Who is in control of your brand?

PayPal was a big game changer in the early 2000′s, there have been some micro payment gateways that have entered the fray, however, this new concept Square, which melds some new technology and an old process with a new way of thinking to form a very accessible and lean payment system. (According to TechCrunch it was valued at $40m before launch)

There are some definite questions around security, cost and many others, but I’m sure they will work through those and come out the other end with a game changing business. Think of the applications in developing worlds, SMEs, borrowing money from friends.

This video explains it pretty well.

Tangent

On a side note, if you like the main dude in that tutorial video, check out another one he’s done for a Twitter app. It’s a refreshing way to explaining technology, go dude!

Hat tip

These gems came via some colleagues at Visual Jazz, Harley Donaldson and Nick Sturgess. Harley is a great source of interesting internets every week with kettlevision.

I must preface this post with the fact that I love the concept of FriendFeed, bringing all my online world together, hence why I jumped on ages ago. Jimmy Wales also named me “more famous that scobleizer” a couple of months back thanks to a conversation I had with him on FriendFeed AND I do & will continue to use the service…

There has been SO MUCH NOISE about Facebook buying FriendFeed which makes FriendFeed seem like a fantastic service. However,  since I’ve been using it I’ve realised it’s fairly useless in a real & practical way; i.e. if I removed my account today, my life wouldn’t be any different.

So here are the three reasons why I think Friend Feed sucks:

• It’s cluttered
  The fact that everything is in one place makes it noisy, confusing and cluttered
• It’s soul-less
  There’s hardly any dialogue between users (or you can’t see it), which is WHY we use social media
• It doesn’t drive traffic
  Twitter drives 20-30% of traffic to my blog & in the last 30 days Friend Feed has delivered 1 visitor

If you do like FriendFeed, tell me why & how I can use it differently to realise it’s awesomeness.

If you haven’t tried it, maybe give it a go.

Here’s my profile http://friendfeed.com/simontsmall/

And here’s FriendFeed’s biggest advocate and international nerd superstar, Scobleizer, on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/scobleizer. Clearly he’s doing something I’m not.

I visited a site where lots of people are able to contribute content about Twitter. I posted the content below on the 14th of April and to my surprise there haven’t been any since.

1. Twitter should be an extension of your social media communications plan, and a connector throughout the plan

2. Just because you’re followed by 45,052 people, it doesn’t they all want to buy your product

3. Aim to be followed by ONLY people who could buy or influence to buy your product/service

4. Twitter is becoming more populated, everyday there is more quality content for you to compete with

5. It won’t be the marketing magic you’ve been looking for, but it will extend your current activity

This article was originally posted at Digital Ministry.

I’d like everyone to pay 1 minute silence for the late Digsby Minnie, Digital Ministry’s fictional Facebook profile. The killer, Facebook terms and conditions.

This is a follow-up to Chris’s article last August on the limitations of Facebook for advertisers.

So, Facebook is a profit seeking organisation, no news here, it employs over 700 people (news to me too), and I’m sure some of them are pretty smart. Like Free-to-air TV, Facebook’s offering is effectively free for consumers, and they seek to generate revenue through alternative channels, like advertising.

Their challenge

Therefore FB’s product, in effect, is people, the people that use it. How it monetises this is the key challenge, one which many Web 2.0 companies are yet to crack. They do know, as a rule of thumb, that the more people they have spending more time in their product the greater the revenues will be, when they figure it out.

Entertaining the masses

And the 150,000,000 people using FB seem relatively happy, they’re uploading over 800,000,000 photos every month (5.3/person), 13,000,000 (8.6%)  are updating their status atleast once a day and they’ve all gotten over the ‘new layout’. So, they’re happy. (More stats here)

Spammers rejoice

Now businesses wanting to reach those 150M people have jumped on the web 2.0.socialmedia.conversational marketing bandwagon and started building databases, promoting events, creating profiles (like poor Digsby) and they’re getting some great value out of it.

The fine print

This is where FB are extremely smart. In the terms and conditions there are cerain details which most people seem to overlook, like the fact that businesses can’t setup groups, they’re only for having fun and community groups.

So why are they smart? Well they’re letting you break the rules, and watching what happens…  If it gets to a point where you’re getting lots of value, they pull back your features, or delete your profile.

They’re doing market research.

So FB needs to make money and they’re figuring out what will work by letting businesses trial applications for free… Events, groups, pages, polls, photos and analytics to name a few. Once they think you’re getting value out of anything, they see they’ve got a product to sell.

It’s in the best interests for everyone.

1. FB need to make money to survive

2. FB need to keep their user base happy (keep spammers out)

Without either of those being fullfilled FB will no longer exist, everyone losses.

Should they care about businesses?

Well not really unless you’re paying them lots of money. And how much would you be willing to pay to manage your 2000 strong member base on your group? Probably not enough to keep them afloat.

I believe they’re realising all kinds of value that they could be charging for and are weighing up the potential profitability of all of them.

