Marketers Studio - David Berkowitz's Marketing Blog

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.

The Facebook Effect: Even More Fun Than Spending a Few Hours on Facebook

I had no interest in reading The Facebook Effect, the new book from David Kirkpatrick. I spend way too much time on Facebook as is, and when I'm not spending time on it, I'm working on a client's Facebook program or reading about all the latest news. Why would I want to read a book about the damn thing?

It turns out I had a very good reason: I was serving on a panel with him so I had to read the book in advance. If only everyone could find such a good excuse.

The real joy reading the book came from watching Mark Zuckerberg's revelation as the genius that he is, working with a few equally gifted youngsters and ultimately some very supportive older mentors to unleash Mark's vision on the world. It's inspiring, and truly amazing. Luck may have played a role, but what's more striking is how great decision making - from people who often had little experience making such decisions - played a tremendous role. It's not just people who built a somewhat better network and managed to get ahead; these were people who believed in a vision and had the brains and balls to carry it out. And several weren't even 20 when they started doing so.

Then there's the latter part of the book, which is very good and interesting, though not quite as inspiring. Kirkpatrick focused extensively on Facebook's approach to privacy - along with its missteps, and the development of its advertising-focused revenue model. These chapters felt a bit more like work, which is fine since I love my job, and if you find debates about privacy particularly touching maybe you'll like it more than me.

It's clearly written for a business audience. That's a shame in a sense, as it really could be two books - the version of it that's a riches to megariches tale of a kid pursuing his dreams, which would have much wider appeal and just about any Facebook user friend of mine would love it. Then there's the rest, and it's hard to recommend that too broadly. But readers of the blog should appreciate it.

And while I am publishing this an hour before sharing a stage (or a table) with Kirkpatric, I'd be just as glowing if I wasn't. It shouldn't have taken that much motivation to get me to read it, and with any luck you'll be a little less hesitant now. I actually read relatively few business books these days (while reading as much as ever in general) so I have to choose carefully, and this was well worth the time spent with it.

Making Privacy Personal

From today's MediaPost Social Media Insider

How do you get people to care about privacy?

People care about it in offline settings. At home, you know which window shades you prefer to draw closed at which times. At work, you might discuss Saturday night's exploits with your cubicle-mate and not with your boss. Few can tell online; I can't. I avoid networks like blippy that share purchases based on credit card data, and I turned off Google Latitude's option of automatically broadcasting my location from mobile devices, but I'm admittedly inconsistent and too laissez-faire with most other forms of social media.

The latest debates over Facebook's privacy policies may not last, but there's a lot of good coming out of the dialogue. If Facebook won't clearly explain how it publicizes consumers' information, others are trying to fill the void. Most resources have the echo-chamber effect, only reaching people who care about privacy and social media to begin with. But if enough of these echoes escape and start ricocheting around the water coolers where more Facebook users hang out, then there's a chance to bring the discussion to people who wouldn't intentionally look for it.

Let's look at several attempts to raise awareness about these privacy issues, and how likely they'll break through the echo chamber:

Matt McKeon's The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook (via All Facebook)

I keep returning to these illustrations of how Facebook's default privacy settings have changed over the years. In 2005, userswould share some profile info with friends and their networks. By 2007, basic information was shared with all Facebook users. Now, the default settings allow almost all information to be shared with the entire Internet.

I've spent far longer studying the diagrams here than the text, and it's striking going back and forth between the 2005 and 2010 images. If you've seen anything this clear in mainstream media, please share it in the comments, as these infographics are screaming for more exposure.

ReclaimPrivacy.org (via Anthony Haney on Facebook)

Using a bookmarklet you can drag to your browser's bookmarks, log into Facebook and the link will tell you how secure your privacy settings are. As I continue to violate best practices for maintaining privacy, you can see a screen shot of ReclaimPrivacy's review of my own settings. Somehow I managed to block all known applications that could leak my personal information, which must have been a fluke. All of my other settings are rated "caution" or "insecure."

The best part of the tool is that it fixes some of your settings for you. Yet will you really trust a random tool more than Facebook? OK, maybe. Beyond coming from a largely unknown source, the bookmarklet approach will turn off more novice Internet users. It does work, though.

