the facebookizing of twitter

after the last post where i gave my thoughts on the twitterizing of facebook i started thinking about how to facebookize twitter a little. i do love that twitter is so very simple and uncluttered, but i do believe they could be a bit more social. certainly not going so far as to diverge from the core of what makes twitter so great and loved, but to add a few features to enhance the overall experience.

here's some things i think could make twitter better:

more profile information
as twitter becomes more and more the virtual presence of people on the web (at least one of them), i think we could have the ability to feature more information on the person behind the @. it's pretty limited right now where you only have a 160 characters for your bio and a website link that gets cut off. i often see people trying to get around this by making a background picture with a lot of the info, but it doesn't always work. so just building it in makes sense.

more customization
i don't mean to the extent that myspace allows you to create such an ugly profile, but allowing users to make the profile more their own. could be as easy as simple blog type features to incorporate a few widgets or pull in rss feeds. just more personalization.

who's following who
as it is now, there's no easy way to know what new people the people you're following are now following. you could go to each of the people you're following and see if there's anyone new, but that's a bit cumbersome isn't it? especially if you are following more than say 50 people. it makes sense as your social network expands, and as the twitter user community grows, to continue finding those interesting people, that those you find interesting, also find interesting.

message threading
not only for the main stream, but dm's as well. especially dm's because right now, they are just a jumble without the ability to sort, group, file, etc. in the stream, some lessons from friendfeed in how conversations appear could go a long way.

groups
similar to how you can sort your news-feed in facebook and similar to how you can set up groups in tweetdeck. simply an easier way to manage your stream, prioritize people and separate like content.

a few thoughts. nothing i think strays from the core functionality of twitter and nothing i think detracts from the experience. maybe adding these features is a revenue route. charge a small fee to allow you to add these features to your profile.

the twitterizing of facebook

the internet is in uproar about the latest facebook redesign. i wanted to wait until i was able to use it for a while before i weighed in. well, i'm not alone in disliking it as a poll application on facebook has tallied 94% 'thumbs down.'

my issue with the change is how facebook is attempting to be more twitter-like. forget about how they're so openly scared of what twitter could do to their business, it's about moving away from what made them so successful and ingrained with people's lives in the first place.

the new redesign puts increased emphasis on the status update, attempting to match the tweet as a real-time lifestreaming tool. but it's been done to the detriment of everything else facebook is used for. i think this is too narrow for facebook users.

see, tweets were always far more reaching than "what are you doing now" as twitter purports to be the question driving what people do in the community. instead it's part 'what am i doing now', part sharing, part dialogue, part breaking news, part mobilizing people and part self promotion. facebook status was never that and would say still isn't except for those people who direct import their tweets as their status.

one thing facebook did add was the ability to comment on a status or 'like' it. great addition and one that i use heavily. it's great for conversation threads around a particular topic/status. where they fell short is that comments, which are the conversation and the power of social media, are not propagated in the message stream. no one knows you commented unless they happened to see the original update. a bit of a miss.

back on track. the part of the change that bothers me is that everything other than status updates and wall posts are in the news-feed. everything else is shunted into the never read right-side column. to me, this is a terrible move. facebook is so much more than a status update and yet that's all that matters now.

facebook was great because it was multi-functional. it allowed people to share so much of themselves and had great utility across all the interest points of social media. photos, link sharing, messaging, events, video, applications, notes, gifts, and chat amongst others. apparently these don't matter as much anymore. facebook long sold that they were the largest photo sharing site on the internet and now you're not alerted as well that people are posting them. you can still get at them and all that other stuff, it's just a lot less obvious.

my point in all this is why make for another twitter when you already have something unique and good already? other twitter clones have failed (pownce, jaiku) so why try to be somehting you're not? to alienate your user base? because that's what you're doing. if facebook users wanted twitter, they'd go to twitter. or maybe they think because they are so big now, they can force this on people and instantly create a viable twitter competitor where the others failed.

it makes even less sense when you factor in that facebook is a walled-garden. users can't get at the breadth of streams they can in an open environment like twitter. you can't hear from news sources, personalities, companies, celebrities, or non-friends in your profession on facebook as you can on twitter. yes, the new fan pages open up message streams, but generally people don't have that many fan pages (we ad types do because we're seeing what's going out there). certainly no one has fanned the number of people twitterers tend to follow.

it seems pretty unanimous that facebook should revert to what it was and leave twitter to their niche. facebook is so much more than twitter and that's a competitive advantage. what is wrong with the existing ability to integrate twitter into your status? just because the update didn't originate with facebook doesn't diminish it. the coming months should be interesting as twitter continues to explode.

