Marketers Studio - David Berkowitz's Marketing Blog

What You Won't Like about Google+ Pages

This column was originally published in MediaPost's Social Media Insider.

For more perspective on Google+, check out my post in Ad Age on Why Google+ Isn't Just Another Facebook, as well as 360i's White Paper on Google+ Brand Pages.

On to today's column...

What You Won't Like about Google+ Pages

If you haven’t set up a Google+ Page for your brand yet, you’re missing out on the Internet’s new favorite pastime: complaining about Google+ Pages.

Brands should have a lot to complain about. Marketers all over the world paying any attention to social media have been eagerly awaiting Google+ Pages. Google took a few months to release Pages, and what went live is a scaled-back version that will satisfy some smaller businesses but will underwhelm large brands accustomed to other social platforms.                  

For brands that can cope with Google’s growing pains or that can wait for Pages to evolve, most of the current limitations should fade in the coming months. Meanwhile, early adopters of Pages will have their headaches, and the kvetching will keep on coming.

Many kvetches will be objectively sound. There are shortcomings to Pages today, and some of these drawbacks may linger for a while. For a balanced look, though, here are five things you won’t like about Google+ Pages, and why they won’t be that big a deal down the road.

1) You’ll have to learn a new language. You may have learned a lot of the language if you experienced Google+ as a user, with all the plussing and circles and hangouts and streams. Did you know that if you made a list of all the terms introduced by social media companies and services, it would fill up almost half the space of an Oxford English Dictionary? I just made that up, but if that statistic sounds plausible to you, then you won’t enjoy decoding a new lexicon.

Why it’s not such a big deal: There are about  10 words to learn. Maybe it’ll be 20 within a year. That’s the equivalent of one week’s worth of homework when you studied for third-grade vocabulary tests.

2) You’ll reach the same people through Google+ that you’ll reach in other services. Yes, there will be overlap, and this will be truer for some brands than others. So now you’ll have to spend even more time reaching all of these people you’ve been able to reach through existing platforms.

Why it’s not such a big deal: Regardless of which social media services your brands are active with, it’s a safe bet that only a small minority of your audience will see any individual post. This gives you another way to make sure your messages are received by people who want to receive them.

3) You’ll reach entirely new people through Google+. Who are they, and why are they following you there when they had all these other ways to find you before? Can’t they just consolidate around your Facebook page so you can get back to your day job?

Why it’s not such a big deal: Google has been slow to share details about the audience using Google+, but in time Google should wind up shedding more light on who these people are. In the meantime, ask your followers what they want to get out of your Google+ Page.

4) There’s no geotargeting posts. Brands love to localize content. It’s what they do at brand marketer parties after playing Pin the KPI on the ROI. Facebook has allowed targeting posts by geography for years, and Google knows a few things about geotargeting. What gives?

Why it’s not such a big deal: You still can’t do this on Twitter. That hasn’t prevented millions of marketers from asking, “What’s my Twitter strategy?”

5) Where are the analytics? The official Google blog post announcing Google+ pages does not reference analytics. The help files for Google+ include references to “sports,” “coffee,” and “AdWords,” but there’s nothing on analytics. If Google is going to compete with Facebook for brands’ attention, analytics is the way to do it.

Why it’s not such a big deal: Analytics is one thing Google does unequivocally well. Remember, before Google acquired Urchin and turned it into Google Analytics, Web analytics were either meager or expensive. Thanks to Google, marketers and publishers of all sizes have had access to a robust analytics suite for free. Expect Google to turn this into a major competitive advantage for Google+. This analytics arms race will also lead to much better offerings from Facebook, Twitter, and others.

Expect to hear all sorts of other complaints. Most of them will be marketing folks sitting in the back of the Googlemobile asking, “Are we there yet?” And then Google’s going to turn around from the driver’s seat, yelling, “If you don’t cut it out this instant, I’m going to bring you back to Google Buzz!” That’s the cue for everyone to buckle up. When Google steps on the gas, Google+ Pages are going to get a lot more fun.

