Facebook | Social Media University, Global (SMUG)

Of COURSE Facebook is for Business

A recent Techmeme has it that “Facebook’s closed platform and data lock-in” make it “NOT for Business.”

Please. Of COURSE Facebook is for business.

Any place that has 35 million people spending an average of 20 minutes a day absolutely has business uses.

If Facebook isn’t for business, then neither is eBay. Except of course now everyone knows people have made hugely profitable businesses solely on eBay. Many businesses found eBay valuable as a means of finding and selling to broadly dispersed customers. Even for business-to-business sales.

Now, doesn’t eBay have exactly the kind of “walled garden” characteristics that so many find it fashionable to revile in Facebook? How does it differ?

Facebook is, as Mark Zuckerberg says, a social utility. Utilities are like heating and electricity. They do things, or empower you to do things. Right off the bat there are lots of ways businesses can use Facebook to accomplish their goals. I’ve outlined a few Facebook business uses here. But beyond that, Facebook is infinitely extensible. If it doesn’t do what you want it to do, you can wait for someone to develop the application you need, or you can contract to develop the application yourself.

And unlike heat and lights — or eBay for that matter — you can use Facebook for free.

The problem isn’t with Facebook. It’s a lack of imagination in how to use it. Facebook, Twitter and all the other web 2.0 tools are just that: tools.

They aren’t the only tools for business; but web-wise MacGyvers will find creative ways to use them – not necessarily exactly according to the user manual (oh yeah, there is no user manual) – to accomplish their organizations’ goals.

For those concerned about mixing their personal and professional selves, I offer this: You can have lots of interaction with people with common interests in Facebook without becoming their Friend. You can just belong to the same groups. And for non-family members, you can use the limited profile to avoid divulging an information about yourself that you think others might find controversial. More on that in a future post.
Technorati: Facebook, eBay, business, marketing, PR, Twitter, MacGyver, walled gardens, social networks, social utility

Facebook and The 4-Hour Workweek

I reviewed Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero talk at Google in this previous post, and suggested that Facebook could help create a new class of messaging, in keeping with the recommendations in The 4-Hour Workweek, that makes less-frequent checking of email a practical reality. I said I would elaborate in a future post. The future is now.

But first, let’s look at the past. Merlin was full of wist as he recalled his first email account in 1993, and how special each message felt because only a dozen or so of his friends had email. Email was a much more personal experience then. Now it threatens to overwhelm everything, with many people living most of their lives in their email inboxes. This should not be. There’s much more to life.
In his New York Times bestseller, The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss suggests that a key to productivity and a fulfilling life is to go on a low-information diet and eliminate distractions so you can focus on priorities and actually accomplish important things.

One of his key recommendations is to check email no more than twice per day, and to facilitate this and reset expectations among those sending you messages he suggests creating an auto-responder for your email along these lines:

Greetings All,
Due to high workload and pending deadlines, I am currently responding to email twice daily at 12pm et and 4pm et.
If you require help with something that can’t wait until either 12pm or 4pm, please call me on my cell phone at 555-555-5555.
Thank you for understanding this move to greater effectiveness.
All the best,
Tim Ferriss

But what about people who need to be more available, whose success depends on timely response to key customers? What if responsiveness is one of your important priorities? For example, if you work in PR and a reporter with whom you are developing a relationship sends out an email to several potential interview sources, you don’t want to wait a few hours to find out about it. Someone else will have responded and will be in the story.
And sometimes you’re not at your computer. You’re in a meeting or otherwise having a life. News doesn’t happen in a predictable 8-5 schedule. So how do you stay in touch?

One “solution” to prevent missing an important email message when you’re out at a meeting is to have your Blackberry set to vibrate each time you get a new message. I used to do that. It was extremely disruptive. And it’s rude to have the Blackberry on silent mode, and then just pulling it out every so often to check messages. It tells people with whom you are meeting that they don’t have your full attention. Because they don’t.

With Facebook, you can recreate Merlin’s Edenic email world of 1993 all over again, and establish a priority level for your messages that goes beyond flagging in regular email.After all, if you’re only checking email twice a day, it doesn’t matter whether the message is flagged as highest priority or not: you’re not going to see it until you log in. That’s why you need an alternate way for people to get in touch when they really need you urgently.
If you use the Mobile application in Facebook, you can receive a text message delivered to your phone whenever someone sends you a message, or pokes you, or writes on your wall, or sends you a friend request.

So, I’m thinking I might adapt Tim’s autoresponder as follows:

Greetings All,
Due to high workload and pending deadlines, I am currently responding to email twice daily at 11 am CT and 4 pm CT.
If you require help with something that can’t wait until either 11 am or 4 pm, please call me on my office phone at 507-266-2442 during regular business hours, and ask to have me paged if I’m not at my desk.

Another way to reach me quickly any time is though Facebook (www.facebook.com). If you’re not in Facebook yet it’s easy to sign up, and 150,000 people a day are joining. Search for Lee Aase in Facebook (I’m the only Lee Aase there…one of the benefits of a unique name), and click Send Message. I will get an alert text message sent to my cell phone, so I’ll know you’ve sent me an urgent message. I’ll get back to you right away.

