BradPace.com

By Beth Kanter who runs a non profit and is a blogger. Raised 93k to help kids in Cambodia. The sharing foundation.

Beth participated in the Americas giving challenge. Get the most number of donations using internet tools over 50 days. She simply blogged about it and asked her visitors what they thought. She got good ideas from her users and defined people to help. Then she jumped into the contest. She ended up winning and won an extra $50k for her foundation.

Strategy.

1. Make it personal. The theory is from the book the power of influance. Her own children came form cambodia and this makes it very personal.
2. Will it scale? The ladder of engagement. Happy bystanders, spreaders, donors, evangelists, instigators.
3. Use stories. Talked about the kids and the people gave to the campaign. Give examples.
4. the 3 rs of social networking. ?????, rewards, reciprocity
5. Fun, humor, easy, urgency, competitive spirit, and passion.
6. Online and offline donations. Used face to face donations and used personal email to friends.

Presented by Rodney Rumford from facereviews.com. Users spend an average of 20 minutes per visit! Facebook changes the way people communicate and interact. The question is how do companies leverage this new type of communication. Frictionless word of mouth marketing. Facebook marketing opportunities include Lead gen, brand extension, commerce, customer engagement, traffic, fan pages, frictionless woma, groups, applications, advertising targeted, sponsored groups (min 100k ad spend).

8 facebook marketing options

1. applications – A new way to micro-touch and communicate. Scrapulus is the new golf. 580k daily. Useful apps can get sponsorships. Like Where I’ve been. Orbits sponsors them and 65K daily users. This provides a way for brands to engage users.
2. groups – hundreds of groups
3. paid groups
4. targeted ads – very targeted demographics. We tested this with ads from World Vital Records with little success. We are continuing to see how this will work for us.
5. news feed ad buys – Social ads are getting better and provide a type of advertising that google ad words cant do. 100k minimum to buy this space. There are also great 3rd party companies to display ads. Cubics, lookery, social media, appsaholic, Zynga, SGN.
6. pages – Pages are getting better. There is a question as to what is the difference between groups and pages. Jeep is a good example of a good page.
7. beacon
8. guerilla
9. execute with a cohesive strategy

Define success in your marketing campaigns. What are your metrics. Use a multipronged approach. Reach a target market. Measure marketing performance. Also measure engagement and the viral multiplier, frequency of return and conversion rate. How are people interacting and understand that.

6 steps to success

1. start at the end
2. defined business opportunities and objectives
3. simplified and engaging application 10k foot
4. application strategy 1k food, viral turning
5. Embrace multiple marketing vehicles. Measure ROI
6. Continue to change and evolve.

Cool greating cards app used forced invites. When they removed this their growth was still about the same. So you don’t need forced invites.

Presented by BJ Fogg. Sharing some secrets that have never been shared before. At stanford they had a class where teams built facebooks. They had 5 apps that got over 1 million users and had 10 apps get over 100k users. This was a big success. They started the class and did not know what they where doing. They expected 20-40 users and ended up with over 120 the first day. Ended up with 7 teachers and 80 students. They got some great press coverage. Students started meeting outside of class and still get together. $500k-$1Million in revenue at least 3 companies where formed. At least 2 companies where acquired.

Learnings from the class. #1. It is never to late to create a winning app. #2 the simple apps won. Apps need to be simple and easy. #3 speed and flexibility in launch and iterations. #4 community cooperation leads to success. Students helped others #5 individual opinions about apps are worthless. dont be swayed by one persons opinion. #6 Copying success is a cheap fast way to succeed. Novelty inst the best approach to apps. $7 metrics do matter, but todays tools are too weak. Instrument your apps to track success #10 mass interpersonal persuasion is finally here. Persuasion, social network, observable impact, fast cycle, easy to do, automated.

I was a bit disappointed by this presentation. I was already familiar with what they did there. They did not talk about the psychology behind the apps much. They went over their learnings very quickly. We built out app at this same time and achieved 2 million users in 10 weeks for our we’re related app. But our app is a real app and not a toy like these students created. And our app continues to grow.

