Facebook Usernames and URL’s

Tonight I was going through my tasklist knocking off projects for the week and realized that I hadn’t gotten around to securing our custom URL or username for Facebook yet for our Pleth page. The truth is that we have had a page on Facebook for a while now but we haven’t really promoted it a lot because we have been very busy as of late working on client projects, but I will admit that that’s not a good excuse, especially since Facebook is where a lot of our new clients have been finding us.  I have even advised some of my existing clients this past week to get online and reserve their usernames and URL’s before they were grabbed up.  Here’s a description of what usernames do for you that I found on Facebook’s FAQ’s

Usernames allow public entities to easily promote your presence on Facebook with a short URL (http://www.facebook.com/companyname). This username can be used in your marketing communications, company website and business cards.

I have probably 20 or so pages that I am an admin for inside of Facebook and I went through and set most of them up that I could tonight, but when I got to Pleth’s page it wouldn’t let me set it up so I went to the FAQ’s section to find out why.  We didn’t have 100 fans yet on our page, as I mentioned earlier I haven’t been promoting our presence on Facebook hardly at all.  One of our projects recently had over 20,000 fans so I should be ashamed of myself I guess.  Here’s what I found on the FAQ’s:

Your Facebook Page must meet two requirements: it must have been live on Facebook prior to the May 31, 2009 cut-off date and have had a minimum 1,000 fans at that time. This limitation is temporary. All Pages created after May 31, 2009 or that had less than 1,000 fans on that day will be eligible to claim usernames on Sunday, June 28, 2009 if they have more than 100 fans.

In an effort to reach the 100 fan mark I went out to Twitter and posted a request and also sent messages to a group of my Facebook friends asking them for their help in getting us to the 100 mark, hopefully we will get there sometime tonight so I can knock this last project off of my tasklist…  If you have a few minutes and are on facebook, I would appreciate the love, http://www.facebook.com/s.php?q=pleth&init=q&sid=ec50f898d1747e133d9d81ad83aaaa22#/pages/Batesville-AR/Pleth-Networks-LLC/14932808682?ref=ts

If you are interested in setting up a username or custom URL for your business, click here.

Facebook | Usernames: Facebook Pages

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Facebook Connect is a Huge Success

I was reading today in the The Business Insider Insider that Facebook Connect was being hailed as a huge success. I started putting Facebook Connect onto client applications and websites pretty soon after it was released to the development community.  I am not typically an early adopter of any technology until I have had a chance to see it in action for a little while but Facebook has such a reach right now into so many households that I had a pretty good hunch that it was going to take off.

The idea of a user being able to use their Facebook account to login to their favorite websites or applications outside of the Facebook network is pure genius.  Let’s face it, no one likes keeping up with their login credentials for the various websites and services that they use.  The OpenID project probably had the idea before anyone else thought of it, and I guess there is also a few .net people out there that would argue that Microsoft’s passport has been around for a while too, but neither one of these two services have ever been able to recruit the volume of users that Facebook has, and probably never will…

Speaking from a developers perspective it’s a win-win situation. You provide users with an easy, one click way to authenticate themselves, or login to your application and you don’t have to store any login credentials or personal information on your end.  Something else I have found about Facebook Connect that I share with a lot of my clients is that the perception of Facebook has changed dramatically, even over the past year or so.  If you watch CNN you might have noticed that they are using CNN and Twitter to cover the uprising in Iran…

Here are some quick stats that were provided by Facebook to the insider:

 

• Registration: sites that use Facebook Connect as an alternate to account registration have seen a 30-200% increase in registration on their sites.
• Engagement: sites with Facebook Connect see a 15-100% increase in reviews and other user generated content
• Traffic: For each story published in Facebook, we see roughly 3 clicks back to the site.  Nearly half the stories in the Stream get clicked on. This creates opportunities for the site to encourage more user actions – knowing that each one may result in 3 new visits to their site. With other models like search, there’s nothing you can do to increase user traffic besides optimizing for keywords.

