ChasNote

Kohler is sponsoring a water-themed Graffiti drawing contest to increase awareness of its H2OVisions site (more). Select Graffiti artists will have their creations showcased in the Graffiti Gallery section of the H2OVisions site. Like this one:

From The Economist:

“Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist who now works at Oxford University, concluded that the cognitive power of the brain limits the size of the social network that an individual of any given species can develop. Extrapolating from the brain sizes and social networks of apes, Dr Dunbar suggested that the size of the human brain allows stable networks of about 148. Rounded to 150, this has become famous as ‘the Dunbar number’.”

(Credit: Thinking Monkey. Facebook Graffiti Art by Evan Islam.)

While some humans — especially those crazy kids on Facebook! — can handle social circles that include as many as double that number, the core group with which any of us can actively socialize is much, much smaller.

“When it comes to two-way communication such as e-mails or chats, the average man interacts with only four people and the average woman with six. Among those Facebook users with 500 friends, these numbers are somewhat higher, but not hugely so. Men leave comments for 17 friends, women for 26. Men communicate with ten, women with 16.

“What mainly goes up, therefore, is not the core network but the number of casual contacts that people track more passively. This corroborates Dr Marsden’s ideas about core networks, since even those Facebook users with the most friends communicate only with a relatively small number of them. “

At Continuous Beta, my FM colleague Pete Spande draws a distinction between the reality that conversational marketing can be enormously efficient and the myth that it’s free.

“That is the trick with Social Media. It isn’t free but the low cost of the tools make it feel free from a distance.

“If you go to where the people are (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, the ‘blogosphere,’ etc) you must invest time, money, and energy to stimulate a conversation. Marketers can and do create fan pages, groups, and even applications for very little money. But creating them and getting people to use them are two very different things. The people who become a fan of you your brand within Facebook or subscribe to your brand blog’s RSS feed are the people your brand has already converted. To grow beyond that base you must invest money, time, and energy.”

Many marketers are using social media platforms to create noise — getting customers to a fan page — without joining those customers in an actual conversation. In Battelle’s response to Pete’s post, he proposes how brands can begin to converse.

“First, finding the true leaders of a community you care about, and engaging them in a dialog about how best to join the conversation they lead. What you come up with just might be something like HP’s VoicePosts, Intel’s embedding code and support of BB’s OffWorld, or American Express’ Open Forum.

“Secondly, I like the approach of determining you have something valuable to add on your own, and you might become a publisher in your own right, as long as what you build is truly valuable. That’s how you end up with Microsoft’s CrowdFire, or Asus’ WePC.com (or come to think of it, American Express’ Open Forum again).”

I agree with Godin that traditional advertising doesn’t and won’t work in Facebook or Twitter. Operative word: traditional. But I don’t agree that Twitter and Facebook — just because they’re designed for connecting communities rather than distributing traditional media content — won’t devise native experiences that will work well for their communities and for brand marketers at the same time.

Brand marketing doesn’t need to operate like “traditional advertising.” For example, with its OPEN Forum blog, American Express is using marketing dollars to create a credible small business publication, replete with editorial contributions from the leading names in business advice. Based on repeat visitor rates and links from other sites that recommend it to their readers, the SMB community is finding value in the OPEN Forum blog even though its content is funded by ad dollars. And because the contributors to the site, such as Guy Kawasaki and Anita Campbell, are given license to create real, editorial content (they wouldn’t participate otherwise), they’re alerting their Twitter followers each time they post something new. They are not paid to post these stories to Twitter; they’re doing it because they always Twitter new stuff they publish, whether the content appears on their own sites or at someone else’s publication.

I’d argue that American Express is using Twitter for brand marketing right now, and it’s working as well for Guy’s and Anita’s followers as it is for American Express.

Certain applications within Facebook, like Graffiti, have done the same: Developing ad-supported experiences that allow brands to enter the conversation without spoiling the conversation. Here are some exmples.

(Disclosure of sorts: Seth Godin is not officially affiliated with FM, unless you count our informal Seth Godin Fan Club. He is, however, a sometime contributor to the OPEN Forum site, the content of which FM manages.)

Full review at Time.

Congrats, Mark, Tim and Ted!

According to AdWeek, brands building their own Facebook applications are struggling to stand out among the tens of thousands of other apps, and most — like Nike’s Ballers Network — aren’t racking up impressive install numbers:

“Six months later, Nike is confronting a dilemma familiar to many brands that charged headlong onto Facebook: very few people use Ballers Network. Despite its global ambitions and support in three languages, the application has a mere 3,400 users per month. According to Nike, it’s still testing the application.

“Brands, in general, have found Facebook unforgiving terrain for marketing. It’s well known, for instance, that banner ads perform poorly on the site. (A recent IDC report called advertising on social networks ’stillborn.’) But the Facebook Platform, launched 18 months ago — which lets developers create social applications for users — was thought to offer the perfect opportunity to move beyond banners to provide ‘branded utility.’ So far, however, Facebook apps from brands like Coca-Cola, Champion, Ford and Microsoft are as popular as desolate Second Life islands.”

But to call advertising on social networks “stillborn” ignores many programs where brands successful partner with applications like Graffiti, such as Acuvue, BMW, and Intel, among others.

And it’s a reckless point of view. Facebook is deeply engaged with tens of millions of your customers. Deeply engaged with them. Sure, the marketing models and formats aren’t yet perfect. But taking your ball and going home just isn’t an option.

UPDATE: iMedia is out with its Predictions for 2009 report, in which they asked me for my take. One question is relevant to the above. They asked, “In what news ways will marketers use social networks?” My comment:

“They’ll stop looking at Facebook or MySpace as coherent media ‘things.’ Instead, they’ll view social networks as platforms — like multiple-system operators (MSOs) in cable TV — and work harder to find the communities — the ‘media properties’ — on top of those platforms.”

Johnson & Johnson’s Acuvue contact lens brand has sponsored the development of a new feature on the Graffiti Facebook app: One click to larger, higher resolution versions of your favorite Graffitis. The Acuvue High-Res button runs at the base of every Graffiti image. (There are tens of millions of them.)

When you click on the High-Res button, a message pops up to tell you what’s about to happen — with an Acuvue ad unit to the right of the message:

And what happens is this: The Graffiti image enlarges and (because the resolution is better) comes into greater focus, like that feeling you get when you pop in your contacts and see a more focused version of yourself in the mirror. If you’re the Joker, it looks like this:

(Graffiti credit: Rainna Langley.)

(Other credits: Rob D’Alto, Scott Haldeman and Eugina Valliades at McCann; Mark Kantor and Tim Suzman at Graffiti; and Jon Ohliger, Stephanie Loleng, Jana Hartz, Michael Cohn, and Paula Pentogenis at FM. Well done!)

Says Ted McConnell, general manager-interactive marketing and innovation at Procter & Gamble, (from Ad Age), “I really don’t want to buy any more banner ads on Facebook.”

“That’s not to say he believes P&G should end all involvement with Facebook. He cited Facebook applications as a potentially valuable vehicle for advertisers, one in which they can create an environment that’s favorable for their brands and consumers alike.”

Jones Soda’s Graffiti drawing contest helped drive a significant jump in online sales, according to the company’s Q2 2008 earnings call:

“We ran two very targeted online My Jones programs on Facebook’s Graffiti application along with the very popular I Can Has Cheezburger site. These programs along with increased awareness of My Jones drove our online sales to double versus the same period a year ago.”

Thanks, Graffiti community!

From among thousands of entries, the top picks in several categories have been announced. Here’s the winner in the “band reference” category: