Will Marlow

Whenever a new social networking product is launched, the question of whether it will KILL its rivals always comes up. 

But for those of you who are loyal to Facebook, never fear.  Google+ will NOT kill Facebook.

Here's why.  Google+ is not in the business of being the virtual glue that holds together your real world relationships.  That's Facebook's mission.  Facebook wants to make your real world relationships richer by letting you share, chat, and interact in a safe place online.

Google+ doesn't do that.  It doesn't even TRY to do that.  Instead, Google+ wants to be the catapult that helps you launch your message/product/company/idea to greater and greater numbers of people more effectively.  It also wants to be the net that you use to pull in the best information from the people you respect.  That is Twitter's business, and my guess is that Google has a weakened Twitter (there are no full-time founders left at Twitter day-to-day) in its crosshairs right now, but most people are missing that story.

Just look at the reviews of Google+.  My hero Thomas Hawk wrote a great analysis of why Google+ is great for promoting photography.  He's mostly correct in what he says, but the very fact that Google+ is great for photographers is evidence that it is NOT competing in an area that Facebook cares about.

By the way, if anyone wants an invite to Google+, just let me know in the comments below, by email, or send up smoke signals.

A lot of people think that all the different social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, etc.) are more complicated than they really are.   Every social media platform, however, has one thing in common: they all make publishing possible.  That is the key to the social media revolution.

"Today, the Web exists as a series of unstructured links between pages." - Mark Zuckerberg

"Even when you're...at www.washingtonpost.com, you are essentially on Facebook." - The Washington Post Privacy Policy

If you haven't heard about Facebook's ambitious new plans already, you should expect to read about Facebook's new moves in the near future, and for a long time to come.  This post is an early analysis about what the changes mean for you, both as a Facebook user, and as a marketer.

Facebook's new "enhancements" are likely to change the way everyone surfs the Internet.  Make no mistake: Facebook's new announcements are huge.  Without further introduction, here are the eight things you need to know about what Facebook is doing right now:

1. What is Facebook up to?  The first big change that Facebook announced is called the "Open Graph."  The "Open Graph" is Facebook's attempt to pull in all the important websites on the Internet and place them under a Facebook umbrella.  When the Facebook CEO said that "Today the Web exists as a series of unstructured links between pages" his point was that very shortly things will not be unstructured.  Facebook wants to be the structure that connects the links between pages on the Internet.  Let that sink in for a minute.  It helps to think about the difference between this approach and the approach taken by Google.  Both Facebook and Google want to understand the Internet.  But Google looks at the Internet from the outside and tries to decode what’s going on.  Facebook is trying to impose order on the Internet, so that it can be the only company to have a view of what’s going on under the tent.   

2. How does the Open Graph work?  Facebook has made it really easy for any website in the world to add Facebook's "social features," and by adding the social features, each website will make itself a part of Facebook's Open Graph.  This means that an e-commerce website that sells funny t-shirts can add a "like" button next to each t-shirt design.  As you browse the t-shirts and "like" different products, your Facebook news feed will be updated back on Facebook for all your friends to see.  The e-commerce website benefits because all your friends will see two things: (a) a link back to an article of merchandise, and (b) the fact that a friend of theirs "likes" that merchandise.  Facebook benefits because they see and analyze how their 400 million members are behaving on the Internet.  That's the graph.  Instead of hopping from one website to another anonymously, Facebook sees it all, and each time you register an opinion, Facebook has a new data point.  But that's not all. 

3. What else will Facebook do with the Open Graph?  It will allow any website in the world to give you a "custom experience."  You'll see what products the Facebook relevancy engine thinks you'll like most.  You can already see this over at the Washington Post.  You don't need to be logged in anywhere other than at Facebook, and then you'll see personalized "social" content on the Washington Post's website.  For example, when I went to the Washington Post today, I saw a little box that told me which of my friends had commented or "liked" certain articles, and I also saw other content that was promoted by people outside of my network.  This is really interesting (especially for someone like me, who was a former Capitol Hill Press Secretary), because this is a huge step away from human beings determining the news, in favor of computers telling us what to read.  Granted, the computers are telling us what to read based on actions taken by humans, but it is still a major shift away from the days when the Editor-in-Chief of a major newspaper would determine what made the front page.  Now, the machine chooses.  As the Washington Post says about this new development, "Even when you're...at www.washingtonpost.com, you are essentially on Facebook."

4. Does all of this mean that Facebook is becoming more important than Google? No.  Facebook is going to be the most important "internal" marketing factor for almost all websites. You won't be able to design a website visually without thinking about Facebook.  But Google will still be the most important "external" factor in designing and marketing websites.  You will still need to design your website's architecture (all the hidden, mostly non-visual elements of a website) with Google in mind.  In other words, the art of making sure your website appears in Google searches will still be important, but the art will get simpler, due to the fact that great content will have a better chance of rising to the top by means of Facebook optimization, even if a website is hindered by poor Google optimization. 

