Countdown to the Death of Facebook, Part Deux

Well it was about a year ago when Facebook fumbled the launch of Beacon, it’s follow-you-anywhere ad service. The public reaction was pretty heated, although as expected it blew over quickly. Facebook toned down it’s release, and many of the most threatening features (from a privacy advocate’s perspective) never came to be.

I do not see “Your brother Joe just bought a 50″ Sony Plasma television. Click here to buy one too!” links littering my FB feed. That just hasn’t happened. Facebook is not following my every move. (Well, maybe they are but Google is worse.)

But Facebook appears to be dying from another problem. Lack of revenue.

Given how much Facebook knows about me, you’d think they would be able to target some ads at me that are HIGHLY relevant. When I update my status to say “going to watch a movie tonight”, it should bombard me with movie ads and trailers. “I’m hungry” should be responded with ads for Pizza, Subs, McDonald’s and all the food under the sun.

Instead I get “Free Samples?” ads. Not sure what traits about me suggest I am likely to give up my personal information in return for a tiny pouch of shampoo. And of course the ubiquitous “Find Sexy Singles Online” ads. Facebook knows I’m married – not sure why I am the target demographic for those ads.

Maybe I turned the privacy settings too high? Maybe there’s somewhere in the settings that lets me avoid these useless bits of junk that I would never in a million years click. I’ve probably screwed myself out of some nice fast food discounts because of my own paranoia.

No the truth of the matter is that Facebook has millions of pages to serve daily. I think I read they have surpassed or matched MySpace in traffic according to some metrics. Millions of pages, and very few of those ads get clicked. Most of them are probably mistakes where the user thought they were clicking something useful and their finger slipped and they clicked an ad by mistake. 

As it stands now, Facebook can never monitize it’s emerging dominance in this space. Applications have been killed off for the most part. They’re hidden away on some distant tab under some unrelated section somewhere. And despite it’s continuing popularity, they have no ability to turn that in cash.

Well, at least not billions and billions that they need to justify their costs. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying they have $0 revenue. I’m saying their revenue can in no way cover their costs, and since people don’t go to Facebook to click ads it never ever will.

Except by accident.

Twitter On Its Way Out?

It’s amazing to me, but the buzz around the Internet over the last couple of weeks has been over a new Twitter-like site called FriendFeed.

Jason Calacanis, who is a highly-respected entrepreneur in the new social media space has written that FriendFeed is actually better than Twitter feature wise, and has suffered none of the down-time that Twitter has.

Leo Laporte, who has one of the largest followings on Twitter with 46,000 followers, says he doesn’t use Twitter much any more. That he uses other tools like FriendFeed and Twirhl that link into Twitter.

It seems that Twitter is on its way out with the highest-profile users. Now I’m not going to call for the “death” of Twitter. But the scenario I see happening is that Twitter will become the underlying infrastructure and people will prefer to use other tools to interact with the service instead of the web site Twitter provides.

Now obviously if Twitter continues to have stability problems with it’s infrastructure, then other services will come along (and they have) to fill the void. If Twitter @ replies have been taken offline for a bit, people will start using another commenting system.

From everything I have heard about FriendFeed, it has some very compelling features Twitter doesn’t have. Time will tell if this new service will take root and take over. But it might not be that much time before we know. Stay tuned.

(Add me on twitter, at http://www.twitter.com/scottjduffy or FriendFeed at http://www.friendfeed.com/scottjduffy )

Tom Peters is a God

Tom Peters is a world-renowned writer, sparking imagination and creativity. This is from a couple of years ago, but it’s still as relevant today as it was in 2005.

 

100 WAYS TO SUCCEED #39:

BLOG AS IF YOUR LIFE DEPENDED ON IT!

 

Blogging, I firmly believe, is the premier emergent marketing-brandbuilding-lovemark-creating tool of our times! It is the premier way to have intimate-engaging-informative-WOWing “conversations” with Clients and prospects! This all goes double for small enterprises and niche enterprises; and goes triple for the Professional Services; and works wonders in the Public Sector as well.

 

Do you see Blogging in these exalted lights? If not, why not? Please…Blog-As-If-Your-Professional-Success-Depended-On-It. (Hint: I think it does.)

 

Begin today! Appoint yourself Chief Blogging officer. Or, better yet, Chief Intimate Client Conversations Officer!

 

 

Twitter Five Months Later

Way back in January, I wrote about Twitter as a new type of marketing medium.

I mentioned that Robert Scoble had 5000 followers at the time. Well he now has 26,000 followers. That is 26,000 people who regularly read the short 140-character posts that he puts out. He’s not even the biggest any more. Leo Laporte has 40,000 followers.

By the way, if you want to follow me on twitter, go to http://www.twitter.com/scottjduffy and click follow.

Twitter has suffered technical problems caused by its rapid growth and popularity. The site is down all the time, or painfully slow. They are working on it. They recently got a ton of funding to make it better. But they don’t seem to be working on it very fast.

