10 posts tagged “facebook”

Since I love observing social behavior offline and then online to make some personal notes here, one big one that keeps standing out for me is how different and similar we are socially - online and offline. 

Whether it is through our need to belong ("yearn for contact") by adding friends, instead of making them or our ability to have 100s of friends online but the inability to love our neighbors (no pun intended for the neighborhood here on Vox) or that 25% of Americans have no confidant and the average number of confidants for an American has dropped to 2. 
 
Here are a couple of studies that appeared recently that talk to the differences and similarity:

The Economist: Primates on Facebook
"What also struck Dr Marlow, however, was that the number of people on an individual’s friend list with whom he (or she) frequently interacts is remarkably small and stable. The more “active” or intimate the interaction, the smaller and more stable the group."

The Wall Street Journal Blog: Exploring Twitter Ties
"Consistent with behavior on social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, Twitter users interact with a small number of friends compared with the total number of friends and followers declared."

The Mercury News: "Finding our own little worlds has never been easier" by Mike Cassidy
"I wanted to find myself in the continuum of experiences," Wood, 41, tells me, "where speaking with people was neither good nor bad, but it was superfluous."

It turns out that that superfluous place is almost anywhere in America, depending on how you choose to experience it. With the help of Silicon Valley, we have grown into a society where it's possible to quite literally live in your own little world. So much of what we do, we do alone, even while surrounded by people."

Think of those superfluous conversations that we have with grocery clerks offline parallel to those friends we add (not make) online and the few with whom we interact (the 7 to 20 in the studies above) as those whom we actually meet offline, help, show commitment or drink a beer or two independent of their title or net worth.

We ignore people online all the time - whether its email, a friend request or an @reply on Twitter. As Mike continues to write
"One of Wood's most creative tricks was to rely on what social scientists call "anticipatory disengagement," — in his case putting his cell phone to his ear to avoid conversation.".. or maybe avoid eye contact?

Imagine: The Few, The Real  

First it said I was bald, now this - I will let the picture say it all

LinkedIn always had a tradition of celebrating its milestones when a significant number of users had signed up.

They just celebrated 20M users and a HUGE CONGRATULATIONS to the much newer and larger team. See all the fun pictures on their blog post here. I started using LinkedIn:

• As a user in 2003 when they had 40k users and with it my initiation to all things social/Web2.0
  
• As an employee in 2004 when it had about 1.5M users
• Left in 2006 when it had about 6.5M users

2 years later and they have grown by about 3 times!

Two of them where I was in on the journey are below. I can spot myself in the second one but had no luck with the first

It took me a day in 2003 to see that LinkedIn worked and it would always work. Why?

"People Always do Business with People

Imagine: It is that simple

Viral_social marketing

The latest special print issue of MIT's Technology Review has an article on visualizing "Better Friends" by Erica Naone. Apart from the visuals of the blogosphere, Twitter and others, the one that caught my eye was the visual on viral marketing - something very relevant and dear to me.

Furthermore, being deep into social media, networks and user-generated content -  the last line of the paragraph below hit home for me. I used to listen and learn from many top social networkers/producers until I noticed that I started shutting myself out with many - they have lost their influence with me. They are all the time selling products and services with the sole cause of their own popularity. They do not evangelize - they sell. Popularity is their focus - not their collateral success. One erodes the social equity built over time and involvement. Many have have many friends today online but then there is a social connection/equity even with your audience/readers/followers - the mind is fickle with all the noise and the "new new things" and "new new people" coming out everyday.

The web is becoming social - from a network of servers and pages, its becoming a network of people. We are the carriers - we consume from each other (not just reporters), we produce and we distribute.

