Tag Archives: Facebook

One Year Later: I Repeat – Apple Should Be Worried About Facebook

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About a year ago (5/26/2012), I wrote a blog post identifying Facebook as a company Apple needs to watch out for.  Here’s the article: http://zdubpost.com/2012/05/26/apple-needs-to-change-facebook-is-about-to-ruin-them/  It’s a bit over the top when it comes to all the random graphs I through in, but it gets across one major point.  Apple has built all of its sharing products to only work inside the network formed by Apple devices, and Facebook (like Microsoft not too long ago) has built all of its tools to work on any device including Apple.

FB Home app image

Fast forward to today and more than 500K people have downloaded Facebook Home a new app that creates and home screen experience deeply rooted in your Facebook experiences.  More importantly Facebook is stepping up their engagement with a sub-sect of Android users, making FB’s utilities more valuable than the ones that come with their phone.  Specifically – Facebook Messager.  But to understand what FB has done, we first have to dig into two things, what they’re disrupting (iMessage) and what FB’s core focus is.

Group Messaging on iMessage has been a great long-term viral growth asset for the iPhone 

Tell me if this sounds familiar – The first friend in your group gets an iPhone, shows it off, it’s cool.  The second and third friend in your group get an iPhone a few months later, again they show it off, now they start showing their apps and it looks cooler.  You personally don’t feel a need for an iPhone because you see it as a luxury, or at least not great enough to justify switching plans.  But then a few things start happening; iPhones are now basically on every carrier, iPhone apps continue to get better and better, and by now like 5 of your 20 or so friends have them.  This is where iMessage takes over the sales pitch – you start getting texts from individual people but they’re clearly meant for a whole group.  You start seeing full conversations happening, but you only are getting bits and pieces of them, they aren’t easy to keep pace with on your phone.  You’re friend later that week shows you an iMessage group conversation on his iPhone and you realize, for him the conversation looks like a conversation.  Over time you’re phone number starts being left out of conversations, because you’ve had trouble keeping up with them, you tend not to engage in them as much, so you get forgotten from time to time.  At this point friends start having inside jokes you don’t understand and you feel a lot more pressure than you did before to buy a iPhone.  Now I’m not saying this is everyone’s experience, but it is literally the story of how I got an iPhone.  It’s not the reason it became a part of  my consideration set, but it was one of the major differentiators for me.  I suspect for Apple it’s a major tool to drive iPhone user growth after the initial early adopters in a social group buy one.

Who does Facebook want their customer to become

Facebook wants to change the way people communicate.  Facebook wants to make their users expect personalized experiences from what content they see, to what ads are shown, and so on.  Facebook as a company has done great things to nurture/build a user base that demands – TV on demand, custom news feeds just for them, and ads that are actually relevant verses interruptions.  (Talk to all the businesses in the world who rely on “spray and pray” marketing models to find relevant customers, most love Facebook as an ad platform but don’t realize the thing their customers are becoming makes every other ad channel less and less effective if they continue to “spray and pray”.)  In the pursuit of changing the way people communicate, raising people’s expectations of personalized experiences, and encouraging more engagement between networks (friends), FB also must aggressively pursue removing any and all barriers between its users and the tools that make those things happen.

Facebook Home is a problem for Apple

More than a year ago FB launched Facebook Messanger apps for Android, iOS, and all the other major mobile operating systems.  When they did this they extended the very popular one on one and group chat service from desktop to mobile.  It helped, in many groups Facebook Messanger replaced the text message, especially for group chat on mobile – taking share from both Android texting services and Apple’s iMessage.  Fast forward to Facebook Home and now they’ve gotten access at the operating system level on a select set of androids.  As of today they have 500K users and growing.  But that isn’t the stat that matters, what matters is how many people those 500K people talk to via text message on a regular basis.  A big trend of small apps over the last two years have gone after the iMessage problem I documented before, making their way into a lot of phones and making the idea of an internet based messaging service vs. tradition texting models pretty palatable for users.  Mobile users have shown they are ready to switch, they want effective group chat between all their friends… not just the other ones on Apple.  With Facebook Home, FB has created ~500K users already who have raised their hands to say “I want to use Facebook to communicate with friends because of the added values it brings”.

Value = group texting across phone, desktop, no matter the OS + text tracking that show’s who has seen what messages + low barrier to entry since all but 3% of my friends are already on Facebook.