5. So why is all of this scary?  Because change is scary.  The status quo is that you surf the web anonymously, because no website talks to one another right now.  (For example, even though I personally own more than one website, I can't tell you exactly how much of my traffic is identical, because user analytic data generally dies when it goes from server to server. So if you read my blog, and then you visit my startup, I will only know that there was a visitor on each website.  I can't tell that it was the same visitor.  Facebook's knowledge about your Internet browsing behavior is going to be mind-boggling, and it won't be anonymous.  Facebook will be able to know not only that visitor X visited a website, but that visitor X is named Will Marlow.  I don't mean to be a scaremonger, but Facebook is going to realize the dream of mapping out a massive "network of influence" across the Web, and that's a topic that needs its own blog post.  

6. How important is "sharing"? A lot of these controversial changes boil down to this: Facebook wants to know what items on the Internet are "sharable."  So how important is sharing?  Answer: very important.  On Facebook alone, the 400 million Facebook users shared over 25 billion things last month.  Facebook's dream is to allow anyone to share anything across its servers, regardless of what website you're on.  This gives Facebook data on which items are more important than others, based on how the item was shared and how many people shared it. 

7. What else is Facebook up to?  Facebook is allowing a toolbar to be added to ANY website anywhere in the world, that will contain virtually 100% of Facebook's functionality to that site.  For example, if you visit your local jewelry store's website, you can also have a "Facebook chat" with someone using the Facebook chat system.  Again, the upside to the e-commerce site is that all of a sudden, their website has become way more interesting and compelling courtesy of Facebook, and the upside to Facebook is that it will know what its members are doing on all of the world's e-commerce websites. 

8. Why will Facebook succeed? Because they are making things easy.  Because they are enormous, and they are growing faster than ever.  Because the value that they deliver to every website (literally, every website that I can think of) is too compelling.  It will be impossible for websites to resist Facebook's Open Graph.  My guess is that almost all the big websites, and many of the small ones (you don't need an IT staff to get going) will join before 2011, if not before the start of May. 

So what's the bottom line?  All of this is a little scary, but I'm also excited by the thought of making the Internet more social.  As you can see, there's already a Facebook "like" button at the bottom of this post.  I hope that this early look at Facebook's plans was helpful.

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PS - My friend Amy Rowe took the photograph above of the tulips on one of the tables at our rehearsal dinner.  

The enemy of a good social media plan is chatter.  Chatter is what gives ALL social media a bad name.  For example, if a major nonprofit or school were to update their Twitter account with a Tweet that said, "Isn't it a beautiful day out?"  That's borderline chatter, and I would never feel comfortable with that type of update.  

One huge myth is that if you use Twitter or Facebook to link to your website from your status updates, you'll increase your Google PageRank (in other words, your website will get pushed to the top of search results), because Google famously "counts the number of links" to your website to determine how "relevant" your website is.  Lots of links = great search engine optimization, right?  But you can think of the major Internet companies as co-conspirators in a plot to determine "relevancy," because back in 2005 they all decided that whenever someone links to a website in the "user generated content" area of another website, they would start inserting an invisible "nofollow" tag.  This means that ALL links in a Twitter feed have a hidden "nofollow" tag embedded in them (same with Facebook), and this makes them invisible to search engines.  To be clear, this means that the target of the link doesn't look any more attractive in the eyes of Google, Yahoo or Bing. 

Google launched Buzz 13 days ago, and after spending some time getting to know it better, I wanted to write a quick introduction for people who are still wondering (a) how it works, (b) how it's different from other social media platforms and (c) why they might want to use it.

In everyone's favorite list format, here are the answers to those questions:

1. Google Buzz works in the following way: you access your Google Buzz account through Gmail, and the service allows you to post "updates" which have no character limitation.  Your posts can include rich media like pictures and videos.  Gmail has over 200 million users, which means that the scope of Google Buzz is huge, because each Gmail user was given a default Buzz account along with followers from among their email contacts.  As you post updates, the people in your Buzz network can leave comments, register a "like," or send you a message.

2. Unlike Twitter, which has one feed that shows everything you say (whether you're writing your own original post, or commenting about someone else's post), Google Buzz let's you comment on someone else's feed without using your own feed to do it.  This means you can have conversations with thousands of people, while only updating your own feed at your own pace.