The full article is here and the piece on viral marketing from the article below:

Viral_social marketing1

"Several years ago, a large retailer tried to encourage word-of-mouth marketing for products sold on its site byoffering incentives to site visitors who made product recommendations. Many companies are trying to use people's social connections for such "viral marketing" programs, hoping that information about products (and the urge to buy them) can spread through a network of people the way a virus might. But after studying more than 15 million recommendations generated by the retailer's incentive program, a team made up of Jure Leskovec, Lada Adamic, and Bernardo Huberman, director of the information dynamics lab at Hewlett-Packard, was skeptical. Huberman and his colleagues looked at the networks that grew up around each product--who bought and recommended it, and who responded to the recommendation--and saw that they took on different characteristics depending on the type of product. A network around a medical book (top image below), where red dots and lines indicate people who purchased the book while blue dots and lines represent people who received a recommendation, shows a scattered network where recommendations, on average, don't travel very far. The network surrounding a Japanese graphic novel (bottom image below), on the other hand, shows a thick flow of information among densely connected people. The researchers found that viral marketing was most effective for expensive products recommended within a small, tightly connected group. They also found that overusing consumers' social connections for marketing can make them less influential."

There is a really neat article in the new issue of The Economist here about social networks, the walls around them and how they are utilities hard to monetize - like webmails. Since a picture is worth a 1000 words, I thought the one below was very contextual and would say it all.

It is of course possible, that it is a recommendation engine of products - ones that I might need in the future since they have a lot of profile information about my life with startups.

Imagine: Startups can be a hairy ride

Here is a quick back of the envelope comparison of the two recent valuations Ballmer and his team have made - Yahoo (the most recent) and Facebook.

• Microsoft's "overture" to Yahoo - $45B (approximated)
• Microsoft's investment in Facebook - $240M for 1.6% leading to a total valuation of Facebook at $15B
  

So Ballmer values Yahoo at approximately 3x times Facebook.

So lets look at some comparable metrics for Yahoo and Facebook:

1) UNIQUE VISITORS:
Yahoo - 134M (Source: Comscore)
Facebook - 35M (Source: Comscore)

Yahoo has a multiple here of almost 4x

2) PAGE VIEWS
Yahoo - 32B (Source: Compete Blog)
Facebook - 65B (Source: Facebook Press)

Facebook has a 2x multiple advantage (Note: Web analytics software used by comScore and other services treat "page views" as complete refreshes of an entire page. But web sites like Yahoo use more modern approaches to layout have recently adopted Asynchronous JavaScript to enable browsers to refresh select portions of the page when necessary, reducing bandwidth and improving layout.)

3) REVENUE
Yahoo - $7B (Source: WSJ. None of it comes as a guaranteed revenue from MSFT)
Facebook - $250M (the numbers thrown around are $150M for last year so giving FB some benefit of doubt - half of which, of course, comes from MSFT)

The biggie - Yahoo has a 28x multiple advantage over Facebook

Imagine: It is still less than half of a projected value of Facebook! Ooh - ya!

Well - I couldn't think of a better way to test how relevant TechMeme "is" or should I say the relevance of Techmeme.
This post has nothing to do with technology so here is some important trivia on it:

• Is is the third-person singular verb form of the copula in the English language [Source:Wikipedia]
• A search on Google for 'is' gives 4,450,000,000 results
• Is is country code top level domain name for Iceland

Imagine: iSocial instead Social Ads [John/Steve - you cool?]

I usually don't like to blog about technology since I live and breath it. Furthermore, I prefer the more complex creature that uses it - people. Once in a while, I am tempted so here goes:

There are tons of different views on how Facebook should monetize their traffic - something that obviously needs a lot of improvement. Facebook Ads launched recently and if there is one thing in common to all of the various options - it was NewsFeeds. Sponsored Pages, Beacon, Social Ads - all of them tie into the NewsFeed.

Competing against Google with search was recently thrown out there by VentureBeat as a revenue stream but it does not make sense to me and here is why:

1. Search is not in the page views business and is "open" - it sends user to other sites. Social networks are in the page views business and hence they are closed
2. Facebook lives that - even messages (except for mobile) need to read by coming to the site
3. Search is a different beast all together
   

The DNA, imho, of both businesses are very different.

