How good is Tumblr?

Very.

I used to consider blogging to be a pretty simple online activity. I’d just go to this one blogging service (which felt the same as the rest) and I’d sign on, write a post and then leave. It wasn’t a bad experience, just a very simple and unimaginative one.

Tumblr has made blogging much more than that for me. Through awesome design and strong features like “reblogging” and “loves,” I now spend a healthy amount of time digging through random Tumblogs, trying out new themes from the community and generally connecting with a lot of cool people outside of my work-related geek universe.

It’s inspiring to see a company take a concept like blogging and dramatically evolve it. I can’t wait to see what comes next.

Social media internships popping up left and right

As of late, a large influx of social media internships have popped up on job boards.

Here’s the reason: marketers are discovering that manning a Twitter, Facebook and Myspace effectively means spending countless hours updating content and responding directly to customers. Having fully-paid employees on the hook for responding to every tweet just isn’t going to cut it.

This is not to say that brands should hand over the social network reigns to their summer interns. Instead, marketers should take time out to document and teach an approach to customer engagment on the social web before jumping into the conversation.

On a related note, I was recently quoted in a New York Post article about the expanding role of branded social network profiles within online marketing. Check that out here.

Here’s a guest post I did for InsideFacebook. It went live a little while back, so my apologies if you’ve already picked up on it.

What Does Facebook Connect Mean for Agencies?

This is a guest post by Jesse Pickard, Social Media Specialist at Razorfish. You can find Jesse on his blog or Twitter.

After spending the last few months digging into the intricacies of Facebook Connect, I’m here to go on the record: Facebook Connect is much more than the latest bright and shiny object. It has the potential to transform the way we interact with the web and the way agencies like Razorfish for which I work to build online experiences.

At Razorfish, I’m tasked with helping our clients integrate community into their web experiences, to make their sites more “social” for lack of a better term and also to deploy marketing programs across the web that foster two way conversations between brands and their customers. In order to be successful, it’s imperative that I constantly question a brand experience’s ability to make people care enough to do things like write comments or build profiles.

When you’re in the thick of a project, there’s a temptation to overestimate how much people actually care about your site. And that’s what’s so exciting to me about Facebook Connect: because users are able to bypass building profiles and a social graph all over again with just one click, building sophisticated social features is now possible for many more brands. Let’s dive into the reasons why.

Higher value user generated content

With a one-click login to Facebook Connect, websites have access to an unprecedented amount of user data. Using this data, sites now have the ability to redefine the way they display user generated content.  Gone are the days where all you will see is content from random avatars. Now sites can surface UGC from actual friends. If your friends haven’t made any actions on the site, then we can surface UGC from people like you – maybe fellow alumni or co-workers.  Say I’m shopping for a TV on Amazon, the 400+ reviews from people I don’t know have limited value to me compared to a review from my friend or even someone I don’t know who is similar to me.

Get brand content in Facebook without advertising

The strategy of fishing where the fish are is timeless. When time spent online was dominated by the big portals, our media dollars went to buying up ads and unique sponsorships on Yahoo and the like. Although Facebook Connect isn’t an advertising buy, it can accomplish the same goals as one (and in an unintrusive manner).  Brands can get their content into Facebook’s viral channels by letting visitors post news feed stories, status messages, photos, events, and more without leaving the website.

Smart brands and agencies will learn that the key to getting content into Facebook is about providing a meaningful value exchange for each Facebook Connect interaction, not prompting their user to post to Facebook at every turn. If a site is successful at giving users a good reason to post content to Facebook, it can make a world of difference to reach and visibility. The strong impact is only partly due to Facebook’s traffic. When brands appear in Facebook via Connect, the impressions interpreted as an individual’s endorsement of a particular product and are not subject to ad tune-out, making the impression far more valuable.

Faster logins, instant profiles, and individually relevant services

Facebook Connect and the like are going to make “social network fatigue” a very short-lived buzzword. With Connect, the social network fatigue-inducing process of registering for site, creating a profile and connecting with friends can be completely bypassed with one click. The value of this cannot be understated. While other Facebook Connect benefits can be slightly unclear, skipping registration is something any mainstream web user can appreciate.

Upon logging in, the Facebook-powered profile can inform a much more relevant, targeted experience. A retailer can feature merchandise based on profile details like location, age, relationship status or even brands that the user has “fanned.”  Another option is for a company to offer special promotions to influencers, or those who have a high amount of friends, tagged photos and wall posts. It’s not exact science, but I’m willing to guess that these people are more influential and vocal than their counterparts and would be a good type of person to convert into a brand advocate.

Enhanced competitions and ranking

Whether it’s through a contest or reputation system, incentives like earning rewards, raising levels, and winning prizes can help create much-needed energy around websites and marketing programs. Facebook Connect can enhance all forms of competition by creating an experience that’s far more relevant and localized to each individual user. By surfacing where a user ranks among their friends and networks, rather than among unknown peers, a user stronger drive to compete is generated. This is one of the key reasons why social games dominate Facebook’s application platform.

So what’s holding us up? Where are the Facebook Connect implementations for big brands?

Reason #1: There’s a valid concern out there that Facebook will change the rules of Connect just as they have with their application platform.

Reason #2: Implementing Facebook Connect into existing sites is not a walk in the park (depending on your platform). This is one of the reasons many of the big launch partners (Digg, Hulu, etc.) are yet to go live.

