Online Marketing Blog

After the keynote frenzy this morning, the session that stood out for me was “Facebook Marketing: Best Practices” with Jeremiah Owyang from Forrester Research as moderator, Evan Mager from AKQA, Holly Liu from Watercooler, Brett Keintz of 750 Industries and Stanford GSB and Kevin Barenblat of Context Optional.

Some of the key takeaways from this session were:

• Be clear with your objectives
• Test spending money on Facebook marketing even if you aren’t sure about the return. Hey, 1,000,000 visits can’t be wrong!
• Understanding the ROI of Facebook requires a new kind of mindset
• Don’t take away the social features of Facebook from users
• Facebook marketing is not about driving traffic to your web site. Keep Facebook users on Facebook

A recent report from Hitwise cited Facebook as having grown by 51% yet MySpace is still King of the online social networking world with 76% of US social network traffic. According to Nielsen Online, MySpace attracted 60.1 million visitors in December 2007 compared to 22.6 million visitors for Facebook.

While that growth news is all fine a good, from a personal observation standpoint, I’ve noticed I’m not logging into Facebook much anymore. Many of the updates I get are irrelevant to my interests as more and more people try to boost their friend counts and I mistakenly (in hindsight) accept those requests.

I posted a question to Twitter about not using Facebook lately and several others acknowledged the same trend which leads us to a Reader Poll question:

By 2010, 70% of all content online will be developed by individuals, so claims iCrossing’s Adam Lavelle, articulated during the session “Actionable Social Media” today at SES Chicago.

The session, moderated by Anne Kennedy, included on its panel:

• Lavelle
• Todd Parsons, cofounder of Buzz Logic
• Jennifer Laycock, Editor in Chief of Search Engine Guide
• Tamera Kremer, Wildfire Strategic Marketing
• Steven Marder, CEO Eurekster

The panel’s discussion reviewed the most popular social media methods, tying everything back to the main notion that we humans, truly, are social animals. The web has evolved naturally, but a breakneck pace to support this type of behavior.

Everything from blogging, to image submissions, to social bookmarking facilitate our tendency to sort ourselves into likeminded communities, either by finding them or creating them.

Damn, it was a tough weekend for Facebook on the publicity/blogosphere front. With Beacon blatantly selling out Facebook users’ privacy whether they’re logged in or not has nowhere else to go but controversial.

A platform built on community now making more aggressive efforts to monetize that community and not being honest about it smacks of downward spiral. But that’s just me. Here are thoughts from others you might be interested in:

Blognation - I’m Ready to Bail on Facebook - the New Face of Evil

bub.blicio.us (Brian Solis) - Has Silicon Valley Pulled an About Face on Facebook?

The Idea Shower (Nate Weiner) - Facebook, Here is Misinformation

Star Tribune (Jackie Crosby) - Bloggers seeing red over Target’s little secret

The hot potato in social media this week is the OpenSocial web standards initiative (see screenshots here) promoted by Google involving numerous social applications, platforms and partners including: Ning, LinkedIn, Friendster, Oracle, Plaxo, Orkut, Salesforce, iLike, and Slide. Reported first on TechCrunch, “OpenSocial is a set of three common APIs, defined by Google with input from partners, that allow developers to access core functions and information at social networks”. That information includes: profiles, friends and activities.

A distinguishing feature of OpenSocial is that applications will be created with normal HTML and JavaScript. Facebook requires development using it’s own markup language making the apps unusable elsewhere. With the recent $240 million Microsoft investment in Facebook and a $15 billion valuation, the stakes are very high. Some say OpenSocial isn’t really opening any doors or isn’t a threat to Facebook. What say you?

When you have all the social media essentials, and you know that you need to be social and active in your social networking communities, how do you effectively leverage that to benefit yourself (and your company)?

The speakers in this session on SMX Social Media Day 2 gave the audience tips and recommendations on how to best use social networking, specifically Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace, to make yourself known in the networking world.

Dave McClure of 500Hats spoke first with a fun tutorial on Facebook. Facebook is great for promoting events and for joining groups to share your brands and ideas and products to those interested in your industry. One of the main characteristics of Facebook that Dave focused on was leveraging the news feed in Facebook.

Facebook recently deployed an applications programs interface allowing users to create widgets or share applications within their network.

One application in particular caught my interest as it allows you to turn your virtual self into a zombie and “infect” other people by biting them (through email invitation of course). Your zombie gains points as you infect more and more people. In the 3 days that I have had the application up and running, I have infected 6 people who have infected others as well.

After accumulating a certain number of zombie points by infecting others, your virtual self reaches the next level after which you are able upgrade to another type of zombie. In all, nearly 400,000 Facebook users currently subscribe to the zombie application.

I received my “Join Facebook” email today and registered. You can join one of three networks: Regional, College or Work.

While several employees at our firm, TopRank have Facebook accounts and we may (or may not) have done some things with clients, this is the first time “playing around” with my own account. There’s quite a difference between Facebook and MySpace in terms of layout, customization options and functionality.

For more info from the source, check out this very interesting video interview by Bambi Francisco with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg earlier this month after their little redesign fiasco. They discuss whether Facebook is hitting a ceiling, the deal with Microsoft and about opening up Facebook to regional networks.

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