Situation
The market pressure to create technology products that protect or at least damage their impact to the environment continues to grow. Sustainability and green-tech campaigns are coming from nearly every tech company –esp hardware manufactures. Dell is no exception and launches this Regeneration campaign.

[Dell Leaned on an Active Artist Community In Facebook to Create, Vote, Self-Regulate what it “Means to be Green” Regeneration Campaign]

Goals
I’ve not spoken with the Dell marketing team, but it’s pretty obvious this is a campaign helps to help improve Dell products to be more eco-friendly, and of course, spur affinity torwards the brand from green leaning consumers, the ReGeneration site has more details.

Strategy
Dell Computers, along with Federated Media (A social media marketing agency), and Graffiti Wall (A popular self-expression Facebook application), deployed an interactive marketing campaign that encouraged existing Graffiti artists to be involved in a contest that spurred a member created campaign resulting in affinity towards Dell. The artists were encouraged to ‘own’ the message, their creativity would spur a contest, and would continue to fuel the campaign.

Tactics
I was briefed by James Gross, who shares his thoughts mid-flight, a Director at Federated Media, as well as CEO John Battelle (interview), and they explained the contest to me.

1) Existing application with thriving community

Graffiti is a self-expression application in Facebook. It has popular (rated 4 out of 5 stars) Based on 242 reviews, and has 177,506 daily active users. Rather than creating a new application, this campaign took advantage of an application –and community–that already existed.

2) An art contest: What does Green mean to you?

Facebook members who used Graffiti were encouraged to join in a contest to win a 22″ environmentally friendly Dell monitor (appropriate for artists) to create art around the theme of “What does Green mean to you?” The contest lasted for one week

3) Engaged contributors spur theme
Over 7000 pieces of artwork were created and submitted to the contest. If you watch the replay of the art being created, you’ll see hidden messages (like easter eggs) from the artists as they discuss what green means to them. Many of the drawings had the Dell logo or the regeneration logo embedded in it. The Regeneration microsite promotes a few contributors.

4) Self Regulation
There were few negative pics that would detract from the campaign, as the community of existing artists will self-regulate and vote off pics that were not appropriate.

5) Community Voting and Winners Announced

Voting began on the second week by the members and over one million votes were cast. The winners were from United States, Canada, Sweden and Maldives. You can see the actual winners here, or click image.

Results
The campaign was a success, thousands of engaged members participated, created the campaign on behalf of Dell (similar to the Chevy Tahoe campaign a few years ago), and the community was rewarded. I don’t know for sure, but I’ll guess the majority of the campaign dollars were spent creating the microsite, then hiring FM, and working with Graffiti. The monitors, were likely less than a $1000 each.

Over 7300 Graffitis created from Jan. 16th-Jan 23rd around the theme of “What Does Green Mean to You”
Over 1150 fans of the contest

Over 1,000,000 votes were logged from Jan. 26th-Jan.31st for the artwork. (Here are the Top 150 based on votes)

Over 1,000 ideas have now been submitted over at ReGeneration.org

209 comments to the post at ReGeneration.org

Over 197 blog mentions in Technorati

What could have been better
When it comes to social media, the mentality of short lived campaigns should go away. Communities existed before a brand reaches to them and after the campaign stops. Marketers should plan for long term engagements with these people, rather than short two week spurts. There was clearly traction here and now’s the time to step on the gas and continue forward.

Secondly, the artwork created by the winners (and runner ups) should be included in future products, such as digital wallpapers, in the primary branding for Dell, and even the artists should be given an option to continue as sponsored artists. With the relationship forming, take it to the next level. Encourage artwork to be part of next generation green computers, with proceeds going to non-profits or back to the artists to continue forth.

Thirdly, the campaign was limited to Facebook, which isn’t the extent of artists on the web, as well as limited to other social networks such as Bebo or MySpace where similar communities can be found. The contest should have been created not just within the walls of a closed gardens, but also spread to the open web.

Summary
Unlike most marketing campaigns that deploy heavy ads, fake viral videos, or message bombardment, this campaign let go to gain more. Overall, this is a successful campaign as they turned the action over to the community, let them take charge, decide on the winners, all under the context of the regeneration campaign. The campaign moved the active community from Facebook closer to the branded Microsite, closer to the corporate website, migrating users in an opt-in manner that lead to hundreds of comments was clever. Well done.

Articles and Related Case Studies

Article: Virtual art for the natural world

MediaPost Social Media Insider: Maybe Advertising In Social Media Should Be An Oxymoron

LA Times: Web Scout: Spinning through online entertainment and connected culture

Case Study: How Sony connected with the Vampires Application

Case Study: Facebook Sponsored Group Analysis: Target vs Wal-Mart

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Teresa Valdez Klein (Blog, Twitter, Facebook) delivers a great how to video, describing ‘how to use Facebook’s privacy features’. Apparently, the controls are non-intuitive and requires someone from the community to walk through it.

This is an important feature, especially for my three younger kid sisters who are mainly used to sharing their lives online –two of which don’t realize the impact it will have on their professional lives as they get older. (and unwanted attention)

I’m sending them this video, along with encouragement to protect themselves, I encourage you to send this to your Generation Y family members and friends.

They should:

-Create permission groups, one for family, ‘real’ friends, online acquittance, classmates, and colleagues
-Personal pics, content, involving parties, unruly or sensual photos should only be seen by those who were present (often friends)
-Be careful about the content that is left on wallposts, it’s not an IM tool, and should be used as a public blog, this area is very telling of what someone does offline.
-Remember that college and company recruiters now look at social networking sites to see what you’re made out of, so if you’ve not received that phonecall back, this could be one of the reasons.

