Lee Aase | Social Media University, Global (SMUG)

Facebook in Diverse Decades of Life

The Austin American Statesman has a helpful article on Facebook for thirtysomethings (which also applies to those in their 40s and 50s, too.) Hat tip to Mari Smith. It gives a window into the thinking of recent Facebook adopters.

Jeremiah Owyang recently posted a good explanation of “The Social Graph.” I agree with Jeremiah that social networking features may become a greater part of all web sites, but unless someone makes it extremely simple to carry your social networking identity across sites, there will be a gravitation toward the top-tier sites like Facebook and MySpace. That’s why Michael Arrington reports that top leaders and founders of some of the second-tier sites are leaving (or bailing, depending on your perspective.)

The thirtysomethings, fortysomethings and fiftysomethings who will create the critical mass for social networking are not geeks, for the most part. They also seem to be coming to Facebook in large numbers.

As the American Statesman article indicates, these people don’t belong to a ton of social networking sites. They are just now getting into Facebook. Transporting identities isn’t a big deal to them, because they are mostly just starting on their first site. If they find one that is meeting their needs, as Facebook seems to be, they won’t feel the urge to join another one. They can form new groups effortlessly within Facebook. Why go elsewhere?

And now, with Facebook’s Beacon (although it is somewhat controversial), what they do on other sites can find its way into their Facebook news feeds. So that does provide some of that information flow.

For most non-geeks, the issue won’t be “How can I reconcile all of the social networking sites to which I belong?” It will be, “Which one site gives me everything I really need?”

I had dinner with my twentysomething daughter and her husband last night (they met through Facebook), and she asked, “Are people thinking that Facebook is just going to be a fad?” I explained how some believe that thirtysomethings, fortysomethings and fiftysomethings joining Facebook will cause the college crowd to exit to whatever comes next. But I said I don’t think that’s likely, because of how much I see her younger siblings using Facebook, and how they have all of their Homecoming pictures and the like stored there. It’s the world’s biggest photo-sharing service. I don’t see them leaving that, and their friends, to join other sites.

“I just see it as a another way to communicate,” Rachel agreed. “I tell people who want to get in touch with me to ‘Facebook me.’ It’s just like the telephone or the text message.”

Geeks like having interoperability standards between social networking sites. But so far Google’s OpenSocial is just a common language that widget makers can use to make their lives easier in application development.

For everyone else, I think even relatively easy interoperability between sites may be too complicated. I have a bunch of real-life friends who are starting to get into Facebook. Like those mentioned in the American Statesman article, they are starting to see the potiential benefits and usefulness.

What would they have to gain from joining a second social networking site?

Technorati: Facebook, social networking, Jeremiah Owyang, MySpace, OpenSocial, Google, Beacon, TechCrunch, Arrington

Transforming Health Care

For the next couple of days I’m going to be spending much of my time at a symposium hosted by Mayo Clinic (my employer) on transforming health care. It’s called Transformation: A Symposium on Innovative Health Care Delivery. Here’s symposium registration site that gives background on the event, and here’s the blog where several others and I will be writing about the sessions. We have a great roster of speakers, and the discussion should be quite stimulating. I’m hoping many of the participants will have brought laptops so they can contribute to the continuing discussion on the symposium blog, and we’re also planning to eventually have a podcast of the audio from the presentations.

I’ve liveblogged at several other conferences before; this is the first time I will have done it at a Mayo Clinic-sponsored conference. What better one to use as a starting point than a conference on innovation? Most of my posts will likely be at the symposium blog, but as I learn things that might be interesting to readers of this blog I will cross-post here, too.

The good part about being at a conference at work is that I can keep up on some other projects, and step out for meetings when absolutely necessary. The bad part is it can be hard to engage as fully as when I get away.

Technorati: Health care, innovation, symposium, conferences, Mayo Clinic

Facebook Fan Page: Free Yellow Pages Ad?

With this week’s announcement of its fan Pages and Social Ads, along with its Beacon program, Facebook has made business use a much more integral part of its service. This is the way it has to be, even though some users are grumbling about the commercialization.

