Socialsama

So what’s Facebook’s place inside the business?  I mean on a day to day basis? I have heard a few social media experts* attest to the collaborative potential and productivity gains available by using Facebook for business.  They suggest scenarios such as sales people across organizations both internally and externally learning from each other and helping one another.  And perhaps such a situation is possible.  However, I think much about institutional business structure would have to evolve to make such internal sharing remotely feasible, and much about human nature might need to also.  Sales people don’t like to share secrets even internally; companies don’t like to share anything externally.  And I have seen people use Facebook; nothing about it implies time savings in anything.  Currently, if you are not a marketer at a company, you should not be on Facebook during the day; otherwise you are simply wasting company time.  That’s not a productivity improvement. It is much easier for corporate IT departments and CEO’s to simply shut off access to Facebook from the office, rather than do enormous change management and process re-engineering to gain benefits from employees using it.

I do think Facebook wants to become the first and last place people visit when they hit the web – the portal of old.  And while that might work for a while for them, I think it will eventually lose some appeal to the general population (see what happened to Yahoo, MSN, and AOL).  Something else could come along to supplant them.  That perhaps is why they are pushing Facebook Connect (and why they were so sensitive to Twitter over 2009).  I think they recognize that eventually some system will be the default single sign on for the internet, and they would like to be it.  I am not entirely sure how they monetize that position, but I could see it’s appeal to Facebook – if someone else becomes the single-sign on system of record and attaches social data to that login, then the jig is up for Facebook.  They no longer are the only ones with your data.  That other platform may even be open source, and no one ends up making windfall profits from it.

*Everyone is a social media expert.  Just ask them.

Facebook and marketing are becoming inseparable for most businesses.  Not that simple banner ads or click ads are going to necessarily be a huge boon for Facebook; instead Facebook users are more and more comfortable showing their allegiances to business and brands by becoming advocates either as fans or as fan page/group owners.  In the same way that 10 years ago it became necessary for all businesses to develop some sort of online presence, all businesses will soon have to have some sort of interaction with Facebook.

How businesses make use of this platform will vary.  Some will satisfy themselves with fan pages only, others with application enhanced pages, and some with full-blown applications as games or productivity tools built into Facebook’s infrastructure.  Media sites and other online communities will also take advantage of Facebook connect, allowing their user base to log onto their sites and post to both the business site and back to Facebook.  This symbiotic relationship will enhance both parties – driving traffic to Facebook and back to the contributing site.  Facebook is fairly limited in the data they allow participating sites to acquire from it – at least on a permanent basis.  I don’t see Facebook changing this stance any time soon; the data they keep on people are the keys to the castle.  That said, it will be harder and harder for Facebook to limit the data that FB connect sites are gradually acquiring on their own.  Especially as a FB connect site becomes highly trafficked, it will maintain much of the personally identifiable information that FB has and still remain within Facebook’s terms of service.  This situation will likely evolve into FB charging for access to its network at certain levels of interconnection and frequency.

More on Monday.

Just wanted to let everyone know that Spredfast was accepted into the SXSW accelerator! We will present on Monday, March 15.  If things go well, we will present again on March 16.  We are really excited to showcase Spredfast in this arena.  We obviously think the product is great, and hope the judges do, too.  Over 200 companies submitted applications from around the world, so we are pretty pleased to be among the top 8 selected as finalists in the Social Media group.  I don’t often pat ourselves on the back either on this blog or in general, but in this case, I think we really deserve it. Click for more information on the SXSW accelerator or Spredfast – the social media campaign management platform.

Twitter is rolling out Local Trends to everyone today.  Sounds like the locations are currently limited, but they are “working on it.”

Well, if this were a political blog, I’d get all snarky about the State of the Union and my opinion of what Obama and the Dems have (not) accomplished over the past year…  However, it’s a blog about social media – and when the President uses it to interact with the country, that is at least important for the industry.  I have seen this article a few places, but most recently on mashable:

Well this is great news!  I know quite a few of the folks over at Convio and they are great people.  Found on Techcrunch:

Mashable reports Digg to Undergo Drastic Overhaul

People have often asked us about Digg and other bookmarking sites.  Frankly, I have always found them to be more unweildy and difficult to use than anything else.  And time and labor intensive to get articles listed on there or tags to bubble up.  And even then they can be gamed somewhat.  I am interested to see what changes they come up with, particularly the real-time additions.  I would also welcome an API so that authors could at least submit their work automatically.  Wonder what this change might mean for ShareThis?

