Here are some interesting tidbits addressed during the Q&A and some other developments my team and I have noticed as we have continued to explore the recent roll out for Facebook pages.

• The Facebook team determines how to change and mold features of Facebook by collecting feedback from users, partners, and basically anyone that has an opinion. They look for broad themes among this feedback and then develop new ways to create a more social and authentic use of the network. So, if you have a suggestion for Facebook, they welcome your opinion through the Facebook help site.
• One of the main objectives with the new Facebook pages is to enhance the ability of the page to interact “as the page” itself. So as I mentioned in my previous post, admins have the power to operate as the page or as themselves. This means pages can interact with one another and on their own walls. This also means that admins can have a personal presence on the page.
• The photos appearing at the top of all Facebook pages were referred to as the “photo strip.”
• As of right now, you cannot log in as the page from your mobile phone.
• When operating as the page, you can go to other pages and see how many mutual fans you share. Unfortunately, the live feed cut out during part of Facebook’s response when I was watching. Now that I am looking into this for myself, I have noticed that when I am logged in as the page, the other page recommendations that I see show how many fans our pages have in common. So, for example, when logged on as “Ignite Social Media,” I can see that we have 676 fans in common with Facebook’s page, 205 fans in common with CNN’s page, etc.

  

• The moderation and profanity block lists allow you to automatically hide comments with certain words. Comments can also be manually “hidden” or “marked as spam.” You can also “undo” these comments by choosing “Admin View” on the page and then choosing the “Hidden Posts” filter. From there, you can see all comments that were hidden. And just as you would hit the floating “x” to hide/delete the comment, you also have the option here to “Unhide post.”

  

• This brings up my biggest qualm with the new changes to pages, which was the inability to view posts in a chronological order. However, when using “Admin View,” comments appear chronologically, which is helpful for moderation purposes so that comments aren’t lost on the page. I know a lot of people have been complaining about the loss of chronological posts for all fans, which I agree is harmful to the pages because it discourages ongoing conversation.
  

Finally, at the conclusion of the session, the Facebook representatives provided resources for answers to all your Facebook questions. Here are the ones they suggested:

• The Facebook Pages page
• Facebook Developers site
• Facebook Help Center

What questions do you still have about the new Facebook pages?

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As Facebook and other sites that gather personal information continue to grow, the laws that govern and control how much information is divulged are expected to become stricter. More advanced privacy rules from Washington can possibly severely inhibit social company’s ability to customize ads to the users of the sites. This will stunt sales growth and possibly discourage user participation if it is enacted.

For companies like Facebook that aggregate user data, Congress, the Commerce Department and the Federal Trade Commission are seeking ways to impose even more privacy safeguards and limit the exposure that companies have to this information.

Facebook has defended themselves by highlighting the fact that they give users a complete control of how much of their private information they are willing to share. There are several features on the social networking site that the user can alter for their preferences. They can choose with whom to share their individual information, photos and other updates. There are also other features that Facebook uses that completely block the sharing of certain components of a users profile. For instance, Facebook does not allow users to track information such as who un-friended them, contrary to several advertised downloads that offer that particular feature.

Facebook will have a permanent presence in Washington and with the team that has been assembled to investigate the patterns of how sites collect the information, and the ways that it’s used. Since Facebook is so dominate in the industry, their input and cooperation will do a lot to help establish laws and set precedents in information gathering.

For the first time, the percentage of U.S. consumers engaged in certain social behaviors actually went down, not up. Is the bloom off the rose? Is this the long-promised social media backlash?

Overall, social media usage among U.S. adults with Internet access declined 1% from 82% to 81%. This is certainly not a statistically meaningful atrophy, but it paints a picture of a plateauing social Web, where the remaining holdouts are simply not going to jump on board. Forrester analyst Augie Ray made a case for this plateau on his blog recently.

Ten percent of the country doesn’t have cable or satellite TV, and six percent (under the age of 45) don’t have a cell phone. So, I don’t see a one percent decline in overall social media usage as alarming, but rather a signal that the social media “market” is officially mature, and the rampant growth of the past three years may be a thing of the past, like Paula Abdul’s career.

