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Slowly Reprogramming The Web For Social NetworksYesterday

The New York Times printed an article today about Facebook’s growing Facebook Connect initiative. For those who don’t know, Facebook Connect is an API third party sites can use to access a users data from Facebook, as well as push data back to Facebook. Techcrunch has an excellent article enumerating the efforts of MySpace and Google along those lines.

The article listed no new information, but instead highlights the massive shift in the way we will interact with the web. Unlike other web applications, social networks are not simply destination for another form of media we consume (i.e. I go to Youtube for video, and the New York Times for news). They are another essential layer bringing context to the web the way hyperlinking has since 1965. Hyperlinking connects content around the context of a document. Social linking connects content around the user. The chief example has been services like Facebook’s news feed or Friendfeed, which deliver content relevant to your social connections.

We still have a ways to go.

Social networks and content networks are still separated. As a hack, we’re using ad hoc social networks, or underpowered networks to connect content through active sharin

The Death Of The CPMNovember 25

Online ad spend is on the decline. eMarketer has just re-adjusted their spending projections down to 8.9% growth in 2009 after earlier predicting a 14% surge. Although, that growth looks heroic when compared to lagging eCommerce expansion projections hovering around 4.1%.

The contraction in spending growth has forced the marketers to evaluate what can be pulled from their advertising portfolio. With few metrics to back value, display advertising is coming under fire. CPM rates are shrinking and publishers are concerned.

The More Things Change …

However, the growth of social media properties has made this a self fulfilling prophecy. In other words, “web 2.0″ broke web metrics. Back in 2001 top websites included AOL, Yahoo, MSN, and Lycos. To give you an idea, this is what AOL looked like circa 2001. It featured clear blocks of content resembling a magazine. You’d click, read, and move on.

Flash forward to 2008 and the top sites are Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube. These sites generate 100s of page views per session as users take quizzes or page through photo albums. MySpace

Tech Firms Turning To Social Media For Effective MarketingNovember 20

Some of the world’s biggest tech firms (Dell, NetApp, and Seagate) are getting into social media, according to Reuters. The reason, the article suggests, is to “harness the age-old power of the word-of-mouth recommendation” and an implicit acceptance that “television and print are not necessarily the most effective ways to reach buyers, particularly younger ones”.

Dell has a team of over 40 employees interacting with their customers through social media properties like blogs and their “IdeaStorm” voting site.

Technology firms are moving into social media because customers have in droves. Blogs and review sites have blossomed, changing a one to many conversation about their products to a many to many conversation. Companies can either let people say what they want, or dive into the conversation in a meaningful way.

I still think we’re in the very early stages of this shift. Companies are still concerned with constructing their own social media properties instead of focusing on the content. Case in point have be the slew of branded Facebook applications pushing products that only draw a few thousand users a month.

Businesses should focus on buying into the conversation, not into hosting it. More on that later.

Should You Be Marketing In Social Media?November 18

P&G’s Ted McConnell has run large organizations, Been staff to c-level executives, holds 4 Patents, and has successfully driven Digital Marketing at P&G - which is admittedly hard to change. I know this because I read it on his LinkedIn Profile. I also know this means that when Ted speaks about marketing, it means something demonstrably different than when John Smith (who happens to live in Los Angeles) speaks about it.

Frankly, Ted McConnell has more influence over my thoughts and feelings when it comes to marketing, particularly in his latest speech covered in AdAge.

At a forum on digital media, McConnell said he isn’t sure that marketers even belong in Facebook. Specifically, “What in heaven’s name made you think you could monetize the real estate in which somebody is breaking up with their girlfriend?”. McConnell sees marketing on “social media” as invasive and with too much low quality inventory.

Old Metrics - New Medium

He’s right when you apply traditional metrics to this new media. When ad sizes were standardized and users saw roughly the same number of ads on each site, clicks and impressions helped gauge the success of campaigns against one another. However, when you buy on social media, impressions and click through rates can vary

Verified Apps: A Big Bureaucratic Step In The Right DirectionNovember 18

After a year as effectively a “free market”, Facebook has finally launched it’s “verified app” program, which will give Facebook’s blessing to apps that meet their quality standards.

It will cost $375 to apply ($175 for students and non-profits) and must be renewed each year to stay in the program. Verified apps will have a few cosmetic advantages (seal of approval) and some TBA benefits rolled out over time, but the real difference will be in how much Facebook aids verified apps and/or punishes unverified apps. Facebook has several knobs they can turn, from how often your users can invite each other, notify, and where those messages show up in a user’s activity stream. Wrapped in the new redesign was a tightening of these quotas. It has yet to be seen whether Facebook will simply reward the winners, or also punish the apps they don’t like.

The New Bureacracy

Theoretically none of this regulation should be needed. The “best” apps should be the one’s user’s share with friends the most. However, this kind of popularity contest led developers to focus on optimizing traffic flow. Apps focused on sending messages instead of building functionality.

So Facebook has had to step in to shape where they think the platform should go. Facebook would say app verification aligns incentives away from generating more