ChasNote

There was much excitement last week over AdAge’s piece on brands that have built bigger Facebook fan bases than monthly visitors to their websites. Most observers applaud the brands who have taken early initiative to follow their customers into Facebook. If your customers spend their digital time reading, commenting and liking stuff that flows through their Facebook newsfeeds, get yourself into the newsfeed, right?

“For many marketers, their Facebook fan bases have become their largest web presence, outstripping brand sites or e-mail programs either because a brand’s traditional web-based ‘owned media’ is atrophying or because more consumers are migrating to social media.”

James Gross (Federated Media) and Scott Rafer (Feedster, MyBlogLog, Lookery), however, both argue that the race to rack up Facebook fans brings with it a new danger for brands: Namely, the race to sign up fans comes at the expense of creating compelling content assets to distribute to and engage with those fans. First Rafer:

“It’s tough to take brands and their agencies seriously when they complain about their dependence on Google SEM. When they have new options, they make the same old mistake: underinvestment in their own Internet assets. It’s easier for marketing managers and agency account messengers to become dependent on dominant third parties than to fix their own accounting practices and IT organizations.”

Here’s the root problem according to Gross:

“Short term marketing goals along with agency and publisher relationships that create a scooby snack world around results like FB [fan counts].”

In other words, because buying ads to drive up fan counts is easier than executing a content strategy, marketers and their agencies are prioritizing the former. Boosting quantity is easier than delivering quality.

There’s also the issue of the black-box logic that Facebook uses to determine how many of your fans will in fact see your updates — your brand’s story packaged up into Facebook-sized nuggets — in their newsfeeds. Facebook, like any rational company, will put growth of its own businesses ahead of the growth of partners’ projects. What happens, for instance, when Facebook needs to promote a major new product initiative like Places? They might just bump your status updates from your followers’ feeds to make room location updates using Places. From Inside Facebook:

“Reports from Page administrators and data from our PageData service indicate that the launch of Places has decreased the prominence of official Page updates in the news feed. Significant decreases in impressions-per-post and new Likes per day for Pages coincide with the introduction of Places stories. This suggest an alteration has been made to Facebook’s algorithm that determines what users users see in their news feed. We suspect that the weight of Page updates has been decreased while Places stories have been temporarily given a relatively high weight.”

Here’s the impact on Nutella’s fan page:

Starbucks may have nearly 13 million fans of its official Page in Facebook, but those 13 million fans are apparently seeing more updates these days from friends checking in on Facebook Places than status updates from Starbucks.

Full collection, including a link to a site that sells them as posters, at Laughing Squid.

Boing Boing suggests the faux vintage ads must be the work of Mad Men’s Pete Campbell. “These are too cheesy to be the work or Don or Peggy. Let’s be honest here.”

I came across some eMarketer data this week that initially struck me as obvious: Social media users are more likely to trust blog posts, Tweets and Facebook updates authored by friends than those posted by brands. In the “trust completely” column, friends are considered two to three TIMES more trustworthy.

Makes sense: human friendships are built around trust, and while we sometimes trust brands, brands aren’t friends or humans.

Of course brands aren’t people, but they’ve long understood that humanizing themselves (itselves?) — by hiring likable pitchmen and pitchwomen or creating cute animated characters, for example — makes us more likely to think of them as friends. When they act like humans (or tree elves or fun-loving tigers), we often forget they are corporations trying to sell us stuff. We start considering them pals and trusting them.

In social media, though, brands aren’t doing a good job of acting like our human friends. A recent report by digital agency 360i (see Forbes) shows that consumers use Twitter to converse with their online friends — @Replies, in Twitterspeak — while brands predominantly use social media to talk about themselves.

“When marketers use Twitter, 360i says that 75% of the time they are using it to disseminate news or information about the brand, as opposed to actively engaging Twitter users. Consumers are only engaged by the brand approximately 16% of the time. Putting that in perspective, consumers engaged in conversation with each other 43% of the time.”

And it turns out that behaving like a human in social media — listening and conversing rather than spouting from a soapbox — isn’t just an academic exercise or a contest to rack up follower counts. Charlene Li at the Altimeter Group recently ranked brands into a leaderboard of what she calls the Social Media Mavens, the brands that most actively engage with their followers, and cross-checked her data with financial performance of those companies. It turns out that acting more human in social media is good business.

“These Mavens on average grew 18% in revenues over the last 12 months, compared to the least engaged companies who on average saw a decline of 6% in revenue during the same period. The same holds true for two other financial metrics, gross margin and net profit.

“Note that we are not claiming a causal relationship — but there is clearly a correlation and connection. For example, a company mindset that allows a company to be broadly engage with customers on the whole probably performs better because the company is more focused on [customers] than the competition.”

Complicated things are just easier to understand when they’re explained in cartoon format. The best example in recent times, of course, is R. Crumb’s Illustrated Book of Genesis. This new video from Facebook, though, is a candidate for Top 10.

But that’s just me (and Catholic guilt, perhaps). Which do you think does the better job?

