Creating Bebo Applications

Intro to creating Bebo Applications presented at Graphing Social Patterns (Bebo has embraced OpenSocial):

OpenSocial and Google App Engine

Patrick Chanezon (API Evangelist) and Paul McDonald (Product Manager for Google App Engine) presented a technical overview of OpenSocial and Google App Engine at Graphing Social Patterns East. If you aren't familiar with OpenSocial see the second presentation below, first.

Adam Lovallo of Inside Facebook was live blogging the session.
Introduction to Google OpenSocial

Here's a video of Patrick Chanezon:


If you're interested in building OpenSocial Applications using Google App Engine, you may want to check out the article Building an OpenSocial App with Google AppEngine by Lane LiaBraaten, Google Developer Programs.

Open Social: Open For Business - Presentation

From the Graphing Social Patterns conference I blogged about the Open Social: Open for Business session. Following are the slides from the session and covers Google OpenSocial, hi5, imeem, MySpace and my.aol.com

Viral Marketing and Advertising Strategies for Social Networks - Presentation

Earlier, I blogged about the Graphing Social Patterns session, Viral Marketing & Advertising Strategies for Social Networks - Presentation.

Kevin Barenblat, co-founder of Context Optional uploaded the slides to slideshare.net (Thanks Kevin!). I have embedded them below.

“one of the best [presentations] i've ever seen on this topic”- Dave McClure (500 Hats)

I agree with Dave as it was certainly one of the best and most thought provoking sessions at the conference and I am not alone in thinking that. I heard rave reviews from attendees after Kevin finished his session.

Following presentation is by Jeff Ragovin, VP of Sales for Buddy Media.

Mobile Social Networks - A Comparison

In the Social + Mobile = Sociable (Social Networks for SMS, IM and Mobile Devices session, at Graphing Social Patterns East, Benjamin Joffe presented a full of insights session comparing mobile social networks and what makes them so powerful and successful in Asia. I found Benjamin's slides on slideshare (embedded below).

Among other things, Benjamin focused on ARFU (average revenue from users), sticky features, business models, page views growth, services, revenues and profits for various social networks. Very interesting presentation.

If you missed Graphing Social Patterns East this year, make sure you go to the next year one. You may also want to check out Graphing Social Patterns West happening in CA later this year. Otherwise, you'll be missing a lot.

Dave McClure - Top 5 Things That Fail and Win on Social Networks

Dave McClure, master of 500 hats and the host of Graphing Social Patterns, opened the conference with a brief but thought provoking presentation on top 5 things that fail and win on social networks.

Top 5 things that fail on social networks:

• Too many friends
• Too many apps
• Virality is dead
• Ain't no money (targeted advertising fail)
• Your privacy isn't

Top 5 things that win on social networks:

• Poking
• Multiple platforms
• News Feeds
• "App" - vertising
• Data portability

The presentation was quick, simple and brief but had an important message for social networks . Dave is right that having too many friends can fail a social network. You just don't feel connected to your friends if there are too many of them. Virality is also a very crucial component of social networks. If there is no proper platform for viral engagements, it can adversely affect the social network. Finally privacy is something that social network operators just can't ignore. It is much too important today and users are quick to sound their opinions. Just recall what happened in the case of Facebook Beacon, a poorly executed strategy from Facebook that didn't respect privacy. It's no surprise that Facebook took it down after experiencing a major backlash.

Two points I'd like to add to the list of things that cause social networks to fail are scalability and addition of poorly thought features. If your social network isn't scalable and you don't have a high availability strategy then eventually users are going to leave. They may not leave immediately, but they will, especially if a high availability strategy isn't implemented. Addition of poorly thought out features that are primarily there for monetization and don't directly benefit users will hurt user experience causing them to become less engaged on the network.

Overall, this is a very interesting list to remember. Thanks Dave for sharing this.

Graphing Social Patterns - Recap

Jefferson Memorial - Washington DC

I got back today around 5 PM from Washington DC. There was a 3 mile backup on the turnpike because of an accident.

DC was very hot and humid. Back in New York, the weather wasn't much cooler either.

Now that I am back, I wanted to take a few moments to recap my experience and thank the incredible people whose hard work made this conference so much fun.

Dave McClure - The awesome host who made it all possible

Graphing Social Patterns East was a lot of fun, definitely invaluable and one of the best ones in terms of networking opportunities and content if you are interested in penetrating or capitalizing social networks. Dave McClure (the very awesome host), the speakers and the O'reilly conference team did an outstanding job overall to make this conference an unforgettable one.

I have already blogged about few of the sessions. My intention was to take notes from every session but I failed to keep up. At times the conversation became so interesting especially during the panels that I wanted to listen in carefully than having to type everything. In my upcoming posts, I will try to find the slides and other blog posts for you. Here are quick links to my summaries:

• Geek Metrics: Using App Analytics to Drive Distribution, Engagement and Monetization
• Open Social: Open for Business
• Social + Mobile = Sociable (Social Networks for SMS, IM and Mobile Devices
• Widget Strategies and Social Platforms
• Facebook Business and Marketing Solutions
• Viral Marketing and Advertising Strategies for Social Networks
• Developing and Promoting Social Network Applications (Rules of Thumb)
• Social Networks for Business and Marketing Managers

The video clips Dave had painstakingly gathered fit right in with the presentations that followed them and were a lot of fun. Dave has posted the links to videos from both day 1 and day 2.