The average person has about 10-20 people they talk to regularly via text, and many of those conversations are in groups.  If Facebook all of a sudden becomes the messaging platform of choice for 500K people, that means on a regular basis 5-10MM people are going to start having conversations on FB Messager.  As those 5-10MM people begin to convert to using FB Messager first they could start reaching 50-200MM people via FB Messager… And since this is a free software platform – no cost, or device type requirement creating a barrier to use – this adoption could happen pretty quickly.  As it does, iMessage will no longer be something the masses might consider to be a differentiator for iPhone.  As more and more features on the iPhone become table stakes for users to choose a smart phone, and the top 20% of AppStore Apps start appearing on both Android and iPhone – the mobile phone  market place is going to start looking a lot more like the desktop computer market place of the 1990′s.  Apple’s iPhone will just be another phone and they’ll have to invent another product category to keep growing.

This one app by Facebook isn’t going to take down Apple’s iPhone, but over time companies with similar missions to Facebook are going to take away Apple’s dominance on any connected device.  If your company is trying to build an exclusive in network experience like Apple, you better lead/invent your categories so you end up with a large lead.  Companies like Facebook and Google are in every category working to break down network walls to allow every person access to the world’s best tools.

Thanks for Listening,

Zach West

Why a “Favorite” on Twitter is better than a “Like” on Facebook

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It’s not news to anyone that there are a lot of behavioral concepts at work when users explore networks like Twitter and Facebook.  While companies keep digging to solve for the value of a “Like” on a Facebook page or a “Follow” on a Twitter account, have you ever stepped back and thought what some of these “actions” mean to you personally.  I had a moment today when Twitter made me smile.  @arifuchs someone I respect, “favorited” one of my tweets, specifically a blog post I did a few days ago.  I’m going to be honest, when similar folks  ”liked” the post on my Facebook wall I don’t get the same joy.  So here’s my attempt at explaining why…

Twitter is a very Public platform assuming you don’t have a locked account and Facebook is a very private platform assuming you don’t share everything on a public setting.  In contrast the actions you take on

the platforms directly oppose their overall feeling of public or private.  They both have “ReTweet” and “Share” buttons that basically create a “Hey everybody! Look at this cool thing I found!”  They also have reaction options such as “Reply” and  ”Comment” which allow for somewhat private reactions to content.  Finally, there are the passive action buttons of “Like”

and “Favorite” – these I see as having very different functions.  On

the surface both allow you to throw some “Kudos” to the user, but the way the “Kudos” is delivered makes all the difference. ..

Personal vs. Public

When someone “Likes” your content on Facebook they are saying to everyone else who see’s that content, I like this.  While at the same time triggering a heads up to you that they “Like” your content.  The experience is more a public display than private.  When someone “Favorites” a tweet it doesn’t become a focal point of the tweet like on Facebook, rather it is subtly added to the full info of the tweet if a user clicks into it.  All this while again triggering a heads up to you that they like what you tweeted.  The experience is much more personal, given the only incentive behind the action of a “Favorite” is to support the content creator.

Direct vs. Indirect

Going one step further, I see a “Like” as an indirect form of support.  Since there is an incentive to publicly associate one’s self with good content, the psychology that drives someone to “Like” content creates an indirect sort of “Kudos”.  Again with the “Favorite”, since there isn’t a “to be seen” quality to the action, it feels like a much more direct and real action of support.

twitter-bird-white-on-blueRelationships with Many vs. Few

In my private Facebook network it makes perfect sense for those who support my content to be pretty obvious.  (The listed “Likes”)  In a public network (Twitter) however, it makes a lot of sense to really focus on the content first then as sub-content (hidden) offer up who is involved. (“ReTweets” and “Favorites”)  This brings me to something I think is at the core as to the difference between Facebook and Twitter form a high level:  Facebook for most part is a fundamentally private network that creates (because it’s a closed system) one large shared relationship with many, while Twitter for the most part is a public network that creates (because it’s an open system) many relationships with few.  On Twitter short-lived social relationships sprout, grow, and die every day making the platform new (to a point) to the user every time they invest time on Twitter, whereas Facebook is one very large long-term relationship reflected in an ever-growing experience where the user gains their value over a long period of time.  There is a reason your profile (“Timeline”) on Facebook is so important to you as it is built from your content, while most people only focus on the content they post on Twitter in the now (real-time) - their long-term profile really isn’t a big part of the experience.