 

Facebook's Little 'M' KOs Three 'Ws'

Facebook Mobile: big things in a small package (Image via Facebook)

Facebook's Little 'M' KOs Three 'Ws'
originally published in MediaPost

Facebook takes its leadership mantle seriously. Instead of merely coming out with a new iPad app, it changed in ways that will long cement its role as the most important suite of mobile sites and applications in the world.

Lofty claims? Perhaps. But they’re warranted.

Consider Facebook’s 350 million mobile users. Facebook surely hasn’t gotten there by offering the best mobile experience to date. Beyond some of its apps being half-baked, not all mobile devices make it easy to use Facebook’s mobile services. Facebook didn’t have to be the best; it just had to meet enough of its users’ needs. 350 million people don’t voluntarily do something that makes them miserable (though a few million people do somehow keep rooting for the Mets).

Consider how Facebook keeps its app users within its own environment. If a friend posts this column on Facebook and you tap the link from a mobile device, you’ll be able to read the full column on MediaPost while remaining within Facebook’s mobile app. Others have done this, including some Twitter clients. It matters far more on Facebook, though, not just because of the reach but because Facebook has always owned its own mobile experiences.

Consider how Facebook now directs its app users to other apps, as long as they tap into Facebook. This is the most significant mobile update Facebook has announced this week, and perhaps ever. Let’s look at it metaphorically: Mr. Zuckee is the most popular ice cream man in the neighborhood and has more kids lining up at his truck than he knows what to do with. To corner the market, he lets all the other ice cream shops in town accept Mr. Zuckee loyalty cards, but in return he gets the shops’ customer lists. That’s what has been happening all along since Facebook Connect launched. Now, with the new updates, Mr. Zuckee says that as a perk for being in the Zuckee network, he’ll drive kids to any other Zuckee affiliate. In more literal terms, Facebook will send its own app users to other apps on their devices, and will even direct people to those apps’ iTunes Store download pages.

All of this makes Facebook function more like an operating system than a publisher. It doesn’t control the whole experience yet. For instance, there are limits to how Facebook Credits can be used, largely to stay within the bounds of Apple’s policies. But Facebook now cements itself as the best portal on any mobile or portable device.

It’s very different than the portals we used to know. though.  The old Web portals used to be about delivering news, sports, and weather, with a side dish of email. Facebook is instead focused on delivering links and updates from friends, content from brand pages that users opt into, and quick access to their favorite apps, with a side dish of instant communication. Perhaps the weather and a few sports scores will be thrown in over time.

What’s also fascinating is how different these announcements are from what happened at f8 in late September. There, to much fanfare, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the Timeline, a revamped profile page customizable with more multimedia and actions. Yet the Timeline has one massive flaw: It doesn’t work well on mobile devices. It’s a two-column format with rich images and a modular layout. Mobile profiles, however, default to a linear, more rigid format.

Zuckerberg seems to know the future of Facebook is all about mobile usage. Along with the new apps, Facebook is enriching everything it can at its mobile site, m.facebook.com. In time, the mobile experience will be the focal point of Facebook, and this may well have been the last f8 to not issue important mobile announcements. In time, the PC-based site will be where people go to tinker with their profiles and where brand managers administer pages, but for most people, Facebook will be an overwhelmingly mobile experience.

Here are Timeline updates I’d love to see from Mark Zuckerberg. “September 22, 2011: announced Facebook’s Timeline.” “October 10, 2011: effectively killed off Facebook’s Timeline.” Sometimes even those making the future happen to get blindsided by it.

Your Google+ Strategy Calculator

Your Google+ Strategy Calculator
originally pubished in MediaPost's Social Media Insider

When brands are invited to participate in Google+, it's going to get weird. Marketers will face challenges they've never had to deal with before in social media. Without knowing specific details of what Google+ brand pages will look like, enough of the variables are known so that you can create a formula that works for you. Here's a primer.

Addition: The biggest change marketers will encounter is the addition of search engine optimization to their social media strategies. Yes, I know social media optimization has been around for years, but it's had a relatively minimal impact on community management so far. Just look at Facebook's one-pager on SEO; it's using best practices established a decade ago. That will change as Google incorporates users' +1 activity to further refine, reorder, and personalize search engine results pages. Marketers focused on SEO who never cared about community management will evaluate the opportunity that Google+ presents. This is a major shift, and it's quite possibly the most significant change to community management since the practice as we know it was founded in the past decade or so.