Openbook (via Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land and MediaPost)

What if you could shame people into changing their privacy settings? Openbook searches public status updates for potentially questionable phrases people may share on Facebook. I've linked directly to one of the tamer ones, but if you clear the search field and search for something random, what comes up may not fly on network television. Many of the status updates are harmless, but some could be damaging. Searching the phrase "don't tell anyone," someone noted how she's playing hooky from her job, and her profile page says what school district she works for. That won't help her case for tenure if her district faces budget cuts this year.

I'm not sure how many people will see this, but using live examples of real people makes it easy to relate to them, and if you don't change your settings because of it, you may well think twice about what you post on Facebook.

Diaspora

Tired of changing your settings? Are you one of ten people who left Facebook in the past month and now have your picture in a major national newspaper as the sign of a trend? Then do I have the network for you! Join Diaspora, "the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network." If that's not the tagline for the next 500 million-user social network, I don't know what is. About 5,000 chipped in nearly $200,000 to make this project happen, well above the $10,000 goal. Aiming  low has its perks.

Sorry, but I don't know how that anti-Facebook angst translates into a Facebook rival. People weren't looking to leave Six Degrees or Friendster or MySpace; they just kept finding something better and brought more of their friends. There are limits to that scale, so soon enough investors will seek social networks for nematodes or bacteria just to hit growth projections.

I'm not convinced any of these approaches are enough, and the privacy issue is hardly unique to social media. I know my bank has had digital security breaches, but I keep my money there, even if I change my password every so often. There are marketing services firms focused on direct mail and other channels that will probably collect far more data than Facebook ever will.

Facebook gets more attention, though, because it's new, it's massive, and we have more control over it than we're used to. We can do something about it. It's the monster under the bed we can overcome by shining a flashlight down below and realizing we have nothing to fear.

Yet sometimes it's more fun to stay on the bed, worry ourselves to sleep, and wait until the morning comes, when we know for sure there's no monster that can hurt us.

 

Opening the Facebook Open Graph Mailbag

Originally published in MediaPost; image courtesy of Facebook

 

Opening the Facebook Open Graph Mailbag

Congrats, Facebook. You've made every media pundit sound like the female leads in "Clueless," forcing us to use the word "like" every fourth word: "So, like, now you can like every webpage, and then like it on Facebook, and then like Facebook pages, and you can like what your friends like, and it's, like, awesome."

A lot of questions have been coming up about Facebook's updates from last week, and this is a great forum to answer them. I want to thank some Twitter friends (who were, ironically, more responsive than my Facebook friends) for contributing some questions that are answered to varying degrees below: Kevin Planovsky, Ellis Reid, Joey Redmond, and Gavin Thomas. Let's open up the mailbag.

Can you sum up the debate on Facebook's openness?

Sure. Pundits are taking sides on how "open" Facebook is at its influence spreads across the web. The debate's fairly silly, as it only exists because Facebook named its new protocol the Open Graph. If Facebook called it the Facebook Graph or the We Control the Web and You Don't Graph, the whole debate would be moot, and we'd still be debating about whether Chatroulette is better for porn or marketing.

Open Graph allows any website to have the same functionality of a Facebook page, minus the tabs that no one uses. For instance, Pandora will show you the artists and customized radio stations your Facebook friends are listening to. There are a lot of winners here -- Pandora, its users, and Facebook -- but this remains a closed environment. Facebook's in control.

There are genuine attempts to make the web more open, such as with OpenLike. The idea is that no one service will own the sharing and rating data; it will be available to all who take part. It's too soon to tell how well these open protocols will work and if they'll get any traction.

Should I get Facebook's Insights for Your Domain on my site?

Probably. At facebook.com/insights, there's a green box on the upper right called "Insights for Your Domain." Facebook will give you a line of code to add to your site, and you can connect this to any of the Facebook pages you own. This will specifically show you information on Facebook users who visit your site and share content back on Facebook. Data available includes: daily likes, daily shares, feedback per share, reshare rate, most shared links, gender, age, country, city, and language.