in the end it boils down to how people will use facebook status. will they start using it like a tweet? will it ever become the twitter equivalent of all the reasons why people use twitter now? my guess is no. at least not in the immediate future because it's not how they've used facebook and, again, if they wanted to do twitter-like posting, they'd just go to twitter.

facebook's missed revenue

today facebook revamped their fan pages, the promise being they will be more socially integrated. when fist launched, the fan pages were promised to be social and bring companies and brands more into the fold of people's networks where the sponsored groups stood outside. well that didn't really happen and they are evolving again to try and fulfill that promise.

this time they got it right. but their approach is foolish and will likely end up ruining the space.

this move, while a great opportunity for brands and companies, is another in a string of missteps and bad plays by facebook. let's set it up. facebook, while experiencing tremendous growth, is struggling to make money. a recent lawsuit against them revealed that their valuation has been significantly downgraded from what was previously thought and what microsoft bought a 1% stake in. bill and ballmer can't be very happy. facebook's struggles are around monetizing the ecosystem they've created and the economy is aggravating the situation as advertisers are vacillating to spend advertising dollars.

so what's the problem with the new fan pages? well, facebook again missed a huge opportunity to add revenue streams and make their business viable as a free, ad-supported platform. this isn't the first time they've stumbled in actually bringing in money and not just bleeding it.

remember applications? yeah, no one really uses them anymore. the opportunity they blew then was not charging developers and companies a fee for developing and listing them. instead, they opened it up to everyone and that lead to their demise. they became trite spam engines that people stopped using after their initial glow wore off. after the last site design overhaul, they were relegated to a place of far diminished presence and importance. i don't lay blame on the developers for creating crappy apps, but facebook for opening the floodgates and allowing crappy apps to proliferate. they needed to be the gatekeepers to ensure quality control and real value was there for users. without a vested interest (ie. revenue stream) they had no reason to protect the space and as such it was ruined.

then there's the ads themselves, the only revenue stream they have. they aren't making any strides to make those much more compelling or interesting. i mean, it's a tiny static picture and 135 characters. not very interesting or compelling. they were okay when they were in the news-feed, but are now relegated off to the side where they can be ignored much easier. they would argue their engagement ads are the answer, but those still live in a place not many people care about. want proof, look at declining CTR and CPMs. also the ads that appear on your profile page and elsewhere are very often of poor quality and carry messages that are little more than spam companies.

facebook connect could probably be a pay model as well, but they missed out on that too. and while we're on missteps, let's also mention their most recent debacle around their terms of service.

that brings us to the new facebook fan pages. what facebook has done is make these look and act exactly like a person's profile. a fan page can now do all the things we do and have those actions be visible to the fans in their news-feed. that's a powerful proposition. brands and companies now fully integrated into their fans social network.

it's ripe for abuse. brands need to be very conscious of how they use these new communication tools. it'll be very easy to over-use them and spam the fans. and it's open to everyone again to do as much as they want.

how could this be averted so the entire facebook ecosystem doesn't become infested with overzealous brands turning people off from even logging on? well a pay model of course. this would have the side effect of actually bringing in money to the company.

i'm thinking first a pay to play system where there is a yearly fee for companies to create fan pages. something in the neighborhood of $50K to $100K. this is fairly nominal for any company to enter the space which provides them with such a robust offering to communicate with their consumers and most ardent followers. it also serves to weed out those who would likely abuse it.

second, to protect the space from over-use and ensure that the people who are there aren't spammed by the brands and companies they are fans of. the revenue model is a pay-per-interaction fee. so every post, or photo added, or comment made, anything really, comes at some kind of fee so companies are smarter about using them.

we could try and pass on the operating expense to the users and make it a pay model, but we've all been trained to expect to use facebook for free. so it will be hard to make that change. so it falls on an ad supported model or more precisely an advertiser supported model.

i'm just fascinated that facebook can continue to stumble through their operations like this. mark zuckerberg is a smart guy, but he is not a smart businessman. he's not proving to be good at making smart moves to make his company viable. i'll be waiting to see how companies use this new space and how facebook could have to backtrack because of abuse.

p&g not sure about marketers in social media

in today's AdAge, the general manager-interactive marketing at p&g, scott mcconnell, pontificated that brands don't belong in social media, pointing to the difficulty these sites have had in monetizing their spaces. a couple of his points i took objection to and thought that mcconnell was off on his basis.

the easiest way for me to assess this is to go through the article top to bottom.