Multiplication: The challenges of managing communities on Google+ are bound to multiply. Is it a community with SEO benefits, or is it SEO developed through community engagement? What if it's both? Imagine if every status update from a brand will require both a community manager and an SEO manager working together to optimize each word. Like any dance, someone will have to lead.

Division: Get ready to divide and conquer. What will the division of labor look like? Some of it is clear up front, with SEO leads best suited for organizing the overall structure of the page, and community managers owning day-to-day posts and interactions, ideally with training and regular review from the SEO team. It won't always be clear, though, especially for some SEO-driven marketers that are laser focused on +1s and don't care about any of the other benefits of relationship building.

Subtraction: It's time to subtract silos from your community management. This is a classic case of addition by subtraction, as your social program should wind up stronger when SEO experts are involved. How many other silos can you subtract? Who else in your organization isn't yet benefiting from what you're doing on the community front?

Geometry: Marketers will have to understand Circles inside and out. The biggest question marketers will have is how well they can create Circles of consumers to target them specifically. Ideally, some Circles will be auto-generated, such as Circles of people by geography or age, since Google encourages users to create rich profile data.

Trigonometry: Trigonometry is the study of angles. Marketers, what will be your angle on Google+? What will make you stand out from every other brand page? What value will you provide? You'll need your own angle going into it, but you can also triangulate some aspects by plotting your positioning in conjunction with Google's offerings and what your fans respond to.

Calculus: I don't remember much about calculus, largely because once math started dealing with imaginary numbers, I found it very hard to pay attention. Aren't real numbers confusing enough? Marketers will become well acquainted with imaginary numbers when they start operating on Google+. What do all these +1s mean anyway? When top brands start getting added to the Circles of more than one million people, how will that help the overarching strategy? As a marketer, you should pressure Google and your agencies to figure out why this matters for you.

Chaos Theory: I can only predict so much. A safe bet is that when SEO starts driving social media strategy, brush up on chaos theory -- because anything can happen from here

Marketers, Facebook Is Not About You

The mission statement doesn't include making life easier for brands. (from f8 2008; image credit: me)

Marketers, Facebook is not about You
originally published in MediaPost's Social Media Insider

Facebook's f8 event last week will have lasting ramifications for the network's 800 million users. It will also have implications for brands, but the biggest takeaway should that if you're a marketer, Facebook was never about you, it's not about you, and it will never be about you. I'm sorry to the handful of laptops and iPhones that were just hurled across the room, but the truth hurts.

In case you missed last week's news, f8 effectively changed the company's mission statement from "giving people the power to share and make the world more open and more connected" to "making it so easy to share stuff that your own mother will get tired of hearing from you." My agency described a lot of the changes in a report that includes what matters for brands. Until all of Facebook's changes roll out, it will be difficult to make definitive statements about which changes benefit marketers and which will make reaching consumers more difficult, but in the meantime marketers should be paying especially close attention to their Facebook page and campaign performance.

Whenever Facebook announces a change, marketers get in a tizzy reading every tea leaf, wondering what every change means for them. That's a good thing. I cleared my schedule for f8 because these changes matter. Often, marketers feel neglected, as if Facebook is going ahead with all these changes and not considering what will happen to brands.

The problem for marketers is that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg does not lie awake at night thinking about what will happen to brands. f8 is a conference for developers. I remember going to f8 in 2008, before Facebook recorded billions in advertising revenue, and I was a complete outcast. Facebook's user base and revenues have grown exponentially, but the attitude is largely the same.  The point of f8 is "to bring together the developers, entrepreneurs and innovators who are building a more social web." Yes, some marketers count among those groups, but they're not the target, and they probably never will be.

Instead, Zuckerberg and his colleagues used their f8 stage time to talk about changes for the network's users. These include changes to the homepage and profile layouts. Facebook even dared to change how users can post birthday greetings to their friends.