Most marketers and site owners probably aren't tracking this information, and you can compare Facebook's data to what you already track. You can also get a better sense of how the audience of your Facebook page compares with the Facebook users who visit your site.

How much should I care about privacy?

A lot. Let's go back to the Pandora example. My Facebook friends may be okay with me knowing their musical interests; after all, most friends list their interests in their profile. But my friend who says she likes Phish and the Black Eyed Peas on Facebook may not want to broadcast that she's listening to the Spice Girls on Pandora. Actually, I found a friend listening to the Spice Girls on Pandora, and she's not even showing me her musical preferences on Facebook, nor is she a declared fan (or connection) of any musical artist. I'd imagine she'd prefer to remain anonymous here, and I'll leave her name out of it because she didn't opt in. Facebook and Pandora are not giving her the same courtesy.

If you're implementing Open Graph or any of Facebook's social plugins, keep the consumer perspective in mind. Some of the consumers who care the most may never realize what you're revealing, and they may never figure out how to adjust their privacy settings on Facebook. They're the ones whose perspectives you'll have to keep in mind.

Is search dead? Namely, is Google dead?

No. First of all, marketers will always want to reach consumers explicitly seeking their products and services. As long as marketers are appropriately measuring its value and budgeting accordingly, search engine marketing will continue to thrive.

Much bigger advertising and marketing budgets are spent trying to reach consumers who aren't explicitly saying what they want. Google has a stake here too, thanks in large part to acquisitions such as DoubleClick, YouTube, and Pyra Labs (Blogger). Consumers tend to be targeted demographically, contextually, or behaviorally, but there's an emerging field targeting consumers based on their social graphs, or whom they're connected to.

We're just starting to learn the value of social graph ad targeting. There are a number of companies pushing this emerging field forward, including 33 Across, Lotame, Media 6 Degrees, and Socialmedia.com. If Facebook turns the Open Graph into an ad model, it will instantly be the biggest player in the space, but the web and the social web are far bigger than Facebook.

I'm worried about how much information I'm sharing. How do I change my privacy settings on Facebook?

I'll spare reiterating all the details, since GigaOm and Mashable both did this so well. The short version is that while logged in to Facebook, click Account in the upper right corner and then go to Privacy Settings > Applications and Websites > Instant Personalization and uncheck the box. You'll want to visit those other links for more information.

What if I have more questions, or answers?

Share them in the comments and we'll keep the conversation going.

LeeAnn Prescott Gives a State of Social Media in Numbers

LeeAnn Prescott, a longtime research analyst friend, is sharing some great research on social media. I've embedded her presentation below and shared a couple bullets from VentureBeat (there's far more there, where she's a regular contributor), and you can find more analysis on her Research-Write blog.

A couple highlights:

• One in four (25%) US Internet page views occurred at one of the top social networking sites in December 2009, up 83% from 13.8% in December 2008.
• Nearly one in 10 visits went to one of these sites in December 2009, versus 5.8% in December 2008.

Social Networking By The Numbers, December 2009

View more presentations from LeeAnn Prescott.

Checking In, Checking Out - A Memoir of Mobile Social App Addiction

Image by dpstyles™ via Flickr

From MediaPost's Social Media Insider

Checking In, Checking Out

I have a confession to make. On more than one occasion over the past several weeks, I've excused myself at several restaurants to go to the bathroom to indulge my guilty little habit. My wife tolerates it, but it's taking a toll on my social life, and getting addicted once makes it all too easy for it to happen again.

I'm referring, of course (ahem), to location-based mobile social networking applications. I've been playing with eight of them lately: Buzzd, CauseWorld, Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, MyTown, Whrrl, and Yelp. These apps all offer ways to find friends, local hot spots, and often both, and they're increasingly incorporating location-based advertising.

I have mixed feelings about the overall craze. I've discovered friends near me through these apps, and I've learned about local destinations. Yet it can get antisocial; I've discreetly checked in under restaurant tables across the country. And when I've really wanted to be discreet, yes, I've done it in the bathroom. It gets to be a problem when you start interacting with the apps so much that you're not interacting with the people in front of you.

