I’m at the Web Community Forum for work for the next couple days, immersed in Facebook geekery. Of the list of marketing buzz phrases below, one of them is made up. The rest were used (legitimately, or at least as legitimately as buzz phrases can be used) during the course of presentations and panels:

Gravity marketing
Existential marketing
Robin Hood marketing
Fan-sumer
Astroturfing
Viral loop
Micromedia
Grages (group+pages)

Also, if anyone’s interested in my random notes from today, read on. They’re disorganized, misspelled and ugly, but have at it.

Jeremiah Owyang keynote

Note: I took obsessive notes, and then Jeremiah released his power point, making my notes superfluous. But here they are!

Facebook is a readymade marketing platform with many tools available — strategy is key.
• Social utility
• 40-50mil users (34% come and use it monthly)
• 134-200% growth in last year
• Over 40% are over the age of 35
• 6000 applications deployed
• Valued at $15billion
• Average user stays 20minutes
• Domination in North America and Middle East
• College educated, white collar (different from MySpace, which is younger, media-focused, maybe more blue collar)

Friendster: 25mil / 65% growth
Facebook: 40-50mil / 200% growth
MySpace: 120mil / 72% growth
He predicts that in Q4 2008, Facebook will intersect with MySpace.

Why is it important?
Communities
Communities are important because it’s about trust. Consumers don’t trust marketers. People trust their friends/peers way more than marketers, or even analysts. People use Facebook to share information and make decisions.
Rich user information
People share stuff on Facebook that they would NOT share with marketers. A huge amount of information is being shared that you could NOT get elsewhere.
Information spreads quickly
The newsfeed proliferates information.

Groups and communities
Look for hate groups and engage in conversations.
Gen Y is abandoning email — “I only use email to get a hold of old people like you” - “Email is how my boss gets ahold of me, Facebook is how my friends and family get a hold of me.” — in favor for facebook, IM, and text messaging.

Strategies
Advertising: banner ads, contextual/newsfeed/flyer ads, social ads
Marketing: FB pages, sponsored groups
Word of mouth/interaction: applications
Intelligence: profiles and network information, public groups

Sponsored groups: Current amount is $100k/mo. That mostly gets you HTML access. Large companies see this as a “steal.” (!!!)
Supposedly these are being phased out for facebook pages. (Good that we’re not investing too much.)
Communication and dialog are key to Facebook strategies.
How not to do it: Target Rounders. “Your mission: try not to let on in the facebook group that you are a rounder … Keep it like a secret.” OOPS. Failure in transparency.

“Apple doesn’t do social media” — they have a facebook group with 420k users/12k topics.
“If ads are so targeted and contextual, then the cease being ads and start being information.”
Ads can be displayed to friends of brand fans — “fan-sumers.”

 
Opportunities for widgets:
• Span multiple networks (you could develop widgets for facebook AND myspace)
• Smaller developers can montize (use existing ad networks)
• Advertisers (skin, co-brand)
CHALLENGES:
• Facebook data sucked into “black hole”
o Lack of analytics for marketers
o User data
• Facebook releases features without aligning with customers (newsfeed and beacon both very unpopular — “two strikes”)
• Workplace productivity concerns (some companies block facebook)
• Privacy concerns with Facebook

The four step approach to groundswell
People: assess your customer’s social techongraphics profile (how people use technology). Is facebook your audience? (Are your users white collar, educated?) How do they use technologies. What are they talking about? Who are they? What do they want?
Objectives: Why facebook? What are you accomplishing? Goals include: listening (intelligence gathering - E&Y group is a huge example. They were there to just listen, but actually recruiting), speaking (marketing), energizing (word of mouth/viral), supporting (peer to peer, user support forums), embracing (members become contributors, customers define future of services, using facebook customer feedback).
Strategies: Plan how relationships with customers will change.
• Experimentation leads to understanding (make a profile, use it)
• Gain market intelligence
• Use advertising efficiently
• Embrace and lead communities within your own company
• Deploy campaign (think about widgets, sponsored groups, and integration with other campaigns)
Best practices:
• Listen before speaking
• Members are in control
• Allow for discussions
• Segment
• Use media (videos) as a lead-in
• Trouble kick-starting? Be a resource and a reward
• Integrate with other marketing initiatives
Technology: decide which tools to use.

COST
Research: low
Development/Design:
Advertisements: cheap/large
Applications: higher

DON’T LIMIT TO FACEBOOK
Tools come and go — what sustains is a strategy.

Astroturfing: fake grassroots marketing

How to tie Facebook group to actual business website. Now you go where your community already exists and interacting with them there. Driving traffic is not actually key.
Using Facebook as breadcrumbs … blogs point to facebook, facebook points to blogs, blogs point to corporate site. You have to let the information and links spread naturally.
 

