Damien Mulley

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Alexia coined the phrase and I like it so much I bought the company, er, no I mean I liked it so much I stole the term too. I have a few groups I created on Facebook, one of which is the Dear L Drivers group. I didn’t look at it for a whole while and next thing there’s 600 people in the group. I’d love to see 1000 or 2000 people in the group and getting them to engage with each other. But. The evil side of my mostly evil brain was thinking “Couldn’t these groups be used by spammers or sneaky sellers to make money?”.

For example, imagine if a car parts company offered me money to to send a message to all members with some special deal they were offering? Does Facebook say no to this? Imagine if some insurance company offered to buy into the group and take it over and offer cheap insurance to the most young members of the group? What could Facebook do about it besides close the group? Not worth suing the insurance company. There’s probably something in the terms and conditions to prevent this, maybe a law nerd can check it out? I can just see the Pay for Post opportunists coming along and doing something like this. Build something up and then flip it. Isn’t this the business model of so many web apps these days? Build up a massive audience and make money by selling it to Google and the like?

Just look at all the groups that instantly pop up in Facebook surrounding a news event. Within minutes/hours there was a group for Benazir Bhuto and her murder. It currently has 800+ members. I wonder will we see spam groups or “sgroups” start popping up more and more just to get the attention of people in Facebook who love nothing better than to join a group on something that’s in the news? Big event, get people signed up and then sell them out. Or how about creating a “silly” or “fun” group on Facebook such as the I Use my Cell Phone to See in the Dark Group which has over 400,000 members. Imagine flipping that? How much would people pay for access to those people? I wonder are Facebook going to start offering some revenue share deal with these groups actually? That’s one way of stopping potential abuse. Many of these groups have been created by bored college students. But college students are idealists and would never sell out for beer and pizza money so we’re safe there…

But but, we can do positive things too. I freewheeled about this over and Twitter and JP Rangaswami came back with a few very salient points:
Am I really the owner?

“Who owns the group?”. The administrator? The initiator? I would have thought “its members”

Your group or community won’t last long if you sell them off:

as Julius Henry said all those years ago, I wouldn’t want to belong to a group who sold me as a member.

But he also points out that buying or hiring a creator is about their potential:

Ah but. “a salesman is only as good as his NEXT sale”. So when I buy a creator, it is for what she WILL DO, not what she DID.

And that there is a positive way to make money from a group/community you brought together. Get yourself noticed and get experience in looking after a group like that and don’t sell out, don’t do sneaky ads, instead use your skills to gather a community for a company or other interested party. It’s harder to do than just selling out though but I hope it becomes the norm. They’re now refering to people that do this as “community managers” which is a term that bothers me a bit and it’s not just me!

So, being an evil and making money is still a choice. With pay per post tanking, I really do wonder will their people start ruining Facebook too?

We all have bad memories of IPOs in Ireland, eircom’s one in particular. It’s looking likely that Facebook in the near future will go the IPO route. Facebook, not one for doing things the conventional way, even if the convention is about 3 years old could do something unexpected again. Imagine if they gave the members of Facebook options to be shareholders? They already listen to their people and even after all the hulabaloo over Beacon (which was more about a lameass “democrat” organisation finding a new target. MoveOn.org you’re tossers) and other issues, they amended things to keep people happy, they just caught Google out by checkmating them on OpenSocial and they have a few more clever things on the radar to make their users happy and make money from it.

It almost makes sense they’ll do what Google did and have a dutch style IPO but also offer cheaper shares to their users or give them options to buy.

What would that do to their stock though? Would 50Million shareholders mean that their whims, if tweaked, could see the stock go up and down like a yoyo or would it mean they just ensured 50M people are devoted to making the site work and recruiting everyone else? Would the stock would remain very stable as each shareholder feels they have a connection to each other and the Facebook board? What about the traditional institutional investors?

Whatever whichway, I bet the Facebook IPO will be fun.

Via Techcrunch and Facebook Dev blog:

Google Open what?

CEO Michael Birch says that it has been developing these parallel languages for about five months and in communication with Facebook itself, which has been assisting Bebo in its efforts to essentially adopt its platform.

