A Look At Facebook's Ponzi Scheme

I posted something yesterday on Twitter and on Facebook was favorited and Liked by senior executive at one of the world's largest retailers, an executive at a massive, global CPG and senior executives at agencies, respectively, so I'm going to repost it here to share it with you.

A little background, first: A lot of folks in the industry had been creating fan hubs long before Facebook went from being a college hook up site to the place where everyone over shares everything constantly. These hubs had analytics built in, rewards/points systems, mature communications tools, and an organized way of aligning data sources to truly manage customer data. Life was good because it kept true fans in a separate community, where only those people that love your brand could communicate with marketers and each other. Life was good.

Then along came Facebook Brand Pages.

As those of us who've felt the growing pains of the social network most of this won't come as a surprise. For those who haven't engaged in the Facebook Ponzi Scheme, get ready to open up your wallets.

Facebook for marketers is like the "If You Give A Mouse A Cookie" books: 

If you build a page here, not on your web site, for "fans", we'll give you rudimentary tools to manage and measure it. If you're dissatisfied with our garbage tools, you can hire someone full time and rent a bunch of startup tools to do it.

Once you've rented a bunch of tools to do it and built a team, you should make it worth your investment by advertising to grow your fan base. In fact, don't even bother sending anyone to your website -- just put our logo on all of your TV, print, web and mobile ads.

Now that you have all of your customers giving us their data, you should hire analysts to help you weed through all of that data. Don't worry, it moves fast enough that most of their quarterly reports will be outdated anyway. Oh, and most of these folks aren't really marketers, so you'll get back meaningless suggestions without any idea how to implement it. You might even want to bring in an agency, but not one that knows what they're doing -- just give the responsibility to the youngest person in the room at your current ad, PR or digital agency.

Now that we have your money and "fans", we'll hide brand status updates so that 3-7.5% are seen by the people you paid to drive to your page. But there's an easy solution to your problem:

You should advertise some more.

Facebook's Changes Means Digital Agencies Should Thrive

Thursday the bomb was dropped at f8 that Facebook is going to be ditching the Like in favor of user actions and passive updates, meaning that when you engage with apps and have the "Add to Timeline" feature enabled it will automatically update your Timeline with what you're doing (for an example of this, check out the Washington Post Social app). It's mildly reminiscent of the auto-checkin app for Foursquare, and of course the "please rob me" site that followed, however this latest change is not only a strong push for brands to do more on Facebook than create pithy status updates to get noticed, but should be a huge wake up call for the marketing industry as to where the budgets will be going.

Get Me To The Schmoo

Unfortunately this happens all too often at companies: We need to prove that social media delivers a return before we can invest budget in these sort of programs. Pretty chicken and egg, right? The fortunate part is that it's easily correctible; if you set up your social media programs and measurement properly you can determine the ROI.

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

Since it's Friday and everyone's talking about Hurrican Irene, I figured it'd be a good time to slip in some shameless self promotion for a few upcoming speaking gigs in New York City. You know, provided it's not flooded:

September 16, 2011
PRSA's T3PR: Theory, Tactics and Technology for High Tech Public Relations
New York, NY
Technology Crisis. Digital Age.

October 26, 2011
ACI's Focus on Social Media, Business, Technology and the Law
New York, NY
Measuring Social Media’s Value to Your Business Processes in Order to Justify the Investment

Facebook Use May Lead to Psychological Disorders in Teens

This Mashable article reminds me of the Gen Y "Make me famous" syndrome, where Jason Alexander once said:

I once went to speak at a school, and there was a 16-year-old girl. And the girl says to me, "You know what? I don't care what I do, I just want to be famous."


And I thought, you know, I should really just shoot her in the head because it would serve two things: It would make her famous as the girl that Jason Alexander shot in the head, and it would, you know, spare the world of the banality of the rest of her life.

And as my friend Spike Jones points out, this may be true of social media experts as well.

Great CEOs Are Born, Not Made

My capstone course in college was all about Leadership. Specifically, we spent the semester dissecting, discussing and debating what leadership is, what makes a great leader and finally submitting a thesis on whether or not people are born with leadership qualities or they can be learned. Much like when I started learning, thinking and applying word of mouth marketing techniques to my clients in the early 2000's, I didn't have the research at the time but knew I was onto something. Something in my gut told me that I was right about it. It's taken well over a decade since that college course but the Harvard Business Review concurs with my perspective. Ironically the post is based on Bob Lutz's new book where he says that the suits, e.g. MBAs, and not product guys, are what ruined their business (GM was a client at a previous firm).

Classic: How Would You Like Your Graphic Design?

The same saying applies to web design too:



via Damian Rintelmann