Related Posts

-”I only use email to communicate with old people”
- Crises Management Template: Child Relations for Social Networks (Facebook)

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[It’s a perfect day here in San Diego at Graphing Social Patterns, we’re right on the waterfront, but us geeks, well we tweeted, blogged, and talked in a dark room]

Most of the presentations this morning have been very developer focused, I’m covering Graphing Social from the Web Strategists’ perspective: Web decision makers in corporate.

Rodney Rumford gave a Facebook Marketing 101 presentations and explains how businesses can use widgets to reach customers. Facebook gives you multiple ways to reach customers, and with them spending 20 minutes per day, the attention is there.

In the presentation from BJ Fogg who co-ran the Facebook class at Stanford, they developed applications, that they estimated totaled $500,000 in revenue from the students efforts in advertising. They give out a list of learnings on what made them successful, often it included being flexible, quickly iterating, not listening to individual opinions or getting approvals, just launching them, and experimentation. It was very clear to me that that behavior is the opposite of large brands, who want safety, low risk, and pre-written plans.

[Successful applications were experimental, embraced risk, and quickly iterated –everything big brands will struggle with]

Rodney gave the example of the where I’ve been map, and suggested that brand managers should consider sponsoring existing successful apps, rather than create their own. Rodney suggested that advertising rates were disappointing yet, suggested that interactive marketing and social ads gave more opportunity. First, define success, lay out metrics, use a multi-pronged approach (there are many different tools to use).

Rodney suggests that one of the key challenges is with the decision making process:

“Most of the people (at big corporations) who are making the decisions for Facebook are 45 or older, and are not immersed in Facebook”

For success, one should consider: 1) Outsourcing development to those that get it, such as an a successful widget development company, or 2) lean on someone in your own team who really understands this space. While strategy remains, social networking marketing requires a different mindset, approach, and use of tools.

Various pics from the event

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Image: View a screenshot from my Facebook profile

At one time, I added many apps to experiment, but I’ll have to admit, very few I use on a regular basis. I often discuss in my presentations that our research indicates that many folks use social networks to check out others profiles.

Apparently, I need to do some housecleaning as, my kid sister wrote this on my Facebook Wall this morning: “hello big brother!! your facebook profile is a JUNKYARD!”. She’s also the little darling who told me that “I only use email to get a hold of old people like you“.

Sigh, kids. As my former boss Kevin Eves used to tell me, “so it goes”.

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Click To Play

I interviewed Maria and Aaron Contente, who are both native Spanish speakers from Mexico, educated, and are successful professionals in Silicon Valley. Maria Contente manages many of the relationships with our clients at Forrester in Silicon Valley and Aaron is an engineer at a large industrial company.

After enjoying a home cooked Mexican meal (and a spicy cocktail), I asked them for their honest feedback on Facebook’s recent Spanish release. Watch the video to find out that the new version reads awkward.

Apparently, Facebook outsourced some of the translations to the members, in a crowdsourcing effort of 1500 members, but in some cases there’s no substitute for having a professional translator. Apparently, a French version will soon be released, let’s hope the translation fares better than this Spanish one.

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Jason Lopez, former colleague/friend/journalist from PodTech’s newsroom interviews me on the phenomenon we know as Facebook, I also discuss how the web will be distributed, move offsite, and ‘fly’ around the web. I hope you find this insightful.

If you need other information see my tags on Facebook Strategy, or for a broader view, see social networks. If you’re seeking a weekly digest of this space, I go to great lengths to watch this space, and publish a weekly digest of the social networking space.

On a related note, I’ve made some predictions on the crowded white label social network space (over 60 vendors) I’ve made some predictions to CIO magazine, White-Label Social Networking Set for Shake-Up? Yup, a shakeout will happen.

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A Widget Case Study
Yesterday, I gave a teleconference on Facebook as a ready-made marketing program. I gave a few examples of success, and the audience was hungry for success metrics and numbers. One of the case examples was about rebranding an application/widget in this case, Rock You’s vampire application.

Sony rebrands popular Vampires Widget with 30 Days Night, upcoming Vampire movie
Vampires, which you may already know as the RPG where members bite each other to receive points (and duel) was already popular with over 3 million installs in Facebook.

Sony pictures, the parent company of the very scary 30 Days Night vampire horror film rebranded the existing application, and launched a sweepstakes contest to generate registrations and glean intelligence. The grand prizes? 4 wheel ATVs and $1500.

Specifically, they placed banner ads on the rebranded vampire applications which promoted the movie (one could assume that those who opt-in for the vampires application would also like a vampire movie) promoting the sweekstakes.

The measurable results?
The campaign was only live for 3 weeks, and there were 59,100 sweepstakes entries. (success was deemed at 10k, this clearly moved beyond that)
The visits (I don’t know if they were unique or repeated) were 11,642,051 for the bite page, and 17,652,567 for the stats page (I believe these are part of the interactive experience of the game.
Sony was happy, it exceeded expectations, and users of the application weren’t over branded.

RockYou asked me to keep the price confidential, but based upon the results they told me, I suggested they double the rates, this is despite what Mashable reports on.

What worked?

Fishing where the fish are: Sony figured out where the already existing community was (remember to fish where the fish are) and rather than trying to rebuild something completely by scratch, they leveraged an existing successful application.

Rely on specialists for new arenas: In my many briefings with vendors and clients, specialized firms often provide something a general interactive firm or corporate web marketing team can’t. They have experience, know their area, and in this case, they knew to rely on someone that already knew Facebook.

Compliment the existing user experience: Sony didn’t beat the 3 million existing users with heavy advertising (and I’m sure RockYou wouldn’t have let them) over the head, instead offered value by giving away prizes, and tied in a movie that already existed.

What could have been better?
In my opinion, it would be great if:

The campaign lasted longer than 3 weeks.

Rather than simply embedded, Sony could sponsor elements from the movie and integrate within the game. (vampires could fight at different scenes from the movie, key characters from the movie could become non-player characters, etc). They already have a multi-player game that could have tied in.