FACEBOOK APPS

Rodney Rumford from Facereviews: facebook app reviews
“The thing about facebook is that it’s continually evolving — you don’t build it, and then you’re done with your app. That’s only the beginning.”

Compresses timeline of applications to success or failure. It’s a great place to test tools.

The “review” section for application should be called “the bitch session.” It’s 80% negative.

Supposedly 10,000 apps as of 12/5/07.
Acceleration is happening very quickly.
Your app doesn’t need to be more sophisticated, it needs to be more fun.

Define success:
• Metrics: determine what matters
• Business objects
• Installs (force users to invite people — it works, even if it feels like spam)
• Engagement (why do people want to come back to the app? How? The simpler it is, the better. The less functionality, the better. Strip it back, and then you can drop features in later.)
• Frequency of return (how do you use users’ engagement to get them to come back? How do you pull people back in OUTSIDE of facebook?)
• Page views (put google analytics into your application to gain metrics data)
• Sustainable (if the app is too one-dimensional, seasonal, or is only fun once or twice … you have CHURN. Your keep rate is important.)
Common success threads:
• Simple
• Facilitate connections
• Forced behavior paths
• Points systems/levels
• Micro entertainment bursts
• Actions pull others into app
• Relevent to audience
• Delivers value (different for every user)
• Passes the tipping point and gains velocity
• New way to communicate/interact
• Fresh content is key! Give your users what they want
Marketing Opportunities
• Lead generation
• Brand extension
• Commerce
• Customer engagement
• Traffic
• Brand loyalty
• Frictionless word of mouth
• Groups
• Applications
• Advertising
• Web site possibly becoming secondary?
Search sucks on Facebook, because the emphasis is on viral spreading. There is no facebook pages directory.

Facebook: fad, frenzy, or the future?

None of us were talking about facebook 3 years ago. It’s irresponsible to suppose that we can see 5 years out. But no-one’s catching up in the next 12 months.
Google open social isn’t a destination site — it’s a way for devs to plug into other networks.
If you don’t get facebook, what’s missing? “Friends.”
Email is broken — it doesn’t work anymore. Is Facebook a better way to communicate?
The joy with a facebook inbox is that it’s only mail from friends and groups you joined. You get to select who you want to communicate with.
Is the newsfeed a sociological phenomenon? Gives you a steady stream of information about the people you care about.
What about sponsoring applications — ie, Budweiser sponsoring “send a drink” application.
Partnering may be the best way to go with applications.
Der: the best way to know facebook is to use it. DUH.
Facebook is not a marketer’s friend because metrics are really limited.
 

Lessons learned: What other application devs did right and wrong

When an application allows you to send/invite/share something, it pulls in additional users quickly.
Devs need to think a lot about INVITATION. It’s not about what the app does, but about how you share it. And how social it is.
Prioritization scheme:
• Send
• Use
• Play
Design a facebook app like an inductive loop.
It’s more important to have the app be sharable, linkable, sendable than it is to have the app be
Amplify viral loops.
Invites are still an important part of the process. Sending things, sharing things.
Appeal to people’s vanity.
Access to friend networks is native to the entire platform. Communication, game, interaction apps are natural.
Graphics that look like buttons are hawt.
NOTIFICATIONS ARE KEY. Again — this is where Wexley can really shine with a Hey Genius app, I think. Funny newsfeed messages are engaging. More likely to click through.
App developers are aggressive about making people install. Number of users is primary success metric.

“All these apps are childish — why aren’t they useful?” Is being useful the kiss of death? Facebook simulates the real world. What do you do when you’re hanging out with friends? Silly stuff.

Since facebook is mostly a friend networking tool, the focus on friend/silly/fun apps makes perfect sense.
Sponsor existing apps is really a good idea. Are there any apps that we should be sponsoring?
 

What sucks most about facebook?

This panel is sort of a group therapy session.
List of groups is a badge of uselessness. Groups suck.
Baratunde Thurston (LOVE HIM — rss immediately added to reader): Broken group messaging feature ruins communication.
Jeremy Pepper: There’s a mis-placed sense of privacy.
Key quote from this session:

We say Facebook sucks — but we’re all regular users.
Well, the United States sucks, but I’m a regular user of that, too.

My biggest complaint about Facebook is that, like every other social networking platform, I have to build my network manually. How many times have I done this? How many more times will I have to do this?

I spaced out and checked my blog’s referral logs. TOTALLY RANDOMLY I found this quote on a page that linked to me. It’s quite timely:
“A lot of people say that Facebook has jumped the shark. That’s flat out wrong. In fact, Facebook is now being devoured by the shark. There’s so much blood in the water, it’s attracting other sharks. And if Facebook’s not careful, one of them is bound to come along and finish it off. I’ve never seen anything like it in the annals of fast-rising tech companies that fail.”