The Power of Facebook

The Power of Facebook Getting the most out of the Web’s hottest property

Some Facts • “Social Utility” • Over 50 million users • Started out as a college-only network, then opened earlier this year. • 134% growth from September 2006 to September 2007 • More than 50 million users. • 41% of users over the age of 35, fastest growing segment • Platform for application development, over 6,000 apps currently running • Supposed to be worth US$15 billion

The Coolest Thing About Facebook: Your Friends • Reinforce and expand upon real-world social connections • Do things to and with your friends inside of the walled garden • See up-to-date information about your friends at a glance • Share information with your friends • See what your friends ﬁnd interesting • Meet your friends’ friends

The News Feed What’s everyone up to?

Professional Etiquette: Family Friend Requests Close Friends • If your relationship is above the dotted line, a note may not be necessary. Peers in your Team • If your relationship is below the line, attach a note explaining your request. Be speciﬁc! Superiors/ • Men approaching women, be particularly forthcoming. Subordinates • Sucking in address book can Other Coworkers get you “sandboxed” if you send too many requests. Professional Contacts • Promise yourself that you’ll view proﬁle contents in context, Reconnecting especially if you’re the boss.

Your Proﬁle: The Barry Bonds of Business Cards • Create a hub for your content. • List your professional qualiﬁcations and job description. • Post photos that showcase your humanity. • Share items of interest both individually and publicly. • Share books, music, movies and television, but keep those items below the fold. • Use a mobile client to make a friend request on the spot instead of exchanging business cards.

Groups Conversations are Communities

Groups: Facilitated conversations

Driving Traffic by Participating in Groups • Pasting an unsolicited link to your site on a group’s wall or shared items section is poor form. • Instead, develop list of interesting content for group members. • Post the list on your blog. • Then post in the group and tell people why they might find your research useful. • You drive traffic and you’re not being too commercial. Yes, you have commercial motivations, but you’re adding value at the same time.

Sharing Photos and Videos: Reinforcing Shared Experiences

Posted Items • Sharing content facilitates relationships • Download the Facebook toolbar for Firefox and use the share feature • You can either send the news item to a speciﬁc person or group, or you can post it to your proﬁle. • My friends’ shared items feed on Facebook is where I get some of my most bloggable content. I can subscribe in RSS. • My friends add value for me, and I add value for them by sharing items.

Facebook Culture: Vestigial Organs • Poking • Hookups & Random Meetings

Facebook Culture: Immature Applications • Poo-ﬂinging • Zombies and Vampires and Werewolves, oh my! • Virtual Pets • More useful than meets the eye

“What Zuckerberg and the widget-makers have wrought is mostly silly, useless and time- wasting and the kazillion users of these widgets are pretty much just acting like little children.” - Kara Swisher

Successful Applications • Leverage social context, friends want to connect with one another • Start simple • Respond to user input quickly

Widget Marketing on Facebook: Reaching Your Audience • Who are they and what do they want? • Are they on Facebook in large enough numbers to justify the investment? • How can you help them connect? • Be useful! • Think almost altruistically about serving their needs.

Facebook Fridays: Leveraging Facebook Internally

New Features: Facebook Pages • A brand can have fans. • You can create a hub around your brand for content and interaction the same way that you do with your proﬁle. • Don’t just use it as a directory entry. • This is not just another place for users to download Mountain Dew wallpapers, as the “Ad-Vocate” says. • Creates a “social experience” where your friends can give honest feedback about brands and you can see that information associated with a brand.

New Features: Facebook Ads • Adds social action to ads, so you can see when your friends have relationships with the brand that’s being advertised. • Allows targeting by age, gender, geography, interests, marital status and more. • Goal is to make advertising more relevant. • I still want a Pandora for advertising. • Some backlash regarding legality of using people’s likenesses to sell products without their consent.

New Features: Sucking in Stories from Affiliated Sites • An action you take on an affiliated site is brought back into Facebook as a story. • For example, I buy a new pair of BCBGirls slingbacks at Zappos.com and that information can show up on my Facebook profile. • Privacy backlash: should be opt-in instead of opt-out. • Users have to approve outside news stories twice before they are associated with profiles.

“When [Facebook] started to lay bare its intentions to have advertisers get strangely close to users, the whole picture began to look real creepy, real fast. Creepy-drunk-uncle kind of creepy.” - Paul Glazowski

“[Facebook is] still working more items into its system - apps, gadgets, extras, you name it. More utility. More stuff. Ever get the feeling that it’s all just too much? That it’s all happening too quickly. There’s a palpable sense that there’ll come a time - relatively soon, in fact - that the whole operation will trip over its own shoelaces, lose its bearing, and just fall into disarray. And I have to say, that’s something I deﬁnitely see happening. Pretty soon, too.” - Paul Glazowski

• December 5-6, 2007 • Keynotes by Jeremiah Owyang and Lee Lorenzen • Only a few seats left in the overﬂow room. • More information: www.webcommunityforum.com/conferences

Questions? teresa@webcommunityforum.com http://www.webcommunityforum.com http://teresacentric.com http://tetesagehen.go2fb.com http://twitter.com/tetesagehen

The Power of Facebook

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