Well, it’s official.  We have gone out hard launching the product. The dev folks have really stepped up to get us ready and Porter Novelli has been terrific on the PR side.  Thanks to everyone who helped out.  Below are a couple excerpts from the articles that are already out.

Austin startup tracks social media efforts

By Lori Hawkins | Wednesday, January 20, 2010, 03:42 PM

Social media campaigns have become standard marketing fare, but measuring their effectiveness is still next to impossible.

Austin startup Spredfast says it has the answer with its new Web-based software that helps companies manage their social media efforts.

…

Spredfast has managed more than 200 campaigns since September for clients including IBM Corp., Cisco and AOL. University of Texas’ Harry Ransom Center used Spredfast to promote its Edgar Allen Poe exhibit, while Austin restaurant Truluck’s kicked off its social media outreach with the software, adding 659 Facebook fans in four months. Now Truluck’s is using Spredfast to integrate its blog and Flickr photos as well.

“We can measure every piece of content you distribute,” says Ken Cho, Spredfast co-founder. “That lets clients automate the task of collecting metrics, and immediately determine the impact of their message.”

…

And

Spredfast Fashions Social Media Into a Corporate Dashboard

By Liz Gannes Jan. 20, 2010, 5:32pm

Managing your social media presence at times seems like a full-time job, but for some people it actually is one. And professional social media-ites need professional-grade tools to do what they do. A new service called Spredfast, launching tomorrow from Austin, Texas-based Social Agency and already used by IBM, HP, AOL, the Sierra Club, Cisco, Intel, Monster.com and the Salvation Army, is a completely web-based social dashboard with more features than you can shake a stick at.

…

However, the Spredfast product, which costs $50-$100 per month per campaign, offers these key features:

• It is multi-user, with multiple access levels, calendaring and scheduling tools.
• It’s integrated with a whole bunch of services: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Flickr, with support for WordPress, Blogger, Moveable Type, Lotus Live Connections, Drupal and most XML-RPC-enabled blogging platforms. Users can respond to conversations from within the site.
• It offers its own metrics system that helps you compare week to week how your brand or campaign is doing. So, for instance, getting a new fan on Facebook or getting a “like” on a post would earn you a point. Then you can see in a pretty chart how your engagement is trending vs. previous weeks.

Plus, said co-founders Kenneth Cho and Scott McCaskill, upcoming features include: importing conversion stats from Bit.ly links, exporting reports to PDF and email, and an iPhone app.

…

Great stuff – really exciting over here.  If you want to check out Spredfast, just hit the link.

If you got the last part of that title, then you are old like me.  If not, check out some early 90’s Shwarzenegger movies with 5 year olds in ‘em.  But I digress, the point of this post isn’t movie history, its the slowdown of twitter.  As Techcrunch reports:

If folks were unaware, we have a product called Spredfast for managing social media.  Well, this week we are officially launching the product.  But not today!  That would be silly given that it is MLK day.  And not tomorrow since that would be the day after a 3 day weekend, which would also be silly.  So later in the week stay tuned.

But I bring this situation up for a few reasons:

1. Gain awareness from my readers about what we are doing (shameless plug)
2. Mention that we are a live case study for product promotion via social media
3. Recognize that, in some sense, we are cheating.  We are getting the help of PR firm Porter Novelli in this launch.

Now the 3rd point is probably not entirely fair to us.  I have never said firms should eschew other forms of PR or marketing and only do social media.  In fact, I firmly believe the opposite.  Firms should certainly use all tools at their disposal that they can afford and that make strategic sense for themselves.  We aren’t running a super bowl ad, for instance, but we are doing PR.

At any rate, we should be able to get some hard numbers on ourselves and some detail on how it went – how our campaign has gone from the beginning, what we did along way, what changed the game, etc.  Which will be an interesting set of blog posts over time…