A spin off game could have emerged just around the game, where members could give virtual gifts to each relating to the movie, then cross-selling other sony products and merchandise.

Also realize there are very few applications in Facebook that are this popular, don’t expect these type of results to occur every time.

Widget Network Developers
Looking bigger, RockYou isn’t the only vendor doing this type of work, also see Slide, Clearspring, Gigya, and a bunch of others. If you’re in the space, feel free to leave a comment below adding to the conversation.

For those Forrester clients who attended the webinar, I hope that clears up the question (as I promised to find the answer), and thanks to Ro Choy and team of Rock You for the details. If you need to know more, read this weekly digest of the social network industry, or see all posts tagged Facebook.

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A few minutes ago, I completed my Forrester teleconference on Facebook, apparently it was very popular and hand more sign ups than most other topics. During the session we ran a poll to those that were attending (most are web marketers and web strategists). Here are the responses:

1. Do you use Facebook for your personal or professional life?
a. Yes 124/196 ( 63%)
b. No 50/196 ( 26%)
c. Not Sure 3/196 ( 2%)
No Answer 22/196 ( 11%)

2. Does your company use Facebook for Marketing purposes?
a.Yes 45/196 ( 23%)
b.No 103/196 ( 53%)
c.Not Sure 25/196 ( 13%)
No Answer 25/196 ( 13%)

3. Does your business plan on using Faecbook for business in 2008?
a. Yes 68/196 ( 35%)
b. No 27/196 ( 14%)
c. Not Sure 76/196 ( 39%)
No Answer 26/196 ( 13%)

Although a very limited sample, and just of those that are focused in on social networking, It’s interesting to see that a majority of the members on this call were using this tool. Forrester should be using Facebook to reach this audience, such as the Forrester Facebook page that I initially created, that’s now being maintained by Alexis. I’ll be unbiased, you should also take a look at the Gartner page while you’re at it, I was one of the first to become a fan.

During the call there were a lot of questions about widgets, open social, and a few who requested success metrics for some of the campaigns, it felt like a pretty savvy crowd, I’m expecting to receive a few meeting requests from clients to further discuss Facebook and social networks.

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Update: Several have suggested that this announcement is nothing new, (See initial announcement in 2006) and upon further investigation (and a quick email exchange with the Facebook team) confirms this to be right. What’s new is that it’s now easier to do than before. Regardless, the awareness of this feature is low within the marketplace, and everything I write in the following still stands true. Consider this awareness raising, and more of these types of distributed web tactics to continue in 2008.

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My goal is to simply tech speak and boil it down to what it means for you, a web strategist. I’ll update this post as I learn more information.

What Facebook wrote
In their most recent announcement they gave a very technical explanation regarding the announcement:

“This JavaScript client library allows you to make Facebook API calls from any web site and makes it easy to create Ajax Facebook applications. Since the library does not require any server-side code on your server, you can now create a Facebook application that can be hosted on any web site that serves static HTML. An application that uses this client library should be registered as an iframe type. This applies to either iframe Facebook apps that users access through the Facebook web site or apps that users access directly on the app’s own web sites. Almost all Facebook APIs are supported. The exceptions are:”

Web Strategists’ Translation
This means that web owners can now embed existing Facebook applications easier than before. Now, in addition to being able to create an application/widget that will sit on Facebook alone, you can now easily embed it on your own website (in addition to leveraging the social features that Facebook offers).

[You can start to bring the Facebook community to your own corporate website, rather than directly developing on Facebook alone. This is a step towards the community now leaving the social network and moving to other locations]

This is really making the social features and widgets of Facebook portable. This is important as your web strategy is now distributed in many locations. For corporate web strategists, you’ll need to expand the scope of your plan to include how some of these widgets and applications could be embedded on your own microsites and corporate websites. This also means this is a ‘bridge’ to get active Facebook users closer to your corporate website.

Impacts to Google’s Open Social
If you’re not familiar, I’ve outlined what Open Social Means to your executives, read this first. Essentially, Google and it’s many partners wants to make it easy for widgets to move from one social network to another with little re-coding: portable and re-usable widgets. Unfortuantly, this has yet to be seen, and Facebook’s announcement allows widgets to be more portable, somewhat creeping in on Open Social’s intentions. In the long run, expect all of these companies to be working together, sharing API data, as those that don’t will be left out.

What you need to do:

Action: Do nothing at this point, let’s wait to see some case studies of how this is being implemented.

Plan: This doesn’t keep you from correctly planning, so continue to make your web strategy a distributed one, where content, applications, and people move from social network to social network, and to your own corporate website. Talk with your interactive agency, web developers, and social media gurus on what some of these possibilities could mean. Have weekly 30 minute brainstorming parties and see how this could be implemented and integrated within your current activities.

How to think of this: Plan on adding social features to your own corporate website so that visitors will interact with your own content, re-sort it, edit it, and mash it however they want. The future of content is amorphous and ubiquitous. (I’ve been saying this since 2005 and now we’re finally starting to see it happen)

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Every so often as an Analyst I get numbers from some of the companies I cover (I’m mainly covering social networks now), here are some that I’ve received from Reunion, I feel it’s helpful to share this with my readers.

Sources
The ones from MySpace are handed to me from a member of the press, someone I have no reason not to trust, and the Facebook stats are from their own site.

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Facebook

Quick Analysis: The hot talked company Facebook has the highest growth rate, and at Forrester we predict it to achieve the same number of registered users as MySpace in Q4 of 2008, or early 2009 given the current growth rates. The widget platform, which launched summer 2007 has had strong growth as more than 13,000 applications have been launched. Please don’t call this the MySpace killer as each of these sites serves a different demographic, with a different purpose, and different tools. Facebook is more of a ‘lifestyle’ play that allows members to connect to each other.