In the process, Facebook created a lot of speculation for what will happen to brands. Will it still matter for marketers to amass large numbers of Facebook fans? Will posting more often lead to more engagement? Will every brand need an app to stay relevant? Will Facebook users flock to new features like Friend Lists, and will they embrace the new Timeline? Will Sponsored Story ads be the only way for marketers to truly stand out?

There are lots of answers accordingly, but most of the answers depend on how consumer behavior changes on Facebook, what kind of brand and category you're working with, and how your brand has built its social marketing program so far. The fact that there aren't clear answers today underscores how these questions aren't the first priority for Facebook's executive team.

If you read through Facebook's official four-page PDF called "f8 for Marketers," most of the answers end with two words: Sponsored Stories. Even the section on building applications recommends that 20% of your budget goes to building an app and 80% on promoting it. The cynic in me wondered whether all of Facebook's changes were designed to blunt the virality of branded content and require more of a reliance on advertising. That strikes me as too calculating for Zuckerberg. This is not someone who changes the interface in order to juice media spending. There are many easier and direct ways that he could do that.

Instead, we're left with a lot of ambiguity, but a few things are perfectly clear. Facebook has more than 800 million users, and recently had half a billion people using the site in one day. The time spent on Facebook dwarfs the numbers for any other media property. The rate of Facebook's mobile usage is accelerating quickly, and soon more than half of its audience will be using its mobile properties. There is no question that marketers need Facebook more than Facebook needs marketers.

What do you do about it? Be engaging. Be relevant. Figure out what's social about your brand. Set objectives. Measure results. Budget accordingly. Zuckerberg may not care about what you do, but you still should.

Facebook News Feed Protest Posters Through the Ages

I keep seeing various forms of News Feed protest on Facebook, along with the backlash to the backlash. Here are a few more contributions: Facebook News Feed protest posters through the ages.

You can find these on SlideShare, Flickr, and sequentially below.

 

Facebook News Feed Protest Posters Through the Ages

View more presentations from David Berkowitz

Facebook Groups to Bridge BBS and BBM

Originally published in MediaPost's Social Media Insider; image source: Facebook

The overhaul of Facebook Groups last week builds on the ideals of the 1980s and early 1990s. It's only halfway there, though, as it has the potential to be something much bigger.

Back in the early 1990s, in the days when Internet connection speeds were measured in baud rates and the Netscape Navigator web browser didn't yet exist, I got my first taste of social media by participating in BBSs, or bulletin board systems. You connected to these text-based communities by dialing in directly to a terminal often hosted at the home of the system operator (the revered SysOp). Given the kinds of geeks who would participate, the system thrived on many-to-many communications; there wasn't much of a point being a spectator or lurker. Unlike many forums and groups online today, the content was only valuable for participants actively using a given BBS, as there wasn't any latent value such as creating content that others could find through search engines.

The many-to-many spirit is alive and well with Facebook Groups. Within a day or two of the new features launching, I became part of a half dozen groups focused on social media. Sure, they all opted me in automatically, and Facebook's "shoot first, ask users later" approach is problematic, but that's likely a temporary drawback. My first reaction to the new Groups was that it was a usable version of Google Wave, a sentiment echoed by many technologists. Dan Peguine, responding to a post I shared in a group called Social Marketers, compared Facebook Groups favorably with Yammer, noting the quick learning curve for both. As I dive in, trying group chats and contributing to collaborative documents, I keep thinking back to those BBS days. If you want to participate, it's easy to do so, and there are these hubs of constant activity that encourage everyone to keep contributing.

I'm willing to bet this is still an early phase of Facebook Groups. A much bigger phase is coming, one where Groups transitions from the era of the BBS to the era of BBM. In case your coworkers or college-aged kids haven't asked to BBM you, it stands for BlackBerry Messenger, perhaps the most successful mobile app of all time in that it has helped sell BlackBerry devices. BBM is itself a progenitor of other mobile communications services such as TextPlus, GroupMe, and SMS GupShup that let users create groups of people to text, allowing for mobile communities to form and interact on the fly.

