Faces of Facebook – Steve Rubel

Digital Communications…

I spend a lot of time gazing into a crystal ball that I know is going to be cloudy half the time. Lately I have been pondering Facebook’s future.

Facebook is clearly on a roll and is knocking on Google’s door as the biggest site on the web. Will it continue to dominate or see its lead slip? Here are two potential outcomes.

The Google Scenario: In the more rosy picture, Facebook remains the disrupter. It transforms how we use the web.

Just as search changed our expectations that everything we want to know is accessible if we Google it, Facebook is the inverse. If information is important, it will find us through our friends and their friends and so on. We don’t have to Google it.

In a First, Football’s Hall of Fame Opens Doors to Marketers

Van Heusen, JC Penney Sponsor Fan Initiative in Larger Marketing Play to Reach Men

Major pro sports halls of fame tend to be largely pristine, marketer-free shrines to their respective sports, but the Pro Football Hall of Fame is breaking with that tradition in a new multimillion-dollar sponsorship deal with Van Heusen and JC Penney.

The fashion brand and retailer are partnering with the hall on a microsite housed within JC Penney’s website that intends to give fans a voice in the debate over which players ought to be enshrined in the Canton, Ohio, museum. A voice, of course, is not the same as a vote — but the fan’s choice will be promoted extensively via the NFL Network, the league’s premium-cable-TV outlet, and could influence the selection process. The microsite for the partnership incorporates social networks such as Twitter and Facebook.

App Revenue Is Poised to

…Surpass Facebook Revenue

More than a social phenomenon, Facebook harbors a lively and growing ecosystem of game and other application makers, ad networks and retailers of virtual goods. What happens when businesses running on Facebook become bigger than Facebook itself?

That could very well be the case in 2009. Facebook, which just surpassed 200 million global users, is expected to bring in about $500 million in 2009 revenue, mostly from advertising. Tech blog Venturebeat estimated that Facebook developers make a combined $500 million on the platform.

Ad Age estimates the collective revenue from Facebook of developers to be between $300 million and $500 million.

All in all, numbers big enough that Facebook is looking to cash in

Why Free-Ride YouTube Is Finally Winning Ad Dollars

Ford Motor Co.’s much-heralded social-media campaign to introduce the Ford Fiesta to young people shows just how deeply embedded YouTube has become in the strategies of even the straightest-laced marketers. But it is also an example of why it is such a tough business for Google.

The Ford campaign, which will have 100 social-media influencers upload their exploits with the car to the “Fiesta Movement” channel, includes no corresponding media buy. Ford is, in effect, using YouTube as the core of its marketing plan but not paying Google a penny for the privilege. The nation’s biggest marketers, from Geico to Samsung to Unilever to Barack Obama, have embraced the service and routinely seed it with videos.

Skittles.com

What’s Next…?

Quite a bit of buzz has popped up around the new Skittles.com over the weekend and today. If you haven’t seen the site, it’s based on leveraging different social-media sites linked together by a very simple menu navigation that floats on any of the sites. For example, the home page and “chatter” section is the brand’s Twitter page, the video media page is the brand’s YouTube page, the video images page is the brand’s Flickr stream, and the “friends” section is the Facebook fan-page profile.

This is almost certainly inspired by Modernista’s brilliant redesign from about a year ago. Does that matter? Definitely not. Modernista had it right then and now Skittles does too. Skittles has unabashedly made the bold leap into accepting they can’t control the way their brand is defined in today’s social web and can only try their best to participate in the conversation. They’re taking the good with the bad, and I can assure you all that good is going to dramatically outweigh the bad.

Facebook Serves

…as Own Example of How Web Bites Back

Facebook inadvertently made the news on President’s Day when Consumerist reported a change in the social networks’s terms of service. In short, Facebook’s new TOS indicates that it owns all the data that users upload to their system. In fact, it goes a step further to suggest that the company may “retain archived copies of your User Content” even if you terminate your Facebook account. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg felt it necessary to personally respond to the concerns, noting that Facebook’s terms are consistent with many web-service providers.

Why Your Facebook Profile Isn’t Really Yours

Case Study: ‘Lactivists’ Vs. Social Net’s Privacy Policy

Facebook has ticked off various constituencies over the years with its various new-product introductions and policies, but recently it has pushed the button of one group that advertisers have learned are a force to be reckoned with: online moms. Specifically, in this case, lactivists — or breast-feeding advocates.

The group, “Hey Facebook, Breastfeeding Is Not Obscene,” was formed in the summer of 2007 to protest Facebook’s deletion of photos of breast-feeding moms and has spawned MILC — or Mothers International Lactation Campaign. The Facebook group totaled 61,000 members on Dec. 22 but added 25,000 members in the past week after several mainstream news outlets picked up on a virtual protest MILC had planned. The protest, held last Saturday, involved nursing moms staging a “virtual nurse-in” outside Facebook’s Palo Alto, Calif., headquarters and moms changing profile pictures to photos of women or animals nursing. According to the Facebook group, more than 11,000 people participated.

