Tag Archives for facebook
Image via CrunchBase
Zynga, the company that brought Facebook users Farmville, spent $120 million on marketing in 2011, inside the world’s biggest self-service marketing platform.
Efferman Ezzel looks at why Zynga should be focused on why and how their users play social games and not on how to use more marketing dollars to keep them engaged. As new user retention numbers slip, Zynga has started spending $300 — or losing $150 — for every user to marketing costs.
I had asked him earlier this weekend, why would any company spend that much money per user, or any money at all, re-socializing the marketing in an already social system?
He writes:
Why is Zynga spending that much money to market a “social game”, and why are they spending that much money to market a “social game” on Facebook? I believe they’re doing it for two reasons: 1) because they don’t understand why new user retainment is falling (why user growth is plateauing, why there’s a low conversion rate of users who become paying customers, why new user engagement is shrinking), and 2) because they assume increasing Zynga’s market presence will assure new user retainment upon trying their games. As was said in the Edge Magazine article, “The really hardcore [players] are, perhaps, finding themselves trying FarmVille, Castle World and CityVille. The newer audiences are trying and finding that this is all the same and leaving”. It is obvious Zynga needs to redirect their focus from new user retainment to new useradaptability, because they appear to be approaching user retainment from the same understanding they had when user growth skyrocketed, and that was when it was attached to the rapid growth Facebook experienced.
Zynga was supposed to be a dramatic re-imagining of gaming. Social and baked into the world’s largest social graph platform, Zynga offerings seemed like a capstone on any problems that might have been created when a new gaming company had to tackle distribution.
Image via Wikipedia
But the one constant thing about Facebook is that user expectations of what it does for them will change. And that’s without even factoring in that Facebook itself changes all the time.
A gaming company like Zynga that depends on Facebook is going to be out in the cold. And it looks like they have been.
Read more of Ezell’s post to find out what he thinks the company should be doing. Basically, find out what has changed for users. I would put a finer point on it. Find data, take down some narrative, and use the Jobs-to-be-done approach to find out what is causing non-consumption inside Facebook. Is there non-consumption within Facebook, in general?
Facebook Suscribe Button and the Rise of Streamed Feeds
My hunch is that Facebook users are becoming much more interested in using Facebook as a platform for understanding the real world and the world around them.
I have 18,646 subscribers to my public Facebook feed. Many of these people are people outside of the United States. They want a look into someone else’s life.
Facebook is moving away from a platform will you will have fun with friends. It’s trying to fashion itself into the place where each individual is a media hub for publishers and advertisers. It’s challenging every company it can think of, from Google and it’s Google+ offering, to Yahoo! Search and branded content.
As it moves in that direction, say goodbye to Farmville. That experience is way too static. It’s not real. And it doesn’t keep people interested or engaged in finding new people with different lives.
Image via CrunchBase
Vadim Lavrusik, the journalist ambassador at Facebook, today pointed to a well curated media expereience that focuses on the #SOPA fiasco.
I think the curation was a great idea, but I have concerns about how Facebook manages curation and how it organizes search to find curation.
Right now, Vadim and I are talking this out in a comment thread on his profile, but I want to take my points and put them here.
This is what I expect if I am seeking a curated moment in media. Notice that my comments evolve in to ideas about how Facebook could be better at search, what I believe to be a key component to curation. How will you find what you need to find?
There are several expectations that I have as an audience or a participant in curated themes, news, items, or content:
1. Relevancy: is it easy for me to discern at what point in time this is relevant? Was this from an age ago? Is this now? Is this later? (Search rears its head here, because Search allows me to filter backwards in time in some cases)
2. Is the content meaningful? Curation handles his well.
3. Structurally, is it easy for me to identify that the curated media is about the theme? Or, is it about the curator? In Facebook, it’s usually about the person filtering, because things are classified primarily by personal identity. The ticker highlights both the person curating and the comments around the curation, but not often the thing curated. Notifications serve to deliver people to a person so that people are constantly reinforcing a personal connection. I believe this is the marketing language around much of Timeline when Mark Zuckerberg spoke at F8, and later.
