Dear Facebook: Don’t Forget the Marketers

Alisa Leonard-Hansen is a Senior Social Media Analyst within the strategy group at iCrossing. She can also be found blogging at both the iCrossing Great Finds blog and her own blog, The Web is Social.com.

With speculation around how you should monetize mostly a topic of conversation within the tech community, it always surprises me that a marketing perspective isn’t thrown into the mix. After all, it’s marketing dollars that you (and just about every other online entity) are relying on. So, taking a digital marketing perspective, I thought I’d throw a few thoughts into the discussion.

Note: this is not intended to be a “how to use Facebook to develop a social marketing strategy” discussion, but rather the intent is to explore how you could build a business model around your rich user data given what marketers desire in terms of effective marketing and what they’ll pay for (effective marketing= happy marketers who spend more $ on what works).

Your focus is flawed

So, you have one thing right: marketers pay to reach consumers, and the more targeting a platform can offer, the more marketers are willing to spend because of the promise of greater ROI. There is one flaw in your approach, however: you have been entirely focused on monetizing Facebook.com itself.

Now, while it may seem counter-intuitive, you ought to focus on monetizing your rich user data, and not necessarily the site itself. Wait–isn’t that the same thing? What is she saying? Just hear me out: You are not a content platform. You’re a communications utility, and while you’re a platform for UGC, you don’t provide a rich content experience. Users aren’t on your network to experience any kind of particular content–they are there to connect with friends and to essentially store personal data (whether they consciously know this or not).

Although some could argue that explicit and implicit user outputs (all that stuff you see in your newsfeed) IS the new “content,” we still have yet to see that this kind of UGC can be successfully monetized through advertising (translation, ROI for ad spend around UGC tends to be low).

Now, marketers have deployed lots of successful marketing initiatives within Facebook, but a majority of these involve leveraging your free Business Pages to drive conversation and engagement (read: free marketing). You’ve had it in your heads that if you let marketers set up free Business Pages, and draw in communities of brand enthusiasts who “Fan” these Pages, you can then upsell these brands into media buys. But the problem is that while great for engagement initiatives and fostering conversation around a brand (great for marketers!), Facebook is still not an optimal place for ad-spend, no matter how much attention is aggregated there. ROI from your ad spends tend to be relatively low for marketers. Again, it goes back to user intent and behavior.

So what should you do?

Essentially, Facebook is this giant data storage silo. It contains consumer data nearly as valuable as the credit card companies have (the kind of data marketers would pay nearly through the nose to have). It’s user data, not the dot com itself that you should consider your golden ticket.

Now, before anyone starts jumping up and down about the notion of “monetizing user data”– I’m not advocating that private user data be mass-harvested and sold ad hoc to marketers. Rather, what I am suggesting is that with the dawn of Facebook Connect, there may be a viable, ethical way to leverage this user data.

With Facebook Connect, you can essentially create a content network (and note the launch partners, major media companies) that could also support an ad-network. So now, with a Facebook Connect-enabled content/ad network, you have the holy grail of targeted advertising: contextually relevant content experience AND the kind of granular targetability based on user graph data that made the initial promise of social networks so huge for marketers. Basically, participating FBC sites could not only sell targeted ad inventory based on their content, but based on Facebook’s (opt-in) user data as well. This would not only give marketers what they want in terms of targeting, but you would get a cut of the ad revenue for being the arbiters of that valuable graph data.

Of course, even without a potential FBC ad-network, Facebook Connect helps brands and publishers provide a socially enhanced experience for their customers with a lower barrier to adoption than current one-off branded social networks. Not to mention, FBC enables the potential to drive a lot of new traffic to their site as a result of opt-in user actions (including purchases) being broadcast through the Facebook network.

There is also the opportunity for e-tailers to capitalize on social graph data as part of their merchandising model. The benefit of graph data to the e-tailer includes the implicit endorsement of products by your users whose purchases are broadcast to their Facebook friends (again, only if the user opts-in to have their actions published), driving significant traffic, tapping into the power of consumer advocacy, and providing a more socially enhanced and user-friendly experience. Given the significant value this kind of data offers, you could leverage some kind of rev-share program for supplying this graph data to e-tailers (but again, users would have to opt-in!).

Create a value exchange!

Now, this brings me to one last point that my dear friend and brilliant colleague Ben Bose has suggested be baked into all of this– a value exchange for the end user. If it’s consumers’ graph data that is benefiting both supplier/marketer and Facebook, then it should also work for the benefit of the consumer. Perhaps users may be assigned “influence” scores based on their network, and the degree of influence they have over that network. These influence scores could earn them rewards– not unlike our credit card rewards. Of course, some services already have types of user rewards, including ThisNext and imeem, but this is something that could be propagated to a much larger degree with initiatives like Facebook Connect.

