Facebook Tip: Don’t Be Just a Number

One of Facebook‘s limits is that with more than 40 million users, and a million added each week, it’s sometimes hard to find a person searching just by name.

Facebook tip don't be just a number
For example, last night I met Adam Brown from Coca Cola (with whom I am participating as part of a panel today at the Arthur W. Page Society conference.) I went back to my room and wanted to “friend” him, but when I did the search by name for “Adam Brown” I got this result:

Name number facebook

I don’t know exactly how many Adam Browns Facebook has, but it’s more than 500. Finding him would be an arduous process if I had to click through, screen-by-screen, viewing a handful at a time. Fortunately I was able to use the search within other networks function to narrow it to the Coca Cola network and send him the invitation. (By the way, the Coca Cola network has 915 members.)

Then last night I got a friend invitation from Mari Smith, and after I had accepted I saw that she had added an application called Profile Web Address, which lets you create a more memorable URL so people can find you on Facebook.

Which is more memorable? This:

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=777087888

or this:

http://profile.to/leeaase

To ask is to answer, isn’t it?

This application isn’t that essential for someone like me because my name is unique enough. When you Google Lee Aase, you get my blog as the first result. When you search for Lee Aase in Facebook, you get four results (one of which is my Professional Contacts group.)

But the reason I added this application anyway is so someone else doesn’t take my name, so I would encourage everyone in Facebook to add this application and stake your claim. It would be great if profile.to would create a similar application for groups, too. That would enable organizations to create official groups within Facebook and not have them lost in less relevant results that may also use the organization’s name.

If you have a common name like the Browns and Smiths listed above, and if you have a Yahoo or Gmail account, you might want to use that as your Profile Web Address. That way, when you’re meeting people and they want to know how to connect with you, you could tell them, “I’m joesmith23@gmail.com or profile.to/joesmith23.”

When Facebook profiles become available in Google (which should be in a couple of weeks), it may make this tool less relevant. I may be able to search for “Adam Brown Coca Cola” and have his profile show up on top. But for now, I think this is a worthwhile application.

And this is why I typically accept friend requests from people who read my blog, because by seeing what they are doing and the applications they’re adding, I learn things I can apply myself. And I’m still about 4,900 behind Scoble.

For tips and background on using Facebook in business or in your non-profit or not-for-profit organization, click here or the Facebook Business tab above.

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It’s about Time(s)

timesselect free
The New York Times announces in tomorrow’s paper that its experiment with charging for a portion of its content on the web has come to an end:

What changed, The Times said, was that many more readers started coming to the site from search engines and links on other sites instead of coming directly to NYTimes.com. These indirect readers, unable to get access to articles behind the pay wall and less likely to pay subscription fees than the more loyal direct users, were seen as opportunities for more page views and increased advertising revenue.

“What wasn’t anticipated was the explosion in how much of our traffic would be generated by Google, by Yahoo and some others,” Ms. Schiller said.

The Times’s site has about 13 million unique visitors each month, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, far more than any other newspaper site. Ms. Schiller would not say how much increased Web traffic the paper expects by eliminating the charges, or how much additional ad revenue the move was expected to generate.

You can read the whole announcement here and get Jeff Jarvis’ take here.

I used to echo the standard line that “content is king.” If that were true, the Times wouldn’t be giving it away. The reality is relationships and conversations are what matter, and the TimesSelect wall was cutting off those relationships.Content is nobility at best (since users can generate it, too), not royalty.

In the city where I work — Rochester, Minnesota — the Post-Bulletin has likewise opened all of its content to non-subscribers. The reason: it was losing online ad revenue.

As Jarvis notes, it seems much more likely that the Wall Street Journal will soon open its online content to non-subscribers, especially under its new ownership.

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Arthur W. Page Society and Blue Oceans

Blue Oceans

I’ve been listening to an interesting book, Blue Ocean Strategy, over the last couple of weeks. It’s about “value innovation” that companies use to leave the “red oceans” of cutthroat, bloody competition and chart a course for wide-open “blue oceans” of market opportunity. As the authors’ web site puts it:

The aim of BOS is not to out-perform the competition in the existing industry, but to create new market space or a blue ocean, thereby making the competition irrelevant.

I’ll do a more in-depth review of this book when I’m done listening; it’s one of the most compelling business books I’ve encountered.

As the authors say, Good to Great is, well… great, but they argue that the real unit of analysis needs to be the strategic move. The main point is that companies that succeed in creating blue oceans of relatively competition-free markets identify product offerings that can attract the industry’s previous non-customers. They do this by finding key factors that, if present, would turn these non-customers into customers. Then they eliminate or reduce everything else, to provide great value at an attractive price.

Southwest Airlines, Apple, Casella wines, Novo Nordisk, Home Depot and Curves exercise clubs for women are among the profiled companies that followed this strategic approach.

In every case, the companies needed to think creatively and offer an innovative product or service to find these blue oceans.

In hindsight, their moves may seem obvious. But they weren’t obvious at the time. These companies resisted taking the customary but uncreative approach of benchmarking against competitors and trying to offer a little more at a slightly better price for increased market share, which would have been a recipe for commodity pricing and low profitability.