It shouldn't be too hard for Facebook to add mobile functionality to Groups. Given Groups' text-heavy nature, it can work across Facebook's mobile offerings, spanning its smartphone applications, mobile sites optimized for touch-screens and feature phones, and even 0.facebook.com, the scaled-down site designed for countries where bandwidth is more limited. Facebook has SMS commands too, even if they're seldom publicized. To paraphrase Amsterdam Vallon in "Gangs of New York," "They ain't got a gang; they've got an army."

I was having a conversation with one peer working in social marketing, and he lamented that Facebook Groups isn't useful for brands, so there's not as much for us to do. There are two ways I'd counter that. First, anything that makes Facebook even more important for its users is good for those in the social marketing business. More importantly though, features like the Wall, photo sharing, and events all started for users and then became part of brand pages. Heck, marketers can't do much at all with Facebook Mobile right now, but its 150 million-strong user base clearly matters.

Facebook Groups will matter, too. It's a bridge to the BBS past that will build on the BBM present to create something even more meaningful in the future.

 

We Don't Need No Stinkin' Facebook Phone

Here's today's column that originally ran in MediaPost's Social Media Insider

There's a new debate about Facebook that's making echo chambers implode. No, it's not whether "Catfish" or "The Social Network" will prove to be the better Facebook movie, or whether David Fincher's next movie will be a remake of his own "Se7en" with Mark Zuckerberg as the serial killer. This time, it's about whether Facebook is developing a phone.

Despite Facebook's public denials, TechCrunch followed up its exclusive with a post deconstructing and debunking Facebook's spin. Facebook's PR team keeps saying it's not technically manufacturing a phone, which would be true. It's like if I say I'm not making Toll House cookies when I'm really just heating up the pre-made cookie dough; my end result is a batch of cookies just like Facebook's end result is a phone.

What's funny about all of this is that if TechCrunch is right and Facebook is developing its own branded phone, some of Facebook's denials become even more right. Consider this language from Facebook's official statement: "Our view is that almost all experiences would be better if they were social, so integrating deeply into existing platforms and operating systems is a good way to enable this." Even if this is, in the words of TechCrunch's Michael Arrington, "vague language Facebook will point back to later to show they weren't outright lying," it's a compelling argument for why Facebook doesn't need a phone at all.

If I'm playing the role of the judge here, the evidence I've seen for Facebook coming out with a phone is stronger than the evidence against it. There are several good reasons why Facebook shouldn't come out with a phone, though:

1) We already have a Facebook phone. It's called the phone. Facebook is one of the top applications in every major smartphone app store. Beyond that, Ground Truth reported that social media accounts for 60% of mobile web pageviews. I keep thinking back to a moment on a recent flight when I was next to the mother of a 13-year-old girl sitting behind us. Within 60 seconds of hitting the ground, not only did the daughter update her Facebook status, but her mom commented on it. Our current devices make Facebook plenty accessible.

2) We already have a Facebook phone. It's called Android. While Facebook's denials played up the iPhone connections, I like the Android integration even better. On Android, it's far easier to share photos and links through Facebook or other social properties, and syncing phone contacts with Facebook profiles is seamless. One of the 8,000 rumors about this Facebook Phone is that it's being built on Android, which would be the most logical option. Would a MySpace app be able to run on it, though? Internationally, would it welcome competitors like Mixi? More food for thought.

3) Facebook has the carrier relationships already. Facebook reports that there are more than 200 mobile operators in 60 countries deploying Facebook mobile offerings. On one hand, adding a Facebook phone could be a revenue generator for them, but on the other, it could complicate existing relationships. 

4) Remember Google's Nexus One? Thought so.

5) Facebook's future holds Zero promise. I love 0.facebook.com, the program allowing people in 45 countries to access a scaled-down version of Facebook without data charges. That's groundbreaking, far-reaching and potentially world-changing in the way it can allow people everywhere to communicate with each other. In other words, it's far more impactful than adding another phone to the marketplace.