3. Unlike Twitter, there are no follow limits on Google Buzz.  This means you can follow thousands of people, and potentially earn lots of follow backs.  Buzz can get away with this for two reasons: (1) 13 days is not long enough for spammers to flood the system with noise, and (2) it is not yet open to third party apps the way Twitter is, so every time someone follows someone else on Buzz, they physically need to follow them.  This places a natural limitation on the amount of following that can be done, which itself is a protection against spam that doesn't exist on Twitter.

4. On the same topic of follower numbers, unlike Twitter (or Posterous), you don't need to display the names of the people who are following you OR the number of people who you are being followed by and are following.

5. If you comment on someone else's Buzz update, you'll start getting updates in your inbox when other people comment on that thread.  This is jarring at first.  It makes it look like you actually have email in your inbox.  However, it appears that Google simply wants to bring these updates to your attention separately from all the other Buzz noise, because if you've commented on it you've highlighted its importance.  This feature will definitely annoy some people, and I wouldn't be surprised if Google introduces filtering options.  Many people consider their inboxes to be sacred and don't want non-email to fill it up.  However, this aspect of Buzz underscores the fact that Buzz is really an "email-based" social media tool, which is where it derives a lot of its uniqueness.  Even if the hype that is surrounding Buzz right now dies away, it may have strong staying power due to its email roots.

6. So how is Google Buzz the same as Twitter and Facebook?  All three platforms occupy the same category: they are all outposts (to borrow Chris Brogan's term).  This means that Buzz is a great place to meet new people, have new conversations, and to develop a new traffic stream to your primary web base, which should be a blog or a website that you use to deliver real value and host your most important work.

7. So why would you want to use Google Buzz?  If you are interested in truly interacting with people, the features on Buzz are creating lots of rich interactions.  I have over 8,000 followers on Twitter, and far fewer followers on Buzz, but I can already see that my Buzz posts are generating as much or more engagement than my Twitter posts.  It is important to avoid fake success metrics like follower counts and fan lists when measuring success in online media.  It's much better to look at the number of comments, clickthrough numbers, re-posts, "favorites," "likes," and links.  These measures are much harder to fake, and right now the features on Buzz (and its early adopter user-base) have made for the most engaged/engaging platform around.

8. The final point I'd make about Buzz is that if you divide the world between Twitter and Facebook, you'd see Twitter as the best tool for "pushing" information to lots of people, and you'd see Facebook as the best tool for "pulling" information in from the people you choose to connect with.  In my opinion, the strength of Google Buzz is much more in its ability to let you "push" information out than pull it in, which makes it more of a threat to Twitter.  But it took more than 13 days to build Google Buzz, and it'll take longer than 13 days to reach a final verdict on where the platform is headed.  I hope this was a useful early analysis for you.

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Will Marlow co-founded AlumniFidelity to help his clients reposition their fundraising to benefit from Web 2.0 technology and marketing techniques. He’s working with clients such as UVA, the College of William & Mary, the University of Oklahoma, Bowling Green State University, Randolph Macon College, and he loves nothing better than a thorny marketing challenge.  Read more about Will Marlow here, or email him at will@alumnifidelity.com.

A few years ago, it was very fashionable for schools to invest heavily in building custom social networks that were designed for their alums to use.  The upside of building your own social network is that you own all the data, and you make all the big decisions that determine what happens on the social network.  The downside of building your own social network, however, includes:

Where I live in DC, we just got the largest snowfall in 90 years, and now we're preparing for another blizzard that could drop an additional ten inches.  Most news coverage talks about all the negative impacts of the blizzard, but flip that coin over and you can use it to engage your audience.  If you work for a school or nonprofit and you have valuable equipment stored outside, take photographs or videos and share them online via your Facebook or Flickr profile.  If you work for a nonprofit that helps low-income people or the homeless, send an emergency announcement to your supporters letting them know that the weather has increased the need of the people you serve.  If the blizzard damaged the grounds of your school's campus, use Facebook to ask your students and alums to submit their own photographs of the damage by uploading them online.

Split-testing, or A/B testing, is one of the most important concepts in designing new features on a website.  Anyone can do it for a very small amount of money (if you know how), but I wanted to share a real-time example of split-testing in action.

(download)

Click here to download:

Facebook_Is_Doing_Split-Testin.zip (115 KB)

Facebook is currently testing a new user-interface, which means they may be gearing up for a major overhaul.  My fiance (Photo A) logs into Facebook and sees the new layout, while I (Photo B) login to Facebook and see the old version.  Facebook's analysts will measure the clicks of group A and compare them to group B, and if the analysts determine that group A is more productive or optimal against its metrics, they'll implement the changes for all of Facebook's users.  Click the images above to see the different layouts that Facebook is testing.

Some people have a hard time understanding why Facebook is so valuable.