How Outgoing Are You On The Social Web?

I’m down in sunny San Diego at the Graphing Social Patterns West program for the next couple of days.

Listening to a myriad of Social Networking sites pitch, tout, and discuss features and the future.

Highlights so far:

Self Service Advertising

Facebook Platform Product Manager Ben Ling talked about their future development tools and
their growing forms of advertising to reach users on their site.

Facebook will be announcing the ability for online advertisers to login and target their users
geographically or contextually (by profile related specifics) with a Self-Service ad function.

MySpace has the same plans in the works, which also includes what they call “Hyper-Targeting” where they’ve grouped users into types they will hope will make it easy for you, someone who wants to reach a specific type of user, to do so.

What’s the big deal?

If they built a tool that was Pay Per Performance, then I’d really take notice. And spend money.
Facebook and MySpace- wow me. Please. I dare you.

Reaching 10 Million Users In 10 Weeks

BJ Fogg, a teacher at Stanford, created the first Facebook class for students. BJ’s site is at here

Students were pushed to develop 3 Facebook Apps in the 8 weeks of the course. Here are some fascinating tidbits:

-Over $500,000 in revenue generated

-The simplest Apps tended to outperform and catch on with users better than more complex ones

-3 of the students are now starting companies with the success and attention their App has
attracted

-2 of the students already had their project acquired

-3 students dropped out of school to start a business together

-The TA for the class has also left to start a company

-6 of the 20+ Apps created by the students went on to become Top 100 Facebook Apps

Take aways from this short presentation:

-Build an App quickly, test it, re-iterate, test again. The best Apps in the class went through
several iterations to get it right and start getting referred/used

-Apps are a quick way to acquire exposure and get attention, but these are “game” type Apps
or social “toys”- hardly business tie ins

-There is a lot of traffic to be acquired if you jump in and create the right app that users will
want to use/pass along

Deepening Existing Relationships

Charlene Li from Forrester outlined some of the past, present and future of the Social Network
ecosphere. More than anyone I’ve heard so far, she’s talking about not just interaction, tech, or traffic and eyeballs… but about deepening RELATIONSHIPS through the use of Social Networks.

Translation= adding value to our existing everyday activities through the extension of social services and features.

Charlene seems to understand that the recent social network activity, while spurring innovation and investment/acquisition value, still hasn’t forced companies to take a long hard look in the mirror about how to keep these users and provide them with something they’d value enough to pay for.

Or maybe I’m just the one who’s too stuck on the revenue game.

More on Social Networks, Web 2.0, and video to come in the future as I put some new strategies to work. Stay tuned…

Awareness, Focus & Time

There’s something crazy I was reminded of the other day as I was reading…

Something that for most of us in 100% completely UNCONSCIOUS and we’re so “deep” in it that it never occurs to us how we really are, that there is another way to be.

Kind of like if you asked a goldfish how it felt to be wet. If you could ask, the goldfish would just stare at you and think… “Wet? What the hell is this person talking about?”

The point is… our minds have a funny little habit of developing patterns and ways of thinking and perceiving that become so ingrained that we see them as “reality”. And we become more and more fixed and stuck in these patterns the more we use them.

Sounds like pretty esoteric stuff. So let me give an example of what I’m talking about to make this more simple and interesting. Here are some common mental and perceptive “orientations” that are very general and involve our perception of TIME:

-Focusing On Things That Have Happened In THE PAST

-Focusing On Things That Will Happen In THE FUTURE

These are the 2 of the most obvious and clear-cut examples around. But what’s fascinating is that they have a HUGE IMPACT on the way you take in and experience the world, and what you do as a result.

A few other non-Time related modes of thinking/perception are:

-Is The World An Inherently GOOD Place? Or Is it BAD?

-Are People Basically Thoughtful And NICE? Or Are They Selfish And Evil?

Anyhow… back to our perception of TIME. The way we use and think about time can largely dictate where our attention and focus goes.

If you pay significant attention to what will happen in the future, and you experience FEAR and FRUSTRATION about what will be… then it’s no surpise that this will have influence on your perception of events, your thinking, and even your actions in the present time.

And people wonder why there’s so much “mumbo jumbo” about positive intention these days… when it’s not the “supernatural” power of influencing your future that’s at stake – it’s your state of mind and your actions in the present that are largely effected by your views on your own future.

Funny how that works…

So then what happens if you can think your way to what the good things you want and are going to create in the future will look and feel like? Does this have some relevance on THE PRESENT if you take the time to think this through and then walk back in your mind to the present day from where you want to be in the future.

Yes, it does.

Some call it scenario planning. (Large corporations)

Some call it “The Secret”.

Some call it NLP. (Neuro-Linguistic Programming)

Whatever you want to call it… it’s fun, interesting and important to check-in with yourself and take a look at your own mental “model”.

Do you think about THE PAST a lot? And in what context? To criticize yourself? To relive past negative experiences in an effort to somehow make good on them, or to avoid them in the future?

Or do you think about the future? And do you dream, or do you WORRY?

Start to become CONSCIOUS of where in time you spend your mental energy. And in what context. You’ll like the outcome… I promise.