Jennifer Neeley

Strategic Marketing Advisor for Trust-Sensitive Growth

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Jennifer Neeley

Dispatches From Web 2.0… Facebook Best Practices

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After the keynotes, it was on to the conference sessions, the first of which was Facebook Marketing: Best Practices, given by Jeremiah Owyang (Forrester Research), Evan Mager (AKQA), Holly Liu (Watercooler), Brett Keintz (750 Industries / Stanford GSB), Kevin Barenblat (Context Optional).

What we know about Facebook (from Facebook’s own stats page):

  • There are more than 70 million active users; more than half are out of college (older than MySpace demo).
  • There are more than 20,000 apps out there – and most are junk.
  • 40% of Facebook users have watched a video inside Facebook.

The panel suggested approaching Facebook like any other marketing tool -filter users for matches.
Engagement with community is key to leveraging Facebook.

When companies create apps, the panel also suggested partnering with app developers rather than building apps in-house. Companies that specifically make apps are keeping up with trends better and can usually help you leverage changes.

API changed the space between the site and user.

ROI is difficult to gauge because it’s so new; we do know traditional banner ads do not perform as well on Facebook. Must be an ad with virality.

Companies using Facebook are usually looking to accomplish the following:

  1. Audience /virality
  2. Engagement (brand)
  3. Monetization

When using Facebook, be sure to keep the content dynamic and fresh:

  1. Asset: Photo / Video / Discussion
  2. Social digital actions: Comment / rate
  3. Allow interesting interactions, e.g. Which Grey’s Anatomy Character Are You?

When building apps:

  • Build with friendships in mind, e.g. EA’s Smarty Pants, in which social interaction helps – and 5 million games have been played in the last few months as a result.

Need inspiration? The Stanford Facebook Class looked at what people do in everyday life for inspiration. Using that framework, one of the students came up with the idea for the successful app, Dodgeball.

Some other thoughts from the panelists:

  • Take some content you already have and make it available on Facebook so users can experience it there.
  • Facebook tends to be an immersive experience, like TV, and users tend not to like to leave the site. Companies have had success linking off Facebook, but keeping the Facebook look-and-feel.
  • Click-thrus tend to be low throughout Facebook, it might be better to look at Facebook as a syndication model rather than trying to get the page views from Facebook.
  • When using rich media, be sure to preserve the brand.
  • ROI is considered to be much higher within Facebook than driving users outside.
  • Measure success: Track everything and A/B test.

Good app examples:

Office Poke, branded MS Office

Some of the most ardent users are fans of sports and TV shows.

Beacons are another way to keep your brand out there, e.g. when Netflix sends you a new movie, the title and information is added to your mini-feed and broadcast to all your friends. Gamefly and Blockbuster do similar things – it’s a good way to get users to go to sites off Facebook.

Fan / Official pages are another good way to draw users. Recently, Sony and Target upped the ante, offering better experiences than on other, non-company pages.

So is the ad spend worth it? The panel cautioned all away from banners and said that any way to get into the news feed was most valuable (especially with video!).

Rock You has done a good job of leveraging audiences that are already on Facebook.

Who’s done it wrong?
Wal-Mart vs. Target back-to-school campaigns: Target had a roommate style search that allowed and encouraged users to talk to one another. Meantime, Wal-Mart had problems in execution; they disabled most if not all community features, which made users upset and made them comment negatively about the campaign / company elsewhere. Wal-Mart also almost exclusively sent users off to Wal-Mart.com, while Target had ways for users to engage there on Facebook (wallpaper downloads, videos, etc.).

Lessons learned:

  1. Don’t disable community
  2. Don’t just drive users back to your own site
  3. Let the page be a playground with things to use and experience

Another bad app were the Sony snow globes, which never quite worked.

Lessons learned:

  1. Make sure your app works
  2. The app must have a way for users to naturally share it. The app was great, but it needed more community.