Search bring intent inherently in the act whereas most social networks today bring curiosity (unless it is a business network like LinkedIn). It can potentially bring intent to the party by tapping into the offline social behavior of seeking referrals or recommendations.

If 99.8% of stories that all Facebook users publish are not seen, I would think  Facebook could turbo charge curiosity and enhance their referrals (to Quote Mark Zuckerberg: "“People influence people. Nothing influences people more than are recommendation from a trusted friend. A trusted referral influences people more than the best broadcast message. A trusted referral is the Holy Grail of advertising.") by bringing search to its NewsFeeds. Currently they have a limited 'push' element to it but nothing to 'pull'. They definitely have the content. If that is done, there is far more context for their ads on the system.

When you want to achieve/ acquire or research something where do you start - maybe by asking/ searching for people (who you know) who have experienced that in the past?

Focusing on one's core competency, users and their behavior always helps.

Imagine: Seeing relevant ads from Amazon or Orbitz while searching for someone who has read a book (or bought one that Beacon can tell me about) or has traveled to Paris (information available through apps)

Update - it is ironic that now you can [Ad]Friends

With Facebook just launching their new ad program of Beacon, Insight and Social Ads - you have more choices now.
If Gordon Gekko's Social Graph is not a good strategy for you, how about adding them as friends and getting more Insight? Aw - Aren't they cute.

Beacon seems like 'Share' available today on any New York Times article or other sites etc and Insight seems to be like MySpace brand pages (here is one for Cherry Coke) with metrics but I am sure there is something that I don't know ......

   

Mr. Gioia, the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, made the commencement address at Stanford University on June 17th this year. If you get a moment, I would strongly recommend reading the condensed version from The Wall Street Journal called"The Impoverishment of the American Culture"

Since The Journal online is a walled garden, you can read it here for free.

Here are a few lines that are deep:

• "Adult life begins in a child's imagination, and we've relinquished that imagination to the marketplace"
• "Marcus Aurelius believed that the course of wisdom consisted of learning to trade easy pleasures for more complex and challenging ones"
• "Even family communication is breaking down as members increasingly spend their time alone, staring at their individual screens"

When you club the above article with another independent one on the same in The Journal, Jeffrey Zaslow, titled "The Entitlement Epidemic - Who's Really to Blame", it feels like a weird coincidence since they both refer to the downhill path of our culture and one common thread, as I see it - media.

When it comes to media, there are many studies and reports that many college students and the younger generation are spending more time on the Internet or video games today - TV being the constant variable.

I have been working in the social media space on the Internet for a long time now and it makes me wonder what the ubiquity of sites like MySpace, Facebook, YouTube etc. are having on the younger generation. There seems to be a paradox since these social media websites:

• facilitate 'staring at their individual screens'
  

  Crosswalk, Portland, OR
• facilitate popularity with many clicks ('Add as Friend') and potentially a false "self-esteem"
  
• facilitate branding and marketing of oneself, which, imho, unfortunately very important in the business world before and frequently, independent of what you deliver
• facilitate relationships that can be empty since now you do not have to make a friend, you 'add as friend'
  
• facilitate bringing an undiscovered individual or group's originality to millions. A form of mass media which until recently was only accessible through rich PR budgets
  
• encourage unlearning, learning to leverage a new form of media
  
• empower anyone to champion a cause, have a conversation and make a change
• facilitate discovery of people that can enrich your life (with careful due diligence)

I find it extremely fascinating since I was in the 'younger generation' in India, where there was only one word - education - that was drilled in to me and my brother growing up. I do not necessarily think that was good either since the word missing was 'choice'. I went to engineering school and he became a doctor.

Now, I get to raise my daughter in a very different 'social' environment full of 'choices'

Imagine: we are not social animals