Sebastien de Halleux - COO of PlayFish

On Sunday night, as I was about to head to my room, I saw two gentlemen sitting at the bar. As I approached closer, I had to ask, "Are you Dave McClure? You look just like your photo on your blog." To which he made a very friendly reply, "Yes." I ended up sitting with Dave and Sebastien de Halleux of Playfish for a couple of drinks. Very quickly I was impressed by the insights Dave has regarding just about everything. Sebastien's company is growing very fast on Facebook and one of their games, Bowling Buddies, is in fact addicting. I highly recommend checking it out.

Chris Bissell - Chief Software Architect of MySpace

For the first time, I got to meet the MySpace team. Dave introduced them the night before the conference. Really cool and original folks who are not only at the top of their game but also very helpful in lending advice. I had great chats with Allen Hurff (SVP Engineering), Chris Bissell (Chief Software Architect) and Max Newbould (Platform Lead and Product Owner). I was pleasantly surprised by their personalities as I had wrongfully thought that being owned by News Corp., MySpace team would be a lot corporate. But that wasn't the case. Quickly after meeting the team, I was having engaging conversations with them.

Max Newbould - Platform Lead and Product Owner for MySpace

Another thing that pleasantly surprised me was that how much effort MySpace is putting in creating relationships with developers. They have created a dedicated channel on IRC just for developers and are hosting DevDemo days to interact on a more personal basis with developers. In addition, Allen put his friendfeed and twitter streams along with his MySpace and email addresses to give developers multiple ways to connect with him. Watch OpenSocial MySpace Application Demo by Chris Bissell. Immediately after the conference, Max took off to give MySpace presentation in various countries.


Ro Choy of RockYou presented an informative session on viral growth and how users use social networks. His presentation was full of examples on differentiating viral from anti-viral with countless tips on building viral engagement. For anyone wanting to explore marketing opportunities with social applications, this session alone was worth the price paid for conference ticket.

I also met Sachin Rekhi of imeem. Sachin had an incredible story about how he left his very promising job, formed a company, worked very hard to secure licensing contracts, got engaged and sold his company all within a year. A true entrepreneur at heart, Sachin was offering great advice to anyone interested in music startups. He warned about the complexities in negotiating music licensing deals. Sachin used to work at Microsoft creating Visual Studio. He had to go to great lengths to create an Open Social container at imeem since his team wasn't ready to use Shindig. Today, anyone can start creating their application utilizing imeem's Open Social container. Be warned that Sachin is more interested in quality than quantity when it comes to applications. As I learned more about imeem at the conference, I couldn't help but think that Sachin and his team have build an incredible product despite the licensing hurdles they had to face. Thanks, Sachin for great conversations and for building imeem.
Adam Ludwig of Give Real is an entrepreneur working on another disruptive idea. I have known Adam for sometime now and it was a great pleasure to catch up with him at the conference. Adam generously invited me and Michelle for a wonderful lunch at the roof top of Hyatt. Thanks Adam!
Adam Ludwig chatting with Benjamin Joffe
After hearing the thoughts of Benjamin Joffe (Plus Eight Star), I wanted to engage in discussion about mobile social networking and monetization with him. Benjamin had unmatched insight into how to monetize social networks and factors behind the success of mobile social networking in Asian markets. His presentation was one of my favorite ones.

At lunch one day, I sat on a table with Chris Sandoval (Director of New Business Initiatives, Enterprise Hosting at NTT). Chris had a great offer for startups to show how dedicated his company is to acquire business. IIRC, Chris' company hosts Twitter. He told us a joke that went something like: if you throw a stone in US, it would hit a lawyer. if you throw a stone in Japan, it would hit someone who works for NTT.

Scott Slack (founder of a100voices) was also at the lunch table. He is working on a very interesting project as well that focuses on social networking and locality to create content. Check out a100voices.org for more details.

Also sitting with me on the table was Durjoy (Ace) Bhattacharjya (VP, Interactive Marketing, Digital Media of Core Performance). Ace's company trains top athletes and they recently signed a deal with Sheraton to provide a custom program to integrate their services with health clubs at Sheraton.

As I stepped out to smoke a cig. (bad me!), I met Sonu Kansal (CTO of Associated Content). Sonu runs a large infrastructure to support the operations of Associated Content which now has an incredible amount of content. We talked about various scalability and high availability challenges among other things.

On another smoke break, I ran into Peter Foley (CTO of Artez Interactive). Peter's company offers online fund raising solutions to non profit organizations including Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation, Children's Miracle Network and National Ovarian Cancer Foundation. We talked on a variety of things ranging from utilizing social networks to technical challenges. Thanks Peter for a great conversation!

Adam Nash - Senior Director of Products, LinkedIn

Adam Nash (Senior Director of LinkedIn) gave a high level overview of his company that was very interesting. Of all the social networks LinkedIn is the one I use the most. LinkedIn is working on opening their platform to developers so we can expect to see some great applications. Adam, did you get my LinkedIn invitation? :)

Michael Lazerow - Buddy Media

Michael Lazerow of Buddy Media is really good at his job too. His presentations and insights were eye opening. His company has been working on disruptive applications. Unfortunately, although I wanted to, I didn't get to chat with him one on one. I can't wait to run into him next time.