This is very very important for Ireland since Bebo is still the main social networking site here. I still believe Facebook is where it’s at in terms of social networks and current figures show that Facebook now stands at 190k+ users in Ireland but as of a few weeks time applications like Scrabulous can be installed on Bebo. Scrabulous has more mindshare than Facebook it seems and this comes from FB people! If you are an application developer it’s all good as Bebo is mirroring the application markup language that Facebook is using. What is probably most important is that this will allow cross-platform interaction. Play scrabulous via Facebook against your kid brother on Bebo. If you’re a business that wants to reach a large audience and saw Facebook as easier to build for, well now all that’s changed again. Now you don’t have to pay thousands to have your application approved by Bebo and accessed by their userbase. I wonder what those companies will say who paid a lot to load their applications onto Bebo?

One wonders will we see the same happen with other social networking sites? I think we will. Great move by Bebo but this is a coup for Facebook. They just open-socialed Open Social. Of course every other social network will want Facebook applications to be installed on their site and ways to interlink with Facebook’s 50Million users. Next year they’ll have 100Million on the site. I assume we’ll soon see cross-network IM, chat, gaming and VOIP and all done before Open Social.

I’m betting a tenner the werewolves and ninjas applications will be the most popular though.

Gotta love this. So you’re a Fianna Fáil councillor. You’re on Facebook, like we all are.

You install a Facebook application your mates sent which asks you what drug are you and it says you’re cocaine. Jesus, imagine if anyone saw your public profile and you left that there, they’d blog it or something. Fucking bloggers. And now we throw in the default joke about Fianna Fáil always loving their Charlie. You know, this may not be best time to do that quiz.

Above is what it looks like and below is the text.

I’m “Cocaine”!

You’re a smooth talker and a straight shooter and other cliches used by business men in the 1980s. You like the nightlife, and the morning life, and even the early afternoon life. You are upset your friends can’t party as long as you can. That’s okay - you can just buy new friends.

Saying that though, Malcolm’s mates say he is the most trustworthy of all of them. Oh and he drinks the most:

So you want to run ads on Facebook for your business, whatever that business is. Thanks to social ads from Facebook you can target 167,000 people in Ireland that currently use the service in the same way that Google’s ad system allowed you to target ads but even better than Google you can almost be sniper-like on how you target the ads. You can target by age, gender, work status, relationship status, college education and interests, something Google can’t quite do yet. (though when the next iterations of Open Social happen, they will)

In this walkthrough, let’s present were the typical snobby TCD student who can make an almost professional career of sneering at UCD students. So you’ve decided you want to advertise to UCD folks. All you need is a credit card and to spend a minimum of five dollars on your ad campaign.

1. You need to decide what your ad is going to be. For this example the Trinners student is going to advertise jobs in McDonald’s to those in UCD.

2. So first go to Facebook.com/ads

3. Click on the big green button!

4. Choose what website address you want to be clicked. Here it’s the job page on www.McDonalds.ie

5. From here choose your audience. We picked 18-25 year olds that attend UCD.

6. It said there were circa 1380 people from UCD on Facebook:

7. Then write your ad and you can also include an image. The McDonald’s logo was chosen.

8. You can also see a preview of what the ad will look like:

9a. After this you can choose how much is to be spent and what times the ad will be shown. You can also pay per click or by views:

Update: Left out this bit:

9b. If you choose pay per views you have the option of also display the ad in the News Feed of people, something which will probably get you a lot more clicks and views since people actively scan and read their News Feed.

10. Finally, review the campaign and pay up and off you go.

Happy annoying people or er doing business.

Remember though that just because you can advertise and target specific people does not mean that you will get a lot of click throughs. You have to work hard on writing good copy and using good images to get the attention of a Facebook public that doesn’t seem to pay too much attention to ads. While I do think general advertising is becoming disintermediated, in the end if the web is truely democratic/equal and everyone knows SEO, everyone blogs and tells the story of the product and gets the cluetrain, it will again come down to branding and marketing professionals to help make your product the most liked product out there. Not everyone out there can work on making global microbrands so I forsee ad agencies and marketing companies training and educating people on how to do it right and of course helping those too busy to do it themselves.

Rob mentioned recently the dodgy ads he was getting in Facebook. So with their new highly targeted ad system, here’s the type of ads I’m getting on Facebook.

This seems just to be targeted to Ireland

Same with this, nowhere did I say I was into guys. Targeted to all males in Ireland?

Seems like this is targeted just to Cork? Though they have a Dublin office too.

Targeted to all of Ireland?

But before I give my opinion on this: Microsoft have no input into this at all. Holy Cow. This is a competing ad platform to the existing one running on Facebook that Microsoft manages. While the 240 Million dollars is small change for Microsoft, bloody hell, all they got was access to banner advertising while Facebook has control of a more highly targeted system?

