First take on Facebook Timeline, Open Graph, F8

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Sep 23, 2011 in Advertising, Facebook, Marketing | 1 comment

Yesterday I posted my initial thoughts about the new Facebook Timeline after the F8 keynote.

1. Winners: media outlets. Spotify, Hulu, many others. The Open Graph intends to socially enable every possible aspect of your life in as automated a fashion as possible. Who can attract the most eyeballs? The common denominator content providers and big houses.

2. Losers: batch and blast organic marketers. The way marketers are going to get to audiences through Timeline and Open Graph is pretty clearly through Apps. For everything else, you’re going to be using the Ads system. All those Likes and other things? They don’t appear as though they’ll significantly impact this new interface except in the most peripheral of ways.

3. Winners: the popular. Edge Rank has been filtering the real time feed; Open Graph’s new Graph Rank will filter the Timeline and access to eyeballs for apps. Marketing will need to reinforce apps with other channels to ensure their success. If you’re good at marketing, good at building buzz, good at aggregating crowds, you will win.

4. Losers: the entrepreneurs and independents. If you have no budget and/or no capabilities to promote your stuff – whether you’re a content producer, media maker, or developer – you’re pretty much screwed. Everyone else who is a better marketer or has a bigger budget is going to run you over.

5. Winners: the data driven. Over time, you can bet that Timeline and Open Graph data will be made available via API. There’s a huge bounty available for anyone who can crunch massive pools of data and extract insights from it. Imagine being able to do massive data insight gathering from an entire lifetime instead of just a few status updates and likes.

6. Losers: people concerned about privacy. If you thought managing privacy controls now was tough, just wait till you face an entirely new set for Timeline and Open Graph.

Final food for thought: Facebook isn’t doing anything new, data-wise. If you’re creeped out by this, then realize that most of this data is already in their system. They’re simply designing a new way to organize it. Sure, stuff like Timeline and Open Graph will let more parts of your life be socialized, but the vast majority of relevant Timeline data like photos, status, likes, etc. is already in the machine. That said, think carefully about the implications of what this means for what you do online. Here’s Mashable’s take:

Although not as big a deal as the Timeline, this tweak may be one of the more controversial. Previously, apps had to ask every time they shared information about you in your profile. Now, the first time you authorize the app, it will tell you what it’s going to share about you. If you’re cool with that, the app never has to ask you again.

Imagine the first time a politician’s Netflix history is published and we find some entertainment choices that run counter to their professed values.

What are your initial thoughts and takeaways from the Facebook F8 announcements?

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Build your base during the Facebook/Google+ wars

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Sep 22, 2011 in Advertising, Facebook, Google, Marketing, Social media, Social networks | 3 comments

Platforms are changing, evolving, iterating more rapidly than ever. With great change comes great disruption as people move from place to place. Familiar, stable locations suddenly become unstable as mass migrations occur. With that in mind, your home base is now more important than ever. It’s the one thing under your control, the one thing that is as stable and as predictable as possible in turbulent times.

Remember MySpace? So many people, so many companies, sunk thousands of hours and dollars into building out their presence. Companies launched million dollar campaigns to drive traffic to MySpace pages. Bands abandoned their websites in droves to set up MySpace pages. All of that marketing, all of that effort, and today MySpace is a digital foreclosure, with the same weeds and abandoned properties look of the worst neighborhoods.

Right now Facebook and Google+ are battling it out for mindshare and marketshare. Tides of battle will swing back and forth as each network seeks dominance over being the social network of record. This creates turbulence among your customers. Today’s most avid Facebookers might be moving to Google+ or vice versa. The audience you’ve come to rely on today in one network may suddenly be on a different network tomorrow. With this much migration, with this much uncertainty, home base is all you have.

What is home base?

• It’s the website you own and operate.
• It’s the domain name that you bought.
• It’s the content you wrote that is exclusively yours.
• It’s the mailing list that you encourage people to sign up for at every opportunity.
• It’s the discussion forum that you moderate on your site.

It’s the places you have under your control, the audiences that you manage, the only stuff that is truly yours.

If you’re not growing home base, you’re leaving yourself to be a casualty of war between the major powers as they battle for social media dominance.

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Your 10 Step Google+ Launch Day Checklist

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Sep 21, 2011 in Advertising, Marketing, Social media, Social networks, Strategy | 1 comment

Google+ is now open to the public and with that opening, corner offices are asking marketing departments around the world: “What are we doing with Google+?” If you need an answer besides “I don’t know”, this post is for you.

First and foremost, brands are still not rolled out, so put the thought of a corporate page out of your mind for the moment. Let’s talk about building up your personal G+ presence. As with all social networks, size does matter, so feel free to send this post to the rest of your marketing team. The more people from your company that follow these steps, the more powerful your network of people will be to support the main company page when brands are allowed to launch.

1. Set up a profile that doesn’t suck. Take the time to fill it out and tell people about who you are. Bonus: add in your blog and other recommended links to ensure complete coverage of your digital presence. If you’re doing this as part of a company, make sure you’ve got your company in there!

2. Set up a redirect. Google+ still doesn’t have friendly URLs. Set up a redirect off your domain name that is easy to remember. I’ve got cspenn.com/g for mine.

3. Seed your network. Google+ pulls from GMail and Google Contacts. Take your personal mailing list and dump it into your Google Contacts, then find those people on Google+ and circle them as existing contacts.

