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Some of the world’s biggest tech firms (Dell, NetApp, and Seagate) are getting into social media, according to Reuters. The reason, the article suggests, is to “harness the age-old power of the word-of-mouth recommendation” and an implicit acceptance that “television and print are not necessarily the most effective ways to reach buyers, particularly younger ones”.

Dell has a team of over 40 employees interacting with their customers through social media properties like blogs and their “IdeaStorm” voting site.

Technology firms are moving into social media because customers have in droves. Blogs and review sites have blossomed, changing a one to many conversation about their products to a many to many conversation. Companies can either let people say what they want, or dive into the conversation in a meaningful way.

I still think we’re in the very early stages of this shift. Companies are still concerned with constructing their own social media properties instead of focusing on the content. Case in point have be the slew of branded Facebook applications pushing products that only draw a few thousand users a month.

Businesses should focus on buying into the conversation, not into hosting it. More on that later.

P&G’s Ted McConnell has run large organizations, Been staff to c-level executives, holds 4 Patents, and has successfully driven Digital Marketing at P&G - which is admittedly hard to change. I know this because I read it on his LinkedIn Profile. I also know this means that when Ted speaks about marketing, it means something demonstrably different than when John Smith (who happens to live in Los Angeles) speaks about it.

Frankly, Ted McConnell has more influence over my thoughts and feelings when it comes to marketing, particularly in his latest speech covered in AdAge.

At a forum on digital media, McConnell said he isn’t sure that marketers even belong in Facebook. Specifically, “What in heaven’s name made you think you could monetize the real estate in which somebody is breaking up with their girlfriend?”. McConnell sees marketing on “social media” as invasive and with too much low quality inventory.

Old Metrics - New Medium

He’s right when you apply traditional metrics to this new media. When ad sizes were standardized and users saw roughly the same number of ads on each site, clicks and impressions helped gauge the success of campaigns against one another. However, when you buy on social media, impressions and click through rates can vary widely. Traditional media sites like Yahoo or online news sites deliver an alluring consistency, but misses the mark on what makes social media a more effective platform. Brand advertising isn’t about generating impressions or clicks. Brand advertising is about delivering a meaningful message.

It’s All About Meaning

Meaningful messages come from the people we love, hate, and admire. It’s why Nike sells shoes with player’s names on them. It’s why we value a letter from a friend. And it’s why I’m writing about something P&G’s digital guru, Ted McConnell said. When messages come from meaningful people, they influence our decisions and thinking. Focusing on impressions and clicks loses the forest for the trees.

Our social banners focus on meaningful messages. We let advertisers sponsor conversations generated by users on their terms. Advertisers only pay when users volunteer to say something about the brand to their friends. These are impressions that leave an impression and clicks that lead to conversation. That’s what social media marketing is about.

After a year as effectively a “free market”, Facebook has finally launched it’s “verified app” program, which will give Facebook’s blessing to apps that meet their quality standards.

It will cost $375 to apply ($175 for students and non-profits) and must be renewed each year to stay in the program. Verified apps will have a few cosmetic advantages (seal of approval) and some TBA benefits rolled out over time, but the real difference will be in how much Facebook aids verified apps and/or punishes unverified apps. Facebook has several knobs they can turn, from how often your users can invite each other, notify, and where those messages show up in a user’s activity stream. Wrapped in the new redesign was a tightening of these quotas. It has yet to be seen whether Facebook will simply reward the winners, or also punish the apps they don’t like.

The New Bureacracy

Theoretically none of this regulation should be needed. The “best” apps should be the one’s user’s share with friends the most. However, this kind of popularity contest led developers to focus on optimizing traffic flow. Apps focused on sending messages instead of building functionality.

So Facebook has had to step in to shape where they think the platform should go. Facebook would say app verification aligns incentives away from generating more messages to users, and toward pleasing Facebook’s usability goals.

However, the problems of spammy apps was largely cleared up with the Facebook redesign. The new verification program just creates an undue burden on small developers. Developers will have to provide an itemized list of how their application functions, as well as screen shot storyboards of their apps. Even still, they need to make sure their apps abide by a laundry list of functional requirements.

This is antithetical to the way applications are launched. Developers are used to prototyping quickly, finding out what works, and investing in the successes. If Facebook squeezes too tightly on unverified apps, the cost of applying for verification to get the reach they need to test an app, will simply be too great.

Toward A Better Platform

While the verification program will create problems for small developers, incumbent developers will see a boost if they get verified. Verification provides advertisers with a greater level of quality assurance, making advertisers more comfortable with advertising on this cohort of applications.

While logging into your favorite social app, you may have seen one of our most recent campaigns for “Eagle Eye”, Shia LaBeouf’s block busting thriller. The socialized movie promo hit the network, further pumping up developer’s earnings while topping out the box office at $29.2 million and pulling Hollywood out of this Fall’s doldrums.

