About Friends, Facebook & Curfews

John Battelle, CEO of FederatedMedia and a long list of pioneering publications and books on new media and Search, posted about how he “blew it on Facebook” by exceeding the platform’s Friend limit of 5000. He goes on to comment about how his use of the platform has changed and a little about what the nature of friends are. In this post I’ll share some thoughts on these issues and about how I use Facebook.

Polling, The Shortform Killer App

Want quick feedback, input, engagement around a shared passion point or even just facilitate conversation around your brand/category? Hosting periodic polls are an easy way to engage with “limited outcome” results, meaning it doesn’t usually require moderation for innapropriate content and comments. A clear exception would be polls where you can enter your own values/fields (i’m testing one below). In addition to the learning and engagement potential, polling allows you content that can be loaded into a Content Management System (CMS) and optimized for twitter for added distribution. It’s a simple way to microformat content while sourcing from the crowd–maybe even getting discovered by new crowds.

We’ve played around with SocialToo and PollDaddy. Seems like these tools are still evolving and have lots of potential for better publishing and viewing customization. Do you have any favorites? Pls share and post why in the comments below.

And, take 5-seconds to answer the test poll below:

Hiatus Explanation

As those following me in Facebook, Twitter, delicious, slideshare and Friendfeed know, I’m not lacking in things to share, learn about and connect around in SocialMedia. And I’m spending the same amount of time as before, but the blog–an important platform for “Search Signals” and visibility in SocialMedia–has fallen behind. There was a recent NY Times article and a TechGeist follow that asserted that most blogs are ghost towns because the content is most often navel-gazing about mundane daily life. Funny, that’s what they’ve maligned Twitter with since it’s inception. In fact, my wife still calls Twitter the “wiping my posterior” medium in less polite terms.

My hiatus has been on account of time, prioritization, a little hunkermania and heavier use of other forms. But mostly the latter. Twitter’s replaced a lot of this activity and between @-replies on twitter and comments in Facebook and FriendFeed I get more immediate and frequent commentary than you’ll see in the area below. It also takes the commentary into some open spaces as well as behind the doors of SocialNets giving participants an opportunity to react in their preferred communication forms and levels of dynamic personalization.

So, while the blog platform’s been quiet lately the Search, SocialGraph and other SocialMedia channels have been as active as ever. Looking forward to connecting here and there. Cheers!

A Fresh Fish Story: Why Digital is Above The Line

Welcome to RedLobster.com

Sssssssssssshhhhpopsssssssssssss. It’s the sound of flames licking butter and juices dripping from your lobster tail. You can almost feel the warmth of the wood fired grill and smell the wood-fired lobster tail looking through your monitor into Red Lobster. Can digital be as emotional and drive desire and reappraisal better than a TV spot? See for yourself. In this post I’ll point out some of the guided discoveries Red Lobster is earning through the digital channel.

Jobs To Be Done

Kara Swisher has a great appeal for sanity around the Steve Jobs press buffet in her “All Things D” blog today. As we learned about his health-inspired need for succession at Apple, all form of media weighed in with speculation, well wishes and a lot of fear. In her piece Kara expresses concern for “the reputation of a man who is one of the technology industry’s greatest icons–if not the greatest–having positively impacted the whole culture with a style and elegance that is unmatched.”

Kara also posted as I will below Steve Jobs 2005 Stanford Commencement speech. It’s hard not to “connect the dots” as he says and draw comparisons with Randy Pausch’s last lecture (also below) in light of today’s news. In this classic speech Jobs encourages everyone to follow their passion, to live each day as if it were the last and to “stay hungry, stay foolish.” When filtered through the ultimate reality check and final certainty of death, fears fall away, new possibilities emerge and the issue of following your passion and folly is a clear and moral mandate. What fear has hold of you and isn’t it somehow related to that ultimate reality?

On a cross-country Virgin America flight I was fortunate to catch Benjamin Zander delivering his TED presentation where he takes the mandate one step further. He believes once you’ve realized your passion, there’s a responsibility to evangelize it. He had a realization at 45-years old while standing in front of his orchestra that the conductor doesn’t make a sound. He draws his power by making other people powerful. And that changed everything for him, he said. “My job was to awaken possibility in other people. And you know when you’re doing it? The eyes. When the eyes are lit, it’s working.” Benjamin was referring to live speaking, but you can find equivalent “lit eyes” in the comments and re-tweets/forwarded messages you create that are true. Zander challenges: “If the eyes are not shiny, ask question: who am I being?” His “Return On Investment” (ROI) is in reality R-O-Eye.