General Growth
* More than 60 million active users
* An average of 250,000 new registrations per day since Jan. 2007
* An average of 3% weekly growth since Jan. 2007
* Active users doubling every 6 months

User Demographics
* Over 55,000 regional, work-related, collegiate, and high school networks
* More than half of Facebook users are outside of college
* The fastest growing demographic is those 25 years old and older
* Maintain 85 percent market share of 4-year U.S. universities

User Engagement
* Sixth-most trafficked site in the United States (comScore)
* More than 65 billion page views per month
* More than half of active users return daily
* People spend an average of 20 minutes on the site daily (comScore)

Applications
* No. 1 photo sharing application on the Web (comScore)
* Photo application draws more than twice as much traffic as the next three sites combined (comScore)
* More than 14 million photos uploaded daily
* More than 6 million active user groups on the site

International Growth
* Canada has the most users outside of the United States, with more than 7 million active users
* The U.K. is the third largest country with more than 7 million active users
* Remaining top 10 countries in order of active users (outside of the U.S., Canada and UK): Australia, Turkey, Sweden, Norway, South Africa, France, Hong Kong

Platform
* Over 7,000 applications have been built on Facebook Platform
* 100 new applications added per day
* More than 80% of Facebook members have used at least one application built on Facebook Platform

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MySpace

Quick Analysis: MySpace the largest Social Network in North America maintains a dominant position as media site, primarily aimed at youth, giving them the opportunity to relate to brands and bands, as well as self-express. This site will continue to do with advertisers and marketers. Expect to see more TV and video networks to integrate and work with MySpace, who has the new generation that Generation X was to MTV.

Metrics
· MySpace has more than 110 million monthly active users
around the globe
· We are the country’s trafficked site on the Internet
· 85% of MySpace users are of voting age (18 or older)
· 1 in 4 Americans is on MySpace, in the UK it’s as common to
have a MySpace as it is to own a dog

·On average 300,000 new people sign up to MySpace every day,
this month we broke a record and had 4.5 billion page views to the
site in one day.

We are localized and translated in more than 20 international
territories: U.S., UK, Japan, Australia, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy,
Spain, Mexico, Canada, Netherlands, New Zealand, MySpace en
Espanol, Latin America, Austria, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and
Finland.

·MySpace is one of the fastest growing websites of all time,
we have:
·100 Billion rows of data
·14 Billion comments on the site
·20 Billion mails on the site total
·50 Million mails per day (more than Yahoo, Hotmail,
or Google)
·10 Billion friend relationships
·1.5 Billion images
·8 Million images being uploaded per day
·60,000 new videos being upload to MySpaceTV each day
·More than 8 million artists and bands on MySpace Music
Acts including Lily Allen, Sean Kingston, Arctic
Monkeys, Dane Cook discovered on the site by users

Company Details
·Launched in January 2004
·Acquired by Fox Interactive Media in October 2005
·Los Angeles-based
·Founded by Chris DeWolfe, CEO and Tom Anderson, President

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Reunion

Quick Analysis: This quiet company is profitable already, and is making some strong growth with repeat users that are buying services from the company, as well as advertising. Reunion caters to an older crowd that is seeking to connect with each other from school, childhood, work, or locations. It’s surprising that this company has 32 million registered and is already profitable.

Highlights
·Over 32 Million Registered Members, and Growing
·70+ Million Site People Searches Actively Tracked
·7+ Million Avg. Unique Visitors Monthly
·700,000+ Paying Subscribers

Competitive Detail
·Critical Mass of Post-Facebook Members, with 90% Over 25 Years Old
·Patented Technology to Keep Address Book Updated
·Proven, Balanced Revenue Model: Higher Value/Member With Subscription Model

Financial Summary
·Profitable Revenue Growth of over 100% every year without any external capital
·Ranked #664 in Inc. 5000 Top Companies
·4th Fastest-Growing Company in Los Angeles (LA Business Journal)
·Recently took 1st outside investment of $25M from Oak to accelerate growth

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I’m thinking about publishing these numbers once a quarter or once a month, if you’re a company that’s in the social networking space, you can send me some valid and confirmed numbers at my email, listed on my contact page. These are not really centralized anywhere in the industry, and I think it could be of a service to everyone.

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Marketing Profs, a great resource for Marketers, has hired me as a Forrester Analyst to present this webinar on Facebook this Thursday, it’s 90 minutes and just over a hundred bucks “Strategy First on Facebook: Opportunities of a Ready-Made Marketing Platform“. If your boss is asking you to develop a plan to think about Facebook, this will be a great primer to move you forward. It’s based on the keynote I gave at the Web Community Forum, but with some updated content as the website has since changed. Hope to see you there.

A few things you should know about Facebook: It’s the second largest social network, second to MySpace in North America, many of the registered are college educated the growth segment if folks over 30, it’s not just for students. It was the first to let third party developers create mini applications called “widgets”, and has recently been in the press for it’s innovative yet controversial privacy concerns over user data and the Beacon/social ads feature.

If you’ve other Facebook trivia you want to share, leave a comment below.

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Ellen Lee did a great wrap-up article over at SFGate on Facebook in 2007, she called me up for my opinion on the company over the last year. I suggested that Facebook is very innovative (the first to lead an application platform, and to do social based ads) yet remains very arrogant. (twice not including customers to make decisions over their very own privacy of the newspage and beacon).

Having betrayed the trust of it’s users twice, a third time is going to result in mutiny, and users will start leaving, it wont be hard for some users to organize and move.

What could Facebook do better? Involve it’s customers members (Update: See Doc Searls comment) in testing and decision making. I would advise them to bring customers members closer and involve them in the testing and decision making process. Create a small private group of members that really understand the program and involve them in the decision maker process. This group would be empowered to talk to the product team, test out new features, and provide honest and thoughtful research. You can reward them with insider knowledge (they won’t need to be paid) and many of them will become advocates and help promote (and sometimes defend) the feature releases and the brand in general.