The top 12 movies took in $87.8 million, up 15 percent from the same weekend last year.

Facebook has updated the new profiles with an application task bar, which many windows users should be familiar with. Perhaps a Parakey release will be down the road to help with the speed…

No word on when, but it’s coming soon. The change to one Facebook is bound to make developer’s lives easier.

The Compete blog has some interesting stats on users making the switch to the new Facebook. Compared to previous shifts, the latest change on Facebook has proceeded at slower, user based pace. It’s no surprise considering the uproars newsfeed and beacon caused when Facebook flipped the switch pre-maturely.

Over the course of a month, Compete’s data says over half of Facebook’s more than 100 million active users have made the switch to the new Facebook profiles.

More details in their post

What does it mean for Facebook developers? For one, you should get around to reviewing the New Profile entry on the Facebook wiki and get familiar with “fb_sig_in_new_facebook”, which tells you whether a user is using the new profile or not.

A word to the wize, the developer behind “Always Athletes” has said that when a user is using the old Facebook design, they can not see your app displayed on their friends’ profiles.

VentureBeat ran a story couple days ago talking about Facebook integrating some new social features into their ad units. The article cited a test with Facebook’s new “video ad units”, but the Facebook “video ad unit” featured in the story was actually SocialMedia’s. I featured the widget in an earlier post. DreamWorks ran the campaign with SocialMedia in an effort to get at the movie’s key demographics on social networks.

Applications are fun, but the most effective ones are also finely tuned machines. Well developed applications are not only focused on helping users complete a task, but also have the users complete tasks for the application, such as contributing content or sharing it with friends. The problem is how do you do it?

My suggestion is to slightly change the way you think about your application from a functional to a geographical frame of mind. In other words, you’re not trying to make sure your app works, but instead trying to get the user to a destination as fast as possible.

Let’s imagine a case where you’re promoting an application on SocialMedia. You’ve started a campaign linking to your app and you’re interested in getting as many users as possible. Effectively you’ve created what marketers call a funnel trying to get users from point A (origin) to point B (goal).

In this case, it looks something like this:
(A) Views Ad -> … -> (B) Invites another user

Now we need to flesh things out a bit. After all, there are more steps the user needs to take in between.

(A) Views Ad -> Allow access landing page -> Application -> (B) Invites another user

Let’s look at one app advertising right now, “Trade A Favor”. Their app promotion follows this funnel.

At each step of this funnel, some user’s don’t click and follow through to the next step. The largest loss is at the top, where only a fraction of users are interested in the “Trade A Favor” ad. All the following steps generally have less loss because users have signaled a greater interest in completing the goal.

So, if “Trade A Favor” wants to get better organic growth, they’re going to have minimize the drop off at each step. The first thing they can do is make the ad more appealing. Perhaps they can change the ad copy. My suggestion is to run two or three different copies as tests, and kill the two least effective versions.

Next, there’s not much they can do about the allow access page. However, they have a lot of control once the user hits the application. Their app leaves you at a list of favors from other users along with an invite widget at the bottom of the page.

While this keeps the funnel short, it doesn’t provide a great incentive for a user to spread the app. It’s kind of like recommending a restaurant before you tasted the food. A better answer is to let the user taste the app by using it. For instance, the app could suggest favors new users can send to their friends or incentivize invites with virtual points (note: Facebook and MySpace prohibit this).

You can imagine this “funnel” approach being applied even to goals within your application, just follow some general rules.

1. Keep funnel short
2. Keep goal prominent (large text, advertise it)
3. Be honest (misleading ad copy will drive more clicks, but cause greater loss at later steps)
4. Use social pressure (let users interact with their friends)
5. Use incentives (Social Currency helps developers incentivize participating in ads in exchange for currency)

Facebook informally announced a new milestone of over 100 million active users; yet another sign the site is one of the most vibrant social ecosystems again.

However, while crawling around the site, I noticed a lot of apps coming up 0 monthly active users when I know they have thousands (see pic). While I’m sure this is just a delay in reporting, as happens while processing billions of data fields, it throws a monkey wrench into the day to day analysis I like to do on the network and that developers rely on to compare themselves with the competition.

Which brings me to another problem I think monthly active users has, aside from being delayed right now. Monthly Actives, while in sync with standard advertising practices, encourages MAU pumping that was harder with DAUs and Facebook’s crackdown on spam. MAUs mean you only need to get a user to the application once during the month to show activity. This means developers can pump and dump their apps by advertising heavily and then doing business based on that number. Some websites have used this scheme to boost numbers prior to acquisitions or other business deals.

While proper due diligence can avoid the problem, DAUs also showed an apps stickiness better than MAU, giving developers better insights into what’s up on the platform. Facebook, please bring back the DAU.