Random Culture

Interview with DM News: Facebook Pages

I was interviewed recently for this article in DM News: "Facebook Pages Offer Powerful Brand Presence", by Kevin McKeefery. The article references the Facebook Page we built for TiVo. Facebook Pages offer a great opportunity for advertisers to build community without breaking the bank. And it makes sense for them to build community there, on Facebook, rather than trying to reinvent the wheel and coax users away from the social networks that really matter to them.

Want to learn more? Download the official Facebook Pages Insider Guide.

Facebook vs. Alumni Organizations

Yes, we're witnessing a watershed moment for college alumni associations. Facebook has rendered them almost useless for what alumni care the most about... finding updates on classmates. The New York Times has a great article on this phenomenon, focused primarily on how social networking is competing with alumni magazines. According to the article:

"The advent of social networking on the Internet has created a quandary for these magazines, which want to maintain a conversation with alumni but have been slow to embrace the Web. Most schools have set up password-protected sites where graduates can change their contact information, drop a class note or donate money.

But younger alumni, accustomed to second-by-second updates from friends and classmates, are exchanging information in real time on Facebook and MySpace. Why wait for your alma mater to churn out a quarterly journal when you can Twitter all day?"

I'd argue that limiting the conversation to alumni magazines is short-sighted. In fact, Facebook and MySpace have threatened the whole idea of alumni associations, and could render them obsolete. So why haven't more universities embraced this new medium? Here are a few ideas of how universities could use social networking sites to embolden alumni organizations and make them more relevant:

1. Create an official Facebook Page for Alumni
   This provides a single point of contact for alumni to connect in Facebook. Also, pages have advantages over groups, such as more flexibility with content and better "badging" of fans on their own profile pages.
   
2. Create a Facebook application for donations
   Applications such as Facebook Causes are doing it, why not alumni organizations? Soliciting smaller donations can allow rabid fans with less financial means the ability to contribute. What's more, an application like this can enlist alumni to spread the word to other alums.
   
3. Provide assets to help them show their pride
   They're already creating assets themselves, but empower them with better assets. For example, a widget that counts down to football games. Assets will turn alumni into advocates.

These are a few simple ideas, but quite simply, the universities that don't get engaged will see their alumni organizations becoming increasingly irrelevant.

Read the complete NY Times article here.

Data Portability: Multiple Sites, One Profile

"DataPortability gathers existing open standards into a blueprint for a social, open, remixable web where your online identity, media, contacts and content can follow you wherever you go. Find out more at dataportability.org."

Facebook App Best Practices

The folks at the Three Minds blog have a great post up about advertisers and Facebook Applications. Just as Second Life is home to numerous advertiser locations without a soul in site, advertiser created Facebook Applications are starting to become deserted islands, with little to no usage. Here are five key guidelines they spell out for advertisers wanting to create a Facebook App:

1. Don't start a new version of something that's already popular
2. Don't overcomplicate the concept or interface
3. Don't extend a campaign without thinking about the social context
4. Don't separate your fans, reach them where they already exist

Great guidelines for the agency or advertiser wanting to get involved. I would add the following in addition:

1. Don't require invites to use your application
2. Don't require registration at your website to use the application
3. Don't send users outside of Facebook unless you have to

Here are a few valuable questions to ask as you're concepting the application:

• Would a user want to display this app in their profile? (remember, this is optional)
• Are you giving them a reason to interact with the application frequently?
• Will they really want to forward this application to a friend?
• Have you included funds or plans to drive usage of the application?

And a couple technical questions:

• If your app becomes a huge success, can your hosting handle the traffic?
• Are you building the application in a way that it can be utilized in other social networking formats?

Thanks to Three Minds @ Organic for a great conversation starter!

Case Study In Shortsightedness: Scrabulous

You may have heard by now that Hasbro and Mattel are trying to get the plug pulled on Scrabulous, the user-created Scrabble application created for Facebook. It's one of the most popular applications on the site, with nearly 600,000 daily users... myself included. There's no argument that Scrabulous is violating their copyright, but why would Hasbro and Mattel stick their head all the way up the gift horse's mouth and rip out its intestines? I'm not sure if they've been paying attention, but with all the entertainment options available today, people aren't exactly tripping over themselves to snatch up all the board games on the shelves.

Clearly, anyone can see that Scrabulous has been the best thing to happen to Scrabble in a long time. I'm a case in point for this... I own the Scrabble board game, but I've only played it twice. Once Scrabulous came along, it gave me a renewed interest in the game. I have several games running concurrently now, and yes, I've actually played the REAL board game a few more times because of it.

I can only think about the sheer amount of angst that Hasbro and Mattel are creating because of this demand to pull Scrabulous from Facebook. Think about how much more positive press and brand affinity they would have created for rewarding the ingenuity of the Scrabulous creators by purchasing it from them. This is ingenuity they obviously can only pay for...

Yes, I'm a bit sore on the subject because I love Scrabulous soo much. And the folks at Hasbro and Mattel can rest assured that if they succeed in this dim-witted legal task, there will be one less Scrabble board game in existence, because I will boycott the tiles for life.

More from the BBC here.

Join the Facebook group, Save Scrabulous!

Nike Supersonic

Nike has launched a MySpace community, which can be found at www.NikeSupersonic.com. The community supports a special invite-only run in London for 1,000 runners and 2,000 of their friends. It was designed by AKQA in London.

American Express Does Social Media Right

American Express has launched an interesting foray into social media with the launch of the Members Project. It's an impressive idea... card members register on the site, with the ability to submit an idea for a social project, such as rebuilding a school in New Orleans. The ideas are voted on by members of the site, and for each member that joins, American Express kicks in money (up to $5 million), with the winning idea getting funded!

Kudos to American Express for doing something that's actually engaging, and paints the brand in a positive light. Unlike most advertisers, they actually are putting some real money behind the effort, in a way that makes sense, and certainly provides some incentive to participate.

Link via B.L. Ochman.

Disney Launches Social Network

Disney has launched their own social network, Disney XD. According to Cynopsis, the site is aimed at the under-14 crowd and contains lots of parental safeguards. Kids can create their own homepages decorated with Disney-related items, watch videos, play games and more.

Apparently, Disney has also taken a cue from the "bad design" benchmark set by MySpace. Because clearly, the design and layout of this site will make you cringe.

Need Another MySpace? NBC Thinks So

NBC is launching their own social network in June, but is this a sound decision on their part? I have reservations about it.

There certainly is a value for sites like NBC.com to build communities, but I think the mistake they're making is in duplicating the same features and functionality that MySpace has. Many of the people they're targeting already have MySpace pages, and the NBC social network is likely to fall short of the feature set and customization that a MySpace profile offers. This means that visitors will find little or no value in creating and MAINTAINING a profile on the NBC social network.

Maybe I'm being a little quick to judge... so I'll be looking at how NBC handles this new social network. Who knows, they could have some features that make it truly a unique offering. But based on what little information they've released, it will be a half-cocked MySpace clone with a fraction of a fraction of the audience.

Link via Micropersuasion.

Digg for Shoppers

Iliketotallyloveit.com is Digg for shoppers. I ran across this great site in the March 2007 edition of Wired Magazine, and I think it illustrates the general evolution of things online. If you aren't the first to market, pull a "long-tail" and create something niche!