I had originally seen the Pages program as, in essence, a free electronic Yellow Pages ad for businesses and organizations. But then when I published a Fan Page and did a search, it didn’t come up among the results.

When I did a search for the Coca Cola fan page, though, the Coke fan pages did show up:

And when you click the “Page” section of results, you see this:

Whereas when I search for the page I created, no Pages are listed in the results:

Can anyone tell me why Pages don’t show up in search results? Do the Coca Cola pages show up because Coke is an advertiser? If that’s the reason, as I suspect, at what level do you have to be advertising for your Page to be part of the search results?

Technorati: Facebook, Business, Advertising, Yellow Pages, Coke, Coca Cola, marketing, search

Facebook Ads Already More Relevant

The big news today was Facebook‘s announcement of its new advertising network, and the ability for brands to have pages. MySpace also has announced a major advertising initiative.

Jeremiah Owyang has done a great job of summarizing what’s new on both of these platforms. When the Facebook system, especially the new Pages for businesses, launches later tonight, I’m sure I will have some more thoughts to add. I’m a hands-on and visual learner, so I will look forward to experimenting tomorrow and beyond.

From what I’ve seen so far, though, I think this will be huge. Steve Rubel cautions against drinking the Web 2.0 Kool Aid (and offers his own tips for detox), but I think he’s overstating the contrarian case. He says only advertisers can save Web 2.0, and he’s right, as the MySpace and Facebook offerings indicate.

But maybe being halfway between Silicon Valley and Madison Avenue, I’m not as fully experiencing the euphoria Steve senses. I agree there will be a lot of the Web 2.0 and social networking startups that will flop. But some will succeed.

A good chunk of the money that is currently being spent on mass media advertising (primarily TV) will be going elsewhere. See what Jeff Jarvis has to say about Dell’s new approach to marketing. I may be wrong, but I believe it’s something like $67 billion a year. As mainstream media audiences continue to shrink, advertisers will want to put their money where consumers’ attention is. It won’t be enough to support every “me-too” networking site, but those that can provide value for advertisers have a great opportunity.

I’ve been experimenting lately with the pay-per-click Facebook Flyers, and have seen some interesting results. But Flyers are soooo October. Things are changing so rapidly in this social networking advertising field that it will take a serious effort to keep pace, at least if you want to be among the leaders.

With that said, I just wanted to call attention to how the ads I’m experiencing in Facebook are already becoming more targeted and relevant, even before the new system launches. Among my Facebook Flyers experiments was an ad I placed for the Your Voice, New Vision listening tour on behalf of the Mayo Clinic Health Policy Center. We had a trailer in Harvard Square today in Cambridge, Mass. getting the patient perspective on health reform, so we used Facebook Flyers to promote the event.

So it was interesting that as I was in Facebook today, one of the flyers that was served to me was from Harvard Business Review. Facebook apparently saw Harvard mentioned in my flyer, and therefore targeted a Harvard-related ad to me.

Likewise, I got the flyer promoting Stevie Wonder concert tickets shown at the top of this post, undoubtedly because Stevie is in my musical preferences. And when I clicked, I came to this site.

The really happy ending for the advertiser would have been if I’d have continued through to buy tickets. I didn’t. But at least the ad I saw was more interesting and relevant to me, a happily married father of six, than some of the others I’ve gotten. Like this one:

Which all makes me think that if Facebook plays this right, it could actually enhance the user experience with advertising by targeting ads to people’s interests. If I see more of Stevie and less of thirtyplussingles, I will like Facebook even more.
The Social Ads element may also be quite powerful by adding friend validation to the mix. There’s danger of overstepping and becoming too ad-dominated, but so far Facebook has been judicious in extending advertising. I think Zuckerberg and the gang will likely do this well, too.

Technorati: Facebook, advertising, marketing, Dell, Jeremiah Owyang, Jeff Jarvis, Harvard, Health Policy, Stevie Wonder

The PR Measurement Treadmill

PR measurement
I recently heard Shel Holtz on the Oct. 22 edition of his For Immediate Release podcast (with Neville Hobson) talking about the WPP communications conglomerate and its recent stronger-than-expected revenues for PR services. The explanation offered by WPP was that as social media have become more important, effectively placing stories in the mainstream media is more valuable, because that’s what helps seed the social media discussion.