Thanks to the analysis of Jeremiah Owyang on his blog I was able to make some kind of sense of what this ad system actually does.

Executive summary

To me this system appears to be the start of Vendor Relationship Marketing though in a kludgy manner. The new Facebook system allows a company or individual to basically create a profile or group for their brand or product. Instead of “friending” this brand, a person “Fans” this profile and it is listed under their friends listing. The profile owner though can serve ads on your profile. They can also show ads on your news feed when you interact with them on their profile. Also external sites can advertise in your feed when you interact with them e.g. Your feed will say you bought a book from Amazon and under it Amazon might offer you 5% off the same book OR a book that is more tailored to your preferences as with the ad system it caters to your profile. The last bit has the most potential.

The new Facebook Ad Platform is broken into four areas: Social Ads, Facebook Pages, Facebook Beacon and Facebook Insights

Facebook Social Ads:

Very much just an iteration on Facebook Flyers but they allow you to drill down and be even more specific who you can target, age, sex, workplace, college, likes and dislikes etc. Quite targeted but these via Facebook Pages and outside webpages allow you to place ads in the News Feeds of people. They do this by showing ads under the actions of what friends have done with facebook Pages or Facebook Partner websites.

This is pretty much your friend giving permission for you to put an ad on their friend’s News Feed. Not permission marketing as such is it? How many friends will you dump on Facebook when this kicks in wholesale?

Facebook pages:

These are profiles for companies or products. People “friend” or rather “fan” your Facebook Page. It works very much like a profile with a few exceptions. When you add a Facebook Page it goes into the Fan section on your own profile.

This is the screenshot of adding Jeremiah’s Facebook page:

And this is how it looks on my Facebook profile:

All your friends also see this add in their news feed. This is now called a “social story”. When you interact with the Facebook Page by leaving comments and uploading photos and all that, that too goes into your news feed. Just like interacting with a friend. Each of the “social stories” has a link back to the Facebook Page so it is a handy way of increasing traffic to a profile. Then the Social Ads kick in. So you see this on the News Feed and under it is an ad for whatever that brand is BUT it is also tailored, almost sniper-like to your Facebook profile. So people in Ireland might see a different ad to someone in the UK or men see different ones to women.

Facebook Beacon

This is clever. I like this. This is for external websites who want to get a foot in the door of Facebook. Like the example above. Buy a book from Amazon and it gets listed in the news feed of that Facebook member and you can attach an ad to it. Want 5% off the book John just bought? This is good in that to start with it won’t get astroturfed. It will allow us nosey human beings to see what people bought or what they did with external websites while that site can pique your interest with an offer. And that offer is tailored to your demographic.

Facebook Insights

This is just the stats part of the ad system. Seems basic enough for now but bound to change.

Things unanswered for now

Groups: Why isn’t this offered to existing groups? C’mon Facebook people, with millions in some groups you could actually make more cash by allowing those group owners to do the same. Switch it on for them. Allow group members to opt in.

An ad network inside an ad network
If you build up your brand (Hey, remember Ze Frank is a brand) on Facebook and put a lot of hard work building it up, why not be able to make money by selling ads for other people and do it in some kind of automated fashion. If I have 100k followers, it would make me and Facebook money if I can allow some other people to send targeted ads to my subscribers without this advertiser going off and creating their own page and build up a following. Right now it only seems that I can spend money on Social Ads, not make money. Facebook people, yu do remember something called AdSense, right? Allow people to make money from their Facebook pages. Go on!

Where’s my kickback?
If my friends are reading my lifestream and seeing ads built around what I’ve purchased and done. What do I get back? I want a kickback

Will others rip this idea off?
You friggin bet. Now I sound American! Tumblr just got their revenue stream if they hadn’t already thought of this. Twitter too. I think we’ll also see RSS feeds of purchases become standard on all websites and people encouraged to stick them in their lifestreams via some kind of points thing. Get 5 points every time someone clicks on an item you’ve purchased etc. etc.

The future

This will get people and advertisers next to the next step in advertising. Vendor Relationship Management. A post on that another time.

Google Groups I must say are really impressive. Google made a great service when they bought DejaNews back in 2001. Yahoo! Groups are also another good mailing list and group discussion service but with so many people creating Facebook Groups for anything and everything, you have to wonder will this be the next area of Facebook that will start to be taken seriously by Facebook. Right now it’s awful to use and manage. There’s no wall activity to let you know people have contributed to group discussions without you going off to check it out. A right pain when you are subbed to a lot of groups.

