Facebook deserves marketers' attention

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.

Labels: marketing, social_media, socialnetworks

  ¶ 1:06 PM 4 Comments

  Is second life a massive marketing self-deception? 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.

Labels: socialnetworks

  ¶ 3:39 PM 4 Comments

  Response to a skeptical review

IMedia Connection published the first less-than-positive review of The New Influencers today. It’s written by Phil Gomes, a veteran blogger who’s often cited as the first PR professional to practice the craft. In my view, Mr. Gomes’ review can be summed up as follows: New Influencers is a useful, if flawed attempt at putting into context a rapidly changing market in which decisions are frustratingly difficult to make. The book is full of good stories and makes a solid case for why corporations should pay attention to social media. However, it is marred by some factual mistakes and advice that is occasionally off-base. It's a decent early attempt at putting social media in context, but it needs to be baked more fully.

I would call the review modestly positive, although the headline, "Does ‘Guide To The New Social Media Mis-Guide?’" implies otherwise. I don't completely agree that the headline accurately represents the review, but I've written enough headlines in my time to know that it’s a judgment call and reasonable people disagree.

I have enormous respect for Phil Gomes and don't quibble with any of the flaws cited in his review. I would like to respond to a few of them, though, if only to point out sources and motivations.

Mr. Gomes notes disapprovingly that I recommended that readers vote for favorable stories about their own companies on Digg.com. He’s right that that was bad advice. Digg was still fairly new when the book was submitted to the publisher last October, and time has demonstrated that my recommendation was misguided. He has a good point.

He takes me to task for using statistics from Alexa and Technorati to validate the significance of trends and the influence of blogs. He notes accurately that Alexa relies upon a limited universe of users of its toolbar to estimate traffic statistics, which skews the results. This is true; however, the Alexa toolbar is used by millions of people, and should give a representative, if not statistically valid view of traffic performance. Alexa is open about the limitations of its approach, and I should have cited this at least in a footnote. However, in the land of the blind, a one-eyed man is king, and Alexa is the best we’ve got.

The same can be said of Technorati, whose blog popularity ranking has been both hailed and reviled. I cited Technorati rankings generously in the book, mainly because it is the measure of popularity that bloggers overwhelmingly told me they use. Blogpulse has a similar ranking, but its universe is much more limited. While Technorati has its flaws, bloggers pay attention to it and I think that has merit.

Mr. Gomes comes away with the impression that I lavished too much attention on the Technorati A-list, thereby downplaying the importance of less prominent bloggers. If this is the impression the book leaves, then I did a terrible job of making my case in Chapter 4, titled "Measures of Influence." The whole point of that chapter was to emphasize that A-list bloggers are influenced by many others, and that any campaign that focuses exclusively on the A-list is ignoring the sophisticated patterns of influence that work in the blogosphere. As noted in that chapter:

“Most A-list bloggers actually select at least half the items they choose to highlight from tips sent in by their readers, many of whom are small-time players. So the supernodes actually get their energy from satellites of much smaller influence who have their ear… [E]ven small players in the blogosphere can exert an unusually high level of influence depending on who is reading them. It is a modern version of the six-degrees-of-separation model. The blogger without much influence may actually be a link between two bloggers who have significant influence.”

He points out that I incorrectly identified Steve Rubel as head of Edelman's new-media consultancy. I stand corrected. I did send Steve an earlier version of that material for his review, but I evidently introduced errors after he had seen the early draft.

Finally, Mr. Gomes chides me for claiming that entertainment and celebrity blogs "don't generate much cross hyper-linking activity." In fact, that statement was attributed to a researcher at Nielsen BuzzMetrics in the context of a discussion about patterns of influence. While that doesn't absolve me of blame, I did not present the statement as being my own.

I offer these comments solely in the spirit of giving my perspective of these issues. In reviews of any kind, perception is reality, and Mr. Gomes’ perception of my misfires are my responsibility to correct, hopefully in a second edition. He says he’d be willing to read it :-).

Labels: NewInfluencers, social_media, social_media influence

  ¶ 2:52 PM 2 Comments

  Tech PR War Stories 18: CEO bloggers are great except when they're not

Labels: blogging, socialnetworks

  ¶ 1:50 PM 1 Comments

  How to create brand advocates My article on brand advocacy published today on iMedia Connection. It's all about how to use electronic tools to engage with customers and make them your best sales representatives. I'd love to get your feedback and war stories. I'm starting work on a new book, Secrets of Social Media Marketing, and tales from the field are a key component. Don't be shy to tell me your successes. Failures are welcome, too. Names will be changed to protect the guilty.

Labels: advertising, social_media

  ¶ 3:45 PM 0 Comments

  WSJ's blogging retrospective is interesting reading The Wall Street Journal celebrates the 10th anniversary of blogging (can you believe it?) with a series of essays from prominent media and literary figures about the role and value of blogs. They range from Tom Wolfe's dismissal of the medium as a "universe of rumors" to Elizabeth Spiers' thoughtful essay on the value of targeted audiences. It's an eclectic and interesting selection of contributors representing a wide range of perspective. Recommended reading.

Labels: blogging

  ¶ 8:24 AM 0 Comments

  The Wall Street Journal reviews New Influencers Much to my delight, The Wall Street Journal this morning carried a 900-word review of my book, calling it "a persuasive case for companies' reaching out to bloggers," and recounting many of the stories and examples I used to argue for greater marketer attention to social media.

Unfortunately, you have to be a paid subscriber to read the article. We'll see what we can do about that :-)

Having tried (unsuccessfully) for years to get published in the Journal, this was an unexpected endorsement and a very gratifying one. It's good to see marketers coming around the perspective that social media can be a meaningful channel for customer connection.

Labels: marketing, NewInfluencers, social_media

  ¶ 2:11 PM 1 Comments

  My interview on Blog Talk Radio

I’ve done lots of radio interviews over the years, and they are invariably similar: the host has maybe three to five minutes to talk and asks a question every 30 seconds or so. You can't slow down because the listener's attention will wane and will switch to another station. It’s invigorating, but also ultimately frustrating because it's so hard to say much that’s meaningful in that short a period of time.

That's why my interview this week on Blog Talk Radio was such a pleasant surprise. Just minutes before going on the air, host Wayne Hurlbert informed me that the program lasted a full hour with no commercial breaks. This is like telling someone in a Porsche that they have the entire highway to themselves. It was such a pleasure to stretch out and really talk over some of the issues with Wayne, who asked excellent questions. I don't know if anyone has the stomach to listen to me for an hour, but if you want to hear more details about what I learned about social media while writing The New Influencers, give it a listen.

Labels: blogging, podcast, social_media

  ¶ 3:27 PM 4 Comments

  Our latest podcasts focus on social media marketing

The Tech PR War Stories podcast, episodes 15 and 16, are about the future of marketing with social media. In episode 15, we talk to Brian Solis, a PR executive who has been writing the PR 2.0 blog and who recently authored a social media manifesto that nicely pulls these technologies together.

In episode 16, our guest is Maggie Fox, founding partner of Social Media Group. The year-old firm is exclusively devoted to helping businesses use social media platforms and has had some remarkable early successes.

Both of our speakers are clued in to the potential of social media marketing, but both understand the difficulty of selling new ideas to top management. They offer advice on the benefits of embracing these new tools and how to get your clients and managers on board.

Labels: PR, social_media

  ¶ 11:22 AM 2 Comments