6 Things Facebook May Be Over- Or Underestimating

The biggest, most popular social network is rightfully confident in their product, but perhaps Facebook has gotten a little too confident. After all, arrogance has the reputation for blinding.little too confident.
Does Facebook need to dip their toes in modest waters, or is it doing just fine? You decide. Here are six things Facebook is overestimating and underestimating.

Overestimating: User Adaptability

Frequent interface changes make Facebook users mad, that’s no secret. Facebook perversely assumes that despite their users’ dissonance they’ll stay faithful to the platform — no matter what. With this mentality, a reliance on users’ threshold for change is pressed to the limits.
Facebook’s most recent changes pushed many users to the edge. Although the amount is unknown, threats and declarations to quit the platform are made aplenty each time Facebook implements its changes.

Overestimating: Brand Loyalty

Facebook may have over 800 million active users, but that doesn’t mean they’re brand-loyal. Earlier this year Facebook collaborated with AT&;T on a mobile phone, the HTC Status. The “Facebook phone” was expected to reel in purchases from Facebook lovers and addicts alike, but with sales so poor the phone faced discontinuation rumors early on.
Lesson learned: Facebook users are weak in brand loyalty. Just because a product is marketed as Facebook friendly, doesn’t mean it will sell. Wonder if there’s any hope for Buffy?

Overestimating: Engineer Recruitment

No, Facebook. Not every young, brilliant mind wants to work for you. With aspirations of making their own dent on the universe, the appeal of working for a small start up over a powerhouse company like Facebook is becoming a popular decision among young developers.
Facebook is a massive company with thousands of employees. Young computer science students entering the workforce don’t want to be just another number; they want to make a difference. Hot new start ups are staying competitive on the recruitment front by selling company intimacy and impact possibility.

Overestimating: China

Will China ever release its ban on Facebook? It’s an exhausted topic.
Although it’s impossible to accurately say what Facebook’s current plans for China are, it is fair to assume the social network wants acceptance by the entire world, especially the country with the largest population.
It’s doubtful that Facebook has given up the fight to win China’s approval, although maybe that’s worth reconsidering. The Chinese have their successful social networking sites, so no one over there is missing out on anything.

 

 

Underestimating: Privacy

Give them an inch; they’ll go a mile. Five years ago I would have never been okay with the world seeing my personal information and photos, however, as the years have passed I’ve loosened up on my privacy settings. Likely, my story speaks to many.
For those who have yet to be properly acquainted to this new world of total transparency, of which Facebook is responsible, they’re still fighting the good war and seem to have won a small battle, as the FTC recently put Facebook in check.
This just proves that privacy — or a right to privacy control — is non-negotiable for users and Facebook’s coaxing for more lax privacy settings will not work.

Underestimating: Google Plus

Despite media reports to the contrary, Google Plus is growing, says its Vice President of Product, Bradley Horowitz.
With the recent release of brand pages, the nascent social network is helping Google compete directly with Facebook. Whether s this a legitimate reason for the leading social network to stay on its toes remains to be seen.

First Congressional Facebook Hackathon Starts Today

Facebook developers, Congressional staff and members of Congress, transparency experts and digital innovators, will be welcomed to Capitol Hill today as Congressional leaders host the first Congressional Facebook Developer Hackathon.
The bipartisan Hackathon was announced by the offices of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia and Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer of Maryland.
According to a press release, the event will, “explore the potential connections between legislative data, constituent correspondence, and social media.”
The format of the four-hour Hackathon will include general sessions and breakout sessions on a range of topics, from casework and constituent services, legislative workflow (floor operations and committee meetings and how they’re structured), and press and public relations.
According to Stephen Dwyer, director of online communications for Whip Hoyer, the organizers had to close the event after registering 250 people. The organizers will release a report after the Hackathon, since the event will not be streamed online.
And in late-breaking news on a related Facebook issue, the House passed H.R. 2471 Tuesday -– a bipartisan bill that would enable Netflix customers to share their rental history on Facebook.
The legislation was highlighted by the two companies’ Chief Executive Officers Reed Hastings and Mark Zuckerberg at this September’s f8 developers conference.
Despite early opposition in the House, the bill ultimately passed today.
Matt Lira of Leader Cantor’s office shared this statement with us about the Hackathon:

Leader Cantor and Whip Hoyer are excited to bring together programmers, software developers and Capitol Hill stakeholders to discuss ways to improve Congressional operations. Since announcing the event, the reaction from the public has been very enthusiastic; in terms of turnout, regardless of the final number, I’ll be happy so long as the people who do participate are interested in solving problems together.

Democratic Whip Hoyer also shared his thoughts with us via email:

Online technologies are transforming our society, and that includes Congress. By utilizing social media platforms like Facebook, we can keep our constituents informed of how we are working for them, and stay informed ourselves so that we can better serve them. However, there is still a lot of work to be done, and I’m pleased that both parties have a chance to come together with industry leaders like Facebook, as well as individuals who bring new ideas to the table on how we can keep the legislative process as open and accessible as possible.

Adaptly Looks To Track Facebook Marketing Momentum

The latest approach to Facebook marketing analytics comes from Adaptly, which said its Momentum measurement tool tracks more than 160 social metrics, as well as accounting for every dollar spent.
Adaptly Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer Nikhil Sethi