So whether we live another year or another hundred years, we each have jobs to be done. And we’ve got some amazing sources of inspiration to draw from. All three videos posted below. Enjoy and, if it moves you, pls post a reaction with what you believe to be your mandate.

Steve Jobs 2005 Stanford Speech:

Randy Pausch Last Lecture

Benjamin Zander TED presentation

Too Many In-Boxes

"Something came whizzing down the kitchen chimney as he spoke and caught him sharply on the back of the head. Next moment, thirty or forty letters came pelting out of the fireplace like bullets. The Dursleys ducked, but Harry leapt into the air trying to catch one."

There’s a b-plan in your inboxes, or specifically in their consolidation and management, and the key may be SocialMedia.

I’m reading the first Harry Potter book to my kids at bedtime. Remember the scene where the letters wanted so badly to get to Harry that they came shooting through every open space in the house? It’s a good visual for the flood of information we have coming into our inbox, the contempt many have for it and the joy someone can experience getting just the right message created expressly for them.

Your home mailbox–the one that’s got your Netflix red envelope in it–is rarely bringing you anything personal except during special events/holidays. Your office inbox rarely empties of those declining rags still distributed in print in spite of  the economic realites. If your Outlook email inbox is like mine, it’s full of disappointments for lower-priority senders (sorry) whose bold-faced salutations remind me they have not been read. My phone buzzes to let me know a direct message arrived from Twitter. And the SMS/Message app has a lengthy inbox–at least these have been read. My Facebook mailbox, once an uncluttered, pure environment of friendly connections and smiles, now buries threaded conversations pages deep as the volume grows.

Sometimes I forget which inbox I received a message and it takes time to cycle through the services–email, txt, twitter, fb and a growing number of small, function or topic-specific socialnets–to discover and recover the interaction.

David Armano has content coming through the context of our crowds, not just an editor's selection process.

If email applications were transportation, we’d be driving off the road with intent. It’s a bad user experience made only slightly better by search. Not as dangerous as driving a poorly designed automobile, but hazardous to our health all the same. I’ve been reproached about my email management, as though it were my fault the tool didn’t work better.  ”If I just put more effort and commitment,” the logic goes, “I could get my inbox to zero.”

To illustrate my point further, did someone have to show you how to use Google? The iPod album flipper? Even this blog platform from which we’re engaging is intuitive enough to execute frequent saves as I write the post so I don’t lose my content/flow if the browser decides to crash (which it did).

The first time I saw a Mac in 1984 I smiled–it got me out of command-line navigation and green type for something that looked intuitively like the real world. Same with the browser in 1993, iPhone and any number of other innovations that recognized me as a human with better things to do than to serve it. Each of these got us further from code and more into interaction. They blurred the lines between real world type, content and now physics.

I’m convinced a better solution is near. As Clay Shirky, author of “Here Comes Everybody,” says, “there is no such thing as information overload, there’s only filter failure.” I believe in the stronger filters. Already more robust algorythmic filters have gotten rid of much of my SPAM email. But there are also human filters to content: I follow hundreds of people on Twitter and friend even more in Facebook. In my twitterstream and socialgraph they’ve broken news more quickly than any other medium. My “crowd” also has better taste in selecting rore relevant articles in greater quantities for me than any issue of newspaper or trade can offer. This doesn’t completely solve the issues from “too many inboxes,” but it starts to prune the activity in my main channels.

The key may lie in initiatives we’ve heard announced and seen coming out of Yahoo! and Facebook lately, allowing SocialNets into their email platform and other “inboxes” to bring in SocialNets through their “Connect” program respectively. Built into their social platforms are features around what they call “Dynamic Privacy.” That means the system is aware or can become more aware about who you value more in your connections and how. With whom do you share or tag photos? To whom do you forward interesting content and do the click or pass it along? Is that a professional, university or family contact? Do you share common interests? These can become powerful enablers and filters in the context of the in-box.

Facebook, Yahoo, Google, MySpace and others have all announced and are rolling out some version of their “Connect” programs. Many in the Valley have talked about this as a “single-user login” benefit for the consumer and owning the login or attention currency equivalent of “wallet.” It’s like not having to get carded everywhere you go, nor populate more accounts. I believe the single-user login benefit is huge, and I think that it may also be secondary in the long run to helping clear inbox proliferation.

Note: quick word of caution navigating the waters of people-filtered inboxes. The other day I pinged a professional associate who quickly informed me that they weren’t available in Facebook for connecting professionally. You have to respect the boundaries of how people want to use their inboxes, when and with whom.

