Saturday Morning Web Surfing

Numbers tell a story

John McCain:

• 53,381 MySpace friends
• 136,793 Facebook friends

Barack OBama

• 386,341 MySpace friends
• 894,666 Facebook friends

Aside from the obvious, Obama's supporters are younger, have more time on their hands, and have been involved in a heated primary for 6 months, the numbers say something else to me.

Both candidates have more friends on Facebook than MySpace by a little less than 3:1. But MySpace total US traffic more than doubles Facebook. If they are both similar "social networks" the numbers would be opposite. If they had the same level of activity, that would favor Facebook a lot but this is pretty crazy.

People are just a ton more likely to share political views on Facebook, what else are they more likely to share? Alot would be my guess. Think marketers should care about that?

What makes Facebook tick

Love how Josh Beil gets to the guts of Facebook's value. Its Newsfeed + Scale. I see the openness as one way to create valuable applications but not the only one (and potentially noisy to customers). Apple doesn't need it.

If you can build an engine for passive communcations between people like Newsfeed and have a level of ubiquity you can change lives. Tivo, cellphones, major retailers, airlines, hotel chains, governments, car makers can all be players. Facebook is a gateway drug.

One to Grow On... For Marketers

Here's an example of how a brand develops a personal relationship with its target. It is not MASS marketing, its smaller and more targeted and can create a deeper connection than standard advertising.

Jason Calcannis founded Silicon Alley Reporter, and Weblogs and is kind of geek famous. He blogs regularly, and updates his twitter a couple times a day and I track him as do 12,000 other people (a number that’s growing rapidly day over day) He’s a bit of a pompous jerk, but very smart. I track him because his ideas and thinking are useful to me professionally and he’s a wise ass and I’m curious to see which significant tech power player he’s going to pick a fight with next. Tonight he organized what he called Dim Sum 2.0 where he invited tech entrepreneurs, marketers, programmers, and writers to get together for Dim Sum at a place in China Town tonight to talk technology. The invite was extended through his blog and twitter feed. I would’ve been there but I’m in LA.

Around east coast dinner time in my twitter feed I saw this from Calcannis:

I'm streaming live right now, come chat! http://qik.com/video/38665

1 minute ago from web

At his Qik.com link he ran around with a video enabled cell phone and filmed the event. He kibitzed with other tech geeks while 500 people chatted live, and he spoke to them and shared their comments with other geeks.


For most people the content sucks, but they're not Jason Calcannis fans and they have little or no interest in him or what he’s talking about. But I do. When he tells people from ValleyWag to fuck off, that’s entertaining to me because I know the back story. When he talks to the founder of Trender about when they met in 1995, and saw the Mosaic browser, and believed in the internet when no one else did, that was cool b/c guys like that are pioneers to me. Take the nerdness out of it. Everyone has things they care about like this and our brands can draft off them.

I don’t think Qik or Twitter or a Blog is any more answer to communications challenges than Dim Sum is. It’s the frequent contact that’s always fresh, its inclusion of the audience with the brand, it’s the real-time interaction, and its niche content that matches a target audience. A blog and twitter and Dim Sum are tools to help you communicate more frequently with those that are interested and give your customers what they want.

You don’t need a twitter strategy we need an engagement strategy (knowing about the tools how they are used just opens up possibilities)

Friendfeed Makes the World's Collide

A couple former Googlers created this social network aggregator and it bubbled up on Techmeme. I saw a line about "2008's Twitter" so I needed to check it out.

What it does is brings all your social networking venues such as Twitter, Google Reader, Delicious, Facebook, Blogger all together in one stream that you can view and publish.

Problem for me is, I use all of these services quite differently. I'm experimental in Twitter and Blogger. I use Google Reader as a personal link archiving tool. I use Facebook to keep up with real friends. I use Delicious to promote social learning at my company.

By putting all this info in one place it zaps some of the value of each. As a content producer it bothers me. But as a viewer, I think I might enjoy tracking people across different vehicles, I might learn useful things or see a more complete picture.

What can marketers do with this? First they have to make the commitment to be a social marketer, then a diverse social marketer, then an aggregator of their own diverse voices. Is it worth the time and money, that's for you to decide.