what in heaven's name made you think you could monetize the real estate in which somebody is breaking up with their girlfriend?...
... they were trying to talk to somebody. so it just seems a bit arrogant. ... we hijack their own conversations, their own thoughts and feelings, and try to monetize it.

the basic premise that this space is for consumers to have conversations (namely breaking up with their girlfriend - which is dubious to start with) and that brands don't have a place in that kind of environment is erroneous. consumers are having conversations about brands, branded content (ie. commercials), and how brands fit in their lives. granted, this probably doesn't happen as much as we'd like, but gentle pushes and good reasons to want to talk about our brands i don't see as problematic. yes, the main thing about facebook is for consumers to interact with each other (talking, sharing, etc), but it's certainly not exclusionary to brands.

to say that we hijack their conversations is completely unfounded. in no way do brands become associated with the personal dialogue of people on facebook. the only conversations our presence and our media become associated with are those of the community doing something with the brand itself and that is completely legitimate to want to capitalize on and promote. and the news-feed stories those propagate do not take over user conversations, just add new ones.

so the targeting is fantastic. you can do really amazing things. but i'm not so sure i want to be targeted like that. ... i don't think everything every consumer says to someone else and writes down is somehow monetizable by the media industry.

it is folly to say that he doesn't want to see highly targeted ads and thusly imply that other consumers don't want to as well. increasing ad relevance is a much better scenario for consumers and one that i think they'd actually appreciate. why do i want to see feminine hygiene products as it's completely irrelevant to me? i will ignore it and be left with a negative feeling about a brand or media channel.

however, if an ad appeared that met a certain specific needs, or was of high interest to me, consumers would pay attention, be more likely to respond and have a better feeling about the brand as it fulfilled something missing in my life. at the end of the day, there is consumer acceptance to seeing the ads there because they get that in order for the space to be a free service, it has to be ad supported. so if they have to see something, it might as well be appropriate.

as for our right as marketers to tap into consumer conversations and interests to target ads, i would bet that p&g puts money in search. that more or less taps into people's interests to target ads to them or in gmail tapping into keywords within to serve relevant ads. what's the difference there than in facebook or other social media spaces.

mcconell went on to say that marketers should not abandon the space entirely, and that there are potentially valuable vehicles for advertisers such as applications. this is a somewhat outdated viewpoint as facebook has severely curtailed their visibility. you have to have something really powerful to break through the wall Facebook has put them behind (literally and figuratively). it's a huge challenge that only very few brands could hope to accomplish.

they held promise when they were launched and facebook took the wrong approach and that ruined applications. facebook let anyone and everyone make their own applications and didn't vet any of them or put a pay model in place to launch them. this completely ruined the space as it was flooded with useless and invasive applications and they had to correct it. that correction was the redesign and it devalued them significantly. so to believe that applications are the promised land is a hard pill to swallow.

all in all, i find the article and his viewpoints showed a lack of understanding about the value of the social media space and how brands in fact DO belong there. it's a fine line and marketers have to approach cautiously. but it's rich and valuable territory if they can get it right.

new look facebook

today at around 3pm, mark zuckerberg finished unveiling his plans for the next phase in facebook's life, and in his words, the next phase in communication. to much anticipation, the ceo of facebook made three key announcements that will change how people and companies will interact and communicate on the site with themselves and each other.

the three big changes are: social ads, project beacon, and insight marketing. i won't go into detail on what each entails, but in essence, it is the maturation of facebook and their big foray into leveraging the vast amounts of incredibly powerful data inherent to the site and intimate relationship users have with it.

there will be a lot of people crying foul on this as it really pushes the boundaries of privacy. but i for one welcome it, both as a consumer, and a marketer. as a consumer, i have longed to eliminate unnecessary messages and information from my life because there are just too many that are not relevant to me in the least. so, naturally, ignore them. now there is a way that i might only see something that i'm interested in (because i've put it on my profile), well i just might be more likely to pay attention because you're catering to me. and as a marketer, well this is surely xanadu. to only have to pay for the people i actually want to speak to and not be paying for all the other people i don't care about, it's a no-brainer.

there's probably also the concern that facebook has sold out with these moves. that they're becoming myspace. i'll disagree with that too. mark z is smarter than that. he knows what he's got and isn't going to ruin that. he's seen what happened with myspace and if he couldn't learn that simple lesson, then he deserves to fail. i do believe him in his belief that he wants to keep the site very pure and consumer focused. he's calculated in what he brings to life on the site and these moves i think are for the betterment of the site and the people who use it. oh and let's not forget the companies who now have an exciting, new playground with which to play where they can be very smart and effective with their efforts.