Will close with this letter for my most bloated inbox: 

Dear email inbox, I’m not trying to be difficult, but you really don’t get me. And I think it’s time we take a little break. We’ve tried it your way for many years with pretty much the same result, now it’s time we try it my way. As of today, I’m taking a break from you. I need some space to redefine our relationship. I’m packing up my closest peeps and taking them with me over to the socialnets; that’s where you can find me if you need something. I’m going to throw away all the news articles, press clippings and stuff you’ve got stashed everywhere, so round-up what you need quickly and store it somewhere safe. 

It’s been a blast. I mean literraly. Most marketers still call you their “email blast.” They carpet bomb inboxes on time with an interesting item at best or with the randomness and relevance of an unwanted advance at worse. You’ve been loyally shielding me from the worst offenders, but my crowd gets me better.

If it makes you feel better, it’s not about you. It’s all me. I mean, you haven’t changed a bit. But I have. I found better, more interesting and related things from my crowd. I’ve grown to trust them and they helped me realize how far we’ve grown apart. I hope we can stay friends or at least professional. We still have all the business affairs we need to deal with. I think with time you’ll find this was really the right decision for both of us. Maybe with time you’ll slim down some, get active and grow in new directions. That would be really interesting for both of us. Here’s looking at you, kid.

From the Twitterstream this week: “Filing a cease and desist… against my inbox.” Chris Sacca.

Lessons from Book Quote’s Viral FB Meme

The Book Quote Game Goes Viral in Facebook

Virally speaking based on watching my own response along with others in my social graph, a clever little meme called the “Book Quote Game” is exploding over on Facebook. Over the weekend a quick challenge gambit  appeared in my Facebook socialgraph and I took it. I responded in to a friend’s post asking me to find a random but specifically-placed quote from “a book near me.”

What followed surprised me: within 12 hours 18 others added their quotes–more comments than my FB posts usually get; their socialgraph represents 3641 people and inspired another 23 comments. I didn’t crawl their comments to see the network effect in added reach, but if we use the averages based on mine, the echo would include another 9300 in reach. With an average friend duplication of 7.75% you still reach over 10,000 people per post in the first two generations of the meme. Because the active socialgraph/profile will bury this meme, it needs to reappear at different times, which it does as others replicate and comment. I expect to see this meme come back around many times in the coming months.

More surprising is that this isn’t even a Facebook application. It’s an activity that’s as catchy as an application but relies on The Groundswell to crawl all the SocialNetwork’s carriers to produce the Metacalfe effect. So, without any programming and low-production content you can create a viral campaign by following the best practices of The Book Quote Game.

I’ll give more evidence and details then see if there are best practices that can be applied for Marketers. Please add your reactions below in the comments area as well.

Ben and Jerry’s Killer Facebook Ad Integration

Check out this page. It’s content right? This is the Election ‘08 page on Facebook.

It’s got your voting booth location mash-up powered by Google Maps, some info graphics and even a gift/badge for you to wear your colors–Red or Blue. It showed volumes in real-time as people clicked the “I voted” link on their Facebook profile page after visiting the polls. I tweeted about the page in the morning of election day when 1.1 million people had already been counted and watched the numbers swell each hour until the polls closed. Nearly 5.5 million acted making it one of the highest daily-use apps to date (think about how few YouTube videos get that much play in a single day, let alone month for comparison).

The genius is in the Ben & Jerry’s map/application integration. This is content, but it’s also a delivery mechanism for the advertising sponsorship by Ben & Jerry. Simple. Natural (as in additive and not interruptive). Brilliant.

In this case you were able to find the local Ben & Jerry’s store to get the free icecream cone they were offering for those that voted IRL and in the integrated link you could also send a “vote cone” virtual gift to your friends in Facebook.

For Ben & Jerry’s it’s a win across the board. The association is perfect for a brand that has in its roots social change and political activision. That future analysis will likely attribute SocialMedia and Facebook’s influence on 14mm new young voters heavily skewed to Obama as a determing factor in the race can’t hurt the brand. And the message was party-neutral regardless of the results. These are the kind of brand-fit filters every connection planner should find: Content, Context and mission.

As a campaign tracking mechanism, free cone redemptions will be an easy metric. Virtual gift talleys will also be telling as will traffic to the Election ‘08 page. Without a doubt, Buzzmetrics and other influence trackers will be tallying total blog mentions and related viewership. And, I’d love to see the total impressions this campaign earned from the SocialGraph as well. We’ll reach out to Facebook, the brand and related agencies to see if we can get the numbers. And, if you’re related to the brand and know, feel free to share below.

