Posts tagged facebook
The “Be-Attitudes:” Creating influence on Facebook
Apr 4th
I wanted to let you all know that I’ve created a cool new eBook for you called “The Be-Attitudes: Creating Influence on Facebook.”
This was a fun project that involved 35 of my absolute social media heroes like Mitch Joel, Gini Dietrich, Liz Strauss, C.C. Chapman, Shelly Kramer, Jay Baer, Tom Webster, and Jessica Northey.
It’s short, it’s fun, it’s useful. What’s not to like?
This was a collaborative effort with Chuck Kent of Creative On Call, who did the great design work for the project. Be sure to let Chuck know that you appreciate his vision on this publication.
Enjoy the insights and don’t forget to share it with your friends.
Social media trends that are colliding in 2013
Jan 2nd
There is nothing more fun than thinking about how tech trends and humanity are colliding and there is no better time to write about it than the beginning of a new year. There are lots of things to be excited about, but here are a few of the trends that I see colliding in 2013 and what might happen when they do …
The optimized self
Colliding trends: 1) The cost of collecting, storing, and analyzing big data is dropping; 2) The desire to live smarter and healthier is going up.
New trend: The optimized self. The Nike Fuel Band
We will increasingly turn healthy living into a fun competition with daily objectives and rewards from brands. Huge sponsorship opportunities.
Facebook Financial Fatigue
Colliding trends: 1) Facebook faces unrelenting shareholder pressure to meet quarterly financial goals; 2) Consumers weary of new ad schemes
New trend: Facebook Fatigue. Didn’t you think the latest round of announcements, apologies and counter-announcements by Facebook-owned Instagram were bizarre?
This is a signal that Facebook will be aggressively pushing the limits of our tolerance for monetization schemes. As I wrote earlier this year, the most disruptive event in the development of the social web was the Facebook IPO. This is a company that now has to deliver the goods to shareholders every quarter, without fail, without end. And the only way to do this is to draw more money out of me and you.
I believe this will take the form of a constant experimentation with monetization models … some intrusive, some helpful … but at some point they will risk fatiguing users with the constant changes and increasingly prevalent sponsored posts from advertisers. Will there be a crunch point that opens the door for a more-user-friendly competitor?
Social learning creates crisis for traditional universities
Colliding trends: 1) Unaffordable college tuition; 2) Highly-endowed universities offering free online classes
New trend: Traditional universities in crisis. On top of ridiculous tuition costs, we are at a tipping point where many young people are wondering about the relevance of a college degree in many professions.
Coursera, a start-up online education company, has enrolled 1.35 million students in its free online courses since it began in early 2012. In just a few months it added 33 partner universities, including Brown, Columbia, and Weslyan, to provide more than 200 free “massive open online courses,” known as MOOCs.
Could there be a time in the near future where the richest universities simply give away their “content” for many undergraduate classes? Could this be the next wave of “content marketing” that may depend on monetization through adjacent products and services?
Universities are among the most inefficient and slowest-moving institutions on earth (speaking from experience!). They could be facing severe and rapid financial consequences if they don’t find a way to maintain their relevance in the digital age.
Entertain me
Colliding trends: 1) Internet information density 2) Even more information density
New trend: Emphasis on entertaining content. Let’s face it. It’s not that hard to be in the content marketing game today. But the bar for quality content is being raised day by day. What will it take to cut through? Entertainment!
Companies will have to continuously push for more interesting, timely and entertaining content to remain relevant. Here are the implications: The need for exceptional content creators will be high. The cost of content marketing is going to go up over time as we place more emphasis on design and entertainment value. Coke just turned their website into a news magazine. That’s where the market is heading. How are you going to stand out?
The singularity in sight?
Colliding trends: 1) Man-machine interface, 2) Rapidly-improving artificial intelligence.
New trend: The “singularity” is the emergence of greater-than-human superintelligence that has long been theorized by science fiction writers. It is a controversial and yet nonetheless fascinating topic. Is it coming into view?
A hyper-intelligent IBM computer (Watson) being training to be a medical doctor. For $1,500, Google glasses can take you another step toward the man-machine interface — ubiquitous information as part of our bodies. Mind-controlled exo-skeleton connected to humans are helping parapalegics to walk, and robots can be controlled by human brain implants. Japanese researchers are building humanoid robots with bones and muscles. Eureqa is a software system that uses evolutionary computing to discover laws of nature that scientists haven’t been able to solve on their own.