Microsites in Facebook:

  • Sprite Sips was one of the first, but it’s not very social – a drawback.
  • (fluff)Friends is a better example of a page that functions almost like a microsite.

The overwhelming lesson of the session? Most go to Facebook without a goal. Don’t do that. Figure out what you want to do.

Some places Facebook apps still have far to go? Forwarding the conversation with regard to news and current events. The Washington Post, WSJ and Ernst and Young have had good examples.

The other lingering question was: Is Facebook enough? The panel agreed that everyone needs to be everywhere, including on Open Social sites.

Dispatches From Web 2.0… Inspiring Keynotes – and DATA!

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Day Two – 24th April 2008

The morning began with more keynote addresses… the first two disappointed, but then came Yahoo CTO Ari Balogh (full first name: Aristotle! Hercu, are you reading?) who talked about “opening up the social graph” through Y! OS – Open Yahoo. Interestingly, of all the content Yahoo has, he called out Yahoo Sports as a key area where the web can add an additional dimension – context. He promised that Y! OS would add another dimension at Yahoo – a developer’s platform that is socially driven and open (get the deets here.

After that, it was on to Current TV‘s Chief Architect Ofer Shaked discussing “What Current Knows About Viewers.” What I found interesting:

  • They define themselves as a “participatory media company.”
  • Their audience is young adults looking for user-generated content.

Some data:

  • Current is carried in 56 million US homes.
  • They have 1.5 million hits to their site per month.
  • Users are defined as 20-somethings who are educated, skew male and more than two-thirds have a laptop working and TV on at the same time.

In Oct. they launched a “2.0” version of their site. They tweaked it at the beginning of April – adding an incentive to get users face / content onto an hourly news program. They wanted to find out what this would do for their existing user base. What they found was that by using this incentive, they had 5 times the commentary and contributions they had before the “tweak.”

Their top ten types of clips include:

  • Lo-fi funny clips
  • More thoughtful pieces
  • Controversial / thought-provoking
  • Hard-to-watch, sometimes violent or disturbing

Their community favors the following content categories:

  • Culture
  • Music
  • Art

A piece on their site represents how much time users spend watching various categories. Watch here.

On to Steve Peerman, Vice President of Strategic Products at MySpace, who talked about the need to listen to users (What MySpace Knows). Peerman said he’d been at MySpace for 4 years – starting out as a product manager. He says the story of MySpace is one of growth and scale. Take a look at some of their data:

  • They have 117 million unique visitors per month (more than the population of Japan and less than Mexico).
  • They have 100 billion rows of data.
  • They have 5 million simultaneous users.
  • 000-400,000 new users per day.

Because of these figures, he says MySpace cannot afford to be 90% right. Using their user population as scale, “being 10% wrong means we’ve pissed off Ireland and New Zealand.”

  • Their goal is user experiences that users find interesting.
  • Users are best at self-organizing and self-regulating.
  • They, “live and die by the goodwill and determination of community and you’ll never be as smart as they are.”
  • Their users love “Tom” – everyone’s first friend on MySpace.
  • The “most productive roadmap is directed by asking users.”
  • They’re using “Tom’s blog” to try-out new navigation.
  • MySpace is driven by “richness, engagement, privacy…” and spam deference.
  • He left after saying, “users are 1,000% times smarter than you’ll ever be… you have to check your ego at the door.”