Thank you for understanding this move to greater effectiveness. I hope it will mean that I will be able to completely respond to the non-urgent messages on that regular schedule, and give everyone the service they need.

All the best,
Lee Aase

Michael Hyatt says his experience with the 4-Hour Workweek method has made him more productive, and he’s the CEO of a major publishing company. If you click the link above you’ll see how he’s tailored the Ferris formulation of the email autoresponse.

Even someone as promiscuous is accepting Facebook friend requests as Robert Scoble is would not likely be overwhelmed by text messages in this system. I’m one of Robert’s 4,701 friends, but I’m unlikely to send him a message unless I think it will be REALLY interesting.

If someone sends you a message in this way through Facebook that you don’t think was urgent, you can let her know that this was one that could have waited. And if she persists in not respecting the boundary you’ve set, you can block further Facebook contact.

In this way, Facebook can be not only the Spam Killer because it lets you segregate personally meaningful messages from everything else, thereby turning back the clock toward Merlin’s email Camelot; when combined with your cell phone and Facebook Mobile it also can serve as a 24-hour pager that alerts you when someone truly needs to get in touch urgently.

If you’re one of the self-employed “new rich” Tim Ferriss describes, giving your cell phone number may be the best and simplest way to let people reach you urgently. If you work for a company where someone answers your phone when you’re not able to take a call, maybe this work phone/Facebook message option will be a good option, instead of giving your personal cell phone number to anyone, including spammers, who sends you an email. We’ll see.

What do you think?

Technorati: GTD, PR, Media Relations, 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss, Merlin Mann, Facebook, B2B, Business uses of Facebook, email, e-mail

Facebook: Covering the Planet in 5 years?

Newsweek’s cover story on Facebook has an interesting quote attributed to a company cofounder:

Karel Baloun, an engineer who worked at Facebook until last year, recalls vividly the baldly stated prediction of one of the company’s cofounders: “In five years,” he said, “we’ll have everybody on the planet on Facebook.”

Is that just a lot of hype? Let’s do the math:

According to Newsweek, Facebook has 35 million users today and has “an astonishing growth rate of 3 percent a week.” Assuming 35 million users as of 8/20/2007 and continued 3 percent per week growth compounding, that would project to 62 million users by the end of the year, 108 million by the time I turn 45 in mid-May and 162 million a year from now.

Let’s take it a little further. By New Year’s Day 2009, Facebook would have something over 285 million users, and would log its billionth account around October 22 of that year. User 2,000,000,000 would sign up on April Fools Day 2010, with the total reaching 3 billion by Independence Day, just a few months later.

If that weekly growth trend continues, Facebook would have 6 billion users in January 2011, which would make that cofounder prediction of blanketing the planet in 5 years come true.
Of course lots of factors could intervene to diminish Facebook’s growth rate. As the old prospectus boilerplate says, “Past performance does not guarantee future results.” But even if Facebook’s “astonishing” growth rate were cut by a third, to 2 percent a week, it would have 400 million users by January 2010.

Here’s a PDF of the Excel spreadsheet I used in these calculations.

Facebook Growth Rates

I also uploaded the spreadsheet to my Facebook profile using the file sharing utility MediaFire, so if you want to play with different growth scenarios you can friend me and then get the file yourself and plug in different rates.

At any rate (if you’ll pardon the pun), you can see why Mark Zuckerberg turned down $1 billion for Facebook (I’ll bet he’s calculated the growth trends, too), and why many investors consider it worth more than MTV. With friends inviting friends to join, and with companies like MediaFire developing applications that extend its usefulness (I don’t have to worry about sending large email attachments anymore), Facebook’s “astonishing” growth is likely to continue.

Technorati: Facebook, users, growth, MTV, Newsweek, MediaFire, Facebook Platform

Facebook Newsweek Cover Story

The cover story in Newsweek‘s current issue is about Facebook and how it’s a) not just for college kids and b) the hottest internet property since Google. Here are a couple of key summary paragraphs:

Zuckerberg himself, whose baby-faced looks at 23 would lead any bartender in America to scrutinize his driver’s license carefully before serving a mojito, eschews talk about money. It’s all about building the company. Speaking with NEWSWEEK between bites of a tofu snack, he is much more interested in explaining why Facebook is (1) not a social-networking site but a “utility,” a tool to facilitate the information flow between users and their compatriots, family members and professional connections; (2) not just for college students, and (3) a world-changing idea of unlimited potential. Every so often he drifts back to No. 2 again, just for good measure. But the nub of his vision revolves around a concept he calls the “social graph.”

As he describes it, this is a mathematical construct that maps the real-life connections between every human on the planet. Each of us is a node radiating links to the people we know. “We don’t own the social graph,” he says. “The social graph is this thing that exists in the world, and it always has and it always will. It’s really most natural for people to communicate through it, because it’s with the people around you, friends and business connections or whatever. What [Facebook] needed to do was construct as accurate of a model as possible of the way the social graph looks in the world. So once Facebook knows who you care about, you can upload a photo album and we can send it to all those people automatically.”

I’ll have more to say about this article later; for the last few weeks I haven’t been talking about much else on this blog, as you see here. For now, just go here and give it a read, and also check out the related articles here, here and here.

What do you think about the Newsweek cover story?

Technorati: Facebook, Newsweek, social media, networking, cover story, Google