So if you can’t tell, I like Twitter a lot.  But that’s mostly because over the time I’ve built out my Facebook “Timeline” I had a major change in who I am… and who my network is.  I graduated college and moved on to a working world miles away both physically and mentally, making a large portion of the “Timeline” I had built into only a memory rather than an active long-term relationship.  For me both platforms are great, but only in their purpose, which brings me back to the title.  At the end of the day I’ll always value private displays of support over public ones.  Maybe its just me.

Thanks for Listening,

Zach West

Social Media Isn’t the Answer to Everything, But It Answers a Lot

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Below is a recent chapter I wrote with one of my co-workers Eric Gottloeb (@Gottloeb) also a Social Media Manager @Walgreens – thought it was worth sharing.  You can get the whole book (free PDF) here: http://spr.ly/ZachDWest (they even gave me a fancy personalized URL)

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Rather than attempting to write eloquent paragraphs, we figured you (the reader) probably just want bullets. So here’s a snapshot of Walgreens’ Best Practices:

• Treat your customers with the respect they deserve. Social isn’t an ad platform—it’s a conversation. Don’t interrupt people trying to have a conversation without something relevant to talk about.

• Don’t let “Social” the buzz word drive “Social” the strategy. Social media isn’t the answer for everything. Before coming up with a “social media plan” for something, what you’re actually trying to do needs to be weighed against all the other channels that your digital and traditional marketing teams have at their disposal.

• “If you build it, they will come,” doesn’t work. It’s true for microsites, it’s true for Facebook pages, and it’s true for Twitter handles. Build long-term products that customers can keep coming back to. Social is a long term game not a short-term ad buy.

• How You Keep Innovating: Separate then Integrate. Separate the team from the bigger organization so they can be forward thinking, unhindered and frankly, weird. But never let the whole group fully detach from the bigger team. Then once they’ve done lots of small independent things to prove what the core concepts of the strategy will be, scale. Integrate the winning concepts where they belong, and evolve just like every start-up.  The team has to grow up into the organization, something that both the team and the organization need to have in the cards from Day 1.

Organizational Structure: Each time you integrate something new, you start isolated in a vertical team, then you drive the team into a horizontal structure and integrate it into the larger company. Take for example, customer service. You start with the social team, understand the nuances of how social can play a role in customer service, build up the process and then scale it into the customer service organization. There are many examples like this one, where social media as a utility does not belong to a Social Media center of expertise, but that center of expertise can incubate the utility until it has matured enough to live in the right part of your organization.  We realize there aren’t any trade secrets here, but let’s be honest: The secret sauce isn’t going to be the same for everyone. However, the core concepts behind innovation pretty much apply everywhere. Start with your company’s business model, solve for where opportunities to drive on those models exist, and then scale it.

Thanks for Listening,

Zach West

#Sandy is quite a Social Storm, and Why That’s Great

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The ability of social media and technology to drive awareness is amazing.  From youTube sensation “Gangnam Style” – 592 Million views at the time of this post – to real world problems like a major hurricane heading to the Northeast.  I’m not going to do much in this article other than marvel at the impact social media has had already on #Sandy, and what it might have done on #Katrina.

In the past 7 days – October 22 – October 29 approx 12 CT vs. the 7 days leading up to Katrina.

Twitter:

~184,000 Tweets have been shared containing either the words “#Sandy”, “Sandy”, or “Hurricane”.

~0 Tweets were shared, as twitter wasn’t a public tool until 2006

Facebook:

Currently ~66% of the US population is on FB, with ~33% of those checking it daily

Versus in 2005, when in August the only people with Facebook were on college campuses.

Real time Photos:

Not only do we have all kinds of ways to reach people, but we also have a very powerful way to show what’s coming.  66%+ of Cell Phone owners have “smart phones” giving them the ability to report what they see to their social circles, literally.  (Every smart phone has a camera and an internet connection.)

Phones with both cameras and internet connections were not heavily adopted in 2005, there was no instant archive of what was happening.

What this all means:

I’ve said a number of times that “Perspective is Reality”.  For most of us hurricanes and other major events aren’t real, I personally have never been through one so how could I ever know how much it impacts a group of people.  And more importantly how could I be able to understand the urgency of the situation without a real-time perspective?  That’s why Social Media is a great thing, it offers the world instant perspective.  It offers a great conversation in which everyone can take part, where we can debate, show, and understand with the perspective of others.  For many people the awareness of what’s going on in the Northeast this week will be much higher than what they had during Katrina.  (Both the general population, and the folks that are directly in the path of the storm.)

