7 Ways Facebook will Change
your Life June 23, 2009

About this eBook My name
is Paul Dunay and I have just finished co- authoring a book called Facebook Marketing for Dummies (Wiley) due out this summer. It was a very eye opening experience to say the least. But the one thing it taught me was a profound respect for the Facebook platform. What you are about to see is a number of ideas I have about the future of Facebook. These are not pie in the sky ideas or something I dreamed up – I feel these are very doable. In fact I wondered if I could get this eBook out fast enough to share these ideas with you before they actually happened! So sit back relax and enjoy what I think is a sneak peek into the future of social networking.

Life Changer #1 Search and
Facebook Type the keyword VoIP into Google and you get 66 Million responses. 66 Million!! How archaic is that? Does Google have any idea how long it would take me to go through 66 Million responses? Someone can (and will) connect search to my social profile on Facebook thereby making a truly intelligent search engine that will know where I work, and who my friends are. So when I Google a term like VoIP – it will know I work for Avaya, it will access my work friends list and can present me with a way to filter the web based on my social profile – call it Social Search. Then you will be able to narrow down a search for VoIP in seconds based on the company I work for, or members of my marketing team, or other friends I have in my network and get a completely different view of the internet that I can’t get now.

Life Changer #2 Amazon and
Facebook I was searching on Amazon to check out the listing for my book Facebook Marketing for Dummies (Wiley) and there is a section under my book’s listing called “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought”. This grouping of books are not bad recommendations but they are not exactly “personal” to me. Note: I also tried the same search on my wife’s computer and got the same results! How personal is that? So what would it take to make these results truly personal? Amazon should connect a book search on its site to my social profile on Facebook thereby making a truly personal search. Then Amazon would know who my friends are and what books THEY bought in the same “space” as my book. There should just be a different box on Amazon that says – “Your Friends from Facebook also Bought” … then I would get a completely different view on their site and one that is truly personal to me.

Life Changer #3 Gaming and
Facebook This one is already in the works and leave it to the gaming community to nail this one first! Facebook Connect has been generally available now for a while and quietly we are seeing sites begin to take advantage of it. But recently I noted on Inside Facebook that Microsoft Xbox Games will share Games through Facebook Connect. Users will be able to update their Facebook status, post photos, and play games with friends directly within Xbox Live. In addition, Electronic Arts announced that Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2010 would integrate Facebook Connect on Xbox when it is released this fall, marking the first Facebook Connect integration on a gaming console ever! But with games like Texas Holdem and Black Jack already growing in popularity on Facebook – one day we should be able to sit at home and play high stakes poker with folks around the world and pay through the Facebook platform!

Life Changer #4 Magazines and
Facebook I have long cancelled all the subscriptions I had to any physical magazines in favor of reading them digitally and only in my feed reader. Which poses a problem – because I like to read and have collected over 300 feeds in my feed reader – how am I going to know what to read first? Worse than that – because the magazines have all made their content free and available online via RSS – not only do they miss out on the physical ad revenues but also the digital ad revenues by pushing it out via RSS. But if they would enable Facebook Connect on their website - I would be able to see in a separate column on their website what’s hot and getting read by all my favorite marketing friends. Thereby bringing me back to their website and increasing their page views so they can sell more ads.

Life Changer #5 Reality TV
and Facebook I know it is sad to admit but I really like Reality TV shows like The Apprentice, Top Chef or Project Runway. These shows do a great job in creating interaction with their audience by using cell phones to take polls during the commercials and pointing fans of the show to their website when the show is over for some “never before seen footage”. But they are missing the big opportunity. What about broadcasting TV shows via Facebook and/or building communities around them. By doing this advertisers would really be the winners, as they would have so much more data on their viewers... Profiling data, demographic data, friendship data, etc. We saw a glimpse of this live with CNN and the Inauguration which was a great one time occurrence but there is a much bigger opportunity for these types of shows to leverage the same technology. This would truly enable a Social TV experience the likes of which we have never seen before allowing us, the viewers, to vote people off the show!

Life Changer #6 Shopping and
Facebook In order to enable Social Shopping at the mall with your Friends from Facebook a few things need to be in place. The first is “Presence Identification”, that is the identification of the exact location of a Facebook friend in a particular store at the mall. GPS and even assisted GPS (AGPS) which most of the GPS-enabled phones have implemented does not possess the accuracy to know exactly where a person is within a given store. For that you need an Active RFID system installed at the mall to conclusively identify where your friends are. They could plan meet-ups all because of a chip that could be read anywhere. Informing friends and having them join you at the retail store leverages the power of WOM marketing and creates a shopping destination. Then based on a few internal hot-spots in key locations within the mall friends could track their location and make suggestions from their mobile devices or from home. Upon completing the sale there would be a Facebook status update along with a photo of the purchase and a rating of the service delivered by the retail store that day. We have all read stories of the exceptional customer service but this would take customer service and shopping to a whole new and much more personal level! Disclaimer: I act as a Marketing Advisor to Novitaz

Life Changer #7 Customer Service
and Facebook Ok, let’s say you are searching the web for a new fishing rod. You find the right website but you are having trouble locating the right rod and reel combination. Frustrated you consider giving up but give it one last shot and decide to call the 800 number on the site. And instead of getting the usual “press 1 for” – you are prompted for your Facebook id. What’s going on here you think? Reluctantly you give them your Facebook id and behind the scenes there is technology at work that matches you up with the best Call Center agent based on your profile information and your purchasing data and any product reviews you've posted. Instantly you are matched up with someone who now can give you the best customer experience of your lifetime. They have access to your shopping data, profiling data, review data and know exactly what would be best for you because they can talk about the product in ways you never heard before coming from a call center agent. Maybe they have also helped someone in your social network and can even broker a chat with them (live through Facebook) about their recommended rod and reel combo for you.

What does this all mean?
So over the last few pages we have looked at ways in which Facebook will provide you with a very different experience over the next 24 months. But this is just a look forward – what about a look backwards? And what does this mean for our future? What it means is that your Social Capital will be a very important asset in your life. Perhaps even as important as your home. (see an Avaya colleague of mine - Jim Keenan’s blog post called – (Why Your Social Graph Will Be Worth as Much as Your Home) What currently looks like islands of Social activity in various Social Networks will begin to control your life – the jobs you get, the schools you go to. Those that have weak Social Capital will become the equivalent of Social Outcasts – not able to get the killer job at the financial institution or accepted into Harvard because they have very low Social Capital. Said differently, who would you rather hire – the person with 2 followers on Twitter and no Facebook or LinkedIn account or the person with 2000 followers on Twitter and a huge network on Facebook and LinkedIn with 36 glowing recommendations! I know who I would rather have. This means all this work you are putting into your Facebook profile, LinkedIn account and Twitter followers will all pay off for you. I recommend you should spend at least an hour a day building your profiles, connecting with people, engaging in more conversations and generally building up your Social Capital. At first I used to wonder why we were all doing these social activities, I asked people on my podcast series – so where is this all going? And now its clear to me we aren’t just messing around and wasting time – we are building one of the most important assets of our lives. Build your Social Capital!

How to contact me? Paul
Dunay Global Managing Director of Services & Social Marketing Avaya Office: 908.953.2755 Mobile: 917.306.8440 pdunay@avaya.com Facebook Marketing for Dummies (Wiley) Available for Pre-Order on Amazon now!! Don’t forget to become part of my network! Blog: www.buzzmarketingfortechnology.com LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/pauldunay Facebook: facebook.com/pauldunay Twitter: twitter.com/pauldunay