As soon as Facebook opened up its platform to outside developers a few months back, myself and the various strategy and marketing teams at electricArtists have been conducting a massive 360° deep dive into the specifics and details of (a) how Facebook "works" and (b), how Facebook can best be leveraged by our clients.
When any new platform or technology starts to move from the "early adopter" stage to the "early mass" stage (be it RSS, Social Bookmarking, DIGG type voting systems, etc), during these initial months the priority for me isn't about selling in a new client engagement. Rather, it's about giving myself the freedom and the time to play with it and develop a strong point-of-view, a cultural perspective, and ultimately a deep knowledge base on all aspects of the new innovation.
My only goal during this period of "play" is to develop a 360° view where the traditional silos are broken down and there is no clear distinction between marketing, advertising, PR, and media.
The important thing for me is to do this early work first on my own without being beholden to the client's needs for a quantitative ROI.
In the early days, with most new technologies or innovations, there is no quantitative ROI we can give to the client so to start our experimenting and learning while at the same time getting paid for it, and thus having the pressure to deliver an ROI to the client, is a non-starter and a waste of time.
It only leads to disaster.
What I found at most marketing and advertising agencies, and something that I think is different about electricArtists, is that we allow ourselves this time early on to develop a POV without any pressures from the client. Most agencies don't. I think that most agencies are so tied to the billable hour and quarterly revenue targets that senior management mandates that you're either working on a paying client engagement or you're looking for a new job. Most agencies don't allow their actual account teams (and I'm not speaking about the new technology gurus that each agency has) enough time to actually play and develop their own POV about how things can, and should, be used.
We do.
It's only after these initial deep dives that I feel that we can fully provide our clients with a solid framework to serve as a base and a foundation for ongoing ideation and strategy.
This was the process that we used when we started working with blogs four years ago, then Myspace three years ago, then Second Life last year, and now Facebook and widgets this year. It was this process that led to an amazing group of breakthrough client work including the launch of thelobby.com, findrenewal.com and aloft in Second Life for Starwood Hotels, and most recently the suite of embeddable and downloadable travel tools for STA Travel.
So this week, as we begin development our first native Facebook apps for our clients, I've begun to synthesize and organize some of my thinking about Facebook.
Here's some highlights:
First, it's a major mistake to think of Facebook as "just another Myspace".
It's not.
Facebook has in it's DNA things that completely change how we, as marketers, should be conceiving and developing our online marketing campaigns. Not just for Facebook, but for the entire web. Facebook is only the tip of the iceberg as to how the web has changed in the last 18 months. In the last 18 months we as marketers needed to rethink everything we do if we want to be effective for our clients.
As the web continues to become more social, the focus for brands should be less on building websites as "destinations" and more about creating effective distribution systems for branded content that enter and spread across the social ecosystem that is the web. This is what the API, lightweight applications, and embeddable content "movement" is all about.
Today, there's far too much information for us to absorb on a daily basis. Because our desire is to stay informed, it's become impossible for us to keep track of everything. Because Facebook is now an open platform for third party developers to create lightweight apps that tap into Facebook's 35 million person userbase, more and more of us are using places like Facebook as filters and self organizers to help us better organize and plan our daily lives.
Facebook provides us that one single place to curate all the information that we choose to consume. It collects and organizes those things that are meaningful to us.
For me, the true brilliance of Facebook comes by way of the Facebook's News Feed.
For one - the Facebook News Feed completely redefines how, as marketers, we should view viral marketing.
In the past, for content to “go viral” people had to email it (or a link) to their friends . Now, for something to "go viral" all you have do is click on the piece of content to add it to your Facebook page. Facebook’s news feed then does the job for you of promoting and distributing this content virally to your friends by automatically notifying your contacts when you take an action like adding the content to your page. The News Feed tells everyone else every time you install a new app, make a comment, or add a new video or photo.
For example, one of my Facebook contacts is an old college friend of mine, Kenny Miller, who is now an executive at MTV Networks on the digital side. With Facebook, Kenny no longer needs to email me a great new video clip from MTV for it go "go viral". All he now has to do is add it to his Facebook page and I'll see it. As will all of Kenny's friends. If I then add it to my page, all of my friends will then see it via my News Feed. If they then add it, their friends will see it too. And so on and so on.
The key point here is that viral marketing is essentially built into the DNA of Facebook via the brilliance of the News Feed. For me, I'm convinced that for brands to be successful with viral marketing on social networks like Facebook the key will be for them to not only create content that is distributable, but also content that has at it's core an understated and personal tonality that will connect with people on a social level such that it encourages and invites them to add the content to their personal page and thus enter it into the "river" of distributed content that travels from site to site, blog to blog...
That's it for now. More on Facebook in the coming days...
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