SMUG Social Media University Global

“The Social Graph” Makes Facebook “Business” Friends Inevitable

Facebook will have a way of enabling its users to create various levels of “friendship.” It’s inevitable, and not just because of the speculation on the Inside Facebook blog.

I don’t know how to interpret the new API methods uncovered in that post and what the code really means, but this news does seem to indicate that Facebook is on its way to developing what Nick O’Neill calls Facebook’s Killer Feature. I’ve written previously about some work-arounds for this problem of personal and professional friends being all in one group, and how segregating them would be essential to widespread adoption of Facebook for B2B networking.

This recent speculation only suggests to me that the new feature enabling classes of friends, which would be a serious blow to LinkedIn, may be coming sooner than I had expected. But whatever the timing, I am absolutely convinced that Facebook will have this feature.
Why? Because it is essential for Facebook to have if it wants to achieve its goal of representing what Mark Zuckerberg calls “the social graph” within Facebook. Zuckerberg says the social graph exists in reality, and Facebook is just making it visible.

Well, the reality is people have different kinds of relationships. Some are strictly personal. Others are professional or business-related. If Facebook is to accurately mirror The Social Graph, it must have a way of distinguishing between these kinds of relationships.

You can do this already to some extent through the limited profile and by using groups, but that’s the MacGyver way. It needs to be easy. Facebook needs to make maintaining these “arms length” relationships as simple as the regular “friend” interactions.

It will, because continuing its “astonishing” growth and maturing into a true information-sharing utility depends on it. Zuckerberg knows it. He’s a smart guy. Like the United Way commercial used to say about Minnesota Vikings Center Matt Birk, “He went to Harvard.”

Technorati: Facebook, LinkedIn, Business, Friends, Social Graph, Inside Facebook, AllFacebook, Nick O’Neill, B2B, Professional, Matt Birk, Minnesota Vikings

Facebook in USA Today

Many in the mainstream media have written articles recently about Facebook that are helping to make it, well…mainstream. Both Newsweek and TIME have had major articles in the last couple of weeks, and here are excerpts from a couple more stories about Facebook in USA Today from the last few days. Click the title links to read the whole articles.

Travelers arrive at Facebook

Since opening its virtual doors last fall to anyone with an e-mail address, Facebook has graduated to more than 37 million users, and the 25-and-over crowd is its fastest-growing demographic.

A key factor in the site’s rapid ascent: development of more than 3,000 free, third-party software applications that let Facebook “friends” trade everything from travel tips, Scrabble scores and books they’re reading to hedge fund advice via a fantasy stock exchange.

The most popular of Facebook’s 100-odd travel applications, downloaded by more than 2.6 million members since its launch by a freelance Web developer in June, is Where I’ve Been — a map that highlights places users have been to, lived in and hope to visit. The interactive map includes a smattering of facts for each destination.

Facebook plans to offer targeted ads

Social-networking site Facebook is ramping up efforts on a major new advertising plan that would let marketers tailor ads for the millions of Facebook customers who provide a mountain of information about themselves on the site, according to major advertisers and analysts briefed on the system.

But the potential volume of ads, and their proximity to the personal content of customers, could stir privacy concerns, say tech and advertising analysts.

Facebook’s new format may display more prominent ads on the news feed — a list of updates on the activities of a user’s Facebook friends, according to those briefed on the new system. Facebook ads also currently appear as banners on the left-hand and bottom borders of Facebook pages.

Eventually, Facebook hopes to refine the system to deliver ads based on users’ interests, says Debra Aho Williamson, senior analyst at market researcher eMarketer.

Obviously, Facebook has to walk a fine line. If it does this right, it will be seen as a service, helping people find goods and services that interest them. It reminds me of David’s Bridal and its arrangements with various vendors that provide special offers to its wedding-dress customers. The feedback I heard at a recent seminar was that brides-who-had-been were thankful to David’s for “all the bonus goodies you get when you buy your wedding dress there.”