4. My other expectation is that I can constantly visit a theme or a curated idea. In FB, I find that hard to do. I can’t — here is search again — go back to a specific point in time easily. I don’t know where to look. If I had a search capability that would allow me to input “theme” and find the themes, rather than the people, being discussed I would have an easier time locating a curated experience. Facebook actually doesn’t have to choose
Image via Wikipedia
between being about people or being about media content. If they are trying to make people in to remote controls for video and TV content, or music content, or if they are trying to make people hubs for publishing legacies, then they need to find a way to blend it so that it can be approached form both sides of the fence. You are doing really well at being a marketer for the journalists who need an audience. This will eventually pull much of the media content from legacy publishing platforms into Facebook. But the experience and the “searching” for that experience is disorderly.
Right now, I found out about SOPA curating through you. You are a person. Unless you are on some robotic schedule I can’t depend on any person to consistently deliver me to the right thing every time. But if I search for it, I will find it every time. IF it’s set up to be searched.
And Lavrusik responds, roundly, with a good point, though I don’t think I am missing the point. My point is that the average user may not know these expectations because they are not given the ability to experience the result of having them. Says Lavrusik:
You’re missing one of the big points here. Much of the discovery happens through people you’re connected to and not search…for the average user. You’re not the average user, so it’s important to remember how the average user interacts with content. It’s usually not the same way we do
Before you read on, here is the nut graf: I think that’s what is happening to Twitter is not a competition with Sina Weibo — different countries, different folks; different economies of scale. I think the engineers and developers at Twitter are just trying to find a broad base on which most people can be happy, while the people at Twitter try to get done the jobs they want done, which, on a guess, must be: rake in advertising dollars; spread Twitter; spread the user base; incorporate more information.
Image via CrunchBase
Now read on if you would like the reason why I don’t think Twitter is just adapting to look more like Sina Weibo.
Bloggers typically reach for shorthand techniques when describing developments in the tech landscape. This writeup of Sina Weibo and Twitter is not an exception. I respect the folks at Penn Olson, but I think there is a fundamental flaw in writing about tech.
The platform we are describing cannot describe the user. It only describes the platform. Why is distinction important?
Because, even if Twitter was doing things to look like Sina Weibo — which I kind of doubt — the users are the ones that determine what the platform does. The way around this is to interview and talk to Sina Weibo users, and Twitter users, to get some idea of how they are using the platforms to get jobs done.
That being said, Steven Millward at Penn Olson says that Twitter is becoming more like Sina Weibo. Perhaps, structurally. But when you read through the blog post, the claim is rather shaky, since the changes that have been coming to Twitter also mimic those of other social platforms.
Finally, Twitter’s side pane now shows more information, such as suggestions as to who to follow, and some of the hottest trends. Of course, Facebook has been doing this for even longer, as part of the way it draws you in to the service.
Having said all that, I really like the redesign, and I like how it follows Twitter’s ethos whilst also adding some much-needed features.
I think it’s more likely that there is a universal way of presenting information that works for the granular user — that there are no universal users but there are techniques that designers can acheive that make those multi-various users experience the social platform in a cogent way.
At the heart of this I think is that we are all learning that there is no power user who can be the holy grail for how people use a social platform. Everyone’s needs are different.
I always think about this stuff in terms of relationships: we could all go forward and say I want a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship. Most of us, if we swing that way, could make that happen. But I bet the percentage of people who are really happy in that setup is small compared to the percentage of people that are a little uncomfortable in that setup but can get along in it.
I think that’s what is happening to Twitter. I think the engineers and developers are just trying to find a broad base on which most people can be happy, while the people at Twitter try to get done the jobs they want done, which, on a guess, must be: rake in advertising dollars; spread Twitter; spread the user base; incorporate more information.
Does that make sense? What would you add to this framework?
This just popped up in my profile settings today, and I cannot confirm how many other people are seeing this in their profiles.
Facebook is now asking people to enter their blood type as part of the standard biographical information, at least as far as I can see on my wall.
Does anyone else see something like this? What would be the reason for seeing this, or for having this? Who benefits by this?
Why is Facebook asking people to document their blood type in profiles?
