Facebook

I was reading Sebastien Provencher’s guest post this morning on the LeWeb’s blog about foursquare and comparing it to Twitter.  I agree with Seb that fourSquare is not the next Twitter but I do think its a bit of a game changer in what its doing with in Social Mobile space.

foursquare gives users incentives to ‘check-in’ to different locations on their mobile phone.  It uses the phone’s GPS location to provide a list of local and popular locations for the user to check-in or the user can quickly create a new location profile.   The user can earn badges for each location they visit and it becomes a bit of a game to earn new badges and compare you points with your friends.  The user who visits an individual location the most earns a ‘mayor’ badge for that location.

I think the game changing aspect of foursquare is what its changing for user behaviour.   As users check into new locations they can instantly see other popular locations that are near them.    Right now that list is free from advertising and just based on the location and popularity of the locations.  Kinda like search engines were in 2000, where there race was on finding content and less on advertising/monetizing like search engines today.  Right now the user group engaged in foursquare is still quite small but its growing and ff this user behaviour continues it should develop into an excellent user intercept opportunity.

Advertisers could target users in their proximity with real-time offers.    This is already happening on the Twitter today and its only going to get more powerful with the social mobile connection.  Populating and controlling the list of ‘check-in’ locations will be increasingly important and profitable.  As will advertising that can connect with this location information in a meaningful form.

It will be interesting to see if foursquare can maintain a unique position here or if the other social networks will just duplicate its functionality and bring it internally.  Right now if feels like foursquare is more like an app on Facebook or Twitter than a social network on its own.  I would expect that Facebook and Twitter will continue to provide the identity data for the social mobile experience but the player with the local advertising is still an unknown.

For most marketing search engine marketing is a common marketing technique and entire business united have been established to focus on search.   The most popular tool being Google and in a distant second the Microsoft Bing/live tools.   Facebook search on the other hand is a much different beast and much more difficult to market against.   In order to optimize we need to understand the Facebook Search function.

The key component to understand with Facebook search is the interaction relationship.  This means that content that the user has interacted with in the past will appear first and may appear in the auto-complete if they have Fan, Joined or Bookmarked the content.

Facebook search then will  display search results based on your friends involvement with content.  This means that individuals, groups, pages, or applications which your friends have interacted with appear at the top.  The next considertation is your network(s) and content types with more people from your network will be assigned priority.  Facebook has indicated they will removing networks but this logic is likely to be replace with geographic filters.

The next concept to understand is that Facebook assigns a priorty to different content types, assuming you have equal friend interactions or no friend interactions.  The priority is generally:

1. Individual user profiles
2. Facebook Pages
3. Facebook Groups
4. Facebook Applications
5. Facebook Events
6. Friend Facebook Posts
7. Everyone’s Facebook Posts

After these internal Facebook content types Web Search results will be presented from the Microsoft Bing search results.

The other major different between Facebook and other search tools is the keyword matching.  The matching seems to be much more strict that other tools and partial keyword matching is very poor.

Across all content types the depth of search seems to limited to the content title.    This is probably the most important tool for Facebook search marketing.  Creating an effective title can increase your placement in search.  Without partial keyword matching a long title will be difficult to match with user keyword and keyword stuff has limited impact because the title on most content sources is limited.

The other important consideration, especially when combined with paid advertising is to get maximum coverage across networks ( geographic, schools and employers ) and across as many friend clusters as possible.   Facebook allows for a number of geographic targeting options and good distribution here can help with Facebook search results.

Since Facebook launched Facebook Pages in 2007 alot clients have asked how their page is
performing.

Sysomos provides tools for measuring and comparing brand performance among across social media and yesterday released a report on Facebook Pages here:

http://www.sysomos.com/insidefacebook/

The report includes the Top 5 pages in each of the Facebook Page categories and includes a comparison between the different categories in terms of overall number of Facebook Fans.  The main advantage that a Facebook offers is the ability to communicate with your “Fan” based using the Facebook Page wall and update channel.   Facebook Pages can also be used with Facebook Applications to provide additional functionality and the basis for more interactive campaigns.

One of the more interesting aspects of the report is the owner generated content and fan generated content.   I believe the ratio between these is a great indicator of the level of interaction your achieving with your Fan base.  It also shows the impact of mass in social media with larger pages ( over 1 Million Fans ) having a much greater Owner to Fan content ratio.

Facebook revealed their roadmap yesterday and it includes a number of changes for developers.  Inside Facebook has a create summer here.

I think the biggest change is the consolidation of communications into the Facebook inbox.  Facebook Invites and Notifications are going away and communication will be divided into Inbox communication and Email.  It looks like both channels will feature an opt-in requirement, making app to user communications very challenging in the future.

I think the consolidation of communication is probably a good thing.  Everytime I see a screenshot of someone’s Homepage I always see hundreds of ignored invites and notifications.  I don’t know that the new system will fix that but it should allow users to find these types of communications centrally.

The other change is around the placement of Bookmarked Applications.  It looks like these will be moving from the task bar to right side bar where the feed filters are located now.  Its not clear where the feed filters will be going or how often they are used ( I suspect they are not being used effectively ).

All of these represent another UI change for users though and Facebook has indicated they want to roll-out the changes by the end of the year.  As always it will be interesting to see the reaction from users to these changes…

Facebook released some interface changes last night.  They appear to be:

• New Group Page design with Tab Interface and strong wall presence.  This makes groups now very similar to Facebook Pages.
• Addition of a LiveFeed option to the Homepage.   This works similar to the Newsfeed but doesn’t allow the same type of content filtering and the Newsfeed doesn’t seem to update as often.
• Remove Feature Items, the featured items from the right hand side have been removed.  These were kind of random in any case.
• Friend Suggest now suggests contacting friends with incomplete or low-Facebook profile usage

The changes are all relatively small but the most significant is probably the LiveFeed addition and it seems users will be defaulting to this in most cases.