Facebook Connect Is A Huge Success — By The Numbers

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David Ebersman is Facebook’s New CFO

Facebook named a new CFO today, his name is David Ebersman.  Ebersman has some prior CFO experience at other firms and should be a huge asset to Facebook.  I think the question that we have all been wondering about will soon be answered, and that question is, “when will we see the Facebook IPO?”

I suspect that it’s going to take a few months, possibly even a year for the new CFO to get a grasp on everything that Facebook has going on.  Let’s face it, from the onset Facebook hasn’t been your typical startup, they have been able to woo millions from angel investors and even pulled in way more than any web startup I have ever seen without facing up close and personal scrutiny from the government or SEC.  To put it bluntly, I am surprised that they have existed this long w/out going public.  The amount of money takes to fund an online community like Facebook would blow it’s users minds. 

One other thing that I am going to be paying close attention to is how Facebook plans to make money.  Sure, i know they have their ad sales, which are probably substantial, but probably not the complete answer.  I think that they missed the boat on the whole “vanity url” thing, that could have been epic.  Here’s the press release for those of you that might have missed it:

PALO ALTO, Calif. — June 29, 2009 — Facebook today announced that David Ebersman, the former executive vice president and chief financial officer (CFO) of Genentech, the pioneering biotechnology firm recently acquired by Roche, will become the company’s chief financial officer.

Ebersman will report to Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and Founder Mark Zuckerberg. He will oversee Facebook’s finance, accounting, investor relations, and real estate functions. He also becomes a part of the company’s executive management team, which directs all aspects of company strategy, planning and operations. Ebersman will formally start in September 2009.

“We received a lot of interest in the CFO position and had the opportunity to meet with many impressive candidates,” said Mark Zuckerberg. “We quickly recognized that David was the right person for Facebook. He was Genentech’s CFO while revenue tripled, and his success in scaling the finance organization of a fast growing company will be important to Facebook.”

“After meeting with Mark and the rest of the team, I was thoroughly impressed with everyone’s drive and sense of purpose to help people connect and share,“ noted Ebersman. “Mark is constantly pushing the company forward and he’s assembled a world-class team that is achieving remarkable results both for its users and as a business. I’m excited to join this effort and this new industry.”

Ebersman worked at Genentech for nearly 15 years. He served as the firm’s executive vice president and CFO from 2006 through April 2009, when Roche Group acquired the company. Prior to joining the company’s finance organization, he was senior vice president of Product Operations. He joined Genentech as a business development analyst. Previously, he was a research analyst at Oppenheimer & Company Inc.

 

Facebook | Press Releases

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Facebook Vanity URL’s Possibly Coming This Weekend…

Facebook is scheduled to release vanity URL’s this weekend for those that are interested.  I strongly recommend businesses and individuals looking to do self promotion take advantage of this feature.  When I first heard of this plan for vanity URL’s I assumed that Facebook had figured out a way to charge for this service and to generate some revenue, but from what I have gathered on CNN Money this morning, that is not their intention, and like everything else on Facebook, this service is slated to be free.

At some point Facebook is going to have to start looking at ways to generate revenue from their social networking platform, unless of course there is some method they have in mind that the rest of us in the industry are missing.  Ad sales are great, and Facebook has one of the best ad platforms out there, but ad revenue alone isn’t the answer in my opinion, for long term stability…

From the beginning of Facebook, people have used their real names to share and connect with the people they know. This authenticity helps to create a trusted environment because you know the identity of the people and things on Facebook. The one place, though, where your identity wasn’t reflected was in the Web address for your profile or the Facebook Pages you administer. The URL was just a randomly assigned number like "id=592952074." That soon will change.

We’re planning to offer Facebook usernames to make it easier for people to find and connect with you. When your friends, family members or co-workers visit your profile or Pages on Facebook, they will be able to enter your username as part of the URL in their browser. This way people will have an easy-to-remember way to find you. We expect to offer even more ways to use your Facebook username in the future.