Thanks for Listening,

Zach West

Apple Needs to Change – Facebook is About to Ruin Them

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Think about your phone… is it an iPhone?  What apps do you have, or more importantly what apps do you use?

Notice Q2-Q3 2011, that is what’s really happening over time in the market place. Then notice the adjustment that happens after the expansion to Sprint and Verizon. Great gains but not sustainable position. Also notice how the market is characterized as being only a few competitors.

The Situation:

Apple the world’s most “successful” company is at a decision point, one they’ve seen before.  Apple’s winning edge in their categories has been based on being clearly the best product available.  The iPhone in particular is by far the best phone you can buy.  (Or at least it was)  About a year ago the iPhone’s market share begin to fall back.  Apple was able to cover that up by expanding to Verizon and Sprint which has given them a short-term bump in market share.  In time though they will return to the issue of declining market share.  This is pretty normal as more and more people buy smart phones and more and more competition shows up in the market.  Android has done a very good job at grabbing share as the platform of the “everyphone”.  The trick is that no two Android devices are quite the same, creating a market not made up of two major user experiences as almost every graph would suggest, but rather a market place of one major user experience (iPhone) and hundreds of niche experiences.

Effectively the key to this is that the smart phone market has evolved into a marketplace with lots of different devices, creative lots of choice and niche offerings.  Some phones are better of taking pictures, others are all about the web, other basically just high-end GPS units, but all of them are unique in one way or another.  This is causing the smart phone buyer/user to place a lot of weight on what the main features of value

Notice here the snap shot of all the different device manufacturers in the category. This is important to understand, that while Apple competes in both, Android only is OS focused. (For the sake of the argument we’ll pretend Google doesn’t own Motorola.)

proposition of each phone is.  Buying a phone is like buying a car, there become a lot of things to consider and often that consideration leads a customer to want the iPhone for its quality.

Enter the problem – It’s hard to stay different with app stores and cloud based solutions.

Almost every smart phone has some version of an app store, a place where users can go to download additional features for their device.  These app stores usually have a number of different phone upgrades available in them.  Instagram to upgrade your photos/camera, Evernote to upgrade your note taking capabilities, even Foursquare to improve on the initial maps tool that comes with your phone.  This is where Apple starts running into some problems -

1.  Over time Apple can’t sustain an advantage in the hardware it produces.  While Apple may continue to stay ahead of the curve, the major hardware features most consumers crave will be available on both iPhones and its competitors.  This creates an issue where customers will no longer be able see the iPhone as differentiated from its competitors in the physical device’s features.

2.  If all smart phones have app stores than an app builder, say

The iPhone has a lot of different Android based competitors, not just one.  This makes it very hard to won in the long term as each of these “small-share” devices can beat the iPhone in the various niche’s they target.

Facebook, could build there apps pretty uniformly across all of the smart phone providers.  This creates a problem for Apple when trying the differentiate the iPhone when it comes to Apps.  In the early days, app developers were mostly private individuals, so iOS being the biggest market to build apps for Apple enjoyed having apps like Instagram be iPhone Exclusive.  But over the next few years, this isn’t going to continue.  The most popular apps  are going to be owned and managed by big companies such as Facebook.  The big companies may not build them, but they’ll buy them and give them the resources to develop the app on all platforms, not just the iPhone.  (The App developer world is going to evolve in a very similar way to how the video game industry and PC software industry have.)

3.  When working on an internet enabled device one has the ability to send/save their data anywhere, this simple technology overcomes the biggest switching cost when buying a new phone.  The user never wants to risk losing their photos, contacts, recent conversations, and so on.  This also undermines the need for me and all of my friends to have the iPhone, because not only are all my favorite apps on every device, my friends can have them too, no matter the smart phone type.  The cloud combined with app developers like a Facebook create problems from Apple’s differentiation argument.

What remains of Apple’s Power Base, and How Facebook and others will destroy it.

Some things that got me thinking this way:

This is the traditional home screen… how many of these “out of the box features” are unique to the iPhone?  How many of them are vastly improved on by other apps?

1.  The Nintendo64 over came its old technology, the cartridge, because it was able to differentiate itself by have more/better games to play.  Apple used to share the advantage of better apps, but that won’t be the case in the long-term.  Nintendo eventually lost the more/better games point of differentiation because games became uniformly available across platforms.

