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How to Get More From Your Brand’s Facebook Data

Original post by Cotton Delo via Ad Age

As Facebook looks to scale its $1 billion profit for 2011 reported in its IPO filing, its data on about 845 million users is its chief asset. But the company has been restrained in what it offers fan-page owners. It provides aggregate data on the makeup of a fan base, including age ranges and top cities of residence, as well as a breakdown of how fans were acquired.

But for all that marketers can glean from Facebook’s Insights API tool, they can’t tap into interest-level data unless they enlist researchers to search public information on fans’ profiles. They also can’t easily segment a specific fan group to determine whether their path across a page led them to buy something. And it’s laborious to marry Facebook users to a direct mail or email database.

Facebook is still largely a black box, and it’s been suggested that advertising dollars would flow more freely if it were more transparent and allowed marketers to turn on third-party tracking. But given its privacy history and recent settlement with the Federal Trade Commission, Facebook will probably be circumspect about tracking.

Here are three approaches for marketers looking to derive more data-driven value from their Facebook presence:

Build a social app
Marketers can be on the level with consumers by obtaining their email addresses, friends lists and other profile information through apps that require an explicit opt-in. Compelling tie-ins exist for brands looking to do email marketing.

Ben Bloom, a digital strategist at Wunderman, offered a hypothetical scenario of an airline app that would capture when its fans “liked” a competitor and trigger an email that sent them reward points. “In the best case, it’s an even exchange of value,” he said. “You’d want consumers to be excited about this application.”

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February 14, 2012 | Techmeetups

Facebook IPO Filing Reveals Its Stunning Size:
A Private Jet, $1 Billion In Profits, And More

Original post by Bianca Bosker via Huffington Post

We knew Facebook was big — you don’t get to 800 million users without making a few bucks — but until today, we didn’t know just how big.

Facebook filed papers for an initial public offering on Wednesday, pulling back the curtains on the inner workings of the world’s largest social networking site and opening a new phase in the company’s ambitious plan to compile, and make money off of, our personal information. Facebook seeks to raise $5 billion in an IPO that looks likely to be the largest by a web company since Google in 2004 and could place the social network’s value as high as $75 billion to $100 billion.

The portrait of Facebook that emerges in Facebook’s over 150-page S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission is of a mature company — by Silicon Valley standards — already enjoying robust revenues thanks to a vast, active userbase churning out data for the site. Facebook CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg also enjoys the use of a private plane, the filing revealed, and earned a base salary of $500,000 last year, more than triple the salary of Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin when Google filed for its IPO.

Facebook looks more seasoned than many of its Silicon Valley peers had when they announced plans to go public. According to the prospectus it filed with the SEC, Facebook has been profitable for the past three years. The company reported revenues of $3.7 billion last year, an 88 percent increase over the prior year, and earned a $1 billion profit, more than Google’s total revenue the year it debuted on public markets. Facebook’s income also dwarfs that of other internet companies that recently completed their IPOs. Zynga’s profits totaled $90.6 million in 2010, for example, while LinkedIn had barely flirted with profitability when it filed for its IPO and Pandora was still hundreds of millions of dollars short of breaking even.

Advertising comprises a full 85 percent of Facebook’s revenues, down from 98 percent in 2009. Zynga alone accounts for 12 percent of Facebook’s total revenues, as the social gaming company must pay Facebook a cut of purchases made in Zynga’s Facebook games.

Facebook revealed impressive statistics about its growing and active userbase, which totals 845 million members, more than half of whom, or 483 million, return to the site daily. These hundreds of millions of users have shared more than 100 petabytes (100 quadrillion bytes) of photos and videos with Facebook, and produced an average of 2.7 billion “likes” and comments a day in the final three months of 2011

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February 6, 2012 | Techmeetups

Creepy Facebook, No More Wallets, and NYC Tech Rising:
Predictions for the Internet in 2012

Original post by BetaBeat

Soon, there will be no results when we search "wallet" in Google images. (whatsinyourbagnyc.tumblr.com)

Predictions! What do New York techies think will happen to the internet-centric economy in 2012? We asked some smart founders, VCs and members of the startup ecosystem where they think tech, the internet and the New York tech scene are headed in 2012 (assuming the world doesn’t end either due to the apocalypse or SOPA, that is). Without further ado!

