Still think Facebook is a Fad?

If you are dealing with skeptics questioning whether social networking is worthwhile for your organization, maybe this post (and the Washington Post article that inspired it) will help you make your case.

From yesterday’s Washington Post:

In 2010, Facebook pushed past Google to become the most popular site on the Internet for the first time, according to two Web tracking firms. The title caps a year of rapid ascent for Facebook in which the social network hit 500 million users and founder Mark Zuckerberg was named Time magazine’s Person of the Year. It also marks another milestone in the ongoing shift in the way Americans spend their time online, a social change that profoundly alters how people get news and interact with one another – and even the definition of the word “friend.”

“This is the most transformational shift in the history of the Internet,” said Lou Kerner, a social-media analyst with Wedbush Securities and former chief executive of Bolt.com, an early networking site. “We’re moving from a Google-centric Web to a people-centric Web.”

According to Experian Hitwise, Facebook jumped to the top spot after spending last year in third place and the year before ranked ninth. The company found that 8.9 percent of unique online visits were to Facebook this year, compared with Google’s 7.2 percent. Meanwhile, ComScore, another firm that calculates Web traffic, said Facebook is on track in 2010 to surpass Google for the first time in number of pages viewed. Each unique visit to a site can result in multiple page views….

Another interesting element from the story is the comparison of market valuations, which pegs Facebook at $45 billion, roughly a quarter of Google, despite the search giant having more than 20 times Facebook’s revenue.

This reminds me of a post I did three years ago, in which I said Facebook was worth more than the Wall Street Journal, the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Cubs, the Los Angeles Times and YouTube…combined.

Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer and their Microsoft (MSFT) colleagues had given Facebook this $15 billion valuation, buying 1.6 percent of Facebook stock for $240 million.

This seemed like an outlandish valuation at the time, even before the 2008 economic meltdown sent the prices of everything crashing.

Facebook still isn’t publicly traded, but the latest figures suggest it has tripled in value in just over three years.

And now it’s the most-trafficked site on the Web, adding nearly a million users a day.

It has about 8 percent of the world’s population among its regular users.

If your organization’s work involves interacting with humans, Facebook is definitely worth your time and attention.

If you’ve got one of these…

…why would you not get a Facebook page for your business or organization?

Here are four reasons why a Facebook page is better than a Yellow pages ad, and why it’s not even a close call.

  1. A Yellow Pages ad is expensive. A Facebook page is free.
  2. A Yellow Pages ad typically has a distinctive cast that suggests jaundice. Color is even more expensive. Your organization’s logo (or other photo) goes on your Facebook page in full-color for free.
  3. A Yellow Pages ad is limited to text and maybe a photo or two. A Facebook page can have unlimited photos, not to mention videos. (Well, I guess I did just mention videos.)
  4. A Yellow Pages ad reaches a limited geographic market. Anyone in the world can see your Facebook page, except for citizens of repressive political regimes or employees or corporate regimes with a blocking philosophy.

I could go on, talking about how on Facebook your best customers can interact with you and share the love with their friends, while a Yellow pages ad is static. And how the paper directories can get lost on a snowy doorstep (at least here in the frozen tundra.)

I’m certain those with a proprietary interest in Yellow Pages (or Yellow Book, or whatever post Ma Bell-breakup variety you have in your area) would be quick to point out how they also have online directories as part of their package.

But that misses the point. The yellows used to have monopolies when people were looking for a particular category of service. It was expensive to produce a paper directory and deliver to every household in an area.

Now with Yelp and Angie’s List and countless other similar sites, it’s easy for potential customers to get information (including contact phone numbers) for local service providers.

And don’t forget local search in Google.

My point is not to run down the yellow directories, or to say you shouldn’t use them. That’s a call you have to make. Maybe they work for you, and should be part of your mix. If their publishers are doing their jobs well, they should be continually adding features to improve their value proposition.

But if you’re spending substantially for Yellow Pages, why wouldn’t you use the free option, too?

