The Web Pitch

I first heard about David Kirkpatrick’s book during Robert Scoble’s interview of him at the 2010 F8 Facebook conference. Both Scoble and Kirkpatrick discussed how Facebook was evolving from a social networking platform to an identity platform. Facebook’s recent privacy issues, left me intrigued. Over the past eight months, I had found myself going to my Facebook profile less and less. Instead, I devoted my time in following interesting people on Twitter. So, learning more about Facebook’s plans during F8 and the interesting insights from Scoble and Kirkpatrick led me to purchase the book.

Amazon delivered it within a few short days and upon arrival, I immediately skimmed the Prologue. It became apparent early on, that Kirkpatrick was asked to write this book by Mark Zuckerberg, to pen an historical account on how Facebook started, Zuckerberg’s vision for Facebook and how his friends helped him to change the world by building an infectious social network.

The book itself consists of 17 chapters and is a very engaging read. The 333 pages are packed with some truly interesting insights, and I couldn’t help feeling in awe at the research time and commitment that Kirkpatrick put into this work. Hours of interviews with people in Zuckerberg’s inner circle are recalled and provide a great backdrop to the true story behind the world’s leading social network. Zuckerberg describes Facebook as “a social movement”, not as a publishing platform. He is motivated by a passion for radical transparency. Through the sharing of our data and making our lives publicly available, he believes it turns us into better people. Many people disagree and the recent controversy over privacy controls as only fuelled the fire on what Facebook is sharing about us.

Kirkpatrick has written the definitive book on the company so far. It left me with a deep under­standing of how the company thinks, its philosophies and it stunned me on its true power. Anyone who is interested in Facebook’s history will absolutely love this book, as will those who are interested in contemporary geek culture.

The Facebook Effect is a great weekend read, buy your copy of the book from Amazon here.

Last night, Facebook launched “Places”. You can see the announcement and launch video above. This new service from Facebook is similar to other Local Based Services (LBS) such as Foursquare and Gowalla, where you “Check in” at various locations and announce your presence.  Places allows you to see where your friends are and share your location in the real world. When you use Places, you’ll be able to see if any of your friends are currently checked in nearby and connect with them easily. You can check into nearby Places to tell your friends where you are, tag your friends in the Places you visit, and view comments your friends have made about the Places you visit.

Facebook is working with a small group of LBS developers including Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp and Booyah to build Places check ins into their own services. However, Facebook is also launching its own Places API, which means that Facebook will eventually become the key platform on which other location based applications will be be built upon. This is huge for Facebook and no doubt worrying for Twitter and Google.

Places works in conjunction with geo location supported smartphones and allows you to:

• Check in and your Places update, which will appear on the Places page, your friends’ News Feed and your Wall.
• Tag the friends you’re with so they can be part of your update.
• Appear in "Here Now" to friends and others nearby who are also checked in.
• Browse status updates of friends checked in nearby.

[Updated] Facebook releases, “Why to Check In?” video

It will be interesting to see the uptake of businesses on this new feature. To help them, Facebook has released a short guide to help advertisers, you can read the guide below.

Places creates a presence for your business’s physical store locations- encouraging your customers to share that they’ve visited your business by “checking in” to your Place. When your customer checks into your Place, these check-in stories can generate powerful, organic impressions in friends’ News Feeds, extending your brand’s reach to new customers.

As of writing, the new service is not available outside of the US. However, a global rollout is expected over the coming months. Use Places on touch.facebook.com or the Facebook for iPhone.

NB. Places is currently available on phones that support W3 geolocation.

Next up was Trevor Johnson, Head of Strategy and Planning at Facebook Europe. His talk was entitled, “Social Changes Everything”. He discussed how a burglar stopped to update his Facebook status during a robbery! He was subsequently caught. “Social” is indeed everywhere and Facebook is a big touch point for so many of us.

Facebook is used by more than 400 million active users. Users spend on average 16 minutes on the homepage, and spend 28 minutes updating their profile during the day. Facebook has now also overtaken Google as the Web’s number one web property. Here are some others stats that Trevor shared:

· #1 property on the internet (time spent)

· 5 billion+ pieces of content uploaded every week

· 6 billion+ minutes spent online every day

· 2 million+ photos per second

· 250+ platform apps with over 1m active users

· 800,000+ websites use Facebook Connect

· 2 billion+ chat messages

· 60 million+ status updates each day

At the heart of Facebook is “Identity”. “Social” is built on 3 pillars (Identity, Sharing and the Facebook Platform). Identity is core, with real people sharing and connecting with their social graphs. Facebook is particularly focussed on the growing importance of identity & authenticity. And, opportunities that are driven by [Facebook] platform and technology. [Jas Note] Interesting, if Facebook wants to become the Identity on the web what comes next, the wallet?

Social gaming has growing significantly, games such as Farmville now have over 80 million users. Companies such as Evian, even have branded “virtual goods” now. Of note, the virtual economy is anticipated to be worth 10 billion this year, Trevor said.