Yes, there are many counterpoints to these ideas, including the argument that open Web enthusiasts (myself included) would pose around the idea of Facebook (or MySpace) being proprietors of graph data versus users themselves. But rather than examining the differences between FBC and true data portability, this was a look at possibilities for Facebook Connect as a means to increase Facebook revenue.

source: mashable.com

Twitter Rocks the Early Vote; Who Can Catch Them? (OWAs)

This article is part of the Open Web Awards, an open, international contest for the best websites and services.

Since kicking off the voting round of the Open Web Awards yesterday, we’ve seen nearly 10,000 votes cast across 26 different categories. In the Mainstream Social Networks category, Twitter has the early lead, but has some tough competition from last year’s winners, Facebook and Netlog. With voting open until November 30th, perhaps one of these contenders can make a run for the award:

Dotblu – A social network geared primarily towards teens, where users compete in various games to earn virtual currency.

Facebook – Became the most popular social network globally this year. Recently launched a major re-design.

Fastpitch – Social network for business professionals with a focus on gaining “karma” through contributing to the site.

Friendfeed – Aggregator of activities from dozens of different social networks including Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and Del.icio.us.

Koornk – Twitter-like service offered to international audiences in 5 different languages.

Multiply – Social network that likes to focus on “real world” relationships. Traffic more than doubled this year.

MyHeritage – Lets families work together to build an interactve family tree.

MySpace – World’s second largest social network, recently launched MySpace Music with free streaming tracks from the major labels.

Netlog – One of Europe’s biggest social networking sites. Recently launched support for OpenSocial applications.

Platinumlounge – Social network with a focus on entertainment news and nightlife.

Sharenow – Social network that includes unlimited file sharing with friends.

Smeet – Web-based virtual world where each user gets their own avatar and can communicate with others via text or voice.

Squidoo – Experts create pages about their favorite topics and earn revenue.

Twitter – Microblogging tool that lets users post 140 character updates about their activities. Grew rapidly in 2008.

VOTE OFTEN: One Vote Per Category Per Day

Now it’s time to vote for your favorite Mainstream Social Network in the first of two voting rounds. You can vote for one company per day until midnight on November 30th.

Feel free to embed this widget on your own blog or website by clicking the “Grab This” button! For a timeline, rules and information on our 100 blog partners, please visit the Open Web Awards site.

Top Tip For Nominees

You got through? Congratulations! Did you know you can create a custom version of our voting widget above to post to your company blog or website? Just visit the Open Web Awards Widget Creator and check the box to preset a category or company. This means your fans only need to enter an email address to vote - simple!

Start Canvassing for YOUR Candidate!

Want others to vote for your favorite site? Of course you do! Why not leave a comment here and on any of our international partner blogs encouraging other readers to add their support? The more you promote your candidate across these blogs, the more likely it is for your site to proceed to the finals!

OWA Sponsors Love The Web

The Open Web Awards is made possible by our sponsors. By supporting the Open Web Awards, these companies reward and encourage innovative web technologies. We can’t thank them enough for sharing our passion: building great web companies.

Platinum Partner

“PartnerUp brings small business and social networking together to create a community where entrepreneurs find the people, resources and information to grow their businesses.”

Gold Sponsors

“iStockphoto is the world’s leading image market and a revenue-sharing social network. Browse 3.5 million images and videos starting at $1 or become a contributor.”

“With Quintura’s advanced visual-based search and analytics solution, content publishers can increase site usage while creating new ad revenues”

Prize Sponsor

“Infinite and Instant, Zazzle is the only on-demand retail platform for consumers and major brands, offering billions of retail quality, one-of-a-kind products, most of which are produced within 24 hours.”

Source: mashable.com

How to Chase Hurricane Fay Online

So you’re a modern day storm chaser. “Twister” remains in your top 5 favorite flicks ever. You trawl YouTube for highlights, send off 140-character-long remarks about everything from monsoons around Southeast Asia and the Pacific Rim, watch for news of tornadoes in the American Midwest, and follow coastal onslaughts brought on by hurricanes of intensities grand and grander. Put on your wetsuit then, because a hardy sea creature called Fay, presently traveling through Cuba, is slated to hit southern Florida early next week, and the volume of information available to Web-savvy observers is extensive.