2.  Microsoft is entering the market and has played this game before… Twice… and Won.  In the video game industry Microsoft showed up in a later wave of video game consoles as the technology began to be a lot more like the computer industry.  The XBOX wasn’t a huge success initially, but as video games became for uniformly available the system took over share by differentiating itself with online play.  This gap was widened as the company was able to continued growth in the industry with the XBOX 360.  Before the video game industry though, they played this game with Apple, betting that software would be the long-term champion of the computer market.  By creating a world where software could work uniformly across all types of computers Microsoft made it very hard for the customer to differentiate between HP or Dell or even Gateway (Microsoft’s own brand of computer).  Microsoft has put a lot behind the most recent Windows Phone launches and looks to be learning from its previous victories.  The windows phone embraces the cloud not so much as a Microsoft thing, but rather an app world thing.  (The heavy integration of Facebook is a bigger then most might think.)

3.  Evernote and Dropbox have created storage solutions that work across the internet

Here’s my second screen of apps, the apps I use often.  (Honestly almost every day)

connected world making Android’s, Windows’, and Apple’s solutions somewhat irrelevant.  By making the use of the apps free up front Evernote and Dropbox make it easy for users to adopt the apps, and the ease of transition from one device to another basically make the Notes irrelevant.

4.  Beyond Evernote and Dropbox, look at all the apps out there that basically make the basic software features of the iPhone irrelevant.  iMessage can basically be replaced with Facebook Messenger, Twitter and old fashion email.  Notes as mentioned can be replaced with Evernote.  Google+ Hangout or Skype replace the value of Facetime.  Instagram and Facebook Camera can cover all the value offered by Photos and Camera, basically all the Photos tool is needed for is short-term storage until you can upload your photo to Facebook.  This pattern continues with a number of other features.

5.  And then there is Facebook.  Facebook is the company best positioned to take advantage of the changing landscape.  When Zuckerburg says Facebook is in the business of changing the way people communicate… he wasn’t just saying something nice for the IPO.  Facebook is about to make that change to how people communicate, and this weeks release of Facebook Camera…

How Facebook is going to ruin Apple:

Focus on the feature based apps from Facebook. (Their ratings are much higher.)  Facebook’s new strategy of feature focused apps seems to be getting positive results thus far.

Things to understand about Facebook,

-Massive user base already, at the end of 2011 more people were on Facebook than had smart phones.

-Massive amounts of data and storage- messaging, conversation history, photos, contact info, event planning and so on, all in the form of data stored on Facebook.

-Presence on most phones.  There app is widely adopted as a pre-loaded feature on almost every phone.  (except the iPhone)

Facebook’s positioning over the next few years will be what changes the smart phone marketplace.  As we’ve seen over the past few months Facebook has changed its approach to the mobile solution, adapting and learning from the most successful apps that connect to it.  They’ve changed from trying to have one app that does it all (which they’re not deleting any time soon) to feature apps focused on one specific thing.  Basically their bringing the most popular apps on their platform to mobile.  (eg. Photos is an app on Facebook that know is on your phone as “Facebook Camera”)  If they were to do that, think about all the features they could replace.  (Contact Info, Maps, Messaging, Camera, Photo Storage)  Then step back and think about all the features apps tightly aligned with Facebook could replace. (Video Chat (Skype), Music (Spotify),  even the News (Washington Post)) Facebook’s app suite is actually really well set up to add value to any mobile user.  The key there was “any”, all of the apps Facebook is creating can be fitted across all devices.  Facebook unlike most app developers has the resources to make the phone you own not matter when it comes to connecting with them.  With all the data being saved back Facebook itself, the phone again doesn’t have to have any specific amount of storage capabilities.

This is a major issue for Apple, as Facebook could make a run at positioning itself as the means of communication for the average smart phone user.  If that becomes the case, then almost all the differentiating points that make the iPhone such a leader now won’t matter.

The solution:

Honestly, Apple should buy Facebook.  Not because Facebook is some kind of great revenue producer, it’s actually a very flawed one, but because Facebook poses such a threat to the future of Apple as the industry leader.

Thanks for listening,

Zach West

Parallels of the Industrial and Internet Revolutions

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The two greatest tech booms in recent history have been the Industrial and Internet Revolutions.  While both are amazing stories in their own right, I’d like to focus on a few individuals that have and are defining these periods with almost the same strategies.