Anyways, the power of using twitter to broadcast to your most loyal fans has grown. Moreso than just a blog, twitter is turning out to be a conversation. People are twittering AT people. And they are getting answers.

For instance, the communications giant Comcast has someone on twitter – comcastcares. His name is Frank, and he is paid by Comcast to monitor twitter, and help customers having problems with their service out. He has been getting a lot of good reviews, helping solve customer problems. One guy. Single-handedly raising Comcast’s repuation among the leading bloggers and Internet thought-leaders who use twitter.

When The Press Does The Work For You

Everyone and their grandmother is now expecting Apple to release a new iPhone in the coming days – dubbed the 3G iPhone. Expect thousands of old, Edge-network iPhones to show up on Craig’s List or eBay the moment the new phone is announced.

The remarkable thing about this event is that we are even talking about it. Honestly, how jealous is Motorola and Nokia right now at Apple? Motorola can come out with the RAZR2 and barely get a mention in the technology press. Sure, they can get a few mentions when the product officially rolls out… but can they get this?

From Forbes:

The real action, however, took place behind the building–and could only be seen from the parking lot of an adjacent company on the other side of a shallow creek. Workers hustled to maneuver pallets of the brown boxes around trucks from FedEx and Advanced Logistics. The area was crowded with more than a dozen empty trailers from “Xtra Lease” and others.

All around the trucks, workers wheeled around pallets of the plain brown boxes, some using forklifts, others with hydraulic dollies. A security guard working for the company across the creek from Quanta’s facility approached this reporter before a thorough survey could be made.
…
The plain brown boxes could contain almost anything, of course: Apple’s mysterious new tablet computers, new Apple notebooks, even a product for one of Quanta’s other customers. Or the boxes could be bursting with dozens of the stylish cartons Apple wraps around its iPhones.

Reporters are actually staking out the warehouses of anonymous suppliers for Apple. Seeing dozens of unmarked brown boxes, they automatically begin speculating on the contents. Could be another Apple device other than an iPhone, or it could be from other customers. But of course, the reporter is only there because he wants the scoop that it’s the new iPhone.

How does Apple pull this off? A combination of huge demand for it’s products (10 million iPhones sold) and their notorious secrecy. Most companies are trying to announce their products weeks in advance, to get people excited at the prospect of owning one. Apple doesn’t even mention it, doesn’t even leak any bits, announces the product at a developer’s conference and there will be line ups around the block the next day. Genius.

Crowdsourcing: Using the Power of the Masses

One of the hottest buzzwords of The Web starting in September 2005 - one which I am still surprised is in use and has not been replaced – is “Web 2.0″. Web 2.0 was coined by publisher Tim O’Reilly to describe the “second generation” of web sites and businesses. As buzzwords usually are, many companies have become associated with the term:

• Digg.com is the web 2.0 approach to keeping up with technology and other news. Slashdot is the web 1.0 approach.
• Flickr is the web 2.0 approach to sharing photos. Yahoo Photos is the web 1.0 approach.
• Google Mail is the web 2.0 approach to email. Hotmail (the old version) is the web 1.0 approach.

People seem to be throwing around the term Web 2.0 like rice at a wedding. Every new web business these days has to have a web 2.0 angle. But what is Web 2.0 exactly? Is there a way to define it, or has the term become so misused as to become meaningless?

To me, the difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 can be convered by the following four things:

1. Emphasis on usability: less screen clutter, bigger fonts, pretty pastel colors, AJAX elements. An overall easier and more intuitive experience for customers
2. New business models, particularly the rise of freemiums: core features are free and a small one-time or monthly payment for more features. And yes you can make a profit just on Google Ads.
3. Crowdsourcing: let your users create your content. No paid editors and authors, just user submissions and voting. Or create tools that allow users to create and store their OWN content online. To do lists, project management software, shared bookmarks, email. Think YouTube and Flickr.
4. Social networking: enabling a community of web site users to exist with sophisticated user profiles, friends, voting, and seeing what your friends are doing on the site.

Out of those four, crowdsourcing has been one of the biggest trends in web 2.0. Sites like Newsvine and Squidoo lets users write and submit stories. Flickr and YouTube allow them to post their pictures and videos for all to share. Digg allows users to determine what stories hit the home page.

And what is Facebook and MySpace except places that allow users to create content (their profiles) and interact? Those sites don’t have any actual content except for what the users create. Facebook is crowdsourced!

Squidoo

What is Squidoo? It defines itself as a”fast and free way to build a web page about a topic you’re passionate about”.

There are three things interesting about Squidoo (for me):

• It was started by marketing guru Seth Godin, who has written some very interesting marketing books
• It’s a site that pays you a portion of the advertising revenue on pages you create (revenue sharing)
• I simply love the idea: create pages about topics you’re passionate about

Squidoo can defintely be used for marketing. For one, like any web page, you can use your Squidoo page to direct customers to your own product or service web site. If you create a Lens (what they call a web page on Squidoo) on digital cameras, you can definitely send people to your digital camera web site after giving them a decent taste of all the information you can provide on digital cameras.