If Facebook get their groups sorted, it could mean even more opportunities to get people to use their service, especially if they allow business people to sub and contribute by email.

Hopefully with this new cash injection they’ll start improving their existing offerings while bringing out new services too. With the MS money maybe they’ll do the following:

• Messaging service improvements
• Create a Facebook IM service. A few blogs have mentioned this and it makes perfect sense really. Now, if they based this on Jabber it’d be fantastic. Maybe with their cash they’ll buy Meebo?
• Roll out a contextual ad system based on ALL of that profile data they’ve been logging.
• Fix up Facebook groups so businesses will start using them. And then to annoy Google even more, allow selective indexing of the front page of the groups, like selective indexing of Facebook profiles.
• Enable outside search.
• Enable outside advertising.

Using the live details from the advanced flyer option in Facebook, you can see some stats and facts on people on Facebook.

Update: This makes Techmeme already?

From location Ireland we get the below stats. Remember too that these are stats on what people have offered, thus 131k people but only 89k or so have said whether they are male or female. You don’t have to specify a lot of the below or in the case of age, don’t have to be honest.

Sex:
37,440 Men
51,900 Women

Ages:
117,880 people between 18 and 35 years old
55,020 people between 18 and 25 years old
71,980 people between 25 and 35 years old
7,340 people between 18 and 19 years old in Ireland

Employers:
About 1,160 people in Ireland who work at Microsoft
About 320 people in Ireland who work at Google
About 120 people in Ireland who work at IBM
About 140 people in Ireland who work at Accenture
About 80 people in Ireland who work at eBay
Fewer than 20 people in Ireland who work at Oracle
Fewer than 20 people in Ireland who work at SAP
Fewer than 20 people in Ireland who work at Oireachtas
Fewer than 20 people in Ireland who work at Vodafone
Fewer than 20 people in Ireland who work at Taoiseach (Irish Prime Minister)

[ I don't think numbers go below 20, still interesting that people from Taoiseach's put it down on their profile ]

Colleges:
About 8,340 people in Ireland who are in college
About 400 people in Ireland who are at University College Cork
About 2,160 people in Ireland who are at Trinity College Dublin
about 1,300 people in Ireland who are at UCD Ireland
About 640 people in Ireland who are at NUI Galway
About 180 people in Ireland who are at DIT Ireland

Relationships:
About 30,880 people who are single in Ireland
About 11,320 people who are married in Ireland

Fun Combinations:
About 1,840 liberal men older than 25 who are single in Ireland

Now go find your own stats too.

Update: UK Statistics.

Update: Irish Times coverage.
Irish Examiner coverage.

So many people are saying that this whole Facebook “friends” thing is diluting the whole genuine friends thing, since really we’re just adding contacts some of whom are friends and many of which we will never communicate with again, kind of familiar strangers, which kind of goes against the idea of Facebook being a social platform, does it not? I now have about 400 “friends” on Facebook and so I decided if I could maintain regular and social contact with these people. Tara Hunt by the way has a great post on how “friends” and “contacts” are handled by different social networks. As I was writing this post, TechCrunch announced that Facebook is going to redo the way “friends” are ranked. Good.

Each day I tackled one letter in the alphabet and messaged those surnames, asking how they are and trying to be chatty. Trying to be original is tough let me tell you. I must say I was impressed with the feedback I got and some people were very forthcoming about what they were up to and I learned a lot about some people I didn’t know much about to start with. The response rate was higher than I thought too and during the day (office hours!) replies were almost instant.

It’s still early days but I would hope that I can maintain regular contact with some of those who started as familiar strangers. Facebook is still an odd mix but I am finding some interesting people on it, I’m even getting press releases on it and learning more about my own friends by the way they interact with others on this platform. I have also found though that it is very hard to constantly reply to messages and some were coming in thick and fast via the system and unlike GMail, it is much harder to go back through the inbox when you get a lot of messages and check if you messaged person Y back or not. A search feature would be nicer and a longer inbox. For some reason too I lost messages during an upgrade which was annoying.

What has surprised me a lot too has been the status updates. I’ve gotten some unexpected feedback from just writing things in my status messages. This might prove better than sending people messages. Broadcast requests are one use of the status update and they work. You do get a nice enough uptake and it is not seen as spam compared to messaging everyone in Facebook and not being able to BCC them so someone replies all and spams everyone else.

Anyway, I’ll keep going with what I’m doing. Might be interesting stats collected for the Facebook debate on October 17th in London, of which I am a panelist.

Cartoon by Hugh Macleod