Social Behaviors Are Shifting

To me, the more disturbing findings are in the composition of social behaviors. The number of Creators (people that write blogs and upload video); Critics (people that review products and comment on blogs); Collectors (people that use RSS and social bookmarking sites), and Spectators (people that read blogs and watch videos) ALL went down by 1% to 5%. This means that the number of Americans engaged in just about every social media activity was reduced in the past year.

Except for one activity.

The percentage of online Americans who are Joiners (members of a social network) increased from 51% to 59%, a huge change in comparison to the rest of the behaviors examined.

The fact that the number of social networkers (read: Facebook) is almost as large as the number of blog readers and video watchers (59% to 68%) is the most striking finding in this research.

Our love for virtual farming; the ability to keep in touch (somewhat) with an ever-broader circle of “friends”, and the allure of digital bumper sticking when we “like” brands is overwhelming our desire and ability to engage in other social behaviors.

Is Facebook Making Us Stupid?

Why read a blog, when we can look at the headline and first two sentences in a Facebook status update? Why watch videos on YouTube, when the best of them will inevitably be posted on Facebook? Why bother reviewing businesses at Yelp.com when you can just see which places your friends prefer based on their “likes” – or use of Facebook Places? Why use Digg or StumbleUpon or Delicious, when the people we care about already share with us the content they appreciate via status updates that include links?

Our Facebook addiction is threatening the core sociability and widespread content consumption, sharing, and curation behaviors that gave it succor in the early days.

Certainly, there are still PLENTY of people watching YouTube, reading blogs, and Digging their hearts out. But this trend of all social participation declining – except for one specific type – disturbs and frightens me.

How about you?

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Dave’s Answer:

In its quest to be all things to every user, Facebook has again tweaked its interface, adding a feature that Yahoo Answers has had for eons, that Google’s experimented with variously, that’s been part of LinkedIn for a while, and that’s obviously near and dear to my heart with Ask Dave Taylor: the ability to ask your followers and fans a question.

On Facebook, it’s called “Ask Question”, ingeniously enough, and it’s actually pretty neat how they’ve integrated it into the newsfeed and interface, though I’m sure not everyone agrees. Maybe we should ask them!

More seriously, I will also say that in the week or two since the feature was released, I haven’t seen a single question show up in my news, so perhaps it’s not getting the widespread adoption that the Facebook team were hoping?

Anyway, on your main page, instead of the status box ready for input, there’s now a little strip of links along the top, one of which is “Ask Question”:

You can see here that I’ve clicked on “Ask Question” and typed in what I believe is a perfectly reasonable question (at least if you’ve seen the daft film Monty Python and the Holy Grail). To submit the question, I click on the “Ask Question” button and, since it’s the first time I’ve asked a question…

Yeah, yeah, I’m good with this. I click on “Ask Question” and it offers the ability for me to add photos, add a further description, even turn it into a poll (that’s cool!). I can also add topics, which are presumably keywords, but I’ll skip it all and just choose “Done”.

Now in my newsfeed – and presumably that of everyone I’m friends with – this shows up:

A short time later my friend Steve pops up with the correct answer:

Notice here that I can vote the answer helpful / not helpful by clicking on the buttons. Nice. In fact, I like Q&A systems that let you vote on the value of an answer, so I have to say that Facebook took its time and did a very nice job implementing the Ask Question feature. Now the real question: is anyone going to use it?

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While I don’t necessarily believe in the “value” of the page calculated by this tool per se, it is a handy way to put a number to a page based on that page’s activity—looking at both post volume and the reaction to those posts. When you analyze the data this way, only three of the largest pages stay in the top 50. (Actually, it’s 51, as I inadvertently left Starburst off the Top 50 list. They are included here.) Here’s the list.

Key findings

As you can see, the list reorders dramatically. Some key findings:

• Passion products (like Oreos, Slurpees and Converse) may be able to grow fan bases quickly, but that does not automatically translate into page value;
• The pages with the highest value posted the most. While this isn’t surprising, it shows the effort required;

• All 5 of the top 5 most valuable pages had posts on Sunday and each one has custom tabs;
• While each of the top 5 have custom tabs, only 3 of the top 5 have set a tab other than the wall as the landing tab. This surprised me a bit.

• Each of the bottom 5 posted quite infrequently, except McDonalds.

• McDonalds (in the bottom 5) had seemingly random posts, each of which links to a different burger.