Of course, you can visit the de facto forecaster for many a weather watcher - Weather.com - for relevant information. The site is home to news reports, an interactive tracker, videos, and satellite data. All the standard stuff. If you’re situated in the target zone, for whatever reason, and you’re one to document such occurrences, you can upload videos for site visitors to see.

Another base of operation on the Web, MyFoxHurricane.com, run out of the Floridian city of Tampa Bay, seems to do Weather.com one better so far as visual material is concerned. The front page is literally stuffed with satellite readings, both static and time-lapsed. And like Weather.com, MyFoxHurricane offers coverage of all regions most vulnerable during the year’s peak hurricane season: the Eastern Atlantic, the Caribbean, Gulf of Mexico, and the entire southeastern seaboard of the US. The site also gives users the ability to view live video, watch a “supertracker,” chat with fellow visitors, and even transfer hurricane data to Google Earth if you choose. The site presents links to various governmental and non-profit organizations as well. One such destination is NOAA’s National Weather Service website.

The National Weather Service website is, visually speaking, predictably basic, but it’s a useful resource nonetheless. For a quick way to look at multiple perspectives taken by NOAA of the situation pertaining to Hurricane Fay’s presumed path of travel north through Florida, the NWS is perhaps one of the best places to go. No video to consume, from what we can gather, but if you’re interested in the goings on surrounding the cyclone, you can glean some unfiltered output in the ‘State’ link under the ‘Text Messages’ designation.

AccuWeather is one more source for information on storms, which, like all of the abovementioned destinations, has done the duty of putting Fay front and center. It has gathered the requisite satellite and radar data, video updates, analysis, and warnings for advanced preparation, and, if need be, evacuation. It should be said that the layout of AccuWeather is somewhat of a strong point for the service. Nearly everything one could wish for is immediately on tap.

Mobile

As for mobile readings and alerts, both Weather.com and AccuWeather make for quality information engines. Each service’s mobile-specific websites are free to use (they do require mobile Web connections, however). For iPhone owners, the always-available Weather application, which consults AccuWeather, does lack in detail, so if you find yourself wanting for an enhanced view of Fay’s situation this week, WeatherBug [iTunes URL] provides a free application download.
There is also Twitter to consider! Sure, it’s had its ups and downs, some particularly newsworthy in and of themselves. But as with the geological tremors that swept parts of California late last year and earlier this year, there’s no question that the microblogging service we’ve developed undying love-hate relations with will prove useful to anyone concerned with Hurricane Fay and her abusive intentions.

Shapeways Aims to Make 3D Fabrication Cheap and Easy (Invites)

Custom fabrication can be fun. Especially when it gets three-dimensional. Enter, Shapeways, a new startup molded by Philips Incubator Project and currently tagged as a private beta service. (We have lots of invites to share. Click the link at the bottom.)

For inspired originalists, there’s really nothing one can buy that satisfies that ever-present craving for uniqueness. This drives many to paddle the river of DIY (do-it-yourself) fabrication, where everything from knitting to t-shirt screening is accomplished for that one-of-a-kind look (with the hard work done by you or a much more resourceful processor).

Shapeways is made to perform much the same role as those outfits, albeit with 3D designs. The promise of Shapeways is to enable consumers to make stuff, virtually anything of reasonable size and detail, and have it in hand in 10 days or less for an average cost of $50-150.

Mind you, Shapeways requires its users to submit a little more effort in the design of products than, say, t-shirt graphics. Compressed JPEG photos won’t do. Users are asked to import files from 3D modeling software in STL, Collada, or X3D formats. At that point, one is able to specify material and size. Shapeways describes current options as “White Strong & Flexible (SLS), Cream Robust (FDM), White Detail and Transparent Detail (Object). Additional choices will come soon.

If you’re to consider only the intriguing and largely inexpensive inventiveness that might be realized through Shapeways, it seems quite worthwhile. But perhaps its designation as a “consumer co-creation community” is a bit far-fetched. Consumers, for one, have little interest or even reasonable aptitude when it comes to 3D modeling software. It’s simply too complex for the casual user to effectively grapple with. Also, some designer utilities tend to carry with them considerable cost. The very good ones, anyhow. So I don’t imagine Shapeways becoming something akin to Minted, Threadless, or Spreadshirt.
Besides, the tasks commissioned of Shapeways by its users would typically have too many design variables in play to enable a kind of streamlined efficiency as far as a production schedule is concerned.

This leads me to think that the primary role for Shapeways will be one of serving experimentalists, artists, and various organizational or corporate doodad manufacturing. Which is fine enough, really. It need not be hugely popular. Regular output for a portion of its membership will likely suffice.