Your new Facebook URL is like your personal destination, or home, on the Web. People can enter a Facebook username as a search term on Facebook or a popular search engine like Google, for example, which will make it much easier for people to find friends with common names. Your username will have the same privacy setting as your profile name in Search, and you can always edit your search privacy settings here.

Starting at 12:01 a.m. EDT on Saturday, June 13, you’ll be able to choose a username on a first-come, first-serve basis for your profile and the Facebook Pages that you administer by visiting www.facebook.com/username/. You’ll also see a notice on your home page with instructions for obtaining your username at that time.

Facebook usernames will be available in basic text forms, and you can only choose a single username for your profile and for each of the Pages that you administer. Your username must be at least five characters in length and only include alphanumeric characters (A-Z, 0-9), or a period or full stop ("."). While usernames are currently available only for Romanized text, we’re looking at how we might support non-Romanized characters in the future.

Think carefully about the username you choose. Once it’s been selected, you won’t be able to change or transfer it. If you signed up for a Facebook Page after May 31 or a user profile after today at 3 p.m. EDT, you may not be able to sign up for a username immediately because of steps we’ve taken to prevent abuse or "squatting" on names.

Be sure to check out this FAQ for answers to common questions, and if you’re an administrator of Facebook Pages, get more details here. If you want to ensure you keep the rights for a trademark or other protected name, contact us here.

Coming Soon: Facebook Usernames | Facebook

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Another Reason Social Saturation is Important

The report that shows the rise in usage posted on Yahoo didn’t surprise me too much this week when my good friend Brant Collins (another authority on social media) tweeted this link the other day.  Social Networking is here and has been for a while now.  It is for this very reason that my partners and I consult our clients to not only maintain an effective web presence but also plan for a certain level of social saturation as well.

On a recent personal project that my partners and I invested a lot of time and effort into, we were able to quickly achieve great organic search engine positioning but analyzing our statistics quickly showed us that our traffic wasn’t coming from Google so much as it was coming from RSS Feeds that we had tied into social outlets like Facebook & Twitter.

If you are behind the curve, it’s never too late to insert your company into the social landscape, in fact if you jump in now, you can probably beat a lot of your competitors to the punch.

If you thought you wasted a lot of time on Facebook last year, this year things have gotten out of hand, according to a study by Nielsen Online. Time spent last year reading our friends’ Facebook Updates and sharing "25 Random Things About Me" questionnaires totaled 1.7 billion minutes compared to this year’s total of 13.9 billion. That’s a 700 percent increase in time spent virtually loafing around, according to Nielsen Online that just loves to tell us how we waste our time. (First, television. Now, Twitter.)

Speaking of which, that chirpy social network, Twitter, has come onto the scene like a new kid on the block that drives a Mercedes. Everybody wants to be Twitter’s friend – including Microsoft. Twitter saw a 3712 percent year-over-year increase between last and this year, with users clocking in nearly 300,000 total minutes for that site in April ‘09.

And for all you MySpace holdouts: That site can still claim top audience for social network video streams. Users spent 384 million minutes viewing video on MySpace in April versus only 113.5 minutes for video on Facebook.

Nielsen Online also recently released a report (PDF) that says we like blogs and social networks better than our personal email. Facebook holds our attention for longer than any other top site. And time spent on social networking and blogging sites has grown at 3 times the rate of overall Internet growth.

"The staggering increase in the amount of time people are spending on these sites … has ramifications for how people behave, share and interact within their normal daily lives," according to Nielsen’s "Global Faces and Networked Places" report (PDF).

Gulp. That’s quite the charge.

But don’t you go shaking your head and muttering, "Kids, these days," under your breath. It’s the youngsters who might actually be taking a back seat at the family desktop, and their embarrassing parents who are increasingly wooed by friend requests from their long-lost college classmates, and quizzes about what literary heroine they are.