If Facebook does the advertising tastefully, in keeping with its current understated approach, it can create similar feelings among its users. It will be much better if it can grow its page views and time spent, with a light sprinkling of ads, instead of killing the golden goose with a heavy-handed mix. Better to triple the user base in the next year (which is not at all out of the question based on current growth trends) with the same advertising level than to ratchet up the advertising and slow the growth.
Technorati: Facebook, USA Today, Advertising, Marketing, travel applications, Facebook platform

When Labor Day almost WAS “Labor” Day

A personal note as I wind up the month and prepare to unplug from the grid for a few days.

Sixteen years ago today my youngest daughter, Ruth, was born. That’s why I took the day off from work, and look forward to a four-day weekend, including Labor Day. Ruthie arrived three weeks early, and 50 weeks after her sister, Rebekah. So, for the next two weeks, I have two Sweet 16 daughters. Here they are on either side of their older sister, Rachel, at her wedding last December:

labor day

When my wife Lisa was pregnant with either Rebekah or Ruth (I can’t remember which), I told her that maybe this year Labor Day really would be “Labor” day. She didn’t think that was particularly funny.
With one born on August 31 and the other September 14, we also have the unusual and maybe even unique distinction of having two daughters, not twins, in the same class in school. Others have kids who are the same age for a few weeks each year, but Ruthie beat the September 1 deadline to join Rebekah in the Class of 2009 by three hours.

Lisa and I are thankful for the blessings we have in these girls and their four siblings (two older and two younger), and look forward to a great, long weekend with family and friends.

Labor Day blessings to you all.

Technorati: Labor Day, Labor

Blogs for PR Clip Reporting

My previous post may have seemed a little off-topic, because it was essentially a recap of some coverage of a news release, with links to several of the stories. In reality, it was a concrete example of this PR tip, how you can use blogs for PR clip reporting. This is another way you can use social media tools to accomplish business objectives more effectively than through last-generation tools like email.

In my work with the National Media Relations and New Media team at Mayo Clinic, we regularly distribute news releases about findings of Mayo Clinic’s researchers as they appear in peer-reviewed scientific journals. Examples of these are general medical journals like Journal of the American Medical Association, New England Journal of Medicine or Mayo Clinic Proceedings, basic science-oriented journals like Science, PNAS or Nature or others that are devoted to a particular medical specialty such as Circulation or Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

When we do a news release like this one on ovary removal and its correlation with an increased risk of dementia, we want to report results on the news coverage to the physicians and researchers involved, and to leaders of their department and staff members in our Department of Public Affairs.

Typically, if the story involves one major broadcast network or a newspaper like USA Today or the New York Times, we can just send an email with the link to the story. In this case, because of the extent of coverage, that would have been unwieldy.
When we get extraordinary response, we’re starting to use a blog on our intranet to communicate with our key internal groups. We can have links to some of the key stories, and can compile them all in one place to make it convenient for people who are interested to get a feel for the nature and extent of coverage. It also gives them a single link to a blog post that they can copy and paste into an email message to share with colleagues.

We have some key external groups we want to keep informed about the news, too. Unfortunately, because they don’t have access behind our IT firewall, they can’t get to our internal blog. So, here’s an external version of what we placed on our internal blog, which highlights some of the exceptional news coverage Dr. Walter Rocca’s study in Neurology received.

A blog is not an efficient way to produce a comprehensive PR clip report; other services are better for that. And it only works for summarizing on-line coverage. But to quickly do a “show and tell” report, sifting through and identifying key coverage and adding commentary and context, a blog is hard to beat. For this time I just assembled the highlights in my personal blog; we may want to consider developing an external blog for this purpose. It wouldn’t be hard, or expensive, to do.

Technorati: PR, Clip Reports, Media Relations, Blog, Clips, measurement, PR measurement, Public Relations