Tag Archives: Facebook

Why people are wrong about Mark Zuckerberg

Posted on by
Reply

party_time

It seems a lot of people have got it wrong about Mark Zuckerberg.They scoff at his suggestion that with the impending $5bn Facebook IPO that he’s not in it for the money:

“We don’t build services in order to make money, we make money in order to build better services. Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission–to make the world open and more connected.”

But as the recent BBC documentary ‘Mark Zuckerberg: Inside Facebook’ got right (and the film ‘The Social Network’ got wrong – cute screen-grab above) a billion dollars ain’t cool, turning down $1bn is cool. Which is what Mr Zuckerberg did when Yahoo made an offer of close to $1bn for the global social networking site (Facebook record 11 companies with 14 offers in total) in 2006.

Logically then if he was ‘in it for the money’ wouldn’t he have cashed in his ‘cash cow’ there and then? So now he’s both cool and soon-to-be-be very, very rich. What’s not to be jealous of?

 

10 Facebook for Business Best Practices: thanks to Hubspot

Posted on by
1

I borrowed these top ten from inbound marketing experts Hubspot. Do you have any Facebook business tips you’d like to add?

1. Be interactive, fun and helpful. When people reach your Facebook page, they are looking for some kind of interaction. Don‟t disappoint them. As an example, a hardware company offered their Facebook fans links, applications, and engaging information, and within a short time, they added 26,000 fans! <And the more interaction, the higher you score on the ‘EdgeRank’ algorithm, which means more of your content is featured in your fans’ newsfeeds.

2. Embed videos on your Facebook page. There is no reason why you should send people to YouTube to watch your videos. Keep ‘em right on your page with embedded videos! <good idea, and you can create a tab for YouTube videos within your FB Page too.

3. Create a connection between Facebook and the outside world. I recently read a case study about how sales reps worked with local retailers to promote their events through Facebook updates and photos. Consider something similar. <what’s worked for you?

4. Create contests on Facebook. Contests are a fun and engaging way to encourage participation from fans and even generate new fans. For example, in order to enter a contest, one company asked people to comment on a thread announcing a giveaway in Facebook. <See the success with the Shopping.com iPhone giveaway which took place alongside lots of ongoing comps – see Slideshare of the campaign

5. Integrate traditional advertising with Facebook. The Facebook icon/logo is well known. Add it to your print ads to promote your Facebook presence. Another great idea is to use traditional ads to promote contests that encourage people to sign up on your fan page. <and the granular targeting helps to keep costs down and engagement up

6. Use Facebook to grow your email list, and vice versa. Use your email newsletter to boost awareness of your Facebook page. In addition, promote your email newsletter to your existing Facebook fans. The end result will be growth in your email list and your Facebook fan base. <that’s a simple but great way to add ROI from Facebook growth..

7. Introduce new products on Facebook first. People who sign up to be fans of your Facebook page are likely your most loyal evangelists and customers. Reward them by giving them information about a new product/service/feature before everyone else. If you do it right, they will help you promote it to others. <exclusivity rules OK

8. Welcome new page visitors. When thinking about Facebook, a new metric comes to mind: visitor-to-like. As a B2B company, you ultimately want to maximize the percentage of people who visit your Facebook Page and click the “Like” button. One important way to achieve this goal and establish expectations with new fans is to implement a ‘welcome’ landing page that invites new visitors to Like your Page. Technically, there are many ways to execute this. HubSpot customers, for example, can install the free Facebook Welcome Application. <and you can use the Welcome Page to run comps too

9. Integrate social content on your Facebook Page. Facebook is the gateway to the internet for many people. They use it as a home base. In fact, one in eight minutes on the internet is spent on Facebook. Because Facebook has become such an online home for people, it is important to incorporate content from other social channels like YouTube and SlideShare to extend the life and reach of that content. <and not forgetting Twitter!

10. ‘Like’ other businesses’ Facebook Pages. Remember that social media is, well, social. By Liking the Pages of business partners, valued vendors, and customers, Facebook will notify the administrators of those Pages. In return, some of them may also decide to Like your Page, which will also expose it to the individual fans of their Pages. Think of this as leveraging Facebook for co-marketing efforts. <network with other potential partners via Facebook!