To Facebook’s defense, I’ll bet they didn’t know the full ramifications of their innovative actions (or didn’t think it all the way through), and as a result, were learning about it from reading blogs.

With Facebook being a community or “social utility” it will be nice to see them living some of these values we hold dear before they release their next feature.

Get closer to members, and be more successful, a social network is only as good as the collective of it’s members.

Please chime in with your suggestions for Facebook.

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Click To Play

Rodney Rumford, of FaceReviews, one of the speakers at the Web Community Forum shared his expertise with Widgets, which are mini-applications that can be deployed on top of existing communities –like Facebook.

Rodney shares some of the pitfalls to watch out for, as well as gives some specific actionable steps to overcome these issues. Measurement is key in adjusting a product in mid-flight.

According to Rodney, two attributes that make a successful widget are engagement and viral growth. Instead of the term engagement, I prefer attributes like attention or interaction or both.

It was great to catch a beautiful view of Seattle, rare this time of year due to the rain.

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I just spent the last two days exploring nearly all aspects of Facebook with 100 brands, marketers, widget companies, and developers at Seattle’s Web Community Forum (with a focus on Facebook). Some have had success (some were strategic…others were in the right place at the right time), but many are trying to make sense of what to do.

But what does it all mean, what’s the big takeaway? A few high-level themes that I observed:

1. Hard to keep up: Facebook platform is constantly changing
Nearly every developer who presented mentioned that the Facebooks developer platform F8 is constantly changing, and sometimes without notice, it’s difficult to keep up. New features are released (such as the ability to read messages in external email) without warning, and major changes are made that can impact privacy (Newsfeed and Beacon) with little warning to the community. On the brand side, some expressed they were still trying to understand all the different features and tools. Facebook is like an evolving operating system.

2. There are so many features or products –overwhelming for brands We had several sessions showing the many features of Facebook, the 80/20 rule of feature adoption probably holds true. Most of us just use a small portion of features for most of the time. I learned a few new things: I didn’t realize that applications could be put on top of Facebook pages (fan pages), there’s an interesting dynamic there, except for the fact that most applications won’t serve a large brand. With so many features and combinations, it’s difficult for brands to keep up.

3. Advertising effectiveness questioned, although hasn’t been fully explored A few times, the click through rates were challenged for ads, banners, and contextual or social ads. In only one case did I hear that one advertiser created a very focused ad campaign (towards college-bound high school students) received low click through rates, but once the users made it over to her site, the conversion was at 40%, that’s very high. With that said, I’ve yet to hear of a large brand use a balanced advertising campaign on Facebook, a combination of Facebook pages, ads, social ads, banner ads, and applications in an integrated way.

4. Despite privacy issues, majority of users will continue on
The majority of Facebook users (and internet users at large) are unaware or don’t care about how their information is being used online. Proof? I’ve lectured my kid-sisters in college on what’s appropriate, I’m not sure if she understood. Despite the major concerns for user privacy, a majority of users will continue to live life online as normal, they will only become concerned once it impacts them. I still think the majority of internet users are sheep, they follow the behind of the sheep in front of them.

5. Many widget creators are planning for other networks
Some of the widget networks I’ve been talking to (I’m starting to get briefed by others) are looking NOT just at Facebook as the sole place to deploy, but on other networks. It makes sense, yet there are two major challenges: 1) Each community is different, so expecting widgets to work universally across all social networks is unwise. 2) APIs and platforms for each social network are radically different, so many applications have to be rebuilt.

6. A mini eco-system has emerged
Building off the previous bullet, a new service industry has appeared. I made at least two introductions for my clients that were present (at their request) to widget developers for Facebook (which are very hard to find now a days). We should also expect a new service provider to emerge that will help widget developers quickly port applciations to many social networks –sort of a ‘widget/container integration specialist’. Lastly, the conference itself was a nod to this future industry, I mentioned to the press over a call that 12 months ago, no one had even expected that a conference on Facebook would emerge, yet there are at least 4 this year.

7. The “Distributed Web Strategy” starts to take hold
In more than one presentation did the theme of “Fish where the fish are” resonate. Brands, companies, and marketers, need to stop focusing so hard on ‘driving traffic to my irrelevant corporate website (translated into 8 languages now)‘ and now start thinking about joining communities where they exist, where the trust is highest, and being part of the communities that are naturally forming online. This also means that any brand who is focused on a Facebook strategy alone is missing the picture, the scope should be to wherever online communities are forming in their marketplace.

My upcoming research reports are focused on Online Communities and Social Networks, I was able to formerly interview many of the community strategists or community managers that are living in the day to day, they’ve shared quite a bit with me. Many of those who I interviewed for my research I also did some mini-video interviews, you’ll see them published over the next few days.

For some research that is available from Bill Johnston check out this report Online Community ROI Best Practices Survey (PDF) from Forum One. On question 9 on budgets for online communities, is that monthly or yearly? Also, in the metrics that are reported back to management, how come ‘attention’ isn’t listed? (Update: Bill responded in the comments below, budget is annual, and attention wasn’t considered important) Great report overall, if you’re in the space, you should read that, and attend their events –I’ve been to a few, and will attend future ones.

Ok, now back to you, what other large themes and trends are you seeing? Care to dispute any of these observations?

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I’ve just completed my keynote here at the Web Community Forum, my presentation was a kick off: Your Facebook Strategy: Opportunities of a Ready-Made Platform. I also cover some of the challenges, including the recent BeaconGate, and most importantly, how to develop a strategy that makes sense.

If you’re not familiar with Facebook, I’ve written this primer: What you should know about Facebook.

In addition to being an Analyst covering social networks, I’m a user too, you can add me as a contact (I’ll add you back) or join the Web Strategy Group.