Dispatches From 2.0… The Web Is Well, Social

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Day One – 23rd April 2008
My first day at the conference; and the first full day of Web 2.0 Expo. After syncing with Terre and seeing some familiar faces, I was off to my first talk of the day, Polite, Pertinent, and… Pretty: Designing for the New-wave of Personal Informatics, given by Matt Jones (Dopplr) and Tom Coates (Yahoo! Brickhouse, Fire Eagle, specifically). The discussion mainly centered around the way people are choosing to “instrument our lives” through GPS-tracking shoes and even pills we can swallow that record the soundtrack of our – you guessed it – bowels. Obviously, there are a number of design challenges that come from this 2.0 push to use all the information coming at us to do a better job of being productive human beings. There were a few thought-provoking concepts thrown out for all to digest. Those I found especially interesting:

Presenters’ links:

Next on the agenda was Children of Flickr: Making the Massively Multiplayer Social Web with Justin Hall (GameLayers), Rajat Paharia (Bunchball), Christopher Chapman (Areae) and Gabe Zichermann (rmbr) (perhaps the most vocal, and insightful – at least on stage) where the discussion centered on adding video games to everyday life. Flickr actually started as a gaming site and it was interesting to get the perspectives of the panelists. Unfortunately, it was not as focused as the previous talk, but the speakers did talk generally about the concept of gaming and it seemed to carry over well to our objectives at MediaZone. They stressed the need for points systems or any form of “virtual currency” (see: Virtual Cash Breeds Real Greed) for users to take to gaming in a big way. They pointed to EA points as an example. They also noted a “landmark” study that found that people, especially women, do not like 3D user experiences. Interesting. I’ve tried to track the study down, but if you know of it, please share.

After lunch, it was on to Short Attention Span Theater: The Birth of Microblogging & Micromedia presented by Gregarious Narain (Blue Whale Labs), Jeremiah Owyang (Forrester Research), Brian Solis (Future Works and PR 2.0) and Stowe Boyd (The /Messengers) where audience members were invited to Twitter in questions. As a loyal (ardent?) Twitterberry user, I got to work and even had one of my questions addressed – you can check out some of my questions on my Twitter micro-blog at http://twitter.com/jenniferneeley. In a nutshell, Twitter’s as a social, and especially, economic value was discussed with mention of companies that have used it well (H&R Block, Zappos) as well as poorly (lots of links back to your site = disinterest). If you’re very interested in the topic, you might like to take a look at the ramblings on Robert Scoble’s blog, but otherwise it seemed like you got it or you didn’t and without Twitter having a fleshed out business model (their meetings with VCs during the span of the conference were well-dcoumented), there’s still a lot we don’t know. Still, I believe a few of the campaigns we’re trying to run could utilize or be entirely run on Twitter. Please ask me to pontificate, if interested.

On to psychology and a presenter, God bless him, with an unseemly affinity for the word “um.” Web Site Psychology was the name of the lecture, given by Gavin Bell (Nature). If you’re interested, I highly recommended taking a peek at the slides from his presentation. A lot of good, if academically presented, information. Some of my takeaways:

  • Usability needs to look at the consistent vs. the coherent.
  • Cognitive psychology plays a huge role.
  • Web experiences should model human behavior, designing for a good fit and also managing expectations.
  • He asserted that Flash makes users uncomfortable if there is no URL – no way to “go back.”
  • He also discussed: Schema, Congruence, Adaptation, Measured Stability and Affordances along the way.

After a break, it was on to keynotes, all of which I encourage you to check out online, but before that, Brady and Jennifer from O’Reilly Media explained some of the things they tried to make Web 2.0 Expo an “unconference”:

Making it an “open event” with social tools available to all (see the “stay connected” sidebar on the event home page). Examples:

Keynotes then began, with Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media starting things off by “reminding us why we’re there” – “Changing the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators.” He also discussed how Web 2.0 is defined, according to VentureSource, it is:

  • Internet as platform
  • Harnessing the collective intelligence
  • Data as the “Intel Inside”
  • Software above the level of a single device
  • Software as a service

(This is all spelled-out better in another book I bought – Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide: Business thinking and strategies behind successful Web 2.0 implementations).

And, he noted, these are not short-term trends.

For business, one of the ideas he noted as key were:

  • Enterprises understanding that Web 2.0 is about turning themselves inside out.