On Friday I interviewed one of the young men featured in these ads I saw in Facebook:

It’s a common practice for companies to run job postings on Craigslist or LinkedIn, but this is the first time I’ve seen prospective employees taking out ads to announce their interest in working for me. Tough times call for innovative tactics, I guess.

Innovative but not expensive. The candidate I spoke to told me he used Facebook’s self-service ad-buying tool to target the pages of Facebook users who are members of the Digg network, and he agreed to pay about $0.50 any time someone clicked on the ad, which linked to his resume. Given that Digg has fewer than 100 employees (you can only join the Digg network if you’re a current or past employee), not all of whom are members of the Digg network on Facebook, and only a subset of the members clicked on the ad, the job-seeker spent less than $20 to get himself a job interview at the next company he wants to work for.

If you’ve got 17 minutes, and you’re interested in why Facebook is “defaulting to social” (despite the PR hoopla) and why Google’s PageRank algorithm is about to face stiff competition from Facebook’s Like signal, watch this video from the start.

If you’re a short-attention-span ad wonk, skip forward 13 minutes and 30 seconds — to where Kevin predicts syndicated Twitter ads that are targeted based on “interest graphs,” and a future where you no longer hate ads.

Twitter and Facebook are growing like weeds, with 60 million and 400 million members each, respectively. Last month Twitter announced that its account-holders are churning out 50 million Tweets per day, to ever-expanding networks of friends and colleagues (and, let’s be honest, robots). According to stats published in DailyFinance:

“Web analyst firm HubSpot estimates that the average Twitter user now has 300 followers — compared to 70 in July — and follows 170, a substantial increase from 45 in the middle of the year. And, users are tweeting more, with the average output growing from 120 in July to 420.”

There’s a danger to looking at averages, though. Ashton Kutcher, Ellen DeGeneres and Britney Spears each have more than 4.5 million followers (see WeFollow).

And while total Twitter membership is up to nearly 60 million accounts, visitors to Twitter.com remained flat in the 2nd half of 2009. Again from DailyFinance:

“According to data from Web analytics company Compete, Twitter attracted approximately 22 million visitors in December 2009, which was pretty much unchanged from June levels. From its best month, August, the visitor metric fell by 770,000.”

Twitter usage on client and mobile apps such as Tweetdeck isn’t counted by website traffic firms like Compete, but it’s not logical to me that the percentage of Twitter users who use downloadable clients, which requires a bit more technical know-how than visiting a website, would grow faster than usage of Twitter.com as its overall audience has expanded to a more mainstream (and less technical) population.

According to BarracudaLabs, only 21 percent of Twitter accounts are active, if you define “active” as an account holder who has at least 10 followers, follows at least 10 people and has Tweeted at least 10 times. (See PC World.)

Facebook has a similar problem. Total membership is bigger than the entire human population in the United States and those members push 5 billion pieces of content into Facebook newsfeeds every week. But the activity rates per person — sharing links, photos or status updates — are falling. From FastCompany:

“While the actual raw count of data shared has skyrocketed, the overall percentage of Facebookers who post status updates daily has actually fallen. Which means that on the whole, Facebook’s users may be much less engaged with the site. And much of the increased content-sharing is coming either from a proportionally smaller group or from the much larger number of pages being published — many of those, however, are promotional vehicles for other companies, particularly local businesses.”

With total audience numbers as big as Facebook’s, I’m not downgrading its odds of achieving world domination. But declining engagement rates aren’t a good thing. What is Facebook if members aren’t participating? Anecdotally, I know many Twitter lurkers who actively use the service as vital news aggregator. The non-contributing Facebookers I know tend to lose interest altogether.

Anyhoo, because I know you need to know, here’s what I’m up to: Awwww, cloudy Saturday morning in SF!! #ihatecloudydays

(Thanks, Larissa Dinh, for pointing me to several of the above articles!)

Facebook’s default privacy settings in 2005:

And now (April 2010):

Check out the awesomely animated version here.

Miss the good old days of 2005? It turns out dialing back your privacy settings isn’t easy. From the NY Times:

“The new opt-out settings certainly are complex. Facebook users who hope to make their personal information private should be prepared to spend a lot of time pressing a lot of buttons. To opt out of full disclosure of most information, it is necessary to click through more than 50 privacy buttons, which then require choosing among a total of more than 170 options.”

Infographic (from the Times) of the expanding word-count for Facebook’s privacy policy.

From NYT’s Dealbook blog:

“While Twitter has nearly equaled Facebook in awareness among Americans — 87 percent now know of it, compared with 26 percent last year — it still lags behind in use, Teddy Wayne writes in The New York Times.”

Twitter usage is still way, way behind that of Facebook but it’s enormous awareness will keep Facebook on its toes, especially when you look at this other data point from the Edison Research study:

“[Twitter] users are more than three times as likely to follow brands and companies on Twitter as other users of social networks do, with over 40 percent using Twitter to learn about and provide opinions on brands.”