Tris Hussey has blogged about the presentation and there were a tremendous amount of tweets from Teresa on Web Comm Forum. Update: Ariel of Microsoft took amazing notes, I was watching her type with flurry and passion, followed by Mari’s high level bullet points.

Update: Mari also was blogging the event.

Tags for this event are wcf07

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See you in Seattle
I’ll be in Seattle at the Web Community Forum (a focus on Facebook) and will be delivering the opening keynote, Justin has the highlights. If you check out the schedule you’ll see there’s a really interesting mix of discussions, both pro and con. I’ll be pretty objective in my keynote, demonstrating the opportunities, but also highlighting the risks of brands doing it wrong.

Brands need a strategy
The crux of my presentation will advise that brands need to first develop a strategy: Identify who’s in Facebook (is that even your market?), figure out what is it that you’re trying to accomplish (to learn, to talk, viral spread, to build better products, etc) develop a plan, then lastly, figure out which of the different tools are available. So many brands have inverted this and are doing it completely backwards. This is the same methodology that Charlene and Josh perscribe at Forrester. You may have read my previous rants that brands first need a strategy.

Is Facebook really worth $100,000,000,000.00?
On the second day, I’m really curious to hear Lee Lorenzen’s opener, he thinks that Facebook is worth $100 Billion. I’ll be tweeting (from Twitter) that morning all the key nuggets on why he says that, so add me as friend to tune in, even if remote. If you’re going, I’m looking forward to seeing you, I think there’s a group of folks that are getting together for dinner on Tuesday night.

With social networks comes nearly unlimited business opportunities
I rarely request people to be my friend on Facebook, I have an open policy that if you add me, I’ll add you back. People often ask me are those your real friends? Some yes, but most are not. This has become a rolodex for me, and unlike some business social networks, I have a better understanding of who these people are, what they like, and their interests. In many ways, my network is nearly unlimited now, and with that comes nearly unlimited opportunities and possibilities.

From web to print to web
A few weeks ago, Leah Jones and myself (and the Blue Monster) were featured on the front page of the Business section of the Chicago Tribune, including a screenshot of my Facebook profile. It’s a bit sureal, as my real life pictures was put online on a social network, which was then put on print, which I now share online.

Thanks to Leah Jones, and Jay Rudman, for sending me the paper clippings.

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The good folks at Search Engine Journal have written an article demonstrating Why You Need to Make a Facebook Fan Page for Your Website NOW! This blog post is in response.

They see the SEO tactical benefits, (which are being debated) but aren’t looking at the bigger strategy.

[There are so many new social apps flying at every week, before we jump from tool to tool, let’s first develop some objectives and a strategy. Your plan shouldn’t waste time entering the market, but should set you up for long-term, holistic success]

I must caution you, that doing the ’shiny’ hop from product to product is dangerous, and the product has yet to be vetted by the market. Instead of jumping in right away, I suggest that each brand ask and answer the following questions before jumping in and creating a Facebook Fan page for their brand.

1) What’s your objective in joining social networks? Why are you doing this in the first place? Does it align with the direction your company is going?

2) Is Facebook the right network for you? Is your audience there? Do they speak and read English? Are you sure they’re not in Bebo, MySpace, Orkut, or other network? Do you know the Facebook demographics? (I do, and it’s not the right audience for every market)

3) Do you already have a social networking hub elsewhere? Maybe your company has already deployed a social network, or has a sponsored group in Facebook, would this canibalize it?

4) Once you send customers to this page, what’s in it for them? The features of Facebook pages are limited, it’s a discussion board (with oh so spartan features) a wall, and an affinity group (fans).

5) When do you stop? How will this amplify your web strategy? How does this integrate with the rest of your strategies?

6) How do you measure success? Nothing is free, nothing. Using free tools require time, which equals dollars. Unplugging a free system may cost far more than building it. How will you know when this is successful? Have you already dedicated resources to manage and maintain this site? What happens if your detractors flame your wall up? Do you have a plan?

7) How will you have a conversation with your community? Building a fan page is only step one, getting them to come, and actively being part of an ongoing dialog is another.

I was one of the very few briefed on this product and my analysis on the announcement is available.

If you can first answer these 7 questions and still feel confident to go forward, then do it, I just want to make sure you have a clear plan first. I”ll be discussing these strategies as the Keynote speaker at the upcoming Facebook Web Community conference in Seattle this Dec 5-6.

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It’s about 3am and I got up to test the Facebook SocialAd and Facebook Pages system.

Status of Test
I’ll update this section as I have changes

Nov 7: Created a Web Strategy Facebook page, ran $20 SocialAd requesting people write on my wall.

Nov 8: Social Ads are working. A few people have arrived to the Facebook page from Social Ads, at least 4 people have voiced that from the wall writings. The stats on insight are still not populated (it says it takes 48 hours), 99 Fans now.

Nov 9: The insight dashboard is not displaying any data, although there are a few people who left wall comments that they’ve come from newsfeed (socialads).

Nov 11: The insight dashboard is still not displaying click through rates (CTR) of the social ads, so I can’t give any formal metrics away. I do think that it’s likely under 5%. There were a handful of folks that came to the site from social ads, but certainly not the majority, which came from blogs, twitter, and other incoming links (Scoble).

Creating a Facebook Page easy, segmentation detailed
I created a Facebook Page for the “Web Strategy by Jeremiah” brand and was pleased to see there were filters for people (they call them celebrities) and I was able to filter to “Writers”. Analysts are professional writers, and part of why I was hired is because of this blog, so I’m qualified.

Adding details to give color
Creating the page was easy, much like creating a profile, I added a few basic blurbs about the brand, where it’s located, and interests. I uploaded the graphic banner. I tweeted the experience, and within minutes had a few fans. I tested the ‘message all’ product to the three people in the group. I also added an event, promoting the Barcelona Blogger Dinner I’m co-hosting next week. Finally I added a discussion board and asked “How can the Web Strategy Blog improve” (feel free to give honest feedback, even if critical). Of course, I added my masthead photo, which also embodies the brand, and my ugly mug as a profile picture.