Invites: If you’d like to get yourself early entry into Shapeways, you only have to do two simple things. Click here, and where required, enter the code: MashThis. We have 500 invites to give away. Take ‘em while they’re available!

— by Paul Glazowski

DashGo Connects Musicians and Labels to Social Media (The Startup Review)

STARTUP DETAILS:

Company Name: DashGo

20-word Description: DashGo provides digital distributionSelling-Entertainment-Online Jan-08 and social networking analytics for bands and content owners.

CEO’s Pitch: DashGo.com enables bands to easily manage new releases and publish them to digital music services like iTunesitunes-overtakes-wal-mart-in-music-sales Apr-4-2008 .

For each of our clients we track performance across the top 9 social media networks. We standardize the data into the categories of “Profile Views,” “Streams,” “Friends” and “Comments” for timeline analysis. We are rapidly rolling outAcademy-Awards new features - next up is to lay benchmarking and sales data on top of this to help artists identify which sites and spikes in activity generate sales. In the future we plan to offer distribution directly to the social media networks as well, in addition to the digital music stores and ad-partners we currently serve including Last.FM, Meebo and YouTube .


Mashable’s Take: If you’re a solo act or a band of music makers (or studio), chances are you want to get your music out to as many listeners as possible through various channels on the Web. Santa Monica-based DashGo serves to help accomplish this.

Presented as a music label of next-generation making, DashGo connects with virtually all the top sales outlets - plus some lesser-known joints. The list includes iTunes (worldwide), Rhapsody, eMusic, Amazon MP3, Napster, MediaNet, Snocap-Imeem, YouTube, Juno, Turntable Lab, Blast My Music, Amie Street, Songslide, Beatport, Audio Lunchbox, etc. DashGo tracks activity on social sites as well: MySpace, YouTube, iLike, Bebo, Facebook, Purevolume, Virb, Imeem and Last.FM.

Such coverage gives DashGo both a thorough sales spread as well as a comprehensive look at what occurs where on the Web, allowing the company to direct energy where necessary based on a good amount of information. Which can ideally lessen waste and boost marketing potency.

As an intermediary exclusively fixated to the digital space, DashGo’s pursuit is naturally the independent crowd. Artists in the sector are in a continuous race to rise above the fold, and are clearly seeking to raise their profile through online campaigns. DashGo’s purpose is essentially to buoy that desired objective with substantive logistical experience. How successful has it been thus far?

It’s list of partners is a literal potpourri of names. Content producers include: Delicious Vinyl, Krofft Pictures, Downtown RecordsThe-Suit-With-the-Golden-Ear May-07 , CBS Records, and GMG Entertainment (DashGo’s founder, Ben Patterson was an executive). And one of the more high-profile arrangements with a music group Patterson touts is Weezer. Patterson reportedly had a hand in digital marketing effortElection-Campaign-Money Mar-08 for the viral hit “Pork & Beans” video.

— by Paul Glazowski

DashGo

If Google Buys Digg, What Happens Next?

My prediction: nothing. Not a damn thing. If Google acquires Digg, which many sites are reporting as a done deal, it’ll be a little something I call a Vanity buy. Which would mean that Google doesn’t really need Digg ; it wants it. And if Google is smart, it’ll just leave Digg as it is.

The thing is, Digg and other social media sites are very much dependant on having an active, vibrant community. I might be proven wrong, but history has shown that these types of sites never get enormous; and their users are not too keen on clicking ads. In short, they’re not the goldmine everyone thought they would be (hence the thousands of Digg clones out there).

So - if the rumors are true - why is Google buying it? Because it’s cool. It has formidable traffic, yes, but the main reason why anyone would want to own Digg is influence. Let’s face it, it’s a very influential site: some are trying to game it, some are trying to win it (it can be a game, you know), some are trying to understand it and profit from it. But the fact that it’s such an enigma, with its users constantly redefining what works and what doesn’t, is one of the reasons it’s so popular.

The other reason why Google would want to buy Digg is the simplest of all: because they can. Digg is the first and best site in an entirely new niche, and if the price is not outrageous, Google can afford it, so why not own it? If nothing else, it’ll give them a great opportunity to find out about the inner workings of this specific and complex social media ecosystem.

Therefore, I think that it would be dumb for Google to try to do anything to Digg, especially immediately after the acquisition. It could cause a backlash from the community. If they acquire it, they can move some ads around and try to leverage the influence in some ways, but the best thing they can do is enjoy it and go with the flow.

by Stan Schroeder