Pubcon2008 panel. How to integrate social sites to make your site viral

1. Tag You’re It!
Leveraging the social web for fun & profit
Brian Breslin @brbreslin
InfiniMedia.com PubCon 2008

2. Your Objectives
• Build a community through the
community
• Empower the community
• Change your way of thinking

3. The Social Web

4. • Social media sites are driving tons of
traffic. TONS.
• Your customers are spending more
and more time in them.
• The battle is for attention. Are you
winning?

5. The figures
• 161 Million Unique (Facebook)
• 61 BILLION Page Views (Facebook)
• 117 Million Unique (MySpace)
• 73 Million in USA (MySpace)
Figures for September

6. Steps
• Step 1: Realize you have a community
• Step 2: Engage your community
• Step 3: Cast your nets
• Step 4: Let your community bloom

7. Its about community

8. WAIT!

9. Its ONLY about community

10. Your community is
everywhere
• Stop thinking of your site as a single
destination.
• Go to where the people are (lots of
choices, you decide)
• Cast your net wide, because....

11. You can’t fish in a puddle

12. Where are you casting your net?

13. Old web

14. New Web

15. What this means to you?
• Harder to compete for attention on your own
• Harder to acquire new users (people are
fickle)
• BUT People are spending more time online
• AND There are more people online
• so how can this help you?

16. Building a community
from the community
@ theBoaters.com

17. An Ex: theBoaters.com
• Built a NICHE community
• Started seeding it with PPC acquired
traffic (high costs)
• 500 users after 3 weeks ( low
conversion rate on signups)

18. Theboaters + Facebook
• Created a facebook interface for their
site
• Accepted facebook logins as their
users (PRE- FB connect)
• Redefined what a facebook app was to
them
• Grew to 20,000 users in 6 weeks!

19. So how can you play?

20. Does your site look like this?

21. Is your site a silo?
• Are you syndicating your content?
• Are you sharing your site?
• Can your users contribute to your
site?
• Can they take the content with them?

22. What you can do about it
• What opportunities are out there?
• How do we leverage them?
• How do we measure ROI?
• How do we implement these things?

23. Facebook Connect

24. What FB Connect can do for you.
• Lower barrier to • Create a facebook
entry for new users “app” so you own
100% of the page
• They bring their views
friends with them.
• Distribute your
• THEY BRING THEIR content to 160 Million
FRIENDS! users
• Syndicate your site • Low customer
interactions to acquisition costs
facebook

25. Distributed Logins
Yahoo! Open Platform
Microsoft Live login
Social Graph API
Google Friend Connect

26. What OpenID means
• Dramatically lower your signup
friction
• Millions of users (any Yahoo, MSN,
GMail, MySpace, or AIM username)
• Paired with social graph = $$$$$
• Reduce spam/pre-authenticated
people

27. Social Graph & You
• Social portability.
• Bring friend relationships in, and blow
them out.
• make it dead simple for your users to
share with their friends.

28. Social Graph API?
• POTENTIALLY amazing
• Map the relationships between people
• Use the map to find new connections
and customers

29. Implementing it all
• Not trivial. No matter what they tell
you.
• A good programmer can tie in your
site to any of these platforms.
• But make sure you think about this
stuff BEFORE starting a site

30. Conclusion
• Your community is key to your social
media efforts
• Your community is everywhere (so
you need to go to them)
• You can build any niche from the
existing communities

31. Sharing is caring.

32. Contact me
• breslin@infinimedia.com
• http://twitter.com/brbreslin
• http://brianbreslin.com