notes on a revolution

Facebook’s “talking about this”

So I was sitting in a presentation from a Facebook rep today, a guy who did his best to slaughter everyone in the room by first lulling us all to sleep. He was recapping their recent announcements, nothing you haven’t heard.

While I was sitting there contemplating the swift, gracious death that might be bestowed on me were I more fortunate, I noticed a theme in what the rep was saying.

The first thing was, essentially, “If you want your campaigns to work, spend media dollars on them.” This comes as no surprise, of course they’re going to say that. And in my experience, they’re right. They’re right because they know people actually do not care about your brand one little bit, and if you want to have something decent to show for your campaign spend, you’re going to need to force it in front of people. Funny how new marketing looks a lot like old marketing.

The second thing I realised was they had shifted so quickly to focusing on engagement. Talking about engagement. Talking, in fact about their new metric “talking about this”, where the number of people doing just that kicks off that sentence. Strange, I thought, to have made such a sudden about-face.

And then it hit me: they were running out of road.

Look at the below graph. This is Starbucks’ fan growth over time to its present day.

Now look at this, Starbucks’ average new fans per week:

The growth they continue to experience would be the envy of most brands, but it’s still a shadow of its former self. So, this is what I think.

Facebook realised that all brands, from the smallest upstart to globe-straddling behemoths, would have a natural ceiling on the number of fans they had. Once brands hit that ceiling, it becomes harder for marketers to justify the ad spend because they’re not seeing the growth they’re used to, which in turn would mean they started to seek alternate places to spend their media dollars.

So what do they do? Change the conversation purposefully from being about numbers to “People talking about this“.

Now, I actually think it is the right way to go, number of fans had little more meaning than the number of friends anyone had on MySpace, and smart marketers always knew it was about engagement. But in launching this new metric and focusing as much attention on it as they can muster, Facebook have managed to stave off any apathy that may have been headed their way from marketing managers on post-fan-drive come downs.

The above might strike you as wildly cynical, but look at those graphs again. In an environment that will accept nothing less than significant year-on-year growth in all forms, what other conclusion can you come to?

Don’t mind doin’ it for the kids

A couple posts floating around the web today looking at teenage behaviour with regards to managing online identity.

First up from Microsoft researcher Danah Boyd comes a couple outtakes from interviews she has conducted recently looking at how two teenage girls from low socio-economic backgrounds (this is my own interpretation, though I feel it is inferred from the contextual information given) handle their online privacy, with one deleting everything she posts and another disabling her account each time she logs out.

Secondly, Jeff Jarvis looks at a broader scope of social platforms. His discussions lead to some obvious things - such as nobody uses MySpace anymore - as well as some less obvious things, such as why teenagers aren’t flocking to Twitter. He references Danah’s post as part of his piece, but both are short and worth checking out.

The cars we don’t have and the experiences we expect

Back in 2008 I was thinking a lot about our increasingly customised online experience and how we were going to come to expect more and more of that in our offline lives, even if that didn’t make immediate sense do to, at the time, not having the means to put something of our preferences into the world around us as and when we wanted. Akin to walking into the local cafe where they already know how you have your coffee, but filled with knowledge of us we’re piece by piece handing over to services like Glue and Facebook.

That has been changing over the past few years at an increasingly rapid pace. It’s limited to specific implementations at the moment such as Foursquare, but it’s easy to imagine a future not too distant wherein our phones (which come to resemble personal data devices and less like what Alex Bell invented) curate our physical lives as much as our information online does.

What I’m particularly interested in is how this begins to impact the way companies deliver products and services. I believe in the coming years we’ll see opportunities to take functionality akin to Facebook Connect, and plug it into the physical world.

The question is, what kinds of products and services are businesses going to create in response?

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Update: No sooner had I posted that, I came across the below video from designer and film maker Keiichi Matsuda. Titled “Augmented City”, it’s a vision of the future much further than I was thinking about, but perhaps offers some clues as to how we might arrive there.

Augmented City 3D from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.

Foursquare’s Ecosystem of Value

Image via Wikipedia

When looking at emerging web services, I ask myself a very simple question: does this create more value than it captures? It’s a pretty quick gut-check for figuring out if service has legs, and if you really think it is going to grow.

I loved Foursquare from the moment I saw it. Simple and focused, mobile, it brought people together in a physical space around a common interest, a real world manifestation of Hugh Macleod’s Social Objects theory. Imagine that: all ths talk about technology taking us apart when along comes Foursquare designed around bringing us back together. Who would have thought? <— note the sarcasm.

But the thing that made me decide this one was going to stick was the value it brought to small businesses.

It created a platform overnight whereby small businesses could enter a CRM space so long occupied by the big companies that could afford expensive and complicated software, and it did it in a way that was easy to manage and a whole lot of fun. I doubt a CRM platform was really what the founders were thinking (or maybe they were, they’re pretty smart), but it is a classic manifestation of of one of the main themes in Digital Strangelove: everything gets easier.

When your base assumption is everything gets easier, and you focus on the creation of a platform that provides more value to the users than you receive yourself, amazing things can start to happen. We’ve seen it in Facebook, Twitter, MySpace before both of those and all the way back to Geocities in the first dot.com boom.

Given they closed a big round of financing yesterday, it sounds like they’re well on their way to building it out for anyone who wants to go along for the ride.