on our fledgling Netscape browser.  Obviously I was only a small infantryman, and I wasn’t even focusing on the core product, but I was still in the trenches, and I was there when we lost and when AOL took control.  So although I was defeated by the mighty Microsoft, I always supported and even worked for their business in some way, whether by owning a PC, an Xbox 360, working at Anderson & Lembke on Microsoft’s advertising, or again at McCann, or even now being at a holding company that owns one of their agencies, I have always been on their team in some way shape or form.  And to be honest they never let me down, even with my iPhone, multiple computers including a Macbook Pro as one of them, the Wii, PS3, and Xbox 360 all sitting conected to my TV, and with my search engine as primarily Google.

So when Microsoft started talking about Bing, I got sort of excited, a new way of delivering search, from the guys who know how to fight a technology battle, and they were the underdogs.  You see real innovation in search hasn’t happened since September 4, 1998 (the birth of Google), and although a few have offered interesting evolutions of it: searchme, kartoo, etc, but nothing has really caught on, so evolution had to happen: Bing.

Here is the point of of my post, MSFT announced Bing, the press picked up on it and momentum started to swirl, but the problem was there wasn’t even a tool to explore for consumers, there was a ton of sizzle, but not even a the odor of steak in the oven.  Why?  We live in a world where beta is the new launch, where consumers expect bugs, and products are launched in Open Source, and I also completely understand that when you are launching a product in a marketplace where the competitor is so fierce, and so quick to protect its bread and butter business, not to mention that their six letters are “G” “O” “O” “G” “L” “E”, its very dangerous to do anything in the space before you are even ready to go and have built enough barriers to entry that it would take an army of engineers to stop it. So why start talking about something before we could even sample a broken version of it?

Why announce, hold press court and discuss your product even before anyone can play and experience the brilliance and innovation you created.  Why, leave me with a video about the technology, and a feeling of disappointment. . .

I hate to say it but it sounds like a “teaser campaign” that an ad guy who doesn’t understand that today’s consumer is always-on, always engaged and always ready to consume, connect and communicate with brands and marketers, and wants to be a part of the process, we will forgive, we will support and we will even help you create your product if you only give us a chance (see Boxee an open source video tool). At least give us some social media that allows us to secretly connect with the product in late alpha or early beta so we can get excited.

A teaser campaign, a lot of buzz, and PR, but nothing to touch and feel is way too much sizzle for not even a taste of steak to work in todays consumer driven media landscape.

Anyway, I am looking forward to binging this week, and hope that the sizzle lives up to some form of steak.

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