Ben & Jerry’s won big on this campaign–even before all the numbers are in–by hitting the right tone of placement and pitch. I learned about new retail locations in a relevant way. I also didn’t feel like they were selling me. In fact, they were offering a number of value-exchanges I couldn’t get without them entering my social interactions on Facebook. Consider how different this is from the “Market Stall” approach of fast and casual food retail where the strategy based on ad spend (shout louder, sooner and with a better offer than your competitors) dominates their consumer communications. The Market Stall has 90%+ of ad spend concentrated on TV and traditional media in a cluttered, interruptive market place. Ben & Jerry’s essentially opened a new market away from the noise, clutter and lack of relevance of the traditional approach.

Every brand marketer should be asking themselves and their agencies: What’s our occasion(s) that should be so integrated with Facebook? And then buy the date to lock out your competition and outplay them.

Added: was reminded that I previously posted about Lee LeFever’s Common Craft show,  “SocialMedia in Plain English” and it was the metaphor told via Ice Cream retail. Fun conincidence. All our SM Answers Haz Ice Cream.

 

How Do You Do Digital Focus Groups?

Digital Focus Group research is a subject we’d really like to hear your thoughts and input on. Occasionally we commission unique Focus Groups to vet our digital content and distribution strategies. Usually digital is tested along with all other media in larger Focus Groups covering multiple cities and target segments. There are pros and cons to both.

Without delving into the merits or demerits of the Focus Group format, we find them beneficial and additive to our thinking on the whole. There’s always a gem or two of Insight that we can synthesize from participant attitudes and comments. And we expect to get a thematic “zinger” comment that flavors our understanding of the target or our proposition. An example of this is when exploring attitudes about where we could take a certain beverage category a few years back, one participant called it a “chick drink” in less polite terms and that moniker flavored our consumer understanding and marketing approach.

One of the challenges we face in digital is that many Focus Group facilitators, while comfortable with the advertising creative and media of traditional media–a familiarity developed over 60 years of representative experience–simply can not successfully moderate around digital and emerging platforms. We’ve consistently seen digital thinking represented in the “Integrated Media Focus Group” as flats or print campaign equivalents. Or, even in animated form, presented as a website and not as an element in a holistic digital marketing approach. It’s challenging to take the armada of activity around which we go to market and have most moderators–let alone consumers–be informed about various digital media and interpret feedback on digital. Without good interpretation, it’s difficult to get a feedback loop that drives to the most insightful places.

The reason we do less focus group research in digital is because we have the laboratory of real time data, A/B testing, instant SocialNetwork surveys, campaign qualitative research and search as a proxy for intention and needs. At the same time, we’ve yet to find a better substitute for a client to participate “behind the glass” with our team hearing directly from consumer groups what they think, what informs their opinions and how they’re willing to behave around a variety propositions.

So, here’s the request and challenge to you: Who are the best at directing in-person Focus Groups for Digital and/or what other alternatives to you use? Let’s use the comment section below to create our compendium of resources.

What’s Your Social Spectrum?

 

Social Spectrum Visual

This Social Spectrum was inspired by two events–one was an informal conversation at F8 in SF with Jesse Stay, Rodney Rumford and others and the other was while working on a collaborative publishing and sharing initiative at Real Branding. 

At F8 the focus was on dynamic privacy settings and how we need to reset based on tool, time, situation continually. What if I change jobs and they have different privacy policies? What if new people join my network which I want to share some but not all my info until we know each other better? What should show up in my Social Graph and various feeds? 

At Real Branding we’re about to push all of our twitterstreams, bookmarks, posts, slides, etc. to our homepage. At one of our Beer2.0 sessions we discovered that everyone was pre-filtering and heavily editing with that in mind. It inhibited use and utility. So we need to address this issue so people bring more of themselves freely, not less. 

One of the things we’ve discovered is that we’re using different tools and accounts as a way to modulate a spectrum of Private and Public data and personas as well as Professional and Personal content. It’s a mess, especially with all the different accounts to keep track of and to feed, but it may be the best we have for now. 

The attached image is my personal Social Spectrum. The size of the logos relate roughly to the amount of use for each tool. If you use the Powerpoint version on Slideshare, the logos are hot-spotted to my social spaces. You might be surprised to find that my Flickr account is in Personal and Private. Although I post publicly, the content is usually a personal reflection. And the lionshare of the content–family albums and such–are under private lock-down. It’s an understanding I have with my wife about the Spectrum.  

I’d be really interested in seeing what your spectrum looks like. What tools do you use for what area? I think it’s going to be different for everyone, but we may begin to find patterns where one quadrant is more consistently populated by certain services. Download the powerpoint, configure to your Social Spectrum and trackback/comment to share your version. Very interested in your thoughts/reactions.