Presented by Benjamin Link from Facebook. They are trying to create the frictionless platform.

User objective: help users communicate ad share information more efficiently, generating more meaningful activity, providing valuable information to users, increasing value to the users. Value to users means value to developers of facebook apps. This creates a more seamless level of activity.

Enhanced site experience. Expanded and interactive wall where users can generate their own content, friends can write posts. Additional tabs on the profile where users can add their favorite apps. This will be a great ui enhancement.

Seeing an increase in app usage. 99% of all users have used at least one app. Most have 6 or more apps installed. Long term value to developers and businesses.

Sharing proven technology, tools and architecture. Licensing their technology to partners like beebo. They claim that this makes their platform open. I don’t think this makes it open. They have launched the platform developers marketplace. Match developers to major brands. They are working on mass distribution via localization. They used their users to translate the site and then got feedback from users. Now you can get facebook in spanish. This will greatly expand their market. They say these same language translation tools will be available to facebook app devlopers. This will launch “very very shortly”.

Providing core infrastructure and resources. Applications should use the social graph and then leverage the social graph. Timing is less important when interacting online. Interact when you can. Timing of communication is very important and helps the communication be more efficient. Facebook photos is the largest online photos app in the world because it is plugged into the social graph. Facebook wants world class apps that leverage the social graph. Some of the top apps now are entertainment. New apps are more about productivity and more useful applications. They are building commerce functionality into the system. Build native support for accepting credit cards into the developer apis. That will be awesome! He says this will launch very soon (later this year).

Enabling viral distribution to over 66 million active users. Create the best user experience available. Jacking users around has been a big problem on facebook. Like forced invites. Facebook is putting control of these types of poorly designed apps in the hands of the users. Users can report poor experience. Facebook wants apps with a long term view of the world and that put the user first. Facebook now monitors activities like invites and accepted invites. Apps that create good content and functionality get more privlages on the system. Personally I think this is the only way that they can keep a good user experience on Facebook. Our app can now send more invites per user because we have a good conversion rate.

I will be live blogging which is something I have never done before.  In the past I have taken hand written notes and then later tried to get the blog post written.  This allowed me to think during the presentations.  But often I did not find time  to get some of the posts written.  So my posts may be a bit “rougher”, but the content should be there.  Lets see how it goes.

I am at Graphing Social Patterns conference that is put on by O’reilly.

I have moved my blog to a new server and am now using the wordpress multi user version.  It is running many blogs form employees at familylink.com.  Anyway I am told that we can now keep out the comment spammers and so my new posts will have comments enabled.  I invite you to comment and participate on the blog.  Add your thoughts!

My good friend and former co-worker Jeremy Palmer has had a ton of success as an affiliate marketer.  He wrote the best ebook on the subject I have read called “High Performance Affiliate Marketing” that he sold for a year or 2 for $5o.  He is now giving the ebook away for free on his site QuitYourDayJob.com.  Go check out his blog post about it! It has not been updated in 9 months or so but it is still well worth the read.

He is now creating a new updated version that he also says he is going to give away for free.  I think this is a great idea and look forward to reading it.

As anyone who know me knows by now I purchased an iphone about a month ago. Now I am not an Apple zombie (never even used a Mac) but I have been a long time iTunes user and have loved my Ipod video. But as I tell my wife almost everyday, “I LOVE MY IPHONE!”. Here are a few thoughts now that I have used it for a while now:

What I love about the iPhone

1. It looks great. I love the UI and the design of the device. The first thing I did was purchase the super protective cover from Shield Zone. I hate cases and like to just have things in my pockets. This has kept it looking like new. Well worth the money. I also love the touch screen. You can do so much with it.
2. The internet rocks on the iphone. I saw a stat that iphone users use the web 3x more than on any other phone. That’s because it works! The safari browser goes to any website and it has worked on all of them. The only sites it does not work on are some video streaming sites. Like hulu.com and the streaming feature from Netflix. More on this on the salvation part!
3. I love the map, integrated youtube, weather, clock (I had to install a world clock on my treo), and the rest.
4. Email works! I was never able to get my treo to work with email very well other than webmail clients. I tried several programs and hated them. But the email is slick on the iphone. I setup 3 accounts (yahoo, gmail, and my familylink account) in less than 5 minutes and they all worked great. Yahoo has a great push feature for the iphone that is nice (but I since have turned off to save battery). Gmail also works very well.
5. iTunes integration is very nice. You can download music via a wi-fi connection and select which music, videos, and podcasts you want on your phone. I listen to many podcasts regularly and it works great.
6. Business can get done. With the great email and safari support I have been able to do a lot of business on my iPhone. I can access and respond to email. I can get to all our sites and use them. I can even use our facebook app on my phone. I have been able to get work done in the off hour and while traveling.
7. Wi-fi access. I always thought that my Treo should have just come with wi-fi built in. The iPhone easily connects to a wireless network and provides faster access to the web and to email.
8. Lastly is the upgradability of the iphone. They released a new version of the software a few weeks ago and added some great new features. This is what is going to make the iphone rule the world. No other phone I have ever had has actually added features. As Apple opens up the iPhone to 3rd party developers it will only be more popular. When that happens many of the things I don’t like will be fixed by Apple or 3rd party apps.

What I don’t like

1. Battery life is just OK. My Treo had a great battery life and often I did not even charge it for days. The Iphone I have to charge every day or it is dead. If you watch a movie and really use it for several hours the battery goes fast.
2. The headphone jack has a little indent. This makes it so you have to use their headphones or get an adapter. Even though the size is standard the headphone jack hole is set in the phone. This just bugs me and seems like a ploy to force people to buy accessories from them. I bought a $6 adapter and it works fine.
3. Chat is missing. There is no instant messenger client with the iphone. It just seems crazy to me! I am hoping this is fixed when 3rd party developers can get their apps on the iphone. But I have been using meebo.com and it works great. They have an iphone specific version and allows me to chat on all the different IM networks through the safari web browser. But if the browser is not open you cant get chats.
4. Every time I plug the iPhone into its cradle to charge it or to sync, I get a windows popup asking me what I want to do with the photos and files on the phone. I’m sure there is a way to get around this but it just bugs me.
5. iTunes non-music stuff is poor. With my Treo I had the Palm software on my PC. This allowed me to work with my contacts, calendar, and notes on my PC and sync them back to my Treo. No such thing in iTunes. Notes and contacts are kind of an after thought. I have had a hard time importing my contacts into my iphone because there is no feature to do this. The iPhone will do it via the web and a yahoo account. But I want to see them on my PC as well. This also makes the notes app on the phone almost useless. I have started using yahoo notepad and it works pretty well. I hope that Apple fixes this soon.
6. The ring tone scam! The iphone comes with a dozen or so ring tones built in. But there is no way to get a custom ring tone into the phone. You can make clips from many itunes songs into ring tones for $1. Even if you have already paid for the song you have to pay again for the 10 seconds of the song for the ring tone. And I hate ringtones from songs! But I would like more choices of just sounds for funny clips. They don’t even sell anything like this in iTunes.

Salvation through the iPhone

The coolest thing I have found so far is the phone’s ability to access LDS.org via safari. The LDS Church has a great site with tons of great info. They have recently been adding a bunch of audio and video to the site. All this is available via the iphone. The other day I watched a CES fireside video streamed directly to the phone. I also can watch or listen to general conference talks. Read the lesson materials and do searches. Just access to all the info on this one site makes the phone worth it for me.

At the snap chat last week 2 guys (I didn’t catch their names) from WidgetBox.com spoke.  I have never built a web widget before and am simply not that familiar with them so this was a great opportunity for me to understand them better. Widgetbox distributes apps, has 18k developers, 25 Million page views per month and has 30k apps/widgets.

The most common use of widgets is to install them on your blog.  Most are built for WordPress or Movable type.  Also lets not forget Google Gadgets and Yahoo widgets (confabulator).  Then there is the desktop widget. There is a huge audience here and possibility to get your app distributed to thousands of sites.  Widgets tend not to be quite as “Social” as a social network because they don’t have the data that the social networks do.  But I think that hooking a widget into an app in Facebook or an OpenSocial site will be big soon.  Many people on the social networks also have a blog.  There is opportunity in this space and will be for a long time.

Tips for building a widget:

1. Match your audience.  This means take into account who will use the widget and what they want to do.  The Beebo audience is much different than the Eons audience.
2. Focus.  There are many ways to get your widget installed like widgetbox, yourminis, spring widgets and clearspring.
3. Operations.  This is the APIs, the networks, hosting and all the rest of the details.  Make sure you do it right and have a plan that scales well.  If your widget takes off you want to be ready.
4. Marketing. There are several ways to do this.  The above sites all have galleries where users can find apps.  There are also many widget directories.  But don’t forget good old virality.  Have your users invite their friends, make the install easy, and keep it going.  There are many widgets out there but the good ones grow on their own. Use an installer that launches right from the widget and also provide a “Get code” feature so it is easy to embed in a website.

For a good example of a widget check out the Netvibes widget.  Use your widget to push data out and bring users in.

Last Tuesday I was able to fly to San Francisco to attend the Snap Chat at Hi5 Labs.  Patrick Chanezon who is the Google API evangelist spoke.  He did a great job and it was easy to tell he is a major player in planning and implementing OpenSocial.  He spoke on high level non-technical issues all the way down to coding and specifics on the spec.  Google currently has 40 APIs available with their suite of products.  The 2 major APIs Google is focused on right now are Android (for cell phones) and OpenSocial.

In any new product there is a cycle that it goes through.  First there is a peak of inflated expectations then a trough of disillusionment.  After that there is a slope of enlightenment and finally a plateau of productivity.  Patrick was very clear that OpenSocial had a high peak of inflated expectations at the beginning and then hit a trough of disillusionment.  He hopes that now they are on the uphill slope of enlightenment.  But still have a long way to go before it is ready for real customers and business.

OpenSocial is not intended to make it so you can write your app once and have it work everywhere.  OpenSocial allows us to LEARN ONCE (one system) and write everywhere.  Each app will need to be re-written for each social network.  Each network has a different audience and different features and different data that will be available.  But the point of OpenSocial is that it will be very easy to deploy the same app (with some customization) to many networks in a short amount of time.

The .5 version of the OpenSocial spec had no security at all (or user authentication).  The .6 spec came out at the end of December and had many enhancements and included security and user controls.  The OpenSocial spec is really just an extension of the google gadget API.  They have agreed to use Atom as a standard format for files.  The .7 version of the spec will come out by the end of January and should be ready for actual end users to test.  There will be a .8 version in February that will be ready for production or beta use.

The API can be broken down into 3 main parts:

1)      Access to friends

2)      Activities stream (feeds and invites for virality)

3)      A simple hash map (creates a persistence layer for the apps)

If you want to play with OpenSocial the best way to get started is to use a sandbox to run your code on.  Plaxo, Ning, Hi5, and Orkut all have sandboxes.

Ning and Google have created an Apache open source project called Shindig.  There has been some confusion as to what Shindig is.  Simply put Shindig is a container and back end server components for hosting Open Social apps.  Think of it as plumbing to expose your data.  Google is working on the Java version and Ning is working on the PHP version.  They hope that other companies will do other versions like .net (MySpace?) and ruby(Zing?).

Patrick’s prediction was that MySpace would make a big impact this year.  They did not do much in 2007. They are going to be launching a developer outreach program and will be providing some very cool tools for their system.  MySpace is not done yet and we should see some exciting stuff from them over the next few months.

He also hinted that there will be some OpenSocial development tools coming soon.  Maybe even from Google.  He keeps track of all the cool OpenSocial links at http://del.icio.us/chanezon.

The overall take away from the meeting is that OpenSocial is progressing well and will be ready for some serious development and possibly betas in a month or so.  Plus you have to have the networks implement the most recent version of the spec to actually use it. But he acted like the 4-5 major OpenSocial networks are implementing the versions quickly. But it should be ready for production in March.  Start filling those sandboxes now because OpenSocial will be here sooner than we think.