And the rate of progress is accelerating. Can we doubt that many of us will live to see the day when machines become self-aware?
A revolution in design
Colliding trends: 1) Rapid digital replacement of bulky physical assets; 2) A need for more compact urban living spaces
New trend: Empty design. This is a bit of a wild idea but I was moving a box of old records and began thinking how the bulk we used to have to deal with is going away — books, paper files, records and CD’s, huge stereo systems, TV components.
Think about the effect this must be having on the world of design. Most furniture and housing units are designed to maximize storage space but this is no longer a primary requirement. What will we do with all this extra space formerly devoted to shelves, closets and drawers? I think the consolidation of gadgets and cloud storage will revolutionize urban living.
OK, I’ve had my fun. Now it’s your turn! What do you think of these prognostications? What trends are you watching in 2013?
A cautionary tale: Putting your business in the hands of Facebook
Dec 5th
As I enjoyed a mega-popular Kebab restaurant on my street, I wondered about the “secret” of their success.
Certainly one factor is the kebab itself — a delicious jungle of salad, meat, and fresh herb sauce that melted like Angel cream on your tongue. Mmmmmm.
The other aspect of their success, and frankly the more interesting part for us, is their Facebook presence.
The young owner has built an impressive online audience. The fan page attracted thousands of fans from around the country who post pictures and stories about their Kebab experience. Wowzee.
The owners fuel their presence through the share of fun restaurant pictures (guests posing, entertaining quotes, food pics), unique YouTube videos, and sophisticated social media give-and-take.
For a physical food biz to rock the Internet like that, I was truly impressed and as I heard his story, I almost let the Kebab slip through my fingers because of the sheer astonishment.
But when I asked them about their business website, they just shrugged their shoulders and laughed. “Why waste time and money on building a website when you can do everything for free on Facebook ?”
I frowned.
“Because you don’t want to put all of your eggs in one basket … and a basket that you don’t own.”
But the conversation was already over, because the business had placed its entire faith on Facebook’s free fan page which they’ve labored over for almost two years. Argh.
A few weeks later, Facebook introduced the “promote your posts” feature.
Bang.
Needless to say, interactivity and visibility of the restaurant’s fanpage dropped drastically. Now they are finally building their business website.
Lesson learned.
Now this is not a slap against Facebook, but it’s a mistake that happens all the time …
Every big online company wants to lock you into their platform…
…offering you free space and an incredible existing audience.
- Amazon wants authors to mainly use their author’s page and discourages outside linking challenging
- DeviantArt wants to display your entire portfolio on their site
- Facebook “encourages” you to focus on building your fan page followers and marketing
And while their offers are all legitimate, they hide one important fact :
They make you totally dependable on them – and you’ll always be at their mercy.
Seriously, I cringe every time someone focuses heavily on building their online presence on a platform they don’t own.
Instead of worrying about getting email subscribers and customers, they obsess about getting likes and followers on Facebook and Twitter.
It may be accessible, free and powerful in the beginning, but what do you do if their platform rules change, which they eventually will?
- What if the company changes from free sharing to paid promotion ? (*cough* Facebook *cough)
- What if a big player platform loses out and becomes irrelevant ? (Myspace is no space now)
- What if a successful online brand creates a hyped platform that attracts more digital dust that visitors? (sorry Google)
No matter how much you luv a brand (and I like Google a lot), always be suspicious of their offers to rely on them for your business infrastructure and marketing presence. It’s their game, and we all know you’ll never win by rules that have been set by someone else.
You can actually WASTE years of building your brand on someone else’s platform and then lose out when the tide changes. Nothing, nothing and I mean NO-THING is more important than channeling your audience attraction to your self-hosted platform. That’s why I focus the majority of my time getting people on MY site, instead of getting likes and followers somehwere else.
Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr … and sometimes even Google+ … all help me extend my reach, but each of them could vanish in an instant and I’d still have my audience and profits.
The web is in constant flux. The big platforms of today could become the no man’s lands of tomorrow.
