Facebook as Ready-Made Social Media Marketing Platform
I have to admit that until sometime early last week I was a Facebook skeptic, at least as far as being willing to recommend incorporating Facebook into a business strategy. But I have great respect for the people behind the Web Community Forum who had organized a Facebook-focused event in Seattle to take place over the past couple of days.
I knew that web and social media strategist and Forrester Senior Analyst Jeremiah Owyang was delivering the keynote, although I hadn’t actually focused on the topic.
But I sat up and took notice when I read the blog post Seattle Facebook Conference: Main Room Sold Out, Overflow Room Available
And now that Jeremiah has published the slides from his presentation – as below – I’m more than interested. I’m excited.
Because Jeremiah has shown, with supporting data and persuasive argument, why business large and small should move now to take advantage of the brand building and marketing opportunities offered by Facebook.
He does not gloss over the problems – or challenges, if you will – in using Facebook for business. He situates them in a bigger picture of opportunity.
I’m not a great slideshow fan but this one certainly got my attention. So much information, so many great suggestions. I believe this is a “take it to the bank” production.
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As Jeremiah acknowledges in his post on the subject, Ariel at Electrolicious has detailed bullet point notes of the presentation. Although she says that now J O has published his slides the notes are superfluous, I found it useful to read through them.
Jeremiah mentions also that Teresa Valdez Klein put up lots of tweets (on Twitter) on the presentation (I had to tab back to about p16 on Dec 8 to get to the start of her tweets about this presentation). Teresa’s tweets give some of the color that is not evident from the slides, so if you are into color, check it out. But the one tweet of Teresa’s I enjoyed reading particularly was this one from 08:27 AM December 05, 2007 :
a lot of people are walking in late here. @jowyang‘s presentation will be videoed, so if you missed something, you’ll have another chance
So that will give us the audio to go with the slides.
PS: if you have a challenge with playing the slideshow on Mozilla Firefox – as I did – try Internet Explorer, which worked for me.
Des Walsh
Business coach and digital entrepreneur. With coach training from Coachville.com and its Graduate School of Coaching, and a founding member of the International Association of Coaching, Des has been coaching business owners and entrepreneurs for the past 20 years. Over the same period he has also been actively engaged in promoting the business opportunities of the digital economy. He is a certified Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) coach, and a certified specialist in social media strategy and affiliate marketing.
Thanks Des for the analysis, I’m trying to be objective in recommending tools. There are many of them, and Facebook is just one.
In the deck, I recommend that people first analyze the “P” or “People” and find out if their demographic and market is even in Facebook. They may find out their audience could be in Bebo, MySpace, or LinkedIn!
Thanks for that clarification, Jeremiah. Clearly I was getting a bit carried away with my own Aha! moment. Another one is, as you would be well aware, Friendster in the Chinese-speaking market especially, with a big push now on into mainland China, as announced at ad:tech Beijing in October.
I can understand what they mean by “Ready Made” social marketing platform. I don’t think this is where SEO / SMO is at though. Take a look at the examples on http://www.demonzmedia.com/DemonzBlog/?p=9
The whole idea of social media optimisation / social media marketing works around a meme of being non-commercial. I think a large contributing factor to Facebook applications spam creating an uproar in the Facebook community is that it appears too commercial. It has to look / feel / read as user contributed – that’s the whole point of web 2.0 and social media.
One (somewhat) successful media/commercial was Mark Echo’s Air Force 1 hoax (see http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2006/04/70718). This was a highly coordinated social media effort involving a fake air force 1, a film crew and actors, and yet the effect is a highly convincing video that is highly viral and looks user contributed. The branding should come after the look and feel of the campaign, and this I feel is the ultimate downfall of Facebook and Facebook applications.