 

A bill of privacy rights for social network users?

Posted on by
1

I spotted this via Twitter this morning – a bill of privacy rights for Facebook folks, and social network users in general:

Proposed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

“Social network services must ensure that users have ongoing privacy and control over personal information stored with the service. Users are not just a commodity, and their rights must be respected. Innovation in social network services is important, but it must remain consistent with, rather than undermine, user privacy and control. Based on what we see today, therefore, we suggest three basic privacy-protective principles that social network users should demand:

1: The Right to Informed Decision-Making

Users should have the right to a clear user interface that allows them to make informed choices about who sees their data and how it is used.

Users should be able to see readily who is entitled to access any particular piece of information about them, including other people, government officials, websites, applications, advertisers and advertising networks and services.

Whenever possible, a social network service should give users notice when the government or a private party uses legal or administrative processes to seek information about them, so that users have a meaningful opportunity to respond.

2: The Right to Control

Social network services must ensure that users retain control over the use and disclosure of their data. A social network service should take only a limited license to use data for the purpose for which it was originally given to the provider. When the service wants to make a secondary use of the data, it must obtain explicit opt-in permission from the user. The right to control includes users’ right to decide whether their friends may authorize the service to disclose their personal information to third-party websites and applications.

Social network services must ask their users’ permission before making any change that could share new data about users, share users’ data with new categories of people, or use that data in a new way. Changes like this should be “opt-in” by default, not “opt-out,” meaning that users’ data is not shared unless a user makes an informed decision to share it. If a social network service is adding some functionality that its users really want, then it should not have to resort to unclear or misleading interfaces to get people to use it.

The Right to Leave

Users giveth, and users should have the right to taketh away.

One of the most basic ways that users can protect their privacy is by leaving a social network service that does not sufficiently protect it. Therefore, a user should have the right to delete data or her entire account from a social network service. And we mean really delete. It is not enough for a service to disable access to data while continuing to store or use it. It should be permanently eliminated from the service’s servers.

Furthermore, if users decide to leave a social network service, they should be able to easily, efficiently and freely take their uploaded information away from that service and move it to a different one in a usable format. This concept, known as “data portability” or “data liberation,” is fundamental to promote competition and ensure that users truly maintains control over their information, even if they sever their relationship with a particular service.”

How’s Facebook’s social graph doing three years on?

Posted on by
Reply

It’s three years since Mark Zuckerberg proclaimed the power of the social graph? Well its certainly progressed from the 24 million active users it had it May 2007. Here’s what he said, as reported by ZDNet on the subject. Interesting to note that Ning has had a few problems since then, shedding its free service to most users, while Gina Bianchini has left the company – I guess that’s freedom for you. Anyhow it’s time to get into the time machine and turn the dial to May 2007:

Zuckerberg attributed the power of Facebook to the “social graph, ” the network of connections and relationships between people on the service. He said, “It’s the reason Facebook works.”

“Its changing the way the world works,” he said, pushing information out faster than any big company can. “As Facebook adds more and more people with more and more connections it continues growing and becomes more useful at a faster rate. We are going to use it spread information through the social graph.” The net effect of the social graph is that groups and application can achieve exponential growth, he said.

“The Facebook platform is optimized for building applications in Facebook, and with more value for people to develop on our base than we could do on our own. People are already building social apps, but they have to reconstruct the social graph all by themselves. We are going to allow developers worldwide to do complete new things. Today social networks are completely closed nets…today we are going to end that. With this [framework] any developer worldwide can build full applications on top of the social graph inside the Facebook Platform.”

Gina Bianchini, CEO of Ning, which makes another social networking service doesn’t agree that Facebook is going to bring the end closed social networks. “All freedom is good, but when people get a taste of type of freedom Facebook is launching today, they want more than a bite. A tightly controlled service can be successful, but fundamentally people want freedom at every level,” she said.

Facebook is open to third parties to integrate on top of the service, but you do have to inhabit the Facebook’s walled garden, social graph. On the other hand, a controlled environment like Facebook can leverage the huge network of people and allows for targeted innovation.