The greatest growth for Facebook has come from the 35- to 49-year-old crowd, and has added twice as many 50- to 64-year-old members than it did of the under-18 group.

There are, after all, way more people to network with after you’ve been around for 50 years than there are when you’re just starting out as a social being.

Time Spent on Social Networks Doubles in a Year by PC World: Yahoo! Tech

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Marketing Lessons Learned from The Swine Flu

Seriously, if you ever want to read some pretty in depth content about social or viral marketing, you need to checkout Dan Zarrella. 

Dan is an extremely intelligent guy that I have followed for a long time now and he is also pretty popular on the conference circuit as well.  I actually spoke to him today on the phone about possibly coming to Arkansas to speak to our Central Arkansas Refresh group at our next meeting, (hopefully we can get everything lined up to bring him in soon). 

Dan took the recent swine flu virus outbreak and it’s spread to show us some intense lessons in marketing.  This is awesome content for those of you that are embarking on viral campaigns of your own…

The name viral marketing stems from the theory that ideas spread like viruses, making epidemiological metaphors and models useful when attempting to understand the spread of memes. Since the goal of any viral marketer is to create a pandemic with their campaign, we can learn a lot from the early spread of Swine Flu. Here are 7 valuable lessons to take away from this virus.

1 Seed Selection

First emerging near the very densely populated Mexico City, Swine Flu seemed to travel to half a dozen other countries around the world over night. Many of the first confirmed cases were among children in schools who had taken trips to the popular Mexican vacation destination.

Children, due to their gregarious nature and low levels of hygiene awareness, are called the “super spreaders” of this outbreak, prompting many schools to close. Children are often blamed for a host of illnesses, but perhaps the most famous super spreader was Typhoid Mary, a cook who was responsible for 2 outbreaks of typhoid fever in the early part of the 1900s.

When planning to seed a viral marketing campaign it is important to take into account which members of the target audience have the most potential to be contagious. Typically, savvy social media users, including bloggers, Twitter users, Diggers and Facebook fanatics, are the best seeds.

2 Knowledge Gaps

A phenomenon I first noticed when reading a World War II era research paper by the CIA-precursor, the OSS, discusses the spreading of information when knowledge about a particular topic is scarce.

The OSS paper says that good rumors are “provoked by” and provide interpretation or elaboration on a current event, filling a “knowledge gap.” If the locals heard a big boom earlier in the day, a rumor could easily be constructed to explain it if the authorities did not.

In the absence of official or authoritative information, rumors proliferate. The CDC has actually been pretty good at communicating authoritative information about Swine Flu, but in those pockets where people are unaware of it, lots of “theories” and “facts” have emerged. For example, some countries have banned imports of pork products, despite the fact that meat cannot carry the Swine Flu virus, h2N1.

3 Addition vs Replacement

Because the common name “Swine Flu” misrepresents the origin and dangers of the virus (and does not conform to historic convention of naming influenza outbreaks for the geographic region they first emerged from), several organizations have tried to “rename” it, but none have taken hold in the public discourse.

Each of us has a mental framework of ideas built on each other that we use to view and understand the world around us. When we are exposed to a new meme that contradicts an existing portion of our framework, it is very difficult for the new idea to replace the old idea. It is much easier for us to assimilate new ideas that either agree with or expand on our existing mental frameworks. Think of an under-construction brick house: it takes much more effort to replace a previously laid brick with a new one than it does to begin building an addition onto the house with the new bricks.

4 Novelty

One of the factors that makes this version of the swine flu so dangerous is that it is a novel combination of several genetic sources for which humans have built up no natural immunity and for which no vaccines exist. The 2009 version of the h2N1 virus is essentially a remix of previously existing strains and may form the bridge by which the most virulent forms of human, bird and swine flus can merge and co-evolve.