Feedburner: Dress Up Your Feeds

Chancellor’s Note: This is part of the SMUG beautification project, cleaning out some of the underbrush of content originally published at the “page” level but that needs to be demoted.

This content was first published on October 22, 2006. Since then, Google bought Feedburner. But Feedburner is still a great way to add functionality to the RSS feeds from your blog.

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Thanks to Shel Holtz for his advice on how to incorporate “Digg This” and “Add to Del.icio.us” links/badges into blog posts, using FeedFlare, a free service that is available through Feedburner, another free service.
Feedburner
That’s also where I got the badges for My Yahoo, Google Reader, and others that you see at right. Shel explained that Feedburner adapts and enhances your site’s existing RSS feed and provides great reporting on subscriptions and click-throughs.

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Feedburner is definitely still a service worth exploring.

City Manager Suicides Increase

That’s the headline I was envisioning when I saw this on the Google home page this morning:

I thought it was the way Google had chosen to announce the city selected for its super-fast fiber community project. And with the mania and hoopla surrounding this contest, I could envision city managers taking one look at their search screens this morning and heading to the window for a leap.

If they waited about 30 seconds, though, some additional links were added to the screen:

Which took you to this post on the Google Blog explaining what it was all about. Or at least calming the panic among city officials whose fiber fantasies had been crushed.

Google has a long tradition of April Fools jokes; given the timing relating to the Google Fiber contest, this is probably on of its better efforts.

Thesis 23: Everyone uses social media today

The growth of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter has been phenomenal, particularly in 2009. Facebook now boasts 350 million active users, while Twitter grew by more than 1,500 percent during 2008 – and then the growth really started to take off in 2009.

Thesis 4 would be reasonable, I think, based on these factors alone. Social media are the defining communications trend of this millennium, which is not to say they are the only important means of communication or that they have supplanted TV, radio and newspaper. (OK, well maybe newspaper.) But they embody the communications characteristic that defines our time: that anyone

But Thesis 23 says social media already are bigger than most people realize, because they don’t just include networking sites for which you need an account to participate, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and MySpace.

YouTube is in essence a social networking site for videos, and it is the world’s second-biggest search engine after Google. So everyone who watches a YouTube video is in essence participating in social media. Those videos may even be embedded on  mainstream media Web sites. But the reason we even get a chance to see them is because there is a site like YouTube which is open for anyone to upload a video at no cost. This again is how social media are defining this era.

The other reason I say everyone uses social media comes from the nature of blogs. I heard Susannah Fox of the Pew Internet Project speak at a conference in October, and she said something that validated an opinion I’ve long held. She said she expected that her organization would soon retire one of its standard survey questions because it doesn’t provide reliable information. That question asks whether respondents read blogs or not, and the affirmative percentage has held steady at about 30 percent for the last few years.

But the reality is that a blog is just an easy-to-publish Web site that allows comments. So lots of people are reading blogs as they search and surf the Web, and in most cases there isn’t a flashing icon that alerts readers that they are on a blog. I believe that anyone who spends appreciable time on the Web spends at least some time on blogs. Especially given how search engines like Google favor blogs and YouTube videos, it’s almost inconceivable that someone could do 20 Google searches without ending up on at least one site with social media elements.

So between YouTube, the most popular video source on the Web, and blogs, which are the easiest way to publish a Web site, I believe the overwhelming majority of Web users participate in some way with social media, even if it’s only as a consumer of content.

In Thesis 23 as originally posted I said:

Almost all Web surfers use social media today. They just may not know it.

For the headline of this post, and in keeping with the provocative nature of social media, I just rounded up and said “Everyone.”

I don’t think it’s much of an exaggeration. Everyone uses social media today, whether they know it or not. Even more than that, social media dramatically affect the types and amounts of content available to be consumed.

As social media grow, the proportion of time people spend on sites with social capabilities also will increase, as will the proportion of participants moving from strictly consuming content to at least commenting or rating. And many users will move from the ranks of consumers to producers, especially as the user interfaces continue to get easier.

The fact that you are reading this post means you are a social media user, at least at this moment.

Welcome to the revolution.