I guess Mr Zuckerberg is doing is trying to make sure that Facebook has the largest possible social graph, and any issues around privacy controls need to be therefore considered in that context. Obvious when you think about it. Anyhow take a look at Mashable’s view on the subject, in this piece from April this year, with the launch of the new Open Graph API and protocol and the “ability to integrate websites and web apps within your existing social network”, the point is that “public no longer means “public on Facebook,” it means “public in the Facebook ecosystem”.

Connecting Facebook status updates and fighter pilot tactics

Posted on by
2

Really liked the link made in the fourth programme of the BBC’s The Virual Revolution between Norbert Wiener’s feedback loop for anti-aircraft gunners in WWII (ie breaking down the division between people and systems, to allow gunner’s to hit their airborne targets) and the radical impact of the status updates within Facebook (and the likes of Twitter…) on driving the internet revolution.

So here’s my question. What would happen if you applied fighter pilot military strategist John Boyd‘s concept of “the decision cycle or OODA Loop, the process by which an entity (either an individual or an organization) reacts to an event. According to this idea, the key to victory is to be able to create situations wherein one can make appropriate decisions more quickly than one’s opponent” (see wikipedia page) to understanding of how *we* interact online?

I wonder if anyone’s applied this to produce an effective counter-cyber warfare strategy, as I can see the ‘fit’ from a theoretical point of view? [pause while *we*make a quick check..] oh yeah, see here for example as part of the University of Washington’s resource page on cyberwarfare.

More practically perhaps I wonder what would the OODA loop mean in explaining differing peoples’ actions online in the context of the BBC programme’s ‘Web Behaviour Test’ experiment?

Of course on a more practical social media level I have already blogged recently, thanks to HP Labs paper, on the value of creating good feedback loops with your top contributors:

This paper demonstrates that submitters who stop receiving attention tend to stop contributing, while prolific contributors attract an ever increasing number of followers and their attention in a feedback loop.

We demonstrate that this mechanism leads to the observed power law in the number of contributions per user and support our assertions by an analysis of hundreds of millions of contributions to top content sharing websites Digg.com and Youtube.com.

Download:  Feedback loops of attention in peer production (PDF; 0.5 mb).

One swallow does not make a summer

Posted on by
1

Coming out of the Bannatyne’s Gym this evening a news piece on Sky News caught my eye about social networks. It was the news indeed (published on Facebook yesterday) that they were cash flow positive: “Earlier this year, we said we expected to be cash flow positive sometime in 2010, and I’m pleased to share that we achieved this milestone last quarter. This is important to us because it sets Facebook up to be a strong independent service for the long term.”

No doubt plenty of wise folk will say this is a good sign but maybe Facebook are the exception in a recession?

I’d probably agree except that I’ve noticed some other encouraging signs, both at the very large (Facebook) end of the business spectrum and the not so large, in comparison, from the UK. For starters the news on 2 September that European social software specialists Headshift, had been bought by the Dachis Group based in Austin, Texas, in a move described by the Guardian as the ‘Facebookification of business’: “The London-based social media firm Headshift is the first acquisition of Jeffrey Dachis’s newly formed Dachis Group. Dachis’s former agency, Razorfish, was a huge success with a value of $5.5 billion at the height of the 2000 bubble. With his new company, the entrepreneur plans to invest in the corporate social networking area and will focus on making customer participation a big business: “Social business is the new way of working, not just new technology.”

Thirdly, that London-based social media agency FreshNetworks, doubled in size in 2008, are doubling in size again this year and moving to new offices, by all accounts.

So perhaps a trend? Prediction is, as I think they say, an uncertain science, but with online community specialist company SiftGroups in Bristol, who I work for, also moving into new offices things look brighter for sure. For me personally I have one further indicator, which is my own private confirmation of this upward trend, and for sure  there remains the lack of cash for investment in the system at large. But finger’s crossed that while ‘one swallow does not make a summer’ that enough swallows can make something happen. Chaos theory anyone?

PS: And even as I sit here watching French Wednesday evening football at 21:02 news rolls in from TechCrunch: “Twitter Closing New Venture Round With $1 Billion Valuation”.

Twitter vs Facebook?

Posted on by
1

Twitter climbs the ranks of popularity in 2009 — especially if you include traffic from mobile devices (which aren’t counted in this piece).

Facebook simplifies privacy settings, removes regional settings, and upsets the experts. But what do its users think?