As the authors indicate, a specific kind of creativity is needed to unlock blue oceans. It finds value innovations that provide compelling value to customers and non-customers. It looks at why non-customers don’t buy from your industry, and what you can do to attract them.

I had planned to wait to do this review until I was done with the book (and I will finish it later), but I couldn’t resist posting this much when I got to the Ritz Carlton Laguna Niguel for the Arthur W. Page Society’s Annual Conference, and saw the beautiful blue ocean you see in the picture above. The camera phone obviously doesn’t do it justice.

We heard an interesting keynote this evening from Miles White, CEO of Abbott, who kicked off the conference. Laura Hall from Wieck Media will be writing the official conference blog, which will be linked to the Page Society web site. If that blog is available to non-Page members, I will link to it. The conference organizers have asked presenters to be provocative and controversial, and Mr. White certainly fulfilled that goal. As a CEO who has been through some high-profile public controversies, he brought home the fact that “red oceans” aren’t always made bloody by competition within your industry, but sometimes by the agendas of “stakeholder” groups.

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Highlights and Links 9-15-07

Here are some recent posts from others that I think are interesting, but haven’t blogged about myself:

And here are highlights from my posts of the last week:

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Congressional Creativity

town hall meeting creativity

Social media tools are just that: tools. What’s needed is creativity in how you use them to accomplish your organization’s goals. “Off-label” uses can be among the best uses, because they involve creative thinking to solve a business problem.

Here’s an “old-media” illustration of the concept from one of my previous jobs, when I worked for a member of Congress. Members, as they’re known, typically hold town hall meetings in the communities they serve. (For the humorously senseless, that previous link is a parody, not a definition.) Depending on the size of their congressional district, they may get to each community once or twice a year.

Traditionally, members have used the franking privilege (which lets them send mail using their signature as the postage stamp) to send postcards or letters to each household in the community. These notices must be approved by a bipartisan group called the Franking Commission to ensure that they aren’t political or campaign-oriented, but are related to the member’s official duties.

Some members also used commision-approved newspaper ads to announce their meetings.

One problem with town meetings is you typically get the same crowd each time you go to a community, especially if the meeting is during the day. Or rather, the same non-crowd. Often it’s just a handful of people, and they are either retired or political partisans. Not that there’s anything wrong with either category, but it doesn’t represent the broad cross-section of the population.

One day I heard that another member had received approval for a different approach. Instead of using mailers or newspaper ads, he got a script approved for radio ads to announce the meetings. Attendance in his district had been somewhat better.

That gave me an idea: what if instead of just advertising the meetings on the radio, we held them on the radio?

So was born the Radio Town Hall. We would purchase ads in the week before the meeting to announce that we would be having a live call-in town hall from the studio of KXYZ, and the station would donate the hour of airtime for the actual meeting as a public service.

This was quite successful; we typically had more callers during the hour than we had total people attending the in-person meetings. The callers also were more diverse and reflective of the community population. We knew that we were multiplying the number of people who were able to at least listen to the proceedings from home or work. And it was less expensive than sending a postcard to every address.

I’m not sure whether I was the father of the Radio Town Hall; someone else may have done that first. But I think I can claim paternity for another innovation: the networked, district-wide radio town hall.

One of the drawbacks that remained with the local radio town hall was we still could only be in each community twice a year. We wanted more frequent and regular interactions with constituents. So we approached nine stations from across the district and asked: “What if we did this every Friday for a half-hour?” We could give a brief update on the week’s proceedings in Congress, and then open up the phone lines for questions or comments. We hooked the stations together by a phone bridge to an 800 number.

The important point of this example is that it didn’t involve any technological breakthroughs. It was just a different way of using technology that hadn’t changed much since the break-up of AT&T and deregulation of phone services. The pieces were all there. It was just a matter of reorganizing how we used them.

The possibilities for such creative combinations in the Web 2.0 world are amazing. Blogs through WordPress.com or Blogger, social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, photo-sharing sites like Flickr, microblogging tools like Twitter, Jaiku and Pownce, VOIP services like Skype and transcription services like Jott are just some of the examples. They’re all free. And they increasingly can be mixed and matched so you can use them together through APIs that let them interchange data.

I’ve been out of the government service arena for about seven years now, and obviously the internet has become increasingly important in political campaigns, from macaca to online fundraising. All the presidential candidates have Facebook and MySpace pages. Barack Obama has 144,799 supporters on Facebook, and has an application that put his most recent campaign video on your personal profile. Hillary Clinton has just over 42,000 Facebook supporters. Rudy Giuliani trails badly in Facebook, with only 2,700. John McCain has 10,300 and Mitt Romney seems to be the Republican leader, at 17,679 supporters plus this Students for Mitt application (not many users, though.)

I would be interested in hearing how or whether any of these web 2.0 tools are being used in official government capacities, i.e. for taxpayer-funded offices, instead of just campaigns. It seems all of the politicians use Facebook for their campaigns, and it’s interesting that the “friends” are called “supporters” instead (and the 5,000 limit Robert Scoble encountered obviously doesn’t apply.)

Does Facebook charge these campaigns for that kind of account? If not, maybe Scoble should run for something so he could add more friends!

So how are you applying and combining these tools in creative ways to accomplish your business goals? Here’s a compilation of my thoughts on Facebook business use.
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