Finally, Trevor showed a great example on how MySpace is using Facebook Connect to connect fans with music artists, using a viral video campaign called “Fan Video”. Take a look at the one I created here. Viral videos are now becoming personalised!

Key Summary Points (Simple steps for Marketers)

1. Make it social, leverage the platform and social graph

2. Keep it simple, get started and iterate

3. Don’t think in campaigns and silos, develop a conversational calendar

4. Think differently – harness new opportunities and experiment

Could this be the reason why we are all leaving Facebook?

I’m a little scared this morning. I logged into Facebook and noticed the much rumoured Facebook IM has now launched!

Some days I just want to unplug!

Via Facebook Pages

Many businesses, from leading global brands to favourite local bands, are enjoying tremendous impact using Facebook Pages for free viral marketing. Check out some key strategies from the most successful businesses on Pages:

1) Regularly adding engaging and useful content
2) Letting fans participate in the conversation
3) Expanding their distribution with Facebook Ads

We’ve collected some of these winning strategies—along with the nuts of bolts of how to create and manage a Page—into an Insider’s Guide to Viral Marketing

Download the PDF here

Microsoft has announced a new partnership with five of the six most popular social networking sites. The partnership will allow users to more safely and easily share contacts with various Windows Live services.
Microsoft’s new partnership includes Facebook, Bebo, Hi5, LinkedIn, and Tagged. A notable absentee is MySpace. MySpace currently uses an older version of Microsoft’s Windows Live Contacts interoperability and will therefore likely be compatible at some point in the future.

Users of Microsoft’s Windows Live Messenger service can visit, www.invite2messenger.net, where they can invite contacts from Facebook to join Windows Live Messenger. (NB. Support for Hotmail, Bebo, LinkedIn, Hi5, and Tagged will be added in the weeks ahead).

Hat tip to Paul

Using the Flyers Pro application on Facebook, Paul has extrapolated some interesting statistics that are probably not available elsewhere. Thanks to Damien Mulley’s blog post for the idea.

Sex
6,407,580 people in the UK
2,320,200 are male
2,789,540 are female

Age
3,241,800 men between 18 and 25
1,565,520 women between 18 and 25
907,620 men between 25 and 35
1,006,420 women between 25 and 35
227,220 men and women between 35 and 60

Professional vs student
5,160,740 who are not students
295,260 are in High School
447,820 are in college
503,760 Alumni

As you can see, the ratio of professionals to students is extremely high. This is something that LinkedIn enthusiasts should take note of. It’s hardly surprising Facebook is targeting universities via their O2 relationship.

Relationship status
906,980 men registered as single
826,620 women registered as single
638,740 men in a relationship
907,400 women in a relationship
276,840 men who are married
414,740 women who are married

Religion
545,240 Liberals
251,320 Moderates
216,660 Conservatives

London network
1,503,979 people in the London network
577,380 are male
665,180 are female

The most popular posted items recently are

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | JK Rowling outs Dumbledore as gay

Al Pacino Characters John Milton from The Devil’s Advocate

BBC NEWS | World | South Asia | Monkey attack kills Delhi leader

How to be the Perfect Girlfriend

Sneak Peak of James Blunt on Sesame Street

BBC SPORT | Motorsport | Formula One | McLaren set to launch fuel appeal

Miss Teen USA 2007 – South Carolina answers a question

Spitting Image Never Met a Nice South African

Scrum.com – Rugby News, Results, and Action, including the Rugby World Cup, from Scrum, the best …

A fascinating interview with John Battelle and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg at this week’s Web 2.0 Summit. Mark elaborates on his interpretation of mapping the ‘Social Graph’ and confirms that Facebook is looking to develop an advertising model. The video is over 30 minutes long but worth watching to gain some insights into Facebook’s future direction. Also some great questions from Forrester’s Charlene Li!

Charlene Li over at Forrester has written a great post regarding the potential of using Facebook Flyers as a marketing tool. Facebook Flyers allow members to create small display ads that are shown in the left navigation bar within Facebook. If you are already using a Facebook group to promote your business, you may also want to think about using Facebook Flyers as a quick and efficient way to promote your business.

Incidentally, I’ve also wondered how much it costs to ‘sponsor’ a group on Facebook. There are already quite a few organisations who have sponsored groups and the numbers are growing rapidly. Unfortunately, Facebook doesn’t provide the costs on their site, so I decided to email them. Here is the response I received:

“Sponsored Groups provide marketers an opportunity to integrate into the Facebook group experience with a completely customized destination. Sponsored Group enables brand lovers and new customers to share common
interests around your brand, connect with their Facebook friends and other users, communicate frequently and honestly, and exchange thoughts experiences, and recommendations. Please note that there is a minimum
monthly spend of $50K with a 3 month commitment“.

So, if you have $150,000 spare, you might also want to look at sponsoring a Facebook group to promote your business.

I’ve linked to Charlene’s recent presentation which makes great reading.