6) How many phone commercials have you seen featuring Facebook? Just about any time a new phone comes out, at least one of the images or commercials includes a Facebook reference. Facebook is already changing how manufacturers are designing phones. What else can Facebook possibly want to change, the color of the handset?

The "will they or won't they" meter is tipping toward Facebook developing some kind of phone. Yet Facebook already has one of the most innovative, pervasive mobile offerings that works well without them designing the hardware. Odds are you own a Facebook phone already. If you're like me, you own two. The only way Facebook could be more easily accessible is if it becomes surgically implanted in your brain. I can't wait to see how Facebook denies that rumor.

Ten Reasons To Love Mobile Social Media

 
It's OK if you're not obsessed with mobile social media. I know I can get carried away, whether I'm spilling my Super Mayor confessions or taking too much pride in becoming the King of Disinfectant (take that, Lysol serfs!). Less publicly, I spent the summer working with my colleagues on 360i's Mobile Marketing Playbook that was just released today, which includes a meaty chapter on mobile social media.

Whether you're already sold on its importance or still could use more convincing, here are 10 reasons to love mobile social media.

1) It's still early. You're often dealing with consumers who are early adopters, and there's room to experiment. In such an environment, the upside of doing something groundbreaking tends to outweigh the downside of a flop, as long as it's planned to fit in with your goals and strategy.

2) It's mainstream. Facebook reports it has more than 150 million active mobile users globally. Are we there yet? Yes, we're there.

3) It's real  -- as in, it's part of the real world. You use mobile social media in conjunction with where you are and whatever you're doing, not just while you're online.

4) It brings people together in the real world. I remember years ago when I was demonstrating Twitter to a friend at a 4INFO party. After I sent a tweet via text message, someone came up to me and asked if I was David. Sure enough, it was a Twitter follower who caught my note saying I was at the party, and she wanted to make a real-world connection.  Fast-forward to a few weeks ago. I was in Portland, Ore. waiting on line at Voodoo Doughnuts when I checked Facebook Places and saw that my New York friend Mike Lee was having Chinese food nearby. I texted him and he came over before I made it to the front of the line. When these moments happen, they're memorable because they matter.

5) Complete strangers sometimes know best. Some people wonder why anyone would trust tips left by complete strangers through review sites and apps. Given that we trust mysterious algorithms to tell us which search engine results are relevant and we trust four out of five guys in lab coats on TV with their toothpaste recommendations, following tips random people leave at restaurants and bars is hardly a stretch.  I can rattle off great foods -- deviled eggs and bacon scones in New York, apple turnovers in San Francisco, grape-flavored doughnuts in Portland -- I've tried thanks to recommendations from people I don't know.

6) Mobile games are better with friends. The Words With Friends application became a massive hit by turning a mobile version of Scrabble into a multiplayer obsession. I wish all my favorite game apps, such as Angry Birds, had a social layer.

7) Real-world sharing is the best kind. I was just having drinks with MediaPost columnist Kaila Colbin and our valiant editor Phyllis Fine when the conversation ultimately turned to Cat Paint, an app I hailed as a "social media breakthrough" late last year. As I always do in such situations, I shared my favorite Cat Paint creations like a father who passes around baby pictures (someday, when I have kids, I will have to Cat Paint them so I can do both at once). While I can share the pictures through various social media sites, it's far more fun in a live setting.

8) Any mobile site or application can incorporate social media. Any mobile content worth sharing can be shared, whether through third-party registration such as Facebook Connect or links to post content to various social sites.

9) The canvas keeps getting bigger. Mobile social media is starting to change how people watch TV and movies, interact with products, find new businesses, determine directions to the store, and find the nearest bathroom. The use cases grow by the day.

10) If you can't beat it, join it. Beyond the 150 million Facebook mobile users --- a figure which is clearly much higher since Facebook last updated it -- consider the 60%  of mobile internet usage spent on social networking (Ground Truth) and the 240%  increase in social networking app usage year over year (comScore). Like it, love it, or remain totally baffled by it, but as a consumer trend it's here. Marketers, it's your call whether to ignore or embrace mobile social media.