Image via CrunchBase
Re-Wired Radio had the pleasure of meeting and interviewing Sumaya Kazi, the California-based CEO and Founder of social connections platform Sumazi. We interviewed her yesterday as she was traveling between meetings in New York City.
Sumazi works on a fundamentally human principle: that we work graciously with people who help us get things done in our life. Sumazi is the platform that uses social algorithms and your human network to find those people, even if you don’t yet know them.
You can listen to the full radio interview here.
From the Sumazi website:
Sumazi intelligently connects you to the people and opportunities you don’t know, but should.
According to a 2010 Sumazi survey of 1,700 people, the average person makes only 4 new valuable connections per year.
While existing social networks reinforce connections with people you already know, Sumazi connects you with new people and opportunities that may be out of sight but not out of reach.
Sumazi leverages your personal and extended networks to intelligently discover, recommend and introduce you to the right people and opportunities at the right time.
By building on top of the Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter ecosystems, Sumazi is able to harness the untapped reach and potential of your networks and your networks’ network.
By minimizing missed opportunities, Sumazi maximizes serendipity, connecting you to the people you don’t know, but should.
Sumazi helps you make a request, and then your human network links you to people you need to know
Image via CrunchBase
This conversation on recent privacy concerns about Klout is one of the edgier and sometimes loopy discussions about the topic of how people use Klout in their everyday social media use. After submitting a comment two weeks ago, I must have received over four dozen new comments in my inbox, and they keep coming. So, I know how people use Klout is an important discussion, and it’s not just because people are vain, which has always seemed to me a throwaway answer to the question.
Klout recently changed its scoring algorithm, causing on average a drop of about 12 points for people with high influence scores. The reaction has been, typically, to pan Klout as just another piece of broken social software.
I sit on an advisory board called the Klout Squad, so I just want to get that out of the way, because that needs to be evaluated to judge my bias in my commentary on Klout. I wanted to link to this recent discussion about privacy on Klout because gems, like this one quoted below, always pop up when people discuss how they use Klout.
The issue is not really about privacy.
Here’s two reasons, from a recent commenter calling himself Dylan_LW:
I used Klout for two reasons but after the big “make-over” and migrating to the “new” klout I read up on what the controversy was all about and found the disadadvantages by far outweigh the advantages (as to how used it). Was unaware of these privacy issues (esp minors).
Primary reason to use Klout, to me anyway, was to be able to give a/o receive +k, even though this did not at all influence anyone’s score. Giving +k to someone was a nice way of (unexpectedly) giving someone a compliment. It also offered others an option like an ice-breaker, opening/pick-up line. That’s all.
A secondary reason to use Klout, or rather stats in general: check back if scores/stats plummeted. If so that mighta been an indicator that (unintentionally) I may have pissed a lot of people of. Let’s say I have a change in topics or use more tongue-in-cheek and the score plummets, it would tell me: “people don’t get that.”
As to actual Klout score itself. I found Klout was rather quirky to say the least in the month prior to the big change. But I just thought, well heye, these guys are working on something new so I gave them the benefit of the doubt. Either way in my opinion the actual graphs were buggy and did not at all represent actual influence values.
The issue, I think, is that people are learning that all of these online systems are very open, and that eventually, any algorithm that measures our back and forth between people, or our conversations and our personal reflections, is going to to be able to reach into the darkest crevices of our online life and measure it completely. I think we are uncomfortable.
How we do that will have to change, once we begin to realize that anyone, at anytime, outside the conversations or context in question can find out how we do what we do. How we use Klout says as much about our interest in social media as it does about our awareness of how people perceive us. What we call privacy concern is really an anxiety about how people see us for who we are. There is always a conflict between who we say we are, who we want to be and how we want people to consume us.
So, this is not about how we consume Klout. This is about how Klout consumes us, andhow that relationship is extremely symbiotic.
Are we prepared to work and socialize on an online environment that does not allow us to segment our personalities as much as we like to do IRL?
Image by O'Reilly Conferences via Flickr
Update:
Facebook CTO Bret Taylor has said that “most” of Facebook’s users have changed their privacy settings. So? This still only tells us that users follow Facebook’s suggestions on how to use the site. How are they using it otherwise?