Industrial Revolution:  Andrew Carnegie created an empire in Steel.  He started with very little… but over time came to own his own steel company.  While his technology innovations in steel creation helped make his company successful, it was his business sense that made his company into an empire.  As Carnegie’s company became a leader in steel, he began to purchase the mines where his steel company purchased its iron-oar.  Then as he saw another year of record profits he purchased the major railroads that his company used to send its finished steel product around the country.  What Carnegie did was called Vertical Integration, where a company buys out its supply chain to cut its cost and maximize the profits.

Internet Revolution:  Steve Jobs created and empire of access.  Apple under the leadership of Steve Jobs is a perfect example of modern vertical integration.  Apple created the iPod to allow you to listen to all of your music, any where.  Then they created iTunes a place to manage all of your music.  Next came the iTunes Music Store where you could buy all of your music.  This then developed into a larger library of content coupled with bigger and better products such as the iPhone.  All of these offering have evolved into the Apple we know today… a company that has both “vertically and horizontally integrated” the personal electronics experience.  You buy your content through Apple, you buy the product that you consume that content on through Apple, and then to top it off you’re content is part of a “cloud” that rewards you for having multiple products from Apple.

Industrial Revolution:  John D. Rockefeller’s strategy with Standard Oil wasn’t too complicated.  He realized that there was one limited resource that would drive his revolution… OIL.  He grabbed as much of it as he could, creating a position of power in the total revolution.

Internet Revolution:  Mark Zuckerberg had a very simple idea that evolved into Facebook.  (That is all him)  What he realized along the way was something that Rockefeller learned.  Zuckerberg controls by far the most of the one limited resource that drives the internet revolution… TIME.  Mark has a very strong grip on the vast majority of time spent on-line.  As anyone in the internet business can tell you… if you have eye balls on your website you are king.  (also “Time is Money”)

There are more connections than the one’s above… but what I’m most interested in is the aftermath of these periods… what’s next?

Thanks for Listening,

Zach West

Fantasy Football – The very best in Social Gamification (Maybe a blueprint for Facebook)

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So for the last few months I’ve been hearing all these so-called “Social Media Experts” (Not something I believe exists) talking about how “gamification” in the future of Social Media.  While that’s a fairly true statement, it is often overlooked that social gaming has been around for a while.  Both in smaller communities like World or Warcraft (not that it is that small) and in large-scale communities like Fantasy Football, social gaming has been around for a while.  So let’s focus on the Fantasy Football, I figure it will probably consume the next 16 weeks of my life any way…

Fantasy Football is an extension of NFL football on to the web, where users generate all of the content, including re-distributing the NFL roster.  Think about the features of a typical Fantasy Football League…

User Generated Experience-

League Name (Name your own community)

Team Name (You control what your profile in the community)

Members of the Community (This can often be either random people or an invite only situation)

Rules for Gamification (how about that, the user controls the game rules)

Trophies/Rewards (All the incentives to Fantasy Football other than the simple win are designed by the users in the community)

So to recap, the user basically creates everything with only the use of the NFL season and roster as their information.  Hmmm, I don’t think it takes a genius to see that Fantasy Football is the premier social gaming model today.  It takes a fairly common experience, following the NFL, and creates an unbelievably social upgrade to the experience using the web.  Sound familiar?  It should.  Zynga the social gaming company repeats this same formula with “Words with Friends”.  (Most people understand how scrabble works)  Then there is the bigger Social Media concept that all started based on the same concept as Fantasy Football.

FACEBOOK is based on the same principles as Fantasy Football.

1.  The entire concept can be broken down as a utility to better experience the real world.  (FF focuses on on single sport, Facebook originally focused on college social life)

2.  The user creates and crafts their identity.  (The user chooses who they are, and how their profile is built)

3.  The user chooses who to share their experience with.  (FF has invite only leagues, and Facebook is driven by friend invites)

4.  The user controls the rules of the game.  (FF has rules set by the group, while Facebook has a group understood rules concept that develops over time)

5.  They are both games in which the Trophies and Rewards (and value of said rewards) are determined by those you’ve chosen to invite into your community. (This is where it gets the most interesting.)

Digging deeper into #5 we come to a question: Is Facebook a Game?  (Not to go back to economics again) Absolutely it is a game!  Think of it this way- you create a profile with unique attributes, then in order to play you must participate in a conversation, while in the mean time building up “klout” (Klout.com check it out, you might find it interesting after this article.) in your network of friends through such rewards as likes and comments.  The game I just described above goes further.  Because while building up a friends list and earning likes is important, this is nothing compared to the trophies that are out there.  Trophies like “relationships”, tags in photos, and of course larger friend lists.