I really enjoyed meeting, probably the funniest guy at the conference, Mo Kakwan (of MoBouy) as well. His sense of humor was incredible making everyone laugh and smile. I could see that everyone enjoyed Mo's company very much.

As the presentations ended on the last day, I sat in the lobby with a few friends including Mo. There I had some great conversations with Siqi Chen (CEO of Serious Business). Siqi had to catch a flight so we cut our conversation short. He is a very smart entrepreneur with a great personality who created the Friends for Sale application that is getting rave reviews and has a very impressive number of daily active users (IIRC a million plus). Siqi understands social graphs and social interactions on social networking sites and plans to create more engaging games that are built around these interactions. Read Siqi's blog post on Startupism.com, "How to Not Suck at Facebook Apps."

Also sitting with us in the lobby was Brendan King (CEO of MyFrontSteps). Brendan is a real estate veteran and an entrepreneur working on creating exciting solutions for the real estate market.

While we were sitting, Marc Porcelli (Chief Marketing Officer of SinglesNet) joined us. Marc's company is a leading provider of online dating services and he was interested in buying more impressions for his site. It's impressive how much Marc's company is dominating the online dating market. He provided many usability gems as to why his company is perceived better by online daters than eHarmony or Match.com.

In the session, Geek Metrics, Hiten Shah (CEO of KissMetrics), Albert Lai (Kontangent), Ian Swanson (Sometrics, Inc.) and Roy Pereira (Refresh Analytics) provided intuition on the metrics for applications and widgets. Dave moderated the session and herded the panel to highly unique selling proposition of each of the analytics provider. Later, I had interesting conversations with Albert Lai who is an established serial entrepreneur having sold several companies.

Oh, I almost forgot about Mark Sendo (CEO of Urturn). A very approachable, friendly and smart guy, Mark has a background in Macroeconomics and his new company is creating a promising virtual currency for social networks. Urturn has been covered by TechCrunch and several respected sites.

At the dinner on the last day of conference, Dave introduced me to his long time friend Justin Won (President of JayDub Enterprises, LLC). As I conversed with Justin, who used to be involved with databases years ago, I couldn't help but be impressed by his understanding of what a proper scalable solution would comprise of. Very quickly we covered bottlenecks of most infrastructure related issues. I really loved Justin's quote that "DBAs are a different breed than programmers."

David Recordon (Open Platforms Technical Lead for Six Apart) was also present at the dinner. He had quite a bit of industry knowledge including the challenges that some of the popular websites are facing (no, I won't name the sites). Thanks for your insights David.

I am also thankful to Ahson Wardak (founder & CEO of ShareMeme), John Maver (founder of Thought Labs), Chris Saad (Founder and Chairperson of Data Portability Project), Jared Goralnick (Productivity Evangelist at AwayFind), Keith Schacht (Founder & CEO of 42 Friends) and Erik Giberti (AF-Design) for great conversations and insights that they all generously shared with me.

I am sure I missed out some of the names (sorry for my bad memory!). My apologies and a big thanks to everyone with whom I conversed but didn't list here.

Now, I am definitely looking to the next conference.

Geek Metrics: Using App Analytics to Drive Distribution, Engagement, & Monetization

On the next panel, Geek Metrics: Using App Analytics to Drive Distribution, Engagement, & Monetization, the panelists are Dave McClure (500 Hats), Hiten Shah (CrazyEgg / KISSmetrics), Ian Swanson (Sometrics, Inc.), Albert Lai (Kontagent) and Roy Pereira (Refresh). Dave McClure is moderating the panel.

Why would I use third party analytics solution?
HS: It boils down to resources (experience, scaling problems) and insights.

IS: Resources, relationships and partnerships that developers can't build on their own.

RP: Launched on May 1. App developers should focus on core making it viral and as successful as possible.

AL: We develop viral analytics. Most customers tell him that customers don't have bandwidth (time, retention etc).

Are you shipping currently?
AL: Private beta shipping to select customers. Currently not releasing customers. 80% of our time goes into scaling, building infrastructure.

RP: already launched. Their target is application networks (companies that have lots of applications) and ad networks.

IS: Launched in January this year. Currently doing 15 million daily unique active users. He is from Userplane. They have a long tail. 90% facebook, 8% myspace and 2% spread across other networks.

HS: Several large customers lined up. Shipping next week as private beta. Less focused on monetization and more focused on engagement and growth.

Are you currently charging?
RP: Free model right now. Plan on introducing value added functionality in coming months. Fundamental functionality will always be free.

IS: free product. last week launched a social ad platform. They have some premium services. Kind of like atlas or DART but for social space.

HS: base analytics will be free but subscription services will cost some.

AL: I am going to pay million dollars to everyone for using :)

How is your product better than say Google Analytics?
AL: We are focused on viral channels, enagament and allow easier access to A/B testing methodologies like big guys (Slide etc) do.

What are the risks are going forward and what keeps you awake at night?

HS: Social networks control us and the developers. That's what keeps us up at night.

RP: Social networks changing APIs etc.