Placing your bet on an outlet you don’t own is the riskiest and dumbest thing you can do. Treat them for what they really are – marketing tools that attract visitors to your own online real estate where you’ll turn them into subscribers or even paying clients.
Don’t be a leaf in the wind – a brand whose long-term success you want to control is dependable on a platform you own. Agree or disagree?
Mars Dorian describes himself as a creative marketeer with a moon-melting passion for human potential and technology. You can follow his adventures at www.marsdorian.com/
Original illustrations by the author.
New research shows Facebook impacting behaviors in formative years
Apr 11th
Guest post by {grow} community member Tom Webster
My friend Mark Schaefer wrote a provocative piece in this very space yesterday about why Facebook will become the most dangerous company on earth. Perhaps he underestimated the problem.
One of Mark’s central observations — that a public company must find ways to grow, and Facebook’s only path to do that is through you and me — was particularly insightful and, for some, alarming. I’ve been studying Facebook for five years as a researcher, and after seeing our most recent data on social media behaviors I can tell you this: It’s scarier than you think.
In data that my company (Edison Research) just released yesterday, we found that 54% of all Americans age 12 and over have a personal profile on Facebook. This represents some modest growth over last year’s 51%, but not hockey-stick growth, so one might be tempted to see Facebook’s rise as slowing down, especially when that growth is trended over the past five years.
Not so fast. Numbers like “54%” don’t tell the full story.
First of all, it is important to know this: in the same report, we show the percentage of Americans 12+ who have a personal profile on any social network as 56%, and no other network is even remotely close to Facebook. When we talk about social media in this country we are talking about Facebook, plain and simple. The other thing to note about that 54% is it’s an average that masks some intriguing demographic disparities. Note the breakdown of social media usage by demographic below: (and remember, Facebook is used by 96+% of these Americans)
There are two important stories here.
The first speaks to the saturation that Mark wrote about, but in a different light. For the second year in a row, the growth for Facebook has really been people aged 45 and over. Indeed, the 12-34 demographic has largely been static since 2010. Certainly, it isn’t wrong to think that it’s pretty much all ashore that’s going ashore with younger demographics. And, as Mark correctly pointed out, as Facebook’s growth with older demos slows, the company will need to find ways to wring more data out of us in order to feed their shareholders’ insatiable hunger for growth.
The second story, however, is more subtle. As I noted earlier, usage by the 12-24′s haven’t really grown appreciably since 2010. But look where they are “stalled” — at an 80% adoption rate. Now, getting 80% of American youth to do anything is an unbelievably powerful construct to get your head around.
You can’t find any other media property remotely close to that. Heck, 80% of 12-24s don’t have smartphones, or landlines, or read the newspaper, let alone use any one brand or product. That 80% use of social media (i.e. Facebook) is remarkable, to say the least.
Eventually, those 24-year-olds turn 25, and those 34-year-olds turn 35, and so on. Gradually, as these younger demographics age into older demographics, they will take these learned behaviors with them. In that sense, it’s like smoking. Facebook has changed the behavior of Americans in their formative years, and they will take those learned behaviors with them.
With nearly 8 out of 10 young Americans making Facebook the hub of their online lives — and, thus, their lives – the ways in which they consume and share information have changed irrevocably.
Consider the number of Americans who have the “social habit” and check their profiles several times every day — while Facebook’s Edgerank algorithm prioritizes the information they receive based upon our personal interactions — and you can begin to see just how much sway Facebook holds over what we know as Americans. These 12-24s are literally growing up with the news and information they are exposed to being curated by their friends. And by Facebook.
As a parent I am keeping a wary eye on this. Garbage in, garbage out, as they say.
What do you think? Am I overreacting? What do you see in the data?
Tom Webster is Vice President of Strategy for Edison Research, a custom market research company best known as the sole providers of Exit Polling data during U.S. Elections for all the major news networks. Webster specializes in drawing insight from social media data, and writes about these topics at www.brandsavant.com. Follow him on Twitter at @Webby2001.
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You’re in marketing for one reason: Grow.
Grow your company, reputation, customers, impact, profits. Grow yourself. This is a community that will help. It will stretch your mind, connect you to fascinating people, and provide some fun along the way. I am so glad you’re here.
-Mark SchaeferFollow Mark
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