Facebook is the gamification of the college experience.  Taking in only real life information of your college experience and then putting the right “motivations” in place to play the game.  I still think it has the same intention and result of Fantasy Football in that it offer an improved experience on top of the already good NFL (college) experience.  So next time you’re on Facebook… look around… see if you start to notice the game you’re playing.

Thanks for Listening,

Zach West

It is all about “Privacy”. How Google+ is doing to Facebook what Facebook did to MySpace.

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So people like me (Social Media Nerds) think that when a network comes up with new ways to share content and interact with “friends” they’re going to be the next big thing.  Turns out, that is just what we want in a kick ass Social Network.  The rest of 499 million people of Facebook aren’t as interested in that when choosing a primary social network.

In the days since Google+ has launched and my non-social media nerd friends have been joining I’ve notice a trend.  They are in love with the concept of Google+ Circles, the feature that allows you to tag your friends so when you post content you can easily decide who to send what to.  A feature that somewhat exists on Facebook but has never been a focus of the site.  Circles looks to be the privacy Facebook users were craving.  Google found an unmet need and nailed it.  Of course this makes sense, this is exactly how Facebook exploded in the first place.  It was all about privacy.

Back in the day,  (I was young, I’m not a kid any more.) the big social network was MySpace.  A site that allowed you to build a killer profile, share content, and become friends with people.  Then came along “the facebook”, which was a solution to the biggest complaint about MySpace.  On MySpace there were all kinds of people, and any of them could read your profile for the most part, and worse talk to you.  (Basically it was getting a rep for having too many pervs on the site.)  Facebook exploded because it was private, you controlled your community.  Someone had to accept you as a friend to get access to their profile, and you couldn’t even get on the site without an .edu email address in the beginning.  Now obviously Facebook has evolved a lot since then… but at the end of the day, the strength of the site was in its original user controlled privacy.

So that brings us to Google+.  What the Circles feature offers is all the basic functionality of Facebook’s content sharing but with a layer of privacy, because now a days people have all kinds of people in their networks.  And honestly sometimes you want to post pictures from the party last night… but odds are good you want to pick and choose who you show those to.  This is where Google+ has a mass appeal.

Plus, keep in mind Google+ isn’t really a social network, but rather a Relationship Management tool.  It is a layer over your email, search, and much more.  Just like MySpace wasn’t a blog but rather a blogging network, and Facebook wasn’t a blogging network but rather a Social Network.  I like to think of Google+ as my personal Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.  Its purpose isn’t to make my world more social, but rather to help me better manage my world.  There is too much data in our lives, why shouldn’t each person get a tool to manage/simplify all that data?

Thanks for listening,

Zach West

Feel free to join me on Google+ +Zach West

Google+ won’t kill Facebook, but it will give them problems (Google+ will have 50 million active users before 2012)

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A more effiecient social experience.On June 29th, I received an invite to join Google+.  The day prior they had announced the site and I’ll be the first to say I thought it looked cool and then just wrote it off as another soon to be #fail by Google.  But I have to say I was rather impressed.

Enough so to predict that Google+ will have 50 million active users before 2012.  Here’s why:

There is a user base on Facebook that doesn’t really like it any more.  These are the people who have had Facebook long enough to have gone through a life change.  (Think of this as getting married, moving to a new town, graduating college and so on.)  In my case since becoming a user on Facebook in 2005 I’m not exactly the same guy any more.  Today I am a professional, no longer a college student.  And I feel there are a lot more out there like me, who don’t see Facebook as an exciting representation of my world anymore.  (I use the word exciting because in the virtual world you get to be who you want to be. Also in my case I created my profile on Facebook when I was just becoming a freshman in college, a great time to be who you want to be.)  Also now that I’ve graduated the word “friend” need no longer apply to almost 80% of the 650+ “friends” I have on Facebook.  I haven’t seen most of them in a few years.  Not to mention our parents are joining Facebook.  (Not cool)  So all of those things have made me less engaged with Facebook.  (I feel I spend more time thinking about who is going to see what I post than thinking about what to post.)

So with that said, I think Google+ may have figured it out.  Their “News Feed” can be everyone, or you can segment it by circles of contacts.  Meaning you can see the content from just your close friends, your family, and coworkers instead of having to scroll down a mile to see them.  Even more importantly Google+ does a much better job of letting you control your privacy, every time you publish content you choose which circles get to see the content.  This is the very feature that is going to get me to actually use my Google+ account.  (Assuming I can get enough of the people I like to interact with to also use there’s.)