Reason #3: The Beacon privacy fiasco has spooked some brands into being very cautious with Facebook. It’s one of the main reasons for the “wait and see” attitude out there.

Looking ahead

Facebook Connect will likely get much more powerful as Facebook does two things in 2009. First, they will likely make more profile data available through Facebook Connect as the year progresses. Second, and more important, Facebook is expected to allow users to more easily segment their friends into groups and apply granular privacy settings to each group. Facebook Connect sites will respect these settings and users will feel more confident with logging into Facebook Connect.

Major brands should become familiar with the capabilities of all portable social graph technologies, including Google Friend Connect and the unreleased MySpaceID, along with Facebook Connect. It’s also a helpful exercise to imagine what your online destinations would look like on Facebook Connect as we did in our presentation, Portable Social Graphs – Imagining Their Potential.

Barring any privacy debacles, or big advancements from Friend Connect, there should be a strong adoption of Facebook Connect coming in 2009 - especially as major implementations from the likes of Digg and Hulu go live and set an example for brands that are on the fence.

Find me at South by Southwest

Tomorrow I’m taking a much-needed vacation for two weeks. My plan: leave the iphone at home and steer clear of any and all internet cafes at all costs.

When I get back I’ll be off to South by Southwest to give a presentation on “Why Gen-Y Won’t Friend Your Brand” at 3:30 on 3/14. I’m a SXSW first-timer and would love to meet as many people as possible during my time in Austin. If you’re coming and would like to meet up, stop by my presentation or drop me a line via Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, etc.

Collaborative iPhone apps

I’m continuously amazed that there are so few iPhone apps that allow for real-time collaboration between two or more people. That’s why it’s nice to see the “Whiteboard: Collaborative Drawing” app pop up in the app store. It allows two people to create a drawing simultaneously on a virtual white-board.

Hopefully we’ll start seeing more collaborative apps in the future

My Predictions For Mobile Social Networks

In the early summer of 2008, I was really bullish on mobile social networks. I envisioned people walking into a bar and looking at their iphone to see if anybody they knew was there, checking the single to taken ratio of the bar, etc. Like others, I was excited for the value that location and mobility brought to social networking and I predicted a rapid adoption.

Then I bought the iPhone 3G and actually used Loopt (and BrightKite too)

I immedietly realized how critical it is for a mobile social network app to be able to operate in the background. The iPhone only allows for one app to run at a time. It doesn’t even allow for background notifications. Sounds like a small techy issue, but it ends up crushing Loopt’s ability to gather a critical mass of people and deliver on the cool things that were shown off in Apple’s TV commercials.

Loopt and Brightkite are very smart to be releasing features that surface people you don’t know who are near you. But I’m not sure it will be enough. Looking at a bunch of randoms around you is fun for a minute, but not all that useful in the long run. Also, the experience is lacking for those who live outside of the big cities.

Loopt and BrightKite have the following stacked against them:

• Not allowed to operate in the background
• Building a social network from scratch is a pain (when Facebook/Myspace go location-aware, they’re toast)
• Phones takes a little too long to get a fix on your location

Here’s what I think will happen (in order):

1. Brightkite and Loopt introduce very strong Facebook Connect implementations (BK already has a decent one)

2. Brightkite and Loopt get more popular and useful

3. Iphone finally allows for background notifications from apps (think of the little red numbers that appear whenever you get a new text or email)

4. Brightkite and Loopt get much more popular and useful

5. Facebook becomes location aware, propelling location-based social networking into the mainstream, rendering Loopt and Brightkite obsolete.

I still think mobile social networking is next big thing, but I think existing social networks are positioned to dominate it (if they want to).

Thoughts? Am I way off?

Social media starter kit for small businesses

Here’s a guest blog post I did for my friends over at Luprocks.
Their blog gets a lot of traffic from the small business community, particularly within the jewelery industry, so I thought it might be helpful to offfer up five of my favorite beginner resources on social media. The small business owners that I talk to usually know there is a lot to gain through the use of social media, but don’t know where to get started.

1. Common Craft’s “In Plain English” Videos
These three minute videos are perfect for demystifying those terms that you’ve never fully understood. RSS, Social Bookmarking, Wikis and more are all covered to perfection.


2. The Groundswell by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff
Hands-down the best book on social media ever written. This book will open your eyes to the vast potential of social media for businesses through great case-studies and a no-nonsense writing style.

3. Dell’s Social Media for Small Business Facebook Page
In my opinion, Dell is utilizing social media more effectively than any brand out there. They’ve created a nice resource on Facebook for small business owners who want to use social media…

Check out the full post here

SXSW-Bound

I just found out that I have been selected to speak at South By Southwest. It’ll be my first trip down to the conference.

The topic of the presentation is “Why Gen Y won’t friend your brand”. I’m going to propose a bunch of next-generation social media marketing tactics that will work with Gen Y. I’ll do my best to tread new ground and make the content very actionable.

Thanks for all of the votes and comments!

Portable Social Graphs - Imagining their Potential

I’m a firm believer that Portable Social graphs (via Facebook Connect and other technologies) will bring about a new breed of websites. I created this deck along with Shiv Singh, Daniel Stern and a few others to illustrate what this new breed of sites might look like. Check it out and let me know what you think.

Portable Social Graphs - Imagining their Potential View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: retail marketing)