Value by fan

When you sort by dollar value per fan, the top 50 turns practically upside down. Here are the top 10 by that metric, with their rank by fan count in parenthesis:

1. Xbox, $7.08 (51)
2. Dr. Pepper, $7.04 (30)
3. Monster Energy, $5.30 (43)
4. adidas Originals, $4.57 (14)
5. Walt Disney World, $4.50, (46)
6. Breast Cancer Awareness, $4.28 (48)
7. iTunes, $3.31 (10)
8. YouTube, $3.27 (4)
9. H&M, $3.27 (24)
10. Playstation, $2.98, (49)

Xbox barely made the list in terms of size, coming in at 50th 51st, but they’re motivating their base better than anyone else. Dr. Pepper shares a strange collection of very product-centric updates with their fans, but the fans love them. And adidas Originals has both a partnership with Snoop Dog on their page and exclusive product announcements—a good mix of celebrity and insider info.

Real winners

The real winners on this list, then, are the pages that combine both high fan count and high value, as they are doing the best job of converting those fans into action. (Of course, we don’t have insight into the impact this is having on their business objectives, but if you can consistently motivate your fans, I have to think your opportunity to impact your business is enhanced.)

From that angle, the pages that have impressed me so far are:

• YouTube (#4 in size, #1 in value, #8 in value/fan)
• Skittles (#5 in size, #6 in value, #14 in value/fan)
• iTunes (#10 in size, #4 in value, #7 in value/fan)
• Facebook (#1 in size, #2 in value, #19 in value/fan)
• Victoria’s Secret (#9 in size, #11 in value, #18 in value/fan)

Of all of these, I’m most impressed with Skittles. YouTube, iTunes and Facebook have the advantage of a near limitless supply of content. Victoria’s Secret has, well, other advantages. But Skittles does not.

Little blobs of coated sugar, they got heckled a bit for their Skittles.com social takeover in early 2009. But it’s clear from this that they have not taken those fans for granted. They’ve found a way to keep them entertained.

Not the 50 most valuable

Keep in mind, this is a rank of the 50 largest branded Facebook pages, by value. It’s not the 50 most valuable branded Facebook pages. If it were, it would look a lot different, but it would require analyzing hundreds more pages individually.

For example, one of our clients, Windows, has 626,197 fans (as of Sunday, 7/11) and a value of $2,296,080. That would rank it 7th in value per fan ($3.67) and 28th in total value. But since it’s not big enough to be on the current Top 50 list, it’s also not on the “value” list. (But I think we’ll let them know nevertheless.)

What surprised you when you saw how the Top 50 re-ranked by value?

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Facebook has built its brand on pushing the idea that members should share real information so real people can connect to other real people, and not to some persona that is covered up in a neat social media moniker. As a result, people have come to trust the site as a place that is safe and exists for the user.

Well, that was then and this is now. Before the new policy took effect, most of the data that was given to Facebook was kept pretty private and there was not a tremendous concern about the data beyond the normal “it’s the Internet and nothing is really private anyway” talk. What Facebook has done now is to turn their backs on the folks that they built their data community on by saying that privacy is so 2005. In order to get your privacy back, you need to manage it yourself because the doors of the barn have been flung wide open.

Well, this move is just puzzling to me. I realize that there is a need to make money, but if this is how the master plan was laid out, then someone was asleep at the wheel. Since when was it good business to build trust with people over years and then pull the rug out from underneath them for your one-sided benefit?

Now the government is being called in, which is never a good thing.

So what may have Facebook done here? Let’s think about it.