Specific example of viral analytics?
AL: Very very quickly adapting to traffic that's coming in. Providing the ability to forecast virality based on changes. Framework that allows to test various changes.

HS: Viral growth factor number and equation that's getting standardized. Related to invitations and engaging users. The equation is called k-factor.

Why are you better than other guys?
IS: make money
HS: great insight. use all analytics you can.

Another great session at the Graphing Social Patterns conference.

Open Social: Open for Business

Next up is the session Open Social: Open for Business. Panelists are Patrick Chanezon (Google), Paul Lindner (hi5), Max Newbould (MySpace) and Sachin Rekhi (imeem).

Open Social offers a standard for everyone. The IT rights of Open Social are owned by Open Social Foundation. Among Open Social members are hi5, imeem, bebo, ning, Oracle, Yahoo!, six apart, LinkedIn, viadeo, friendster, AOL and many more.

Open Social is 88 days old and reaches 275,000,000 users with 66 million installs of 2000+ apps developed by 20,000 developers. 10 million users use applications on Open Social.

Two client APIs : one for javascript and the other for REST.

Three areas:

• people and friends: access friends information programatically.
• activities: see what friends are doing
• persistence: provide state without a server and share data wth friends.
  

Some examples follow next.

An Open Social application has 80% code that can be readily implemented on other OS containers.

If you have a social site and want to implement OS you can use Apache Shindig which has PHP and Java version of it. Shindig makes it really easy to implement. There is a very active mailing list for it.

SocialSite by Sun: Open source project that utilizes Shindig and builds on top of it. Dave "Roller" Johnson announced it at JavaOne. Heavy potential at Enterprise.

iGoogle: 50% userbase in US!

Google Friend Connect:

• Users... more ways to do more things with my friends
• Site owners... more and engaged traffic for site.
  

MySpace Developer Platform:

• 7 months old
• Supporting REST APIs - over a year old
• #1 social network
  

Why Develop for MySpace?

• unique demographics: users you can't find elsewhere
• forthcoming metrics / analytics focused on small to medium developers
• user base is so large, you just need to get a small portion of MySpace users by popularity not virality.
  

Some Metrics of MySpace:

• 60K registered developers
• 1800+ apps
• 15 million installations (3 months)
  

MySpace Developer platform at developer.myspace.com

• IRC: irc.freenode.net #myspacedev
• Email: developerrelations at myspace.com
• Twitter: MySpaceDevTeam
• Dev Jams: range from 2-8 hours, devs bring their laptops and get first hand instruction and help from MDP team members
• Myspace offers free application press releases apply at myspace at spark.pr.com
  

MySpace Developer Platform future:

• application communication channel
• custom notifications
• invites - requesShare App
• Metrics/analytics to playing field
  

Sachin (Imeem):

• Imeem is social network focused on sharing and discovering all kinds of media.
• 24m unique users per month and third largest social network based on US traffic.
• http://imeem.com/developers
• they have made their content licenses to developers allowing them to utilize imeem's legally licensed media.
• Types of applications
• originally Adobe ActionScript 3 Flex Apps
• OpenSocial Javascript APIs (in May)
• External iFrame
• OpenSocial extensions
• immem-specific extensions that allow access to imeem media metadata, including music, videos and photos.
• Example:
• The Echo Chamber application example built on imeem.
  

My.Aol.com

• newest partner with OpenSocial
• 4 brands
• 16 locales
• 12 languages and more on the way
• 55 myAOL portals
• 2-3 new locales per month
  

My.AOL.com Gadgest

• myAOL is an AJAX basde web applciations (uses Dojo)
• moving to Google Gadgets
• this summer their platform will be completely transformed to work with Google Gadgets and Open Social.
• jennifer.consalvo at corp.aol.com
  

Social + Mobile = Sociable (Social Networks for SMS, IM & Mobile Devices

Last session of the day is a panel discussion. Panelists include Benjamin Joffe, Ben Keighran, Gregory Cypes, Craig Dalton and Chris Butler.

BJ: Spent last 8 years in Asia (4 years in Japan, 3 in Korea and 1 in China).

Information Arbitrage: Identifying most successful best practices.

Some history: Mobile SNS (Social network services) are not new. ImaHima ("are you free now"). In 2001, they had 250,000 users.

What changed? numbers and speed of data access. Also, what you can do with phone. Mindset of people using mobile has changed.

It works: Japan is #2 economy, #1 mobile society. 80% penetration of 3G. China is #1 mobile and Internet population. QQ has 500 million users. Cyworld has 35 million and mixi has 90 million compared to 200 million Facebook users.

Mobile users: 50mln for QQ, 3 mln for facebook, cyworld 45 mln,

Revenue: fb: (50 mln), QQ 250 mln

FB is focused on profile page, IM and groups. QQ has avatars, paid games also.

Sticky feature: FB (applications.
QQ: IM digital currency, pmt system.
Cyworld: real friends, digital currency , pmt systems
mixi (footprints)

Business models: FB: ads, QQ (digital goods, paid games, mobile VAS)
cyworld (brand pages, digital goods.

Revenue mix (ARFU: avg revenue from users):
fb: 0%?
QQ 87%
cyworld: 80%
mixi: 5%

Mixi has more page views on mobile than PC. Mobile CPM is half the price of PC.