After weeks of using some of these and months of using others, I've provided a rundown of how these apps differentiate themselves. To bring them to life for those who aren't actively using them, I've paired each app with a celebrity that personifies it. Note that all references below are to the latest iPhone versions, and the corresponding links go to the iTunes store.

Buzzd: Lindsay Lohan

Buzzd doesn't give a <bleep> if you're in JFK or the grocery store. It wants to tell you what's hot and where the A-listers are. Are you the party girl -- or the paparazzi? Take a spin with Buzzd, which remains far safer than hanging out with Lohan, since you probably won't wind up in a rehab clinic by sunrise. Buzzd is a little too cool for me so I don't use it as much as the others, but if you're more into bottle service than cupcake trucks, party on.

CauseWorld: Lance Armstrong

I dare you to say something bad about Lance Armstrong. Come on, the guy has won more Tour de Frances than, well, whoever has won the second most Tour de Frances, and now he's become one of the best known faces of philanthropy. CauseWorld may not be as much of a name brand as Armstrong, but it's just as much the do-gooder. Every time you check in somewhere, largely at retailers and restaurants, you earn karma points that you can donate to a number of charities, all thanks to sponsors. The appeal here is all about the charity rather than finding your friends.

Foursquare: Ashton Kutcher

Foursquare's the red-hot celebrity trailblazer. Just like Ashton keeps doing things his own way, from popularizing the cougar craze to starting his own production company, Foursquare is responsible for a lot of how we think about mobile social media, from "merit" badges to local advertising. Foursquare may not be as mainstream as Ashton, but Ashton likes hanging with the geeks and cool kids now anyway. It's tough to say how well Foursquare will play to the masses, as the whole idea of checking in creeps some people out. I still like using it to see if I know people at certain venues, but a lot of the fun of the badges has started to wear off.

Gowalla: Anna Kendrick

You might be thinking, "Anna who?" That's the reaction I still get when talking about Gowalla, even as it racks up investments and increases its global appeal. Kendrick is the younger female lead in "Up in the Air" with that breakthrough performance, and Gowalla is also adorable in its own way with a big opportunity ahead. I like the gaming aspect of it, where you find virtual objects in various locations, and you drop objects of your own to claim spots as a founder. And as Kendrick isn't just a pretty face but brings credible acting chops to her roles, Gowalla has its own talents with locating you and keeping you honest. You can only check in if you're really at or close to a location, something Foursquare doesn't require.

Loopt: Mark-Paul Gosselaar, circa "Saved by the Bell"

You remember Gosselaar. He was an adorable kid during the "Saved by the Bell" middle school years and then became the heartthrob in high school. But his popularity faded when they tried stretching the show to college. I fear the same is happening to Loopt. Sure, it was in Apple's ads for awhile and may have a passionate fan base. But it seems short on features compared to its competition. During its "college" phase now, it's the one I keep forgetting about. Remember though, "Zack Morris" returned to rave reviews in "NYPD Blue" and even played Broadway in a successful run; Loopt still could have a strong second act ahead.

MyTown by Booyah: Ellen DeGeneres

MyTown has the most fun with location-based checkins. It's bright and cheery, and you can't help but get caught up with how much fun it's having -- not unlike watching Ellen do her little dance routines. In MyTown, you buy properties and upgrade them, and then you keep collecting rent while finding new items to boost your points (writing this reminded me that my rent was due). And just like Ellen has done alright making a living off of her shtick, the latest version of MyTown includes various game boosts for sale, both for real dollars and virtual treasure. I spent $1.99 for a pack of "leaderboard wins" that increased my points, and I may have to shell out a bit more. Its popularity is on the rise; TechCrunch reported this month it's bigger than Foursquare and Gowalla.

Whrrl: Dame Helen Mirren

Whrrl's not the newest or the hottest of the apps, and it's been around awhile relative to some of the others. It's more of the artiste, like Dame Mirren, and a bit of a shape-shifter who myou can't always recognize. Whrrl has been through a number of changes in its career, but it remains focused on storytelling, and does the most to encourage sharing captioned photos of where you are. It's not a must-use for me, but I like how it practices its craft, including telling you the most popular spots people go after checking in where you are. Expect more innovation to come from it.