1. Pulled a Tiger Woods? Take a pretty good image and do something sleazy and what do you get? Discontent. Lower approval ratings. Nothing good comes of it an act that is disrespectful of others.
2. Shown their true colors? Those true colors may be green, for the money which has been put in front of the community. No one is saying that Facebook shouldn’t make money. In fact, it is quite the opposite. They need to make money to show that social media is a profitable business. Sometimes, how you make the money (like selling out your users) can hurt your efforts.
3. Moved toward MySpace territory? While admittedly a stretch, what if Facebook is simply the bigger version of MySpace and it has made a second or third generation social media business mistake that will make it go the way of Friendster, or even worse, be pushed to the fringes of relevance like MySpace.
4. Shown its age? Let’s face it. Facebook was started by a very young guy and he shows his age more often than not. Maybe he is being swayed by counsel that is not in the best interest of Facebook, but he simply isn’t experienced enough to know differently. Being smart and being experienced are two completely different things. Mark Zuckerberg is definitely smart. The other? Not so much.
5. Created a free monster? Maybe there is no real way to turn the switch on a pay model after being free for so long. Maybe this is just an example of being too big and too ubiquitous. People are used to everything just “being” with Facebook. Now as the company is required to make moves to be profitable (which it has not done yet) it is learning the hard lesson of its model.
6. Assumed people wouldn’t pay attention? This is the most insidious of considerations because Facebook and their terms of service have always been a real PR play. They know full well that most people don’t pay attention to Facebook policies as evidenced by not reaching the required 7,000 comments recently to put a TOS issue to a vote. Maybe they were naïve enough to think that if the users of Facebook are just not paying attention then they could CTA (cover their a%$) with some privacy announcements and never look back.
7. Realized that Google really is in control because of search? With Twitter opening their feed to the major engines, Facebook was up against it to a degree. It was forced to sacrifice one of its pillars of trust (privacy) for the demand to index the entire world in real time.

What’s your take on this? Is it an over-reaction? Did Facebook do any real damage in the long or short term to itself? Will we all forget this in a month or so? I don’t have any answers to this but my suspicion is that this is not the end of this discussion. Not by a long shot.

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But this time, Facebook is finally saving someone’s bacon. Or, oddly enough, his pancakes. As the New York Times says,

The message on Rodney Bradford’s Facebook page, posted at 11:49 a.m. on Oct. 17, asked where his pancakes were. The words were typed from a computer in his father’s apartment in Harlem.

At the time, the sentence, written in street slang, was just another navel-gazing, cryptic Facebook status update — meaningless to anyone besides Mr. Bradford. But when Mr. Bradford, 19, was arrested the next day as a suspect in a robbery at the Farragut Houses in Brooklyn, where he lives, the words took on greater importance. They became his alibi.

One minute after his status update, someone in Brooklyn was mugged. The article isn’t exactly clear on how Bradford was named as a suspect in the mugging, but he was arrested for the crime, even though his father and step-mother both said he was with them in Harlem (and Harlem != Brooklyn, if you’re not familiar with NYC).

When Bradford’s lawyer told the Brooklyn DA about the status update, the DA’s office subpoenaed Facebook’s records to verify that he wasn’t at the scene of the crime. The IP address resolved to Bradford’s father’s home—and the charges against Bradford were dropped.

The ADA realizes that anyone with his username and password could have posted the status update, but, as Bradford’s lawyer says, “This implies a level of criminal genius that you would not expect from a young boy like this; he is not Dr. Evil.”

So it just goes to show: maybe all those pointless status updates aren’t so pointless after all.

What do you think? Can status updates (with IP records) be taken as legal alibis?

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Earlier this year, we speculated on when Facebook would launch APIs for Facebook Ads to allow performance marketers to automate ad management. Well, it appears it’s happening now: recently, Facebook started beta testing its new advertising APIs with just a few agencies around the world.

A Facebook spokesperson confirmed the tests, saying that it will “open up to some more advertisers in the next week or so.”

This is the kind of thing that could give larger advertisers the kinds of tools that are expected from real companies. In other words, Facebook is modeling Google and others in taking the necessary steps to make it easier for advertisers to do what they best: advertise. Based on the last post I did which was bemoaning the near indifference of Twitter’s leadership regarding revenue generation this is refreshing.

Smith explains further

Because those tools have never existed for Facebook Ads, performance advertisers have had to either manage their Facebook Ads campaigns manually, or hack their own tools. Now, Facebook is testing simple yet powerful APIs that allow agencies and advertisers to create thousands of ads with different creative and targeting permutations and optimize bids in real time.

So while there is nothing to see quite yet there is at least something to look forward to. We are in a day and age where the changes in the marketing and advertising landscape are outpacing the ability to take advantage of them. Social media is sweeping everyone away with its constant talk of potential but now it is maturing in some areas to the point to start to deliver. We are starting to get past the sizzle and Facebook is looking to finally serve the steak.

Let’s hope this is just the start of this kind of improvement on the horizon. Lord knows we need it.

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