Community and Social networks are turning into full-fledged media. Cyworld is the nicest mobile application in social networks.
These top mobile SNS in Asia won't "invade us" as they are busy in home markets and they lock cross cultural expertise. Cyworld started and closed operation in Europe.

Myspace has started operation in China, Japan and Korea but so far has failed to gain traction revenue wise.

How to make mobile social networks work:
1. high speed network and flat fee: (No one from large mobile network present in the audience.)
2. Proper payment systems: seems a low hanging fruit.
3. Girls: it's not rocket science.
4. Companies and Schools: Because employees and students spend so much time on it that their computer access is blocked and so they turn to using mobile services.

benjamin at plus8star.com

Panel Introduction:

Ben Keighran (BK) ben at bluepulse-inc.com
Launched in December 2006. built world's largest social messaging platform.

Gregory Cypes (GC): gregory.cypes at corp.aol.com
QQ is trying to break into US market. GC is tech lead for open AIM. Big component of open AIM is mobile. AIM does over a billion IMs a day with 80 million users.

Craig Dalton (CD) (craig.dalton at hookmobile.com)
Hookmobile in mobile development for last years. Now in multimedia messaging. Created a platform to integrate messaging with social networks that takes away complexities such as device recognition. Just launched platform in April.

Chris Butler (cbutler at dash.net):
They do crowd sourcing. People can do Yahoo! mobile search from their car. Twitter from the car :). Working on facebook apps.


What's view on social network on mobile in US?

CD: XHTML is going to die.

BK: Browser is rapidly getting faster and is faster than it was ever before. iPhones, Android and Safari are fast. Create it as a browser based application.

GC: Every application needs SMS strategy.

BK: SMS gives you a huge touch point and advantage but times are changing.

How do you think operators are positioned? Do they hinder or support initiatives.

Careers are changing, they are opening up more. Interest around the browser is very great as it allows companies to come together and create standards.

Google has made cost of information really low.

Widget Strategies & Social Platforms

Next up at Graphing Social Patterns is Hooman Radfar, CEO of Clearspring Technologies, Inc.

Widgets are the new web page and the building block or social web. They provide high-growth channel to audiences and allow you to deploy software as a service. In addition widgets create active dialog with users.

Widgets are a building block, not a building.
- think in context
- think through the life-cycle of widget: how do I create it? how do I market it? how do I track it?
- data-driven, multi-channel strategy: Think bigger and measure across multiple channels.
- focus on user: Widget is another thing in your bag of tricks.

Put a method to the social madness:
- start with a real method and real goals.
- must know your audience
- list channels for distribution
- deploy services across each channel
- create cross-promo 'bridges'
- track each channel and bridge


Long tail: new channels, same audience:
- instead of long tail, look at the fat tail. Look at Adonomics.
- the best apps on facebook are driven by communication

Let the numbers be your guide:
- mantra of web 2.0
- measure channels to goal conversion
- starting with highest converting channels
- optimize each via A/B tests
- lather, rinse, repeat -- FAST FAST FAST
- invest in your metrics infrastructure (really really important)

Build your bag of tricks
- study the best (ahem: copy)
- A/B testing methodologies: get really good at it
- cross promotion strategies: if you don't have that opportunity through existing apps, leverage others who can cross promote your app.
- personalization techniques

See the forest from the trees
- data is good
- interpreting data is better
- drive hard to your metric, but...
- lift your head up to sanity check.

Don't be afraid of failure
- you will fail if you are good
- things will continue change
- but there are a lot of things to try
- so try new things fast and use data!!!

Thing Big:
- widget lifecycle
- cross channel
- lift your head up. check metrics

Act Small:
- establish channel conversion value
- build bag of tricks
- speed over smarts.
GSPEast08

Facebook Business and Marketing Solutions

I am now sitting in the session ,Facebook Business and Marketing Solutions, by Kent Schoen. The session starts out with the video by Rhettandlink.com.

How do you take advantage of the social graph?
Let your customers market for you.

Tools Facebook offers to drive engagement

• Share
• Events: Facebook sends 66 million invites monthly compared to 16 million sent by Evite. Invite product not the best invite product in the world but utilizes the social graph.
• Pages: There are 150,000 pages and more than 85,000,000 fan connections. Hotels, brands and local businesses are creating pages on Facebook.
• Applications: e.g. Open Table and Fedex applications. There are more than 24,000 applications on Facebook. Some applications are created to bring rich content to users, others are using it to promote a product or service. There are 400,000 developers and over a billion installs.
  

If you put things out there that are useful to people, they will use them.

When someone adds an application, an item gets posted to news feed which helps in generating an automatic referral. There is a single digit percentage of your friends that are going to see an action you perform.

Facebook ads show up in either news feed or on left hand corner and allow marketers to accelerate activity by using precise targeting.

What is a social ad? Social actions combined with content. Example provided was of iThink application.

There are plenty of applications that primarily exist to drive traffic off of Facebook to their own site.

Is there a revenue driver for pages? People buy advertising to promotes pages. Also, the more exposure / traffic a page generates, the more possibilities to monetize exist.