The agenda for Facebook Garage Montreal has been posted and I’ve been accepted present on ‘Public Involve with Social Media’.  I will be great to talk about my work with Ascentum over the last few months.  The preliminary agenda is:

• 5pm to 6:30pm: buffet, socializing
• 6:30pm to 6:45pm: opening remarks – Louise Clements, Head of Sales, Facebook Canada
• 6:45pm to 7:15pm: first keynote – Hell’s Kitchen: Facebook comme plateforme de jeux vidéos, Emmanuel Delmoly, co-founder Social2U
• 7:15pm to 7:45pm: Facebook Advertising 101 – speaker to be confirmed
• 7:45pm to 8:15pm: break
• 8:15pm to 9:15pm Social Marketing / Facebook Connect
  • Speaker: Marc Snyder – Facebook et politique municipale
  • Speaker: Colin Smilie – Public involvement with Facebook
  • Speaker: Virginia Magaletta – FB Connect Marketing Case Studies
• 9:15pm to 10:00pm: second keynote – Matt Wyndowe, Facebook (Palo Alto, CA) – Topic to be confirmed

Should be an exciting evening. The event is free and you can register here.

New Facebook Application List

Facebook has changed the Application List again.  Instead of having the Applications list accessible in the header they have moved access to the chat bar.  The presentation looks alot like the Microsoft Start bar but I’m not really sure its an improvement.  I think alot of people pretty much ignore the chat bar ( I haven’t been on FB chat in months ) so its not an ideal location.

There seems to be a common trend with the Facebook re-design to combine items of low value ( ie Chat ) with items of high value ( ie Application navigation ).  We saw the same thing with the new wall where mini-feed items ( low value ) were combined with wall items ( high value ).   I’m not a huge fan of this paradigm and at minimum I think it creates confusion for users.  Areas where they could previously ignore are now much more relevent.

The other big concern I have with this design is the size and the location of the bookmark option.  Instead of being in the top ( where booking is done in every browser on the planet ) its now down at the bottom an relatively small.  Bookmarking is very important for applications going forward because its how users will remember to interact with applications.  I hope Facebook reconsiders this design location or provides applications with a “Bookmark Application” FBML object to make it easier for users.

Facebook seems to be changing their approach to communicating new features/functionality.  In the past Facebook would just use their blog or the developer blog to communicate new functionality.  Media sites and other blogs would then pick the new features and write about them.  The approach worked reasonably well but wasn’t really inline with traditional PR and media relationships.

With the Facebook IM launch and improved privacy settings Facebook seems to be using a traditional PR and media engagement.   Cnet News seems to exclusive coverage of the new features with screenshots of both the privacy settings and the IM client.  The Facebook blogs have been quiet on these new features, even the developer blog which generally gives Facebook developers a heads-up on features that will impact them.

I think this new approach is an interesting evolution for the company and definitely shows signs of Facebook growing up…

When Facebook announced its SocialAds I think everything was fairly accepting of advertising inside Facebook. At the same time they announced Facebook Beacon’s though, which let third-party websites advertise users actions inside Facebook. Unlikely many of the other features inside Facebook, the Facebook Beacons were turned on by default and required users to turn them off.

Jay Goldman from Radiant Core, did an awesome break down of Facebook Beacon process. He went through all the beacon.js functinality and was able to see how the ‘toast’ component of the Facebook Beacon was suppose to be displayed on third-party sites. In a rather non-standard format the ‘toast’ slides up from the bottom of the screen on third-party webpages and displays a message that a Facebook Beacon is about to be presented for the user. Unfortunately the process Facebook used might not work with some browsers and if users missed the ‘toast’ screen the Beacon was automatically sent.

After much up-roar from users about the privacy issues around Beacons, Facebook has decided to change them so that the user has to explicitly confirm that they want a Beacon sent. Techcrunch has a great break down of the Beacon 2.0 process. I think this is a great win for user’s and puts them back in control. One thing you can certainly say about Facebook is that they do listen to their users and respond quickly.

Cory Doctrow, a Canadian writer who I have alot of respect for, has just written an article about Facebook, and social network in general. Cory believes that social networks come and go because people eventually encounter an awkward social connection. A friend from highschool, college or co-worker that you don’t really want as a ‘friend’. After reading the article I think Cory is way off the mark.

First off, I think social networks have come and gone because they fail to achieve a critical mass. People left friends, and myspace because their friends weren’t on in any regular or consistent basis. This has gotten better with each generation of social networks ( friends->myspace->facebook). In Canada Facebook has achieved an incredible market penetration and its similar to Orkut in Brazil in Latin America. Soon after Orkut launched it took off in Brazil and remains the dominate social network today. Not because its innovation, but because it achieved critical mass in social circles to the point where it was efficient not to be on Orkut.

I think another comparison would be email. The ratio of real email to spam has been out of whack for years now but people are still using email because its still the primary means to connect with people. There is enough value and effficiency to make it worth while. As long as social network can do the same it will remain popular.

The article also made reference to Facebook allowing profile pictures to be used in sponsor advertising. While Facebook does claim ownership over this information I was able to find any reference to Facebook use profile pictures this way. The link included in the article just talks about Facebook adding profiles to Google search which I don’t think is the same thing or not atleast in anyways I can understand.