Wake Up When Google Bores You

Google's trailer for virtual world Lively lives on, even if the site doesn't

Wake Up When Google Bores You

The world may not need a Google-branded social network along the lines of what Google is reportedly building. My fellow columnist Cathy Taylor made that perfectly clear last week. Yet I can offer a barometer to show whether Google will launch a great product: the more boring Google makes it, the better it will be.

Google excels at boring. Look at the heart of its business model, search advertising. I've worked for companies with strengths in search engine marketing since 2004 and penned over 200 Search Insider columns for MediaPost, and I love search as few on this planet do. Still, Google's take on search, with its character counts and algorithms, doesn't provide great material for a Cannes award submission or a David Fincher movie.

Google has a similar track record with social media. Its most exciting contribution is a site that has contributed to the democratization of video production and distribution: YouTube. Most of what's great about YouTube already existed before Google acquired it, while Google has done well with the "boring" aspects of making it scale and developing revenue streams.

Below are a number of other ways Google has approached social media, grouped by "exciting" and "boring" entries.

Exciting

Orkut: Google launched its own social network in January 2004 a mere 14 days before Facebook launched, according to the Wikipedia dates. Which would you have bet on succeeding, an independent project at Google or a hobby from some kid in a Harvard dorm room? Google, founded by a couple of grad students who managed to outmaneuver Yahoo and the other 1990s web stalwarts, should have had some algorithm to predict the winner here.

Dodgeball and Jaiku: The former company was ahead of its time, so much that its founder left and created a similar but improved service called Foursquare. The latter was a respected early rival to Twitter back when there were several competitors in the microblogging space. Google acquired them in 2005 and 2007, respectively. Dodgeball was shut down last year, while Quantcast notes Jaiku.com ranks 428,000^th of all U.S. websites. Google has had better luck with other acquisitions, such as Blogger (Quantcast rank: 14) and YouTube (rank: 4).

Lively: TechCrunch inaugurated its coverage of this Google baby saying, "Well, this sucks for Second Life." Guess which virtual world is still here. Of anything Google has done with social media, this was the biggest stretch.

Wave: A video called "Google Wave Developer Preview" got over 9 million views, and Soulja Boy doesn't even make a cameo appearance. Wave was supposed to change how people communicate and collaborate, yet I've barely met anyone who knows how to use it or why they should. Despite launching with the kind of fervor usually expressed by audiences watching Steve Jobs or Oprah, the follow-through has underwhelmed.

Buzz: I'll give Google credit here, because thanks to Buzz, my sister gets updates from my blog. As much as I love her, it's a sad day when Google launches a service like this with so much fanfare and my sister is the best example I can come up with for a power user.

Boring

Google Docs: Instead of the messianic fanfare around Wave, I can't recall much of that around Docs, though exponentially more people use it. Google Docs started with a pretty dull premise: it would strip out 99% of the functionality of Microsoft Word but store the documents online "in the cloud," and then allow users to collaborate. The power of collaboration for such a straightforward purpose makes Docs so powerful, while the open-ended nature of Wave leaves users wondering what to do with it.

Google Moderator: One of the more underappreciated of Google offerings, Moderator essentially lets anyone create their own version of Digg where others can contribute ideas and vote on submissions. In May, it became a feature on YouTube, where it will be far more impactful. It's still fun to use on its own, such as when I solicited votes on questions to ask Google's Dylan Casey at a conference session on the real-time web.

Android photo sharing: When I started using the newest iPhone, I was wondering if Apple would copy one of my favorite features from Google Android, where you can easily share any photo on Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere from the photo itself. Apple still doesn't offer this. Having social sharing built into Android's operating system in subtle ways like this gives a glimpse into how deeply Google can understand and apply the mechanics of social media. Fittingly, features like this tend to be rarely discussed, relegated to the "boring" bucket, while the discussion focuses on screen resolution, battery life, and megapixels.

The odds aren't great for Google to build a new competitive social network. Yet look at what Google already has. It runs a successful web browser (Chrome) and mobile operating system that are used to access every social network. It offers collaboration and communication tools such as Docs, Gmail, Google Talk, and Google Voice. It acquired two social media properties that rank among the top 20 U.S. websites. It also increasingly incorporates social content and experiences into its search engine.