$20 test of SocialAd: Highly targeted
I learned this from Charlene Li, who recently tested Facebook flyers. I aimed for and the text reads “Web Strategy Blog Readers This is really a test of the F Pages and Fan systems” and has my picture on it. The ad systems would not let me have the word “Facebook” in it, interesting.

The targeting system is very targeted, here’s what I selected:

Targeting: You are targeting people between 18 and 65 years old in the United States who like blogging, marketing, or web design.
Social Actions

This ad will display with social actions from: (This is the part everyone is concerned with)
* Web Strategy by Jeremiah

Locations
This ad will display in the:
* News Feed
* Ad Space

In the ad, I requested people to write on my wall, I wanted to be more specific, but there’s not a lot of real estate.

Insight Dashboard
Although there’s no data yet, the dashboard has some pretty sophisticated tracking and graphing tools, I’m sure others will post some screenshots, so I’m not going to worry about it now.

Community Responses: Approvals and Rejections
So far, a few people have become Fan-Sumers, there’s about 8 fans of just an hour of deployment. Many of them saw it from my Tweets, and most I already know.

Warning: Corporate Facebook Pages
I also created a Facebook page for Forrester, but did not publish it yet. Why? Because a corporation should have a strategy before using tools, and I haven’t developed one for this specific tool. Please, before you rush in and create a Facebook page for your company, consider the overall strategy, and use the POST methodology that we prescribe: People, Objectives, Strategy, and then finally Technology.

Analysis: Will update in Real Time
I’ll update this post as the test continues to run, and then will eventually do some analysis, pow-wow with Charlene and then explain HOW TO use these tools most effectively.

Nov 07: So far, the process went smoothly, and since it’s self-service many people can get in on the game.
Nov 08: Overall, I’m starting to see how this could help companies, still in ‘analysis mode’

ok, now back to bed

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Today has been a real whirlwind, I was up pretty late (and got up early) to finish off the analysis and make a few changes based on the feedback from Charlene and Shar (both very insigtful) Today was spent talking to media and press nearly all day, one of which was Robert Scoble (I call him a media personality brand), he came by and we did a 20 minute discussion here at Forrester. His brother has a MySpace page for his bar, which we used as a use case example, if you’re a web designer or UX designer, I highly advise you not to click, you may explode. I did a 2 minute video interview of him, I’ll post it when I get a chance.

I really embrace the other views out there, but I think I made Ian throw up. What will settle his stomach? Francine Hardaway wholeheartedly disagrees with my assessment that SocialAds could work, she can’t think of any brands that she could have a fandom over. I left a comment on her blog indicated that she’s already a fan of Social Media Club (See her left nav). Since we’re friends, and I like the SMC too, this model can work. (Update: Steve Mann of SAP (Client) agrees with me, why? “At SAP, we’ve done quite a bit of work on attitudinal segmentation”)

GigaOm brings up the old privacy issue, (a topic constantly talked about with social network) yet we forget that we are the ones that populate the profiles and information on these free to use websites. Before we throw a rock out the window, we should first look in the mirror.

For other color, check out Techmeme, thanks to all your incoming links and comments, the web strategy blog has become a node. There’s a lot of folks reporting the news, but very who sort out what really matters, give meaningful opinions and can back them up with reason or data.

Oh, and less I forget, Happy Birthday Shel Israel.

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Update: Below I turned the camera on Robert to get his perspective, he had some time to simmer on the news, read a few other perspectives and give it some thought.

If you don’t know Robert, he’s a ‘pathfinder’, I follow him to find out which tools are hot, I knew him before we worked together at PodTech. The key thing is to watch which technologies he throws away. The tools he keeps are often the ones that as the dominant leaders in their particular industry. Then I do my analysis and tell practitioners how to use them. Robert and I act like two filters, it’s an interesting dynamic.

Find out why he’s bullish on both ad systems.

Click To Play

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By Jeremiah Owyang, insight from Charlene Li and Shar VanBoskirk. This is also being cross-posted on the Forrester Marketing Blog.

Executive Summary
Both Facebook and MySpace have launched profile and network targeted advertising and marketing products. As they both use member interests and the communities which they are part of, trust continues to become key in adoption as information is passed along the network. The sheer size of MySpace’s member base, as well as the thriving local business membership will lead to success. Facebook, which brings a unique solution evolves advertisements to endorsements and encourages members to subscribe to a brand in what we are calling “Fan-Sumers” (an evolution of the consumer). As consumers share their affinities, brands can advertise using trusted social relationships.

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Data: Highest trust comes from friends or acquaintances

(Left Graph: Consumers trust their friends and acquaintances far more than any other sources –Report: Leveraging User-Generated Content, 2007)

Trust is and will continue to be one of the most important attributes in the decision making process.

Communities form online, trust develops
How we get information continues to evolve as communities form online organized by individuals with similar interests. Just like in real life, we identify our interests, and are often influenced by opinions and experiences of trusted peers in our communities. For many, social networking sites embody these relationships and influence how trusted decisions are made.

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MySpace: Brands have a home and can hyper-target ads
The already active MySpace platform is leveraging their already active member profile pages, encouraging the many small and medium businesses to setup a online storefront and providing tools to make it easy to self-serve advertisements to their customers. It’s easy to make the case that demand and inventory are present.

[Brands can now self-serve a targeted marketing and advertising campaign within the already thriving MySpace community]

Webmaster not needed: MySpace profile for businesses
Small businesses can continue to build their online profile on MySpace (many of them already have), but now, because of their familiarity with self-marketing (restaurant, nightclub, and other local businesses and their customers) on Myspace.