Say you’re a web developer. Why not create a Squidoo page on “the best web design tools”? That Lens contains a link to your personal web site. It has the result of building up your reputation as an expert in the field, adds another incoming link to your site, and even directs people interested in web development tools to you as potential customers.

Marketing with Twitter

Twitter (see www.twitter.com) is a type of blogging tool that focuses on extremely short messages. Its akin to a blog that is only one sentence long. The maximum length of a twitter post is 140 characters.

People have been mostly using the technology to post “What I am doing now” type information. Some examples of twitter messages (known affectionately as tweets):

• “I’m at SXSW today”
• “Eating lunch, clam chowder”
• “Has anyone heard about kijiji? http://www.kijiji.ca/ Really cool.”

So you know I assume how blogging can be used to market to your current or potential future customers. But can you market over twitter with such small messages? You sure can.

The most common type of marketing over twitter happens with a conversation. On twitter, its very easy to follow other people. So I can subscribe to your twitter feed, another persons, and perhaps even subscribe to hundreds of peoples feeds. Then when Robert posts “Has anyone seen this cool thing?”, I can post “@Robert: yep, its cool. did you try the other thing?” And Robert can see that and respond “@Scott: oh wow, didn’t know that. thx”.

And basically everyone who subscribes to Roberts feed and to my feed can see this conversation.

The marketing happens because you can encourage personal and short responses to your posts. Its not cumbersome as email, blog posts, blog comments, etc. It’s short and concise, and can even be done as a text message from or too your cell phone because its the perfect size for something like that.

So from the corproate perspective, you can post a short question to your customers, and watch their short answers roll in. Or post a thought or link, and watch other peoples thoughts and links come back to you. And that can happen on a truly huge scale, because of the lightweightness of it. Robert Scoble currently watches about 5000 people on twitter, and has that many watching him.

I don’t think he could read 5000 RSS blogs, or 5000 emails, or almost any other form of conversation in a day. And even if he did, could he also be an active participant in so many too?

Thinking Like a Customer

It’s the holiday season, and over the next few days, a billion or so people around the world will be opening billions of packages. Smiles and good cheer all around.

This makes me wonder whether package designers spend enough time thinking like a customer opening the product. It seems like the logistics folks often have the largest say in package design. How does it fit on the shelf, and how can we make it easy for retailers to stock?

If you’ve ever opened an Apple iPod, you will know that the package design team at Apple have given a lot of thought to the customer opening the product. Opening an iPod is an “experience”. People actually post photos to the web of each stage of opening a new iPod box.

Have you ever opened a hard plastic package, for example containing audio earphones? You can’t open this type of package with your hands – its impossible. Even a pen or other sharp metal object would not help much getting the package open. To open such a package, you NEED scissors. It takes 10 minutes to open such a package even with scissors, and when you’re done, the package is destroyed.

So what is the purpose of such a negative customer experience? Why do <insert electronics category here> manufacturers make their products so hard to open, and leave you with a package that’s in several pieces?

I suspect there are two reasons, neither of which are customer-focused. One, to prevent in store theft. Making it very difficult to get at the small product inside, forcing potential theives to have to try to get the entire package out of the store.

The other reason would to discourage returns. Imagine if you could buy something, take it home, open it, try it out, and if you’re not satisfied with it, take it back to the store for a full refund. That costs the store money, and maufacturers as well I bet, so one of their solutions is to discourage returns. By making you destroy the package while opening it, they are effectively saying, there’s now no way you can return this in the original condition. And in fact, since the package ends up in little pieces, you are likely to throw the packaging away immediately after opening, thereby making it impossible for you to return if you change your mind a few days later.

This, I suspect, is the main reason. But perhaps I am just a natural skeptic when it comes to these things.

Nissan in SecondLife

I had the chance to try out the Nissan sim in SecondLife for the first time in a long time.

For those that don’t know, Nissan Motor has two servers in SecondLife. Those servers are mostly just a car track that you can use to drive a Nissan vehicle around.

I’m not sure how popular this campaign has been, although this is the one of the big dtractions about marketing inside secondlife. If Nissan gets 100 people a day visiting their servers, driving their cars around a small track, is it worth it? Is it worth the investment when they can spend the same amount of money on a big newspaper advertisement and get 100,000 daily readers at once?

I believe it is often worth it. Nissan is engaging its customers and potential customers on a more interactive level within SL. You can buy an ad in a newspaper that has 100,000 subscribers, but how many of those people see the ad? If 1,000 people see the ad, how many people spend more than 10 seconds look at it? Not many. Maybe 1 or 2. So the money that Nissan is spending to allow SecondLife residents to interact with this products and experience their brand reaches a lot more people than the same money spent on a billboard, TV commercial or newspaper ad.