Maybe none of this is as exciting as Google launching a social network to rival Facebook, or Buzz as a Twitter killer, or Lively as a Second Life killer. That's not where Google's magic is. Perk up as soon as you get a hint of Google doing something unbearably boring -- it may change how you consume media, share content, and communicate with others.

How Facebook Gets to 7 Billion

Below's my latest column from MediaPost. Clearly it's not for everyone. It's funny, as I'm a day late in posting this while in Atlanta, the tweets have been positive (those I've seen at least) while the comments are much more negative. My next column will be a response to those comments, as I want to hear more from them - not more negative feedback (though that comes with the territory) but more on WHY they are so adamantly opposed to social media while reading the Social Media Insider.

Separately, you can read my review of The Facebook Effect here, or just scroll on down to the next post if you're on the homepage.

 Photo from Gotham Media Ventures: Adam Eland, me, Jerry Spiegel, David Kirkpatrick, Ian Spalter (photo credit: Valerie Milkins, RGA)

On to the column:

How Facebook Gets to 7 Billion

"Ubiquity" was one word that struck me when David Kirkpatrick, author of "The Facebook Effect," kept mentioning it at a Gotham Media Ventures breakfast panel last week. The other was "China."

Those were the answers. The questions, if you summon Johnny Carson's Carnac, were, respectively, "What is Facebook's goal?" and "What is Facebook's biggest obstacle in achieving its goal?"

China may be Facebook's single biggest obstacle in growing from 500 million users to 7 billion and beyond as it tries to gain adoption by every single person on the planet. Yet there's a bigger obstacle collectively: the other 4 billion people who are neither currently using Facebook nor living in China. How will Facebook colonize the rest of the world?

The question came up on the panel, and I had an answer. By the time Facebook has exhausted other courses of pursuing growth, it's going to go for its most ambitious marketing push yet: Facebook will give every person alive age 13 and up a phone.

Facebook will need to do this once its growth levels off, as it reaches somewhere between 1 and 2 billion users. Once it has signed up between 15%  to 30% of the world's population, one of the most ambitious companies the world has known will need the mother of all stimulus packages. Here's how the phone will serve its ultimate mission:

Doing more with Zero: Facebook already has a service called Zero(0.facebook.com). Launched with more than 50 mobile carriers worldwide last month, it allows consumers from Anguilla to Uganda to access a text-only version of Facebook without incurring data charges. Viewing photos incurs data costs, but for no charge at all, users can post status updates and comments, send and receive messages, view the News Feed, and write on friends' Walls. Partnering with carriers this way still will only reach mobile subscribers, which falls short of Facebook's ambition.

The mobile flip: While Facebook reports over 100 million users of its mobile services today compared to an estimated 500 million users overall, the ratio of online to mobile users will quickly flip, especially thanks to carrier partnerships. That flip is already happening elsewhere. For instance, Mixi, Japan's leading social network, has three-quarters of its users accessing it from mobile devices.

One mobile per child: One Laptop Per Child is already pursuing $99 tablets, and the concept of "one mobile per child" is being discussed in various pockets of the web. What would be the cost of getting some kind of mobile device running Facebook in the hands of everyone? That's the ultimate realization of Facebook's mission to "make the world more open and connected."

Voices that care: If Facebook pulled off the feat of finding a scalable way to get billions of Facebook-enabled phones out to the world, it would still need to figure out the phone part. Here's where the next piece of the puzzle fits in: Facebook acquires Skype to enable free calls among handset users. That's just the beginning, as Facebook will pioneer voice translation software to allow someone speaking Ndebele in Zimbabwe to communicate with a Mandarin speaker in China.

There are still countless questions as to how this would work, and the business model is hardly clear-cut. Yet at some point, Facebook's growth will slow and everyone will wonder what's next. For Apple, the answer was the iPod, and then the iPhone. For Google, it's Android. For Facebook, it will also be mobile, but with even greater ambitions. Mark Zuckerberg's one person who can make a goal like gaining top market share in China seem trifling compared to the bigger picture.