Weekly Digest of the Social Networking Space: August 22nd, 2007

Due to the demand and feedback for last week’s Social Networking Digest, (the first one) I’m repeating it again this week. I’ve created a new tag called Digest where you can start to track and access these going forward. The hope? To make it easy for a web strategist to quickly scan the activity in the last week. I strive to make headlines on items categorized and succinct.

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Web Strategy Summary
Market demand and industry discussions for the need of a Social Graph, a technology that lets uses take one set of friends and relationships to another social network with ease, continue to ramp. People are tired of ‘adding’ friends to each Social Network (SoNet). Industry continues to measure value of growth of widgets as well as usage within corporations. I recommend that companies develop a strategy for this market quickly, and budget for 2008, even if it requires monitoring one’s brand.

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Industry: Market demands for a Social Graph
Tired of having to re-add contacts for every application? A lot of other folks are too. There’s a flurry of commentary this month about the need for a Social Graph, a tool that would help transport the relationships of one social network to the next.

Adoption: CIA to have Social Network, security concerns
Early reports suggest that the CIA and other intelligence agencies will use a social network to, well, gain intelligence and collaborate. I’ve concerns about security, but that’s always the risk.

Productivity: Employees “Waste” time on Facebook
Employees are spending more time on Facebook, as a result, a cost analysis indicates that: “The report calculates that if an employee spends an hour each day on Facebook, it costs the company more than $6200 a year. There are about 800,000 workplaces in Australia.” It doesn’t have to be a waste: savvy companies will figure out how to use these tools to increase sales, build better products through intelligence, and encourage customers to self-support. Update: Learn more about how companies can benefit from Facebook from Jnews. Webware has more.

Features: Facebook allows users to email from private messages
Details: “Now you can enter a friend’s email address into the To: line when you send a message or share an album, and Facebook will email them the message. Your friends will be able to reply without signing up, and they will be able to see content you share with them. Keep in mind that all rules of privacy still apply; some Facebook content that you share (photos, groups, notes, etc.) won’t be visible to your friend.”

Adoption Rate: Widgets have rapid growth and crowded
Stats from Venture Beat and Media Videa on state of Widgets in Facebook. There are now more than 3000 Facebook apps. 70% of Facebook users already have applications on their page. Nine of the top 12 Facebook apps are owned by Slide (4), RockYou (4), and Facebook (1). Only 42 of over 3000 apps.

People: Management Change at Facebook
Barely news, but Facebook’s executive team has had some changes, Mark Zuckerberg (founder) is still in charge, COO has been shifted to a lower responsibility.

Stats: Social Networking usage
M:Metrics has data showing that there are 2.3 Million ‘Friends’ in the US and Western Europe. Other hard core stats indicate that text messaging is a common use of communication, for anyone in this space, you’ll need to dig into this data for your planning. The savvy strategist will recognize that there are mobile hooks to every social media program, see stats to draw conclusions.

Case Study: USA Today’s Social Network is lagging
Techcrunch has reported that numbers from compete and comscore (which are never truley accurate) suggest that USA Today’s social network powered by Pluck has decreasing numbers. Should USA Today have joined an existing community? What’s their kick-start strategy? How did they reach out to the influentials? These must all be part of the strategy –software is only 5%.

Money: Widget App acquired for 3 Million by Trip Advisor (True or False)
It’s being debated if the following is true, apparently members from both parties deny this story being accurate, the acquisition may have not occured: A developer named Craig Ulliott created a “Where I’ve Been” application that let’s users show on a map cities and countries one’s visited. This mini-widget had over 2.3 million users, and has now been acquired by Trip Advisor, an online travel brand, by 3 million dollars. This just goes to show that small can be something big.

Regulation: Facebook’s quality control of applications
Apparently, some developers are using less than appropriate tactics to have their widgets grown within Facebook. Facebook polices and regulates it’s own community and has struck back. This technique is known as “Black Hat” which nods to the cloak and dagger approach of the cold war. Companies that create widgets in this space should certainly follow the community and Facebook guidelines or risk of getting one’s brand smeared. This isn’t a free market, it’s much like a capitalistic market with a regulated body, so play nice.

Executive Leadership: Facebook’s young males
Facebook’s board is a group of young males (criticized for no women). Robert Scoble tells me the CTO (see pic) is just a few years older than 21, and so credit should be given, unlike other executive groups, this one is racially diverse and age diverse. Let’s try to see the silver lining.

Growth: Facebook
Facebook is continuting to grow at lighting speed, Shel Israel has numbers directly from Facebook’s Corporate Communications Group. Over 150,000 registrants daily. That’s 1 million a week since January.

Verticals: Social Network for members of Virtual Worlds
Gamers and Virtual world members have a lot in common, although they may literally be in different worlds. This SoNet by Conduit Labs looks to bridge this gap by creating a network to span all members in all virtual worlds.

Advertising: Facebook provides targeted ads
WSJ indicates how contextual and focused ads (down to gender and city) can aid the advertiser in being efficient in their usage of dollars spent on advertising. Signal or noise? I say accuracy could yield more relevant ads, helping users find stuff they may actually want.

Need a strategy to get started? See my article on Marketing Profs: What the Web Marketer Should Know About Facebook. Was this digest helpful? I hope so, I wish I could provide more in-depth industry analysis on social media market, if I had more time, I certainly would.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 22nd, 2007 at 3:54 am and is filed under Digest, Facebook Strategy, Social Networking, Web Industry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.