Viral Marketing and Advertising Strategies for Social Networks

After the lunch break at Graphing Social Patterns, I decided to go to Kevin Barenblat and Jeff Ragovin's session titled Viral Marketing and Advertising Strategies for Social Networks. I may hop to the other tutorial, Intro to MySpace Developer Platform and Apps, after the break.

There has been a big shift in how people spend their time online. He is showing the top sites as of 2005 and 2008. People are spending more and more time on social networks. By 2012, $8 billion is expected to be spent on online social network advertising. Facebook is all about viral communication channels. These communication channels allow people to stay in touch with their friends.

Next is old marketing funnel:
Eyeballs -> Awareness -> Consideration -> Preference -> Action -> Loyalty -> Buyers

People are on social networks to converse with their friends. Marketing works differently on social networks. You make brand part of your conversations. In the funnel world, money spent can predictively reach eyeballs. The most successful applications and campaigns on social networks are all viral.

Creative drives engagement. The slide shows E=mc². Media buying can only get you so far on social networks. On social networks, the creative can really drive the campaign and lead to high level of engagement.

x * y > 1 = viral growth

There are several viral channels on facebook.

The most important channel on social networks is invitations, which positioned right way should be about user's friends.

Notifications are great way to engage/re-engage users once you have recruited them.

Social Marketing Strategy:

• Why?
  
• What are the goals and objectives of the social marketing campaign?
• WHO?
  
• Who is the target customer? How is the customer best engaged?
• HOW?
  
• How should customer relationships change? How will the campaign be measured?
• WHAT/WHERE?
  
• What applications should be built? Which technologies should be used? Where should the campaign be run?
  

Last question, not the first, should be "What"?

Range of advertising options (less to more)

• advertisement (less customization/integration): banner and rich media targeted by demo, geo and/or interests)
• sponsored app: build on existing audience. brand integration
• branded page: independent presence on Facebook. users become brand fans.
• custom application (more customization/integration): interactive branded application engages users. viral channels drive growth. If you have an application, it is a great opportunity to learn about your users.
  

Facebook is probably the biggest repository of information about people in the world.

Next up is Jeff Ragovin from Buddy Media. He is talking about FedEx application that was created to engage in a fun way with users. The application allows users to send virtual gifts.

Every Application should have the following:

• a landing page that provides clear branding- easy to understand instructions
• a unique application title: You should pick something descriptive, unique and interesting. Just based on the title alone, a good deal of users may start using your application.

Next, Jeff engaged us in an exercise of creating an application.

Overall, the session was a lot of fun. Thanks to Jeff and Kevin for sharing their insights.

Developing and Promoting Social Network Applications: Rules of thumb

Some rules of thumb from Context Optional:

F: Frictionless: simple, less is more
A: Audience: on facebook for their friends
C: Communication: integrate into the viral channel
E: Engagement: hook users to return regularly. If you're not engaging users, they will go away.
B: Business model: design with monetization in mind
O: Objective: establish goals and success metrics
O: Obvious: make each page's purpose clear. Don't create about page, it has no value.
K: Keep working: develop, test, repeat. Viral is incremental.

From the Intro to Social Networks for Business and Marketing Managers session at Graphing Social Patterns East 2008.

Social Networks for Business and Marketing Managers

I am sitting in the session "Intro to Social Networks for Business and Marketing Managers" by Ro Choy of Rock You! Folowing are my notes from the session.

Five years ago, people considered Google to be the entry point for the Internet. Now you are talking about social media and social network being the absolute entry point. Where does a teenager go first on the Internet?

What's most relevant for a teenager? Everything related to their social network.

Gone are days of SEO to position your business. Today the question is, what do I do to position my presence online within social networks.

There is an attendee from the State Department interested in reaching globally through social networks.

Another attendee from Microsoft wants to understand how to incorporate feedback mechanisms.

What are social networks used for?
Content posted on social network: "What do you do with your social networking profile?" - Active Internet Universe

• 55.1% upload photos
• 21.9% upload videos
• 74.0% message friends and communicate
• 30.8% write a blog
• 18.3% dating
• 23.3% install applications
• 9.8% promote a band
• 33.6% favorite/currently listened to music
• 3.2% do other activities
  

What are the differences between services?

• Facebook is a communication/collaboration tool which is highly structured and highly functional. Facebook is known for its primarily college-age, well educated high-income demographic although currently Facebook has many diverse demographics today. Historically it was known as an "elite" network for universities.
• MySpace is more famous for self expression. It is less structured and more customizable. You'll see millions and millions of different looking pages. MySpace has a younger, more diverse demographic. The younger you are the more time you have and therefore you can spend time on customizing your page. You can keep scrolling down for hours on some pages. Try 50 cent's page. Historically MySpace was famous for being a haven for music artists.
• LinkedIn is like a proxy for business cards. LinkedIn is used to keep business contacts in touch with each other.
  

How is Facebook used?
Four most important areas of Facebook:

• Profiles:
• used to create a profile
• communicate with friends
• share media
• install applications
• browse
• other!
• Pages
• Groups
• Events
  

Each of the above revolve around trying to communicate.

New Media today is about communication and about finding interests. Information collected by social networks like Facebook is a gold mine for advertisers.

There are 45 million people using RockYou's tools on Facebook today.