Self-service ads remove middle man
When friction is removed, efficiency is created. With MySpace’s “Self-Service” ad network small businesese can target ads across a variety of affinities (over 300) and deploy ads on users’ profile pages. These ads, which should (by theory) be relevant and contextual to a user who has self-populated their profile page will have these ads displayed.

Advertising balance required in already busy MySpace
With marketers already with a strong presence in MySpace this could continue to erode away at early adopter “cool kids” from embracing MySpace. But as cycles have shown, where communities form, marketers follow.

User experience continues to be free-form
These ads, which will conform to IAB advertising standards (sizes) will give advertisers the freedom to create the ads in the style accustomed to the network. Yes, expect more blinking text.

To watch: OpenSocial
As OpenSocial starts to be deployed across MySpace and other partners, expect profile ads to be tied to widgets and vice versa; a fabric of links. I’ve already outlined How to explain OpenSocial to your executives.

Inaccurate user profiles could result in mis-targeting of ads
We know that many members do not make their profiles accurate which could yield inconsistencies in how and where ads are displayed. While MySpace has assured they’re accounting for rogue outliers, expect some inefficiencies in advertisements.

Our Call: Sheer mass will yield success
We think this to be a win for MySpace, given their great reach, there are millions of users with active profiles, and there’s also plenty of inventory as many small and local businesses that are present will be comfortable deploying ads where their community already exists.

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Facebook: Rise of the Fan-Sumer
Going beyond just profile matching of advertisements, Facebook allows consumers to self-identify with brands and becoming fans. In turn, brands can use these “Fan-Sumers” as endorsers to their own trusted networks, resulting in trusted word-of-mouth. Brands can also self-manage their own campaigns, and there’s some unique opportunities for eCommerce widgets or applications to be part of this formula.

[Using Facebook, consumers will publicly endorse brands, resulting in the birth of the “Fan-Sumer”, causing efficient word-of-mouth marketing in their trusted network]

There are three major components to today’s announcement, they include the following:

1) Facebook Pages: Brands get their own profile
For the first time, businesses will legitimately be able to setup profile pages, much like MySpace’s business profiles feature. Next, Facebook members will add these brands as ‘fans’ (much like friends) and this will produce a connection between the parties. Members will self-identify with brands in what we are calling “Fan-Sumers”. Furthermore, this service, called “Beacon” gives third parties the ability to share information on the newsfeed and provides lots of unique opportunities. Sponsored groups will start to evolve into this new form brand profile as this system gets adopted.

2) SocialAds: Endorsements at the friend level lead to eCommerce
Once a member has indicated they are a fan of a brand, that brand can choose to purchase SocialAds (from Facebook Sales or via a self-service platform). A unique endorsement of a product or brand will now appear on that individuals news feed or banner or skyscraper ads. Advertisers can purchase social ads target by profile demographics and profiles, as well as by activities done in Facebook. Payment is an auction-based system available to marketers via both CPM and CPC pricing.

3) Use “Insight” for control and flexibility
This self-service dashboard called Insight gives the marketer detailed knowledge how their advertising campaign is working on Facebook. It’s expected that advertisers will have flexibility, control over the type of ads they deploy, in what quantity, and the demographics they want to target.

A likely scenario:
Shauna, who enjoys Revlon products, indicates she’s a fan of the brand and becomes a Fan-Sumer. Marketers at Revlon can then purchase SocialAds, which will then display on Shauna’s newsfeed or on ads on her profile. If Shauna purchases Revlon makeup from Amazon, her newsfeed could indicate an eCommerce links recommending it to her 100 trusted friends, resulting in further sales.

[The traditional marketing funnel as we know it is distorted; endorsements are now passed from trusted customers to prospects, not direct from the brands themselves]

Implications for Facebook:

Members have more control over ads
Facebook users can opt to turn off social ads, and friends of that user can ‘dial down’ endorsements they see using preferences. We believe that Facebook is attempting to respect the rights of users by giving control to members to ‘opt-in’ to become a Fan-Sumer.

Quest for Fans will cause brands to beg
Since social ads only work if a member has indicated they are a fan, brands will be working to earn and buy fans to accept them as members. Expect a lot of noise to be generated from this activity as brands run campaigns to encourage members to add them as fans through discussion boards, banner ads, and special offers.

Hard to qualify a “business”
Facebook is limiting these features to ‘real’ businesses and organizations. Expect an entire team to be crawling and dealing with this qualifying the issue. As recent member accounts have been disabled from Facebook, expect businesses and organizations to encounter same issues.

Limited ad supply to raise prices
Because Facebook members will see only two social ads per day, we expect the supply of ads to be in scarce supply and thus raising prices and not matching the value. This could shift ad buying to large brands who have experience buying and managing search and direct response ads.

Our Call: Brand affinity leads to community endorsements and more trusted marketing.
We see this as a win for Facebook, this highly targeted system isn’t just about web advertising but about brand affinity and hooks into what’s really important, trusted endorsements from people in a network. This truly is the next generation of advertising. Facebook tells us that the worst case it will be 2 times click through rate over the performance of (existing is 4-26%)

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Next Steps For Brands

Experiment: Because of the control and flexibility, we recommend to brands that are currently on either of these social networks to experiment and test.

Learn how to efficiently manage your campaigns. There’s clearly a trend towards self-service, which provides efficiencies for both businesses and the platforms.

To know: Marketing has changed, advertising is no longer a sole-solution. Marketers must also learn how to be part of communities, engage with them, and be part of the conversation.

To know: Marketing is now distributed, brands must embrace communities where they currently exist, rather than solely driving them to their corporate website.

[While traditional search advertisers like Google and Yahoo match by keyword, My Space and Facebook match on something far more powerful: people and their relationships]

This digest not only explains what is happening, but why it matters to you. If this was helpful, please pass it on. Love to hear your thoughts, please leave a comment, even if you don’t agree.

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