There are two other solutions that Google+ has that Facebook lacks.  Google+’s sparks takes value of iPad apps like Flipbook and Pulse and brings them right into your social network.  Instead of having to go find pages on Facebook to Like, so you can get good content from them.  Google+ just has you put in the keyword you want to see content about and then populates it with relevant articles and blog posts.

So will I switch?  No.  I’ll add this to my social network presences.  I can’t leave Facebook, the contacts and world I’ve built there still has value.  That said, the new Google+ might be where I go first when checking on what’s happening out in my world.

(And I have a feeling a lot of people will do the same.  Between the Tech nerds who are all about Google everything, to the people who’s Facebook worlds aren’t the same as they used to be.)

Social Media is like Prom and Google can’t get a date

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The other day Google launched a new “social tool” the “+1″ button.  It got me thinking about Social Media as a whole, and I realized something… it is basically high school.  And what better way to represent high school than the prom.  (Enjoy)

Here are the characters:

Facebook- obviously the popular kid, probably a jock.  Everyone loves to be seen with Facebook, from his good looks to his game winning touchdown in the state finals.  Every kid, and teacher for that matter, knows and like him.  Everyone just feels like they really connect with him, and know everything there is to know.  (Granted there’s a lot a jealousy and gossip out there on him, but that’s what being popular is all about.)  And if you’re wondering, he’s dating the prom queen… from last year.

Foursquare – probably the closest person to whom most normal people are like in high school.  He’s got a small group of friends that he keeps up with.  They’re real close, and are always going everywhere together.  Prom is going to be weird for them, because it means they’ll have to go to college soon.  And his group is very tight-knit, so talking about what’s going on in different places is going to be weird.  (You know, like when one of the people you follow on Foursquare moves to a different city and all their updates are like ehh… because you have no idea what their talking about…)  Foursquare meet his date in P.E., and was worried she might say no, but she said yes.  Most people at school don’t know him, but the one’s that do are always around.

Twitter- Let’s be honest, twitter is the kind of a pot head, edgy, cool kid.  Everyone knows of him, but most people have no idea who he really is.  The people who he does hang out with are always coming back for more.  (Some people think he might be a drug dealer.)  During prom, odds are good twitter is going to slide out back for a smoke and just talk about prom, actually going in isn’t his style.  Let’s be honest, most people what to hang out with twitter, they just don’t know him well enough.  And twitter has a date; she’s from the school across town.  (A few people think she might be in college.)

LinkedIn- Student Council President, she’s running the Prom.  She got the money together, picked out the themes, and totally does not have time for a date.  (Did my best not to make her a member of Future Business Leaders of America, but let’s be honest she runs that club too.)

Google- Nerd Alert… Google is that guy who is totally a walking encyclopedia.  He knows like everything, accept how to have a normal conversation with a girl.  He’s always trying to use lines that he sees the other guys use and the line never seems to work.  And yes, you got it… Google’s got a blue tux ready to go.  However he’s having trouble finding a date.  I mean he’s asking girls, just not getting any yeses.  Of course, that won’t stop him.  He’ll just go stag.  (Of course fast forward to the 20 year High School reunion… Google is rich and running a 90+% Profit Margin business… so maybe it’s worth it not being the cool kid.)

Microsoft- Coolness by association.  Microsoft hangs out with Facebook, not to mention he’s the richest kid at school.  Has the hot new car, and his date is going to a $200 a plate dinner before prom.  Oh and his date, she’s Facebook’s date’s hot friend.

Yelp- Gossip Queen… Ever see the movie “Mean Girls”.  (Thank you Tina Fey that was an awesome movie.) Remember that book that they wrote all those mean thing in.  Well Yelp and her friends publish that book at this school.  And you better believe she’s going to be reviewing this year’s prom.

So now if you’re wondering how prom went… well I’ll leave most of that to your imagination, but here are the highlights.

-Facebook was the prom king, and LinkedIn was prom queen.  (LinkedIn rigged the voting.)

-Google got drunk because Twitter’s date spiked the punch.  Google actually kissed a girl that night.

-Microsoft was there.

-Yelp got here story… she saw LinkedIn rig the voting.  (Yelp thought she should have been queen.)

-Foursquare had a fun night, filled with memories.

-Twitter got high.

Thanks for listening,

Zach West

If you have social networks that you think were at prom please share!  A 7 person prom is kind of lame.