But all the while keeping their massive user base happy.

Advertising features, based on cost and benefit:

1. Polls (now called Lexicon)
   They were free, but they changed how it works and you have to pay. (As the SMH reports)
2. Advertising
   It’s always been a paid service, however, advertising your page will give you added benefits, like telling your audience which of their friends is in the page.
3. Groups
   Businesses aren’t ‘allowed’ to setup groups, if you reach 1,000 users sending emails becomes more difficult. If a single profile users sends too many emails their profile gets deleted.
4. Pages
   Considered an advertising product, although it’s free, FB pages provide comprehensive stats on your user base, and works well with advertising. One major weakness is that it’s difficult to reach out to your members, emails aren’t allowed.
5. Events
   Still a free application anyone seems to be able to create an event. Like all aspects of FB it goes viral through the news feed. The added benefit is you can send emails to people attending the event. Only two limitations I can find are, you can only invite 100 people at a time, and have 300 pending invitations at any point in time. But keep any eye on the terms page, things may change.
6. Photos
   It’s one of the main reasons people come to FB. By tagging photos you’ll get exposure to the people you tag, and their friends.
7. Search Engine Ranking
   Until recently nothing inside FB would appear outside FB, which in the most part is why people use the site. Now it appears groups, pages & profile summaries now appear on Google. If you’re not logged in to FB and visit the link from Google you will see a highly limited version.
8. Application Platform
   A massive part of FB which, with photos and status updates, makes up the balance of the majority of user’s acivity. There are currently 140 applications created daily, it’s potentially a great way to reach your audience, but you’ve gotta be better than the 52,000 applications that exist. It’s currently free to build an application on the FB platform.

If you don’t want to pay Facebook to help you market your offering, creating engaging & entertaining content, it will spread like wildfire if it’s worthwhile for someone to forward on, and everything I’ve discussed above doesn’t matter. The problem for most of us is that we’re not  professional entertainers, we’re good at spending money to reach eyeballs.

I think woops would be a bit of an understatement when a guy at Google stuffed up on the weekend. (According to the Gaurdian)

He was updating the ‘blacklist’ which indicates which website’s might be harmful and when you search for them it warns you before you visit the site.

He accidentally added a forward slash ‘/’ which in Google speak aparently equals the entire internet.

This is what you would’ve seen on all search results on Google.

So for about 40 minutes over the weekend the entire internet was ‘down’ according to Google.

Thanks to Mumbrella for picking this up.

You can read more about it here on the Google Blog.

It’s scary to say the least that such a major event can be triggered by a tiny mistake.

This is a little follow up post to my predictions for social media in 2009.

People always ask the question “social media sounds good, but how do we measure it?” and there are two parts to monitoring.

1. Business outcomes

When doing social media activty its critical to measure it against ‘real world’ business outcomes like sales, perception, market research, whatever. Without that top level realisation of value, social media is near pointless for organisations.

2. Detailed analytics

Currently you can see how much traffic content generates and where it comes from, which is great, however, someone important might post about you and millions of people see it, that’d be great to know about. And when people Tweet on Twitter about your content, or update their facebook status, this is all indications of good content.

And this is where I’m getting a bit too excited, as some smart Canadians, have built a tool that does all that for you automatically and create a quality score.

They’re called PostRank, and more than anything else I love their approach/philosophy.

PostRank scoring is based on analysis of the “5 Cs” of engagement: creating, critiquing, chatting, collecting, and clicking. By collecting interaction metrics in these categories the overall engagement score is calculated and the PostRank value is determined.

Clicks are only one part of the rank, and they actually count clicks as the least valuable type of activity! NICE!

Activities like clicks and page views indicate lower engagement because they’re passive interactions. Clicking a link to read a blog post doesn’t require much work, and you’re not giving anything back except your reading time. It is an intentional act, however, and thus indicates a mild level of interest and engagement. Which may grow after the item is read.

So get over their, start ranking your content, see how it compares to others, and link that back to real business results. Lovely.

I’m just surprised, that these guys have been around since early 2007 and people are still asking about how we measure ‘social media’… Its here, its easy and its well awesome.

Back in September I discovered this tool, by Technorati, that calculates your blog’s value… It’s based on AOL’s purchase of Blog Inc way back in 2005, so its very theoritical, but interesting non the less.

Back then my blog was theoretically worth around $500, I was curious to see if it had changed, and it has roughly tripled to now being worth nearly $1700! woot! time to move up the coast and retire.

You can chuck your blog in and see how it fares.

I’ve compared a few of my favourite blogs below, add yours to the list.

Seth Godin $4,473,414

Love Digital $4,516.32

Adspace Pioneers $65,486

The Zeitgeists $0.00

Marketing Charts $349,450

Laurel Papworth – Social Networks $92,584

Six Pixels of Seperation $401,952

Jim’s Marketing Blog $36,130

The White Agency $2,258