Among younger generation, email is old medium. 90% mail in his Yahoo! mail is spam whereas 0% of messages on his wall are spam. I find this hard to believe as Wall's on Facebook do generate quite a bit of spam, even though that spam is sometimes being created by your friends :).

You can make a lot of money at Facebook. Anything that works on the Internet, works on Facebook within applications.

Facebook email is probably used more by Facebook users than their own personal email account.

No one likes to read in social environments. Reading is 'death of viral.'

MySpace overtime has adopted a lot of Facebook's features. Background is really important on myspace. It took Ro a week to 'make his profile look really bad.'

Career-oriented and older demographic are the primary users of LinkedIn, which has now adopted Open Social. LinkedIn offers a somewhat different experience and allows you to make business connections, get recommended by associates and to post one's resume.

Viral marketing is key to success. He's showing a graph depicting explosive growth in Rock You's usage.

Key Takeaways for Viral Growth:
- New User focus: Without it, viral isn't possible.
- Simplicity
- Novelty
- Universal Applicability

When you communicate with new users, focus on actionable items because it's the action that's viral. Don't make your users fill out a form.

Anti-viral is thinking. Deliver something with immediate value proposition.

Simplicity is also co-related to virality. Things that take 10 seconds are more viral than things that take 30 seconds. Things that take 1.5 minutes aren't viral at all.

In the viral space, people who know viral get big really quickly. To win virally, you must be novel. There are a lot of free gifting applications. Even small ideas that make an existing application novel can hit big, but there must be something novel about about it.

Games can be very specific or very broad. Casual games do really well on social networks.

RockYou's competitors are experts in viral marketing who look for immediate exposure. Don't market until there's a base established for viral methods.

Good viral methodologies generate 2 new installs per user. Even viral rate of 1.001 is healthy.

Building Viral Engagement: (chart of circles with inner to outer most: user -> direct friends -> indirect friends -> interested parties)
1. New users => build clean flows
-- New users are absolutely key to viral engagement (vs returning user).
-- focus on linear, one-action flows to maximize activation for new users
-- forget registration.
2. Direct friends => deliver clear value proposition
-- provide clear value proposition to new user for inviting friend network (Likeness)
- ensure invitation is first/second step new user flow to maximize viral value of user (superlatives vs superatives)
3. Indirect friends => focus on messaging
-- focus on on messaging to invite/notification receivers to drive more friends invites
-- deliver increasing AND simply understood value to app w/ ever friend invited (Zombies)
4. Interested Parties => allow universal use
-- enable simple tols (comments, ratings, answers) that allow interaction w/o requiring full engagement w/ application (My questions).
-- Old school discussion boards are awesome
-- If you depend on creativity for something viral, you're dead.
-- for e.g. for movie review, have pre-created choices for users (I love this, thumbs up OR I hate this, thumbs down)
--- Click rate for this kind of engagement is really high.

Remember, activities drive awareness. Facebook will reduce an application's ability if your emails don't get clicked on. Your bandwidth on platform will decrease.

Marketing opportunities with social applications
How do you market something successfully in social space? Successful marketing for social media should focus on social applications.

1. Application content integration
-- Integrating brand or product as part of user experience (e.g. Indiana Jones character)
-- Example: likeness quiz, virtual gifts, greeting cards, virtual actions etc.
-- build applications that take into account existing user behavior.
2. Sponsorships or branding of applications
-- app takeover or skinning w/ possible promotion
-- Example: Skin application w/ sweepstakes or cntest
3. Custom social application building and distribution
-- Build a social app for advertiser and/or distribute it through social network specific ad networks
-- Example: build, viraal tune, launch and seed an app recruiting users from RockYou's leading ad network jumpstarting viral spread of app.
4. Rich Media.

For Sweeney Todd campaign, there was a 0.01% CTR for banner alone but when they did integration with application the CTR jumped to 0.65% (65x better).

RockYou created a SuperWall card for Step Brothers and provided that as an example for application integration. They featured two custom designed greeting cards on SuperWall. Greeting Cards were placed in top placement, pre-selected and expanded upon roll-over. The card appeared in user's profile. The results were 8M impressions on application pages. 6M cards sent and immeasurable viral impressions through newsfeed events and in-profile prominenece. These were traditional CPM based campaigns.

Women tend to be more active in sharing content.

Application Sponsorship:
RockYou worked with Sony and Resident Evil to create skins or brand applications. ResidentEvil campaign was expecting 10K registrations for contest but they achieved a million registrations for the contest.

CTR rate:
Social networks: 0.13%
Web 0.20%
Avg RY ad: 0.28%
Best RY campaign: 30%!!!!

Some rules of thumb from Context Optional for developing and promoting applications for social networks.

Application development and Promotion:
- 3rd party ad networks on Facebook can radically accelerate Facebook application adoption
-- RockYou
-- SocialMedia
-- Lookery

- From RockYou's experiecne, advertisers can generate between 1000 to 20,000 installs a day
- CPI can be as much as $0.60.
- Consider potential throughput of the ad network
- quality of ads => requires constant tuning to maintain high CTR
- Ad copy => make it actionable and presonally identifiable
- viral tuning => work with a team that knows engagement / growth
- successful applications require ongoing investment.

Stylefeeder:
Largest fashion/shopping application on Facebook with over 1 million installs. They are getting multi-dollar CPMs. Their goal is to drive traffic to existing website.