It’s worth noting that 11,000 out of Facebook’s 50.5 million November unique visitors, according to ComScore isn’t much in terms of sheer numbers. Of course, neither was the number of Twittering moms that caused Johnson & Johnson to change its Motrin ads after its mom-focused ad offended them (though that could have just as well been a case of the marketer taking the quickest path to silence). Facebook may be less easily swayed — it has yet to change its terms of service, which state that pictures exposing a full breast will be taken down.

And while I applaud exercises of free speech, here’s the point I don’t get: Facebook isn’t saying photos of women breast-feeding won’t be allowed on its site; it’s saying only pictures that expose the full breast will be taken down — whether they involve breast-feeding or baring it all to sell beer. It seems the biggest issue for breast-feeding activists is the implication that there’s something sexual about breast-feeding, just as there’s something sexual about using boobs to sell beer. On a personal level, I don’t think there’s anything sexual about it, but it does seem as though there’s something intimate about it — the sort of intimacy I wouldn’t want to plaster all over Facebook, which is a public site, after all.

Regardless, it’s a reminder that for as much time as people spend pimping out Facebook profiles, those profiles aren’t yours and yours only. They’re Facebook’s, essentially. And Facebook’s terms of service are in line with other media companies. When the St. Petersburg Times wrote about the protest, it noted that Facebook called the paper’s advertising department and asked whether an ad could be placed related to breast-feeding that showed a woman with her breast fully exposed. It was told the ad would need to be reviewed and that such an image would not generally be allowed in the paper.

If you want to post photos of breast-feeding, then go start up your own website to do so. In fact, that’s what MILC has done: It made a place to collect all the photos Facebook has removed.

COO: Fifth-Largest Facebook Social Group Is Facebook Protesters

A 3 Minute Ad Age Video Report

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — In her appearance at the American Magazine Conference last week, Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said it was “good” that so many consumers are using the Facebook product to protest the Facebook product. Her remarks came as 2.7 million Facebook users were being urged to boycott the social site next weekend. The Facebook-protest community to which they belong has now become the social site’s fifth most popular group.

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What Would You Do if You Were Marketing VP for a Day? 10 Things for Clients to Consider When Evaluating Agencies

Small Agency Diary

Every once in a while, I play a cruel game. I pretend I’m the marketing VP of a large corporation with a nice budget and ask myself how I would evaluate an agency partner. Of course, that’s what our clients are doing every day, but knowing the underside of agency operations adds another dimension to the game.

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Frozen Yogurt Wars Heat up Between Red Mango, Pinkberry

Rivals Taps Ad, Branding Shops as Rivals Battle for Share

CHICAGO (AdAge.com) — Red Mango is throwing down the gauntlet in the “authentic frozen yogurt” wars. The chain has hired the Richards Group, Dallas, in a seven-figure deal to create online, in-store, public relations and event marketing. Print and outdoor work will likely be added in 2009.

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Facebook COO: Web Needs New Model, New Metrics Social-Networking Site Points to MTV Promotion of Video Awards as Way to Use Online Ads to Generate Demand

American Magazine Conference 2008

SAN FRANCISCO (AdAge.com) — “The monetization question on the web is a very big and open one,” Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg said at the AMC. Google and its competitors have made answering demands for information very profitable by selling ads attached to search requests, or demand fulfillment, Ms. Sandberg, a former Google executive herself, noted. “What no one’s figured out how to do is demand generation,” she said. “We need to find a new model and new metrics.”

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Make Social Networks Work for You

The Technology Can Be a Huge Asset as a Career and Hiring Tool, as Long as You Understand How Each Network Works

By Logan Kugler

In April, Dallas-based agency IMC2 sent its first tweet: “Check out our job openings! We’re a top 10 digital ad agency!” Within a few days, people started responding. Since then, Twitter has joined LinkedIn, another social-networking site, as a key part of IMC2’s recruiting strategy.

Social networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace and Twitter are not the wave of the future. They’re the wave of the now. Especially in marketing and advertising, you simply cannot afford to be left behind as more of your colleagues, audience and, yes, competitors reach out through social networks as part of their routine strategies.

For IMC2, social networks are a natural place to look for new employees. “Our company is focused on being a thought leader and innovator in digital marketing,” says Lori Kinney, IMC2’s director of recruiting. “The innovators and early adopters we’re looking for would be using these services.”

Whether you’re looking for the next big move in your career, trying to recruit a hotshot creative for your agency or developing your client’s promotional strategy, a strong online presence can be a powerful tool, but only if it’s directed in the right places. Spreading your message willy-nilly across the social web won’t get you anywhere. Every social network has its own strengths and its own character. Taking the time to get to know them individually is what will make the crucial difference in getting the most out of them.

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