4. Turn on those social widgets. The +1 button now lets you share publicly, so if you’ve got a blog or website that can use widgets from companies like ShareThis, AddThis, etc., make sure they’re up to date and active.

5. Lame as it may be, if you have pages on the web that are important to you (like your company, your blog, etc.) hit the +1 button on them now.

That way you’re getting your pages into G+ (and Google’s real time SEO analytics):

6. If you use social networks in your email signature, add in your G+ redirect.

7. Sync your social! On a regular basis, remind people on each network where you are on other networks:

8. Make sure all your welcome pages have Google+ integrated into them.

9. If you’re not already sharing and participating on Google+, now would be a good time to start.

10. Go back and read how to set up metrics on Google+.

Google+ is out the door and publicly available. If you haven’t had a chance to use it until now, use this checklist to lay the groundwork for getting up and running really fast.

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Core Competency and the Netflix Decision

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Sep 20, 2011 in Advertising, Marketing, Strategy | 2 comments

Most MBAs are familiar with C. K. Prahalad and Gary Hamel’s classic business concept, the core competence. For those folks out there who don’t have MBAs (or who slept through the strategy portion of their degree), a core competency is one of the most important, misunderstood, and ignored concepts in business.

The classical definition of core competency is this:

1. A core competency provides access to a wide variety of markets.
2. A core competency provides the value behind end-product benefits.
3. A core competency is difficult for competitors to imitate.

Let’s look at a couple of companies and their core competencies.

Apple, Inc. is one of the most valuable companies in the world. Why? Because one of their core competencies is outstanding design. Great design gives them the ability to access lots of markets in ways that no one thought possible. The tablet computer has been around for years but it wasn’t until the iPad that the market exploded. Design provides the essence of many Apple products. There were plenty of MP3 players before the iPod, but it was design that made it a wild success. Design is also extremely difficult to imitate well, as demonstrated by the sheer number of failed iPod, iPad, and MacBook knockoffs and imitations that fail to capture any market share.

Google, Inc. is another company with a deep core competency: the understanding and development of algorithms. Algorithms are the heart of the company, from search results to contextual advertising to social networks like G+. Their ability to develop great algorithms provides them access to markets and allows for eventual dominance in those markets. For example, Google has been trying out different algorithms for years in social and it took several generations of adaptation to create Google+. Algorithms drive all their successful products and services. And their algorithms are so secret that entire communities of SEO experts spend most of their careers trying to stay ahead of and decode Google algorithms, often to no avail.

You’ve now got two examples of core competencies by companies that understand their core competencies and execute on them very well. Note that in both cases, these competencies aren’t products or features – they’re attributes of the companies themselves, characteristics of their culture and people.

Let’s turn our attention to a recent decision by Netflix to split its DVD and streaming video businesses in half. Based on what you know now, what is/was Netflix’s core competency, and does their decision enhance it or break it?

I would make the argument that the old Netflix’s core competency is content delivery to the home. Their change in business model from DVDs only to DVDs and streaming reflected this competency and allowed them to access the streaming video market. Content delivery to the home informed all of their products, and the integration of DVD by mail and streaming allowed them to outcompete Blockbuster and many other companies in their space.

The latest business decision, then, actually breaks their core competency in half. The decision splits down a method of delivery, creating two companies with the same theoretical core competency – content delivery to the home. This in turn badly violates Prahalad and Hamel’s third rule: a core competency that is difficult for competitors to imitate. The new Netflix as a streaming video company now faces a tremendous amount of competition that is imitating or improving all the time, from Amazon Prime to Google to Apple. The DVD by mail business may or may not survive (it’s operationally very expensive, which is why there are few competitors), but the streaming business faces incredible headwinds.

What would have been the better solution for Netflix to improve profitability and shareholder value? Its core competency was getting content to the home in an incredibly convenient way. That said, there were still some content types they did not carry, such as adult entertainment. Exploring new forms of content and new content delivery methods would have leveraged their core competency of getting content to the home and been even more difficult for competitors to imitate, rather than easier.

Here’s your homework assignment. Determine what your core competency is based on Prahalad and Hamel’s 3 rules. If you can’t, then your business is in severe danger of being beaten by its competitors!

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Finding connections in blog comments

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Sep 19, 2011 in Advertising, Blogging, Marketing, Technology | 0 comments

Borrowing an idea from Tom Webster‘s social media monitoring, let’s take a look at your blog’s comments today.

Start with WordPress (any blogging software will do, however). Open up your comments section and look at only approved comments, as I assume you de-spam your comments regularly before approving them.

Open up your text editor of choice and begin copying and pasting the last 10 pages of comments into it. If you’re feeling more sophisticated than copy/paste, open up MySQL and do an export of the post text column only to simplify the next steps.

Dedupe it if your software allows you to dedupe by line. Remove any obvious formatting or data-only lines and you should be left with a large text file of your recent blog comments.

Now fire up Wordle and feed this large chunk of text into it:

Two questions for you:

1. Do the largest words in the cloud express an intended focus of your blogging? That is, if you blog about marketing or social media, are the comments you’ve received indicative of that? If not, your content may be somewhat off target.

2. Are there words or word associations in the cloud that you didn’t expect to find in there? For example, in my cloud above, I found that people was unusually prominent and it turns out that the word people is used very heavily when referencing how to build social networks like Google+.

Got a blogger you respect? Run their comments through the same mechanism and see if you have anything in common with their audience. Here, for example, is Chris Brogan:

So, what are people saying about your blog posts?

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