Personally my take on this is simply to converge my identity to one username: stuartgh — for this blog (and new url stuartgh.com), for Twitter, and following the vanity url release, for Facebook. That it turn brings up my real name so that people who want to network with me do so on that more personal identity.

Note that in Twitter the real name field is somewhat space restricted so I can’t write my middle name in full! I see they have an account on GetSatisfaction where I can log this as a change request, so here it is.

After all technology is supposed to do the integration for us, but as recent issue with the Twitter’s own Facebook api shows, it’s sometimes best to do the connecting for oneself!

Facebook, watch this space

Posted on by
1

Someone’s tried to set up an account using an email from my domain. I’m now getting friend confirmations based on that account. Hmm, so what does Facebook help centre say on the matter?

I received an account creation email, but I’m already registered.
If you have received a Facebook account confirmation email in error, it’s likely that someone has mistakenly attempted to register using your email address. As long as you do not click the link contained in the email, no action will be taken, and no account will be created.

But here’s the weird part I also have an email confirmation saying ‘Hi…’ your account has been created, even though I didn’t click the create confirmation link (or whatever the tech boys & girls in the back office call this activation event;-)

So just to be on the safe side I clicked on the report link in the email confirmation for the new account. What did I get, but an error. Watch this space?

Sorry, an error has occurred.
We’re working on getting this fixed as soon as we can.

Could Apple Buy Twitter?

Posted on by
Reply

Nice story from Valleywag. I like the comment about Apple culture, as seen by the public, and as seen by insiders. Backs up my hunch. Please can Google buy Twitter rather than Apple?

Facebook tried to buy Twitter. Google and Microsoft have been giving the red-hot Internet-messaging startup the eye. But we hear it’s Apple that’s closest to sealing a deal, possibly for as much as $700 million.

A source who’s plugged into the Valley’s deal scene and has been recruited by Apple for a senior position says Apple and Twitter are in serious negotiations, with the goal of unveiling a deal by June 8, when Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference launches in San Jose.

Twitter turned down a $500 million offer in cash and stock from Facebook, in part because Twitter’s investors couldn’t agree on whether Facebook’s stock was worth as much as Facebook said it was. But Apple could easily pay cash. A source familiar with the thinking of Twitter’s board says the company would be hard-pressed to refuse an all-cash offer in the range of $700 million. (Is Twitter really worth that? Since it’s business is nothing but a fantasy at this point, any valuation, high or low, is a matter of make-believe.)

What does Twitter, an adorable but unprofitable startup, have to do with a hardware company like Apple? The iPhone is the obvious driver of the deal: The many iPhone apps like Tweetie that people use to post Twitter messages are hot sellers for Apple. But Apple gets the benefit of Twitter-addicted iPhone users whether or not it owns Twitter. And it seems like an odd cultural fit, since Apple’s hardly known for its Web prowess.

That’s where the deal makes a certain amount of sense, if you understand the particular culture of those who work on the Web. While Apple might have its pick of hardware designers and software engineers, Web developers are a breed apart — and they have balked at working at a company like Apple, which may look innovative to the world at large, but seems fusty and hidebound to the Mission hipsters who build websites. You’ll hear the complaints: Apple’s secretive and paranoid, resistant to the wide-open ways of the Web.

Twitter , of course, is open in both nature and spirit. Users overshare every last detail of their lives, while Twitter makes these updates available on its website, via RSS, and through third-party applications. Apple is surely realizing it needs to play in this world, and needs someone to show it the way. Is it coincidence that Apple has put Twitter executives on stage so frequently, or that it profiled Twitter as a “business” recently?

If Apple buys Twitter, it won’t be about making money. It will be about making a statement. In 140 characters or less.

Facebook Announces First-Ever User Vote on Terms of Service Changes

Posted on by
Reply

Great example from Inside Facebook of why consulting your community over core changes makes sense, after Facebook had a lrage scale revolt recently after unilaterally changing its T and Cs:

votingboothAs part of its new process for updating the site’s new Terms of Service documents, Facebook has announced the first-ever user vote on proposed changes. On April 16, Facebook will be posting revised versions of the new Facebook Principles and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities governing documents based on feedback it’s received since introducing them in February, and the voting period will run from April 16 to April 23.