I think that’s exactly backwards.

Some companies may be thinking in this way, but if so they are doing the right thing (increasing their PR focus) for the wrong reasons.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m as big an advocate of social media as you’re likely to meet. And it’s not just because I’m 6′ 6″.

But using mainstream media stories to generate blog buzz is like the Minnesota Vikings giving Adrian Peterson the football to set up their play-action passing game. Having a record-setting rusher does cause the defensive backs to creep closer to the line of scrimmage, which with a competent quarterback (always a question for the Vikings) will enable more long pass completions. But getting Adrian the ball is the strategy; Brooks Bollinger’s improved passing is a welcome byproduct.

Likewise, mainstream media stories are “the real deal.” They are not primarily a means to the end of getting social media buzz. Social media have their biggest punch when they break through to generate mainstream media coverage. Like the guy who tried to cancel AOL. He did a blog post which led to New York Times and NBC Today stories. He didn’t pitch the Times and NBC to get blog traffic.

When his story made the leap from the blogosphere to the mainstream media, it did generate huge traffic to his blog. So much that it crashed his server. But the blog buzz (aside from being an end in itself) was a measure of the attention generated through traditional media. It wasn’t a goal of the mass media stories.

One of the benefits of social media is that they can give a mass media buzz biopsy, as Kami Huyse said in an excerpt of an interview highlighted in the same Oct. 22 FIR podcast. It was part of a report from Eric Schwartzman from the PRSA International conference in Philadelphia. Kami said:

Blogs are wonderful for analytics. You get all kinds of great numbers from blogs. How long did somebody look at a particular article? What did they come search for? How did they come to your site? By what search word? Once they’re in your site…do they use your internal search engine, and what do they search for there? Do they find it, or not?

Then Eric said, “I totally agree with Kami. I believe that the true value of new media communications and online PR is the ability to measure buzz and to prove it with numbers as never before.” You can hear the full interview at Eric’s On the Record podcast.

I agree with both Kami and Eric to a point. If you have skeptical business leaders who don’t believe anything has value unless you can “prove it with numbers,” social media can provide a lot of data.

But blog buzz is only the most immediately measurable byproduct of news media stories. Most word-of-mouth happens away from the web. People used to say “Did you see that story on the news last night?” around the proverbial water cooler. Now it’s at Starbucks. Unfortunately, that buzz can’t be easily or economically measured.

Web traffic, whether to a blog or a traditional web site, is just one concrete way of measuring results. And because web sites give such plentiful data, including counts of “conversions” to the desired consumer action, they are over-valued and over-analyzed.

Social Media tools are like a thermostat. They measure word-of-mouth buzz (temperature) and help send signals to raise (heat) it. And they are particularly effective for niche content that can’t attract a mass audience.

Mass media are like a furnace, kicking out the buzz BTUs. You don’t buy a new furnace to improve your thermostat reading. And if blog traffic is the way you measure your mass media PR, you will seriously underestimate your effectiveness.
If you get mass media coverage through your PR efforts, that’s the big win. And social media engagement is worthwhile in its own right. But mass media stories shouldn’t be seen primarily as means to blog buzz; they are, if not an end in themselves, at least a good in themselves with many consequent benefits, one of which may be blog discussions.

I have two main options for my personal exercise during my winters here on the frozen tundra: playing pick-up basketball or running on a treadmill. With the latter I get “all kinds of great numbers,” such as total time, average miles per hour, something called METS and a seemingly precise measurement calories burned. When I play basketball, however, I don’t get any of those “wonderful analytics,” but I get a lot more whole-body benefit through running and jumping, starting and stopping quickly. And I guarantee that I burn more calories. But I can’t “prove it with numbers.” Precise measurement doesn’t necessarily correlate with greater benefit.

I’m feeling another metaphor coming, but I think I’ll just leave it for now.

Technorati: Shel Holtz, WPP, PR, blogs, Kami Huyse, FIR, For Immediate Release, Adrian Peterson, Minnesota Vikings, social media, new media, PRSA, Eric Schartzman, measurement, analytics