Yelp: Michael Jordan -- on the Chicago White Sox

Yelp's a monster when it comes to review apps, dominating its field. It has the chance to be the Michael Jordan (Chicago Bulls style) of review sites, if it doesn't get crushed by Google. But now it's trying a new game, adding check-ins. While users love it for reviews, the notion of checking in is not part of its core purpose. I found myself checking in for the sake of doing so, not because I particularly enjoyed it. Still, when I used Facebook Connect to find which friends were using it, I added dozens of connections instantly, giving me more of a network there than on any other such app.

I'm not getting rid of any of these apps just yet, and I'm sure I'll wind up trying others. But I won't need to check in at every place at every venue, as I'd rather make the most of the time with the people in front of me rather than earning points for broadcasting my whereabouts to others. If the habit's so bad I can't do it at the dinner table, I'm better off not doing it.

Kosher Ham's Jewdar Tell-All

Originally published in MediaPost's Social Media Insider

 

It's one of the most critical, controversial issues of our time. It's been the subject of more columns than MySpace. Even the Talmud, the great repository of Jewish debate and wisdom, is at a loss to comment on it. Yes, in what's undoubtedly the greatest miracle since the time the Maccabees kept their temple menorah burning with a small jar of oil, the gift of Jewdar continues to shed light on how marketers are targeting their ads.

I've wanted to return to this for months, ever since Jeremy Bloom reached out to me in August about his business KosherHam.com, a humorous T-shirt site that claims, "Wearing anything else just isn't kosher." He even noted that my new BFF Perez Hilton has been spotted in his gear.

I was intrigued when Bloom said that he's been honing his Jewdar - in this context, the act of targeting Jews through advertising, specifically on Facebook - and that he'd be willing to share all his secrets with me. He wrote, "I am constantly behaviorally targeting different demos, but the most receptive audiences with some of the highest click-through rates and lowest CPMs seem to be Jews." He tests religiously, trying different subject lines, ad copy, targeting, and models and T-shirts in the photos.

He's able to reach Jews largely through the keywords field in Facebook's self-service ads that target users based on their interests. Facebook won't target users by religion specifically, but if they list "Jewish" or Jews" as interests, they're fair game. Bloom further targets users in major cities with large Jewish populations. This will inherently mean some non-Jews see the ads -- but hey, they're welcome to buy shirts too.

So what keywords does Bloom use to find Jews? The eclectic roster includes: Jew, Jewish, Hebrew, Israel, Hillel, Sigma Alpha Mu, Zeta Beta Tau, Annie Hall, Brooklyn, bagels, deli, Chinese food, Matisyahu, Phish, jam bands, being Jewish, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Adam Sandler, Seth Rogen, Seinfeld, Hebrew Hammer, Heeb Magazine, and Fiddler on the Roof. If you don't know what some of these mean or what they have to do with Judaism, you're probably out of the target demographic.

After perusing the list, I wondered how some of these would do head to head. Bloom indulged me and ran some trials in four different brackets: City, Comedian, Cuisine, and Music. Bids were set at 34 cents CPM. The top performing ads were those with the highest click-through rate (CTR) and lowest cost-per-click (CPC). And the winners are...

Bracket 1

City: New York vs. Los Angeles

Subject Lines: NY Jews Love Kosherham, LA Jews Love Kosherham

Winner: LA gets the Oscar, with 18% CTR and 16 cents CPC, coasting past NY's 12% CTR and 23 cents CPC.

Bracket 2

Comedian: Seinfeld vs. Woody Allen

Subject Lines: Seinfeld Fans Love Us, Woody Allen Fans Love Us

Winner: Woody Allen kvetches up the clicks, with 33% CTR and 8 cents CPC, while Seinfeld's 13% CTR and 21 cents CPC showed signs of shrinkage.

Bracket 3

Cuisine: Bagels vs. Deli

Subject Lines: Shirts for Bagel Fanatics, Shirts for Deli Fanatics

Winner: Bagels win by a shmear, with 13% CTR and 19 cents CPC, overstuffing Deli's tournament-worst 6% CTR and 44 cents CPC.