Rich Media on Social Applications can provide 2x interaction rate and 2x activity rate (e.g. campaign for Ruins movie)

Monetization:
Online advertising is growing but social advertising is growing 3x faster. CAGR in global online media advertising is expected to reach $61 billion by 2010.

Context is the key to social application monetization:
Search is not viral and has high context and low virality. With social networks you have low context and high virality. With social applications, you can get high context and high virality: Apps add context to social networks and social apps are viral.

1. Application cross-promotion:
- CPI = $0.30 - $0.50
- selected customers: Acuvue, IAC, Microsoft, NBC, ESPN, Coca Cola, Expedia

2. Agency sourced branded advertising
- CPM = $2.00 to $10. (their avg CPM from brand agencies is $5)
- customers: Sony, AT&T, Warner Brothers

3. Direct response and lead generation
- CPA

4. Virtual Goods, Micro-transactions and subscription

Agency sourced branded advertising campaigns can range from $30K to $150K spend.

The session has ended. We ran over about 10 minutes but it was worth it.

Graphing Social Patterns East Starts Tomorrow

I am here at Hyatt Regency Crystal City where surprisingly my Verizon cell phone has really bad coverage. The signal level returns to normal once I am out of the hotel but anywhere in the hotel my phone just barely shows one bar. This is becoming really annoying.

DC is great except its excruciatingly hot! We wanted to play tourist yesterday but after visiting a few spots, we decided to come back to our room.

Friday night I met Shirley Bailes who is the speaker manager for O'reilly conferences. She has a pretty tough job herding speakers and arranging conference after conference but she does an outstanding job every time.

A very big surprise for me was that smoking is allowed at the bar and around the lobby. Because of that, you can smell smoke all over. While I smoke (trying to quit), it wasn't a very pleasant feeling for my pregnant wife and so we decided to go back to our room and order room service instead.

Anyway, the Graphing Social Patterns conference starts tomorrow. I wanted to check-in today for the conference but according to the email I received, it won't be possible until tomorrow. The official check-in hours for the conference are:

Registration Hours:
Monday: 7:30 am - 5:00 pm
Tuesday: 7:30 am - 5:30 pm
Wednesday: 8:00 am - 5:30 pm

My intention was to register early so I could beat the rush, but oh well.

There is also an exhibitor hall, the hours of which are as follows:

Exhibit Hall Hours:
Tuesday, June 10
8:00 am - 9:00 am
10:00 am - 10:30 am
12:00 pm - 1:15 pm
3:00 pm - 3:30 pm

Wednesday, June 11
8:00 am - 9:00 am
10:00 am - 10:30 am
12:00 pm - 1:15 pm
3:00 pm - 3:30 pm

I am glad that unlike MySQL Conference, GSPE organizers are not adding the word "Expo" to the conference name.

O'reilly is requesting that all blog posts regarding the conference be tagged with “GSPEast08” and “GSPEConf08.”

So if you are at the conference and spot me (I have really short hair and a goatee), say hi! It will be great to meet new and old friends.

Graphing Social Patterns East - Leaving for DC

Graphing Social Patterns is the premier conference on the topic of social networking and social graphs. The conference is being held in Washington DC.

In a few moments I will be leaving to attend Graphing Social Patterns East. The drive is about four hours so not too bad. I always enjoy driving this route as my first driving route in the US was from German Town, MD to New York.

I wanted to go to Graphing Social Patterns West as well but couldn't so I am very excited to attend the east one. I plan to learn about the inner workings of the platforms and engage in networking opportunities at the conference.

The conference is being held at Hyatt Regency Crystal City which is where I will be staying.

The conference explores social networks from two interesting perspectives:

Business & Marketing Strategy:

* LinkedIn: The Business Social Network
* MySpace and Facebook Social Advertising
* Apps & Widgets: The New New Ad Units
* Social Advertising & "App"-vertising
* 10M in 10 Weeks: What Stanford Learned Building Facebook Apps
* Social Networks & the NEED for FEEDS
* Social Networks for Mobile Devices

App Development & Technical Strategy:

* Google OpenSocial + AppEngine Technical Overview
* Poke Back: Facebook Platform Team Live Chat
* Bring Your Own Platform (BYOP)
* Social Games for Social Platforms
* Geek Metrics: App Analytics for Distribution, Engagement, & Monetization
* OpenSocial: Open for Business
* VIRAL vs STICKY: Designing Social Apps for Reach & Retention
* Show Me the Money: App Monetization

The keynotes at the Graphing Social Patterns conference include:

• LinkedIn: The Business Social Network by Adam Nash
• MySpace Business & Marketing Overview
• Facebook Business & Marketing Solutions by Kent Schoen
• Google OpenSocial + AppEngine Technical Overview by Patrick Chanezon and Paul McDonald
• Technical Overview: The MySpace Developer Platform (MDP) by Allen Hurff
• Poke Back: Facebook Live and Interactive by Benjamin Ling, Dave Morin, Ruchi Sanghvi, Josh Elman and Dave McClure.
  

It should be a lot of fun to see old friends and make new ones. If you are attending, ping me via this blog or by email (on the top right hand side) and let's meet up for a drink or two ;)