The internet, united, will never be defeated

“SOPA and PIPA are both soundly defeated by bipartisan popular support and Congress realizes it shouldn’t tamper with one of the few American industries still creating jobs and out-innovating the world. We in the private sector will innovate solutions for piracy (people will pay for easy access—like Netflix!); the answer is not government intervention that ultimately doesn’t solve the problem and breaks the internet in the process.” -Alexis Ohanian, Reddit, Breadpig and Hipmunk

“2012! The tech community has not really seemed to care much about the upcoming election. SOPA and #Occupy pierced that head-down obliviousness during the last quarter. People will start to care, and not just because Ben Smith is going to Buzzfeed (though that was a signal that, folks, a new market is about to be unleashed). This is the first election year that is truly happening in the age of social media. Hopefully it won’t mean we have to pay attention to Santorum.

“Also! Something very big, or at least highly embarrassing, is going to be captured/disseminated/hive-mind-sleuthed-out/otherwise made horrifically public during this election season. And it will change the game. (Though if it’s that Newt likes to keep his socks on, I don’t want to know.)” -Rachel Sklar, Change the Ratio

New York City rises

“NYC will be recognized with the new distinction as being the world’s “Startup City Incubator” for smart young people to come and build their new businesses with the proactive support of the world’s largest and easiest to connect to pool of talented mentors. Also looks like 2012 will be the year that the growing startup community begins to connect to the underserved NYC communities who needs support to help get their entrepreneurs up to speed. More syndication between angels, angel groups and VCs to fund more deals faster.” -Brian Cohen, New York Angels

“The Facebook effect on NYC tech talent will be a 10 percent lift in compensation for top engineers. Gilt Groupe has a big/surprising exit. Under pressure of thin operating margins, Amazon takes them out (eBay also possible). Marketplaces prove to be superior ecommerce business since no overhead of warehousing inventory.

“$200B online retail market is growing 15 percent per year. 20 percent of that spent on ad tech. Something big is happening in NYC ad tech—maybe just another industry for which NYC is becoming the capital of the universe. Maybe more ad tech startups take root in NYC.” -Dave Carvajal, DavePartners.com

“Deciding year for Foursquare, can it turn on a dime? IAC will continue a mild downward trend. Barry Diller is done. The building is still cool. The tide turns in my ongoing war against The New York Times Company (who no longer have courage).” -Josh Harris, Pseudo.com

“SxSW Breakout App. Foursquare was the breakout app at SxSW 2009. GroupMe was the breakout app at SxSW 2011. Sonar will be the breakout app at SxSW 2012.

“Brett and team are hard at work on some killer features, with hopes to launch a blockbuster 2.0 in time for SxSW 2012. Their team has had an influx of bright, new talent recently and I’ve spent some time getting to know them. Since they haven’t formally announced anything yet, I won’t say any more than this: look for Sonar to crush it this year in Austin.” -David Kay, freelance mobile developer, Xoogler and Startup Bus veteran

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January 4, 2012 | Techmeetups

People Are Not Your Greatest Asset

Original post by Anthony J. Bradley and Mark P. McDonald via HBR

Many of us in business have heard the popular aphorism, “People are your greatest asset.” Some of us may even believe it. But is this sentiment reflected in our corporate cultures and the way our leaders lead? For the most part, no — and there’s a reason for that.

People are not your greatest asset. Even great people are not your greatest asset. In fact, great people can be your greatest liability. If Enron wasn’t enough evidence of this, the 2008 financial crisis has now given us plenty more. What aboutLehman Brothers, AIG and Countrywide? Arguably, these companies employed some of the smartest business people not only in the room but in the world, and yet those same folks took their firms to ruin (or near it) and came close to causing a collapse of the U.S. economy.