Bracket 4

Music: Phish vs. Matisyahu

Subject Lines: Shirts for Phish Fans, Shirts for Matisyahu Fans

Winner: Phish hoists up its tournament-best 55% and 5 cent CPC, out-jamming Matisyahu's 27% CTR and 10 cent CPC.

I asked Bloom if he could explain why Phish has so much mazel in hooking Phacebook -- er, Facebook -- users. He cited a number of reasons: the right age demographic, the loyal Phish fan base of liberal Jews, and the shared interests in certain botanical exploits reflected in Kosher Ham's apparel.

More importantly, I asked about conversion rates. It's great to get a lot of clicks, but do Jews on Facebook convert? (It's just getting too easy, sorry.) He says he was able to track a couple sales from the Phish ads directly, and he also notices spikes when running ads from people who go directly to KosherHam.com or search for it. With search, Google has performed especially well, as has AIM Search -- Boom thinks people find shirts they like and share them via instant message.

So it turns out Jewdar is a little easier to understand than the Zohar, Maimonedes' "Guide to the Perplexed," and my fourth-grade Hebrew teacher's accent. And it's not foolproof, as there are probably a few Woody Allen fans in New York who didn't go to a Jewish sleepaway camp. But if a guy can start a site called KosherHam and sell T-shirts about getting the munchies for unleavened bread to Jewish Phish fans on Facebook, I've got to think he's on to something.

How the Mobile Socialites Network

Originally published in MediaPost. Special thanks to Johanna Werther at AdMob for making this possible. I know I'm not the New York Times and don't seek exclusives, but if it makes sense for you I'm all for exploring story ideas that provide some custom hook or information for my readers in MediaPost, here, or elsewhere.

Mobile Social Networking Study from AdMob

View more presentations from David Berkowitz.

How Mobile Socialites Network

Given how obsessed people are with social networks, especially younger consumers who use it to religiously keep in touch with their friends, it's hardly surprising that mobile social network usage is skyrocketing. So which networks are benefiting the most from the trend?

I sought answers from my friends at mobile advertising platform AdMob. They're able to run surveys through their mobile ad units, and they can target consumers by which phones they're using, among other options. They ran a brief study for me and received responses from 71 iPhone users, 43 smartphone users, and 38 feature phone users (essentially any other mobile phone). It's not a huge sample size, so consider this more of a glimpse than a deep dive. But it's a start for understanding consumer interest in mobile social networking. The full presentation is available on SlideShare.

The study covered eight social properties: Facebook, MySpace, Digg, Twitter, LinkedIn, Mocospace, Peperonity, and Mig33 (the last three are mobile social networks). To get some sort of benchmark, respondents were asked about their favorite social networks they use both on mobile devices and on their computers. Here are some of the findings by device:

iPhone

·       Over half (52%) of iPhone users preferred to use Facebook the most from their phone. MySpace (11%) and Twitter (8%) also ranked, but nothing else came close, unless you count "other" and "I don't use social networks from my phone."

·       MySpace is much more popular on the PC than it is on the phone for iPhone users, while Twitter is the other way around, overrepresented on the phone compared with the PC.

·       Twitter is more popular among iPhone users than it is among any other device user.

·       Nearly two-fifths of iPhone users often engage with social networks from their phones.

Smartphone

·       Facebook is again the hands-down favorite for the most visited mobile social network by smartphone users (44% said it's their top preference).

·       The spread is much more even when asking which network smartphone users engage with at all from mobile devices: 63% for Facebook, 44% for MySpace, and 30% for Twitter, with another 12% noting Mocospace. The PC usage patterns are very similar, with slightly fewer accessing Facebook and Twitter from the PC.

·       Smartphone users were more likely than iPhone users to say they often use their phone for social networking, but also more likely to say they never use their phone that way.

Feature Phone

·       When it comes to social network usage on mobile devices, Mocospace is the dominant network, with 47% of feature phone users calling it their favorite.

·       Leading networks used by feature phone users on the PC include MySpace (66%), Mocospace (55%), and Facebook (42%).