Other thoughts:

  • Apps get better the more people use them (I think this could be said of most of Web 2.0).
  • The computer is every computer.
  • “Cloud Computing.”
  • Amazon.com used Web 2.0 to get ahead of the curve in a number of ways.
  • The programmable web.
  • Ambient computing.

“Big hairy audacious goal”
– Tim O’Reilly

O’Reilly’s examples of how Web 2.0 has been used in this way:

O’Reilly concluded with a poem he says he read to hos father on his death bed 20 years ago called “The Man Watching.” Take a read here:
http://www.cdra.org.za/creativity/Rainer%20Maria%20Rilke%20-%20The%20Man%20Watching.htm. Pretty inspiring.

Some other sites of interest:

After that, Charlene Li of Forrester interviewed Max Levchin from Slide. It was an interesting interview on his take on the value of social networking. I recommend checking it out online, but some thoughts:

  • Levchin defines Slide as a “Social Entertainment Company.”
  • He says Slide adds context to social platforms.
  • He considers widgets social software.
  • Believes the consumer gets “fun” – and that’s the only thing that will keep their products from becoming fads.
  • Says Slide will make money through advertising: Levchin says they’ve made strong brand connections from Paramount to Palm. He believes they will sell sponsorships and split ad revenue between ads and consumer service.
  • Billions are being made from virtual goods – especially in Asia.
  • Content and context are intertwined.
  • Engagement levels are close to, but above standard TV.
  • Madison Avenue is all about “engagement.”
  • Cited the thrown sheep as the thing they’re most known for (via SuperPoke!) and the pregnancy test, tied to a Juno movie campaign, as an example of a successful ad sales example.
  • Says Slide is well-liked by users and must have a base of loyal users for business to work.
  • Designing with privacy in mind (lessons learned from PayPal).
  • In terms of metrics, he says they do not need to know who their users are, but need to know their behavior (in general).
  • Says Slide has 170 million users.
  • Says their may not be as much conflict between the properties they widgets their products to as you might imagine; it’s all around who “owns”/engages the user.
  • Related to engagement, he said it’s more critical for the user to know you (e.g. the brand), than for you to know them.
  • Their focus is on something of real value – not easy to replicate – which users have the deepest connection to. He says if you can do that, there’s a lot of opportunity.
  • There was some discussion about “application spam.”
  • He believes users that uses apps to spam others will “be dealt with” better than it’s been done before with email.
  • There’s also the concept of what’s socially accepted, e.g. sheep being thrown vs. something else.
  • Talked about being featured on the cover of “Portfolio” with a light bulb over his head.
  • He was asked what motivates him to work on startups and said the drive to do so is, well, drive. He noted the first four companies he started destroyed his credit history. Slide is his fifth.
  • When he hires people, he basically looks for drive and people who can deal with failure.
  • He says he now judges his success by how many people make a million or more on exit.
  • He ended with a quote, paraphrased, from Winston Churchill, “never, ever, ever, ever surrender.” (see the full speech here: http://www.winstonchurchill.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=393)

Next up, Microsoft, who showed a nice video, but did not explain the heavy-lifting that may or may not be required to make it work for users, as a means of announcing a new product – Microsoft Mesh (for an explainer, go here: http://www.informationweek.com/news/internet/web2.0/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=207401672).

On to the next speaker, Clay Shirky (one-time Colbert Report interviewee: http://www.comedycentral.com/colbertreport/videos.jhtml?videoId=164882) and author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (I bought this one, too) gave an uplifting chat. He used the phrase “information porn.” What can I say?… love, love, LOVE the guy.

“What AIM Knows” was the next talk, given by Edwin Aoki – nothing really memorable to share. Tellme wants to get ahead of the mobile curve using voice commands (I really liked their speaker, Dariusz Paczuski) and there was talk of the “Myth of Innovation” by Scott Berkun (ScottBerkun.com). LOVED his book and bought it, too (The Myths of Innovation).

I encourage you to take a look at all the keynotes on Blip.tv. I plan to post the ones I found most interesting here, individually.

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