Second Update:
Sergey Brin and Vic Gondotra say that Google is playing a different game than Facebook.
Sean Parker, CEO of Spotify and founder of Napster, was interviewed the other day about Facebook’s privacy settings at Tim O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Summit. Parker, who sits on the Facebook board flippantly — according to him — answered that when it comes to Facebook and privacy there is “good creepy and bad creepy.” The comment, and the write up on TechCrunch have resulted in a little bit of back and forth on just what he meant, and whether Facebook does in fact suffer from a privacy problem.
What follows is a case of where a product-focused company wants the product to mean something for he consumer, which it doesn’t. The consumer has his or her own idea of what the product means. Facebook wants them to be as open as possible on Facebook, because, I think, Mark Zuckerberg wants Facebook to be the platform for open sharing, frictionless and without limits. The fact that they are participating on the platform means that this is what they want. But consumers don’t work that way. You can give a consumer a glass of water, but that does not mean he is drinking it.
Parker believes the problem is semantic, and that if users knew what they were talking about a bit better they would understand that their issue is not one of privacy but one of information control. In a way, he’s right, because from an aspirational point of view, like a marketer, he wants consumers to want Facebook to operate in a certain way.
Image by Getty Images via @daylife
The whole string of comments is here. The following is Parker’s position:
Allow me to rephrase myself — it’s not that privacy isn’t a general problem, it’s that privacy isn’t the correct way of framing issue. The point I was trying to make, which I have made more eloquently in the past, is that many of the problems that users attribute to a lack of privacy basically boil down to a lack of decent controls, which boils down to a lack of sufficiently powerful interfaces for managing the flow of information. This isn’t a “privacy” issue per se, it’s a functionality issue.
The problem is not even privacy or even functionality, it’s the people judging you or using your informations/opinions/pictures against you on Facebook. But I guess fixing that would need another level of changing things…
It is NOT voluntary on their part, it stems from a failure to understand what product changes would actually mollify the privacy concerns that keep coming up. Facebook tries to built all sorts of privacy panels and settings and controls, but none of this seems to address the recurring complaints. I am simply saying that they should build tools for controlling the flow of information like those described above. These would not be considered “privacy” feature but I would argue they will go along way towards addressing what most people are now calling “privacy” concerns.
Image via CrunchBase
You are using semantics to re-frame an issue that, in web design, is not a semantic one. On a web site, as you know, how a user interacts is framed by how the developer creates it. While it may not be the intention for privacy to be an issue, the user experience makes it seem as such. Therefore, it’s an issue. You can’t tell a person not to think about privacy because the site or the experience wasn’t designed properly. If I go on a date, and the person I’m on a date with sneezes, farts, and burps during the date, I can’t say later, well, the date just wasn’t designed properly. That’s the date I had, and that’s the date I experienced, whether the date wanted to fart, sneeze or burp during the wonderful plating of duck a la mode.You can use semantics to frame your issue, but as Facebook is constructed, that’s how people use and see the issue. There are questions already, about whether there is an actual FTC investigation going on — Facebook does not have to reveal this, as a private company. The only way they would reveal this, according to someone I talked to at the FTC, is through the registration of their SEC documents, when they file for an IPO. Facebook delayed their filing, according to recent reports. There are also, I believe, nine different privacy suits being filed against Facebook, according to other reports.Also, my original comment was also pointed to TechCrunch, which didn’t report that you had said that as a shareholder you didn’t believe you could give an accurate answer.
Image via Wikipedia
We often ask, what is the job that a consumer is asking the product to do for him?
Facebook should consider this kind of questioning. If you look at this infographic by WordStream that we first found at Mashable, you might get the impression, as I did, that Facebook’s executives seem to be thinking that Facebook should become the one place on the web where you do everything you do anywhere else on the web.
Has that worked for Facebook? Adding lists; launching daily deals; competing with Foursquare; and so on.
Here’s a list of failures that may suggest that it has not.
WordStream Shows that Facebook Has Racked Up a Lot of Social Media Faux Paus