·       More feature phone users say they use their phone for social networking often -- more than they use other devices.

The results directionally show some of what you might expect: Consumers with higher-end mobile devices gravitate toward Facebook and Twitter, and the likely younger feature phone user base is the most interested in Mocospace. Meanwhile, LinkedIn and Digg are not yet viewed as mobile properties.

The numbers themselves are just a hint of the research that can be done as we gain a better understanding of how mobile social networking differs from the Web experience we're used to. As more research comes out, we'll explore it here to gauge what's a fluke and what's a trend.

Why Does Facebook Think I’m German?

First Jewdar, now Deutschdar?

Is anyone else getting this message?

BEFORE:

AFTER:

Umm, now I have to switch it back. (found the link on the bottom left)

Killing the Killer Conspiracies

This guy's a killer. Facebook is not. via Wikipedia

From today's MediaPost Social Media Insider

Killing the Killer Conspiracies

Cue the movie trailer voice: You thought it was just a social network. Little did you know it would go on a murderous rampage, killing everything in sight. You can run, but you can't hide because Facebook's coming after your friends -- and then it's coming after you.

That's the kind of image that comes from a number of news headlines over the past week. MediaPost had its share of morbid entries. On Aug. 12, its Around the Net in Online Marketing newsletter led with the headline, borrowing TechCrunch's phrasing, "Google 'Knol' No Wiki Killer." TechCrunch reads like a first-person shooter game, with other references last week to Microsoft Zune as an iPod Killer, Apple developing a FriendFeed killer, and two references to Facebook "Lite" as a Twitter killer. When Mashable covered "Lite," it mentioned a "direct assault on Twitter." That's a little less gory, ratcheting down the mayhem from "Summer of Sam" to "Law & Order."

My colleague Cathy Taylor continued coverage of the bloodshed, referring to Twitter getting "thrown under a bus" in her most recent piece. It sounded like the movie "Speed," where Keanu Reeves wound up under a bus, though that was more of his own volition. She reviewed some of the carnage in detail, though I'll give my own highlights here:

• Facebook acquired FriendFeed. Body count: Twitter (and arguably FriendFeed).

• Facebook allowed anyone to search all public posts. Body count: Twitter, Google, and Bing (and maybe FriendFeed).

• Google demoed its new search upgrade, dubbed "Caffeine" that more rapidly and prominently indexes social media content. Body count: Facebook, Twitter, Bing, and some real-time search engines like OneRiot.

• Facebook "Lite" launched for people with slow connections, but its simplicity seemed to resemble microblogging. Body count: Twitter and MySpace, even though MySpace launched its own simplified version in April.

• Facebook banned sponsored status updates. Body count: anyone that would attempt to make a business model out of this (yay!).

Why must something new always kill what exists? Can't the new Facebook search be an asset for the social network without heralding the death of Twitter? A trip to the grocery store is a helpful reminder that new products don't inherentlykill off the old ones. Dreyer's wasn't killed by Haagen-Dazs, which wasn't killed by Ben & Jerry's, which wasn't killed by Weight Watchers. I can't find a SINGLE result in Google that matches the exact expression "Haagen-Dazs killer." But "Facebook killer" has 372,000 (and another 2,000 in Google's "Caffeine").

Much of the problem comes from the linear thinking of technology pundits and journalists. Here's how it works: if Google debuts "Caffeine" at noon and Facebook widely rolls out its new search functionality at 3 p.m., then Facebook's move is seen as a response to that. If it happened in the reverse order, Google would be seen as responding to Facebook. And if over the course of those three hours Twitter was suffering outages, both would be seen as a way to cripple Twitter right in its moment of weakness.

Really, Facebook didn't spend $50 million on FriendFeed the way someone spends $50 on pants. And someone at Google didn't just say they had to overhaul their search engine, the biggest and most consistent revenue source in the entire Internet economy, and then launch a new trial version that day. Silicon Valley would not be such a hotbed of innovation if everything that happened was in response to what's posted on TechCrunch.

The "killer" cliché has been tortured so much that it deserves to be put out to pasture. Yes, it's another act of violence, but it's a killing to end all killers to come. Rest in peace.