So if it’s not people, what is your greatest asset?

It’s how you empower your people. Think about it. What is the primary purpose of a business organization? To assemble a group of people, who previously may have had no association, and empower them to accomplish productive work toward the organization’s objectives. More effective empowerment typically equals more productive work. As leaders and managers, we are familiar with empowering people. We organize them into divisions, units, groups and teams. We provide goals and incentives to motivate them. And we enable them with authority, tools, resources and processes.

Social media ushers in new ways to enhance your greatest asset, because it is about empowering people to collaborate at unprecedented scale. With powerful implementations of social media, we motivate people to form communities around a meaningful and common purpose . We enable them with new technology, seed content, and guidance on desired participation. The aim is to facilitate“mass collaboration” and its accompanying behaviors.

For our book on the social organization, we studied hundreds of social media implementations and identified a set of key mass collaboration behaviors. Understanding them is critical to successfully engaging and empowering people.

Collective Intelligence
Collective intelligence is the meaningful assembly of relatively small and incremental community contributions into a larger and coherent accumulation of knowledge. Collective intelligence is not new, but the mass collaboration enabled by social media provides it at scales never before possible. Even the most modest individual contributions can be tremendously valuable when meaningfully combined at scale. Wikipedia, YouTube and Flickr are all social Web examples of collective intelligence. Each Wikipedia article by itself is relatively insignificant, but a million articles collected and linked together is highly powerful.

Expertise Location
Expertise location involves seeking and finding specific expertise in the masses of people and the often-staggering amount of available content. One view of expertise location is almost the opposite of collective intelligence. It is “selective intelligence,” where the goal is not to collect numerous small contributions from many, but to find just what is needed. Crowdsourcing is a well-known example of expertise location.

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December 23, 2011 | Techmeetups

Using Social Networks to Improve Operations

Original post by Gary Edwards and Mike Amos via HBR

This post is part of the HBR Forum, The Future of Retail.

For decades the mystery shopper was the main way retailers assessed operations from a customer’s point of view. By sending in a fake shopper, typically once a month, an individual store essentially was buying a dozen performance snapshots per year. Then telephone surveys began to supplement mystery shopping. Today, digital technologies are supplanting both, with online customer surveys providing an exponentially greater number of performance snapshots per day.

A well-managed loop that links customer experience feedback with recommendations on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Yelp, can boost service quality and operational performance, increase traffic and create more happy customers — people who crow about a retailer online for free, turning their friends into new customers too.

A new mini-industry has emerged using these techniques, known as “customer experience management,” or CEM. Our company, Empathica — as well as a number of competitors — are providing customer feedback to operations, while partnering with “web-scraping” companies to listen to random chatter online.

Now we’re turning attention to linking operations to marketing through “social CEM.” The aim is not to drive online advertising impressions, but to explicitly and transparently drive the behavior of customers, front line service staff and retail managers. The aim is to create a true dialogue, not simply a listening post for customer kudos and complaints. And by doing so, this loop can drive meaningful operations and customer satisfaction gains.

An example: At Debenhams, a major international department store chain based in London, a customer complained through an online survey about a poor meal they received at the store’s restaurant. “Ordered turkey dinner. Very dried out. Overcooked vegetables in greasy, cold gravy.” The store manager called the customer that night, apologized, and sent a coupon for two free meals. The customer was invited to post their happiness with the problem’s resolution on Facebook, and did. The store manager made sure the kitchen turned out better turkey dinners. The result: a satisfied customer, better kitchen operations, and free social network advertising. Debenham’s effectively took what would have been a one-off customer experience problem and turned that customer into an Debenham’s advocate online and improved its operations to reduce the possibility of future disgruntled customers.

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December 17, 2011 | Techmeetups

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