In the study of applied memetics, we learn that one of the requirements for a successful meme is that it possess some form of novelty. It is often easiest to achieve easily understood novelty by putting new content in an old structure, or putting old content in a new structure.

5 Communal Recreation

Viruses evolve like a giant game of “telephone,” as each host that becomes infected with a particular strain offers the pathogen a chance to evolve into a new variety. This means that the Swine Flu is rapidly morphing and multiple strains probably already exist. The higher mortality rate in Mexico may be due to a more deadly version having evolved there that hasn’t yet spread abroad.

In urban legends, rumors, slang and many other forms of social communication, each person who is exposed to a particular meme creates their own version of it before passing it on, often fitting it to their personal and societal frameworks, thereby making it more adept at spreading in their community. Therefore, successful campaigns must allow and encourage remixing by their target audiences.

6 Infectious Period Length

The period of time from infection to non-contagiousness of a pathogen is known as it’s “infectious period.” This is when the person is a potential seed for the virus. The CDC has defined Swine Flu’s infection period as:

Infectious period for a confirmed case of swine influenza A (h2N1) virus infection is defined as 1 day prior to the case’s illness onset to 7 days after onset.

The longer the infectious period lasts, the more secondary cases may result from an un-quarantined primary case.

In the case of most viral and social marketing campaigns, the infectious period exists as an event rather than a period of time. An “infected” person will blog or Tweet about something. The goal for viral marketers looking to exploit the infectious period should then be to increase the number of infectious events each individual will undertake.

7 Endemic vs Epidemic

In mathematical models of epidemiology, there are 2 concepts of the “state” of the spread of a “successful” pathogen: endemic steady state and epidemic. Assuming a population with zero immunity (because this outbreak is a novel h2N1 strain, no one has any natural immunity to it yet), an endemic state indicates that each infected person infects exactly 1 other person; an epidemic state indicates that each case will cause multiple cases. The steady state means that the outbreak will continue to spread without external influences. Viruses that enter the epidemic state will eventually either die out due to exponential growth or reach the endemic steady state.

In viral marketing, we must strive to understand and improve the reproduction rate of our campaigns. We can assume zero immunity because, except in certain rare cases, people aren’t immune to most ideas. With social marketing, however, we tend to see a reproduction rate of far under 1, that is each “infected” person will infect less than 1 person on average. This has lead to research into extending the total reach of a meme through “big seeding,” but when you model total campaign spread as a function of seed size and reproduction rate, it is much more effective to increase the reproduction rate. As marketers, it is crucial to encourage each user to spread the campaign to as many other users as possible, rather than try to “seed” it with huge numbers of initial users.

7 Viral Marketing Lessons Learned from The Swine Flu Virus | Dan Zarrella

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Xbox to Connect to Facebook, and Twitter

I guess since I am not a big gamer, I really didn’t give this one a lot of thought but after hearing this morning that Microsoft plans to incorporate some popular social applications like Facebook and Twitter into their Live Services for the Xbox I might have dust off my Xbox and give it another look.

This is a win-win for everyone involved in my opinion, probably more so Facebook and Twitter than Microsoft though. I mean, gamers are going to continue to buy their console for Halo and whatever cool game is out this week, but for Facebook and Twitter to have their applications put in front of the young gamer crowd that sits in front of their televisions sipping jolt all day and have no contact with the outside world in an even more pronounced way this could actually generate even more signups for them once it is launched out.

I think that this is a good call on both Facebook and Twitter parts getting involved with the Xbox like they are.  I am a little curious what the finished product is going to look like since it’s been a long time since I did anything with Xbox Live Services I can only speculate.

In addition to debuting ten new games for the Xbox 360, Microsoft today kicked of E3 2009 by introducing a number of new features for the console’s online counterpart, Xbox Live, including partnerships with Facebook, Twitter, Last.FM, and the U.K.’s Sky TV.

Xbox to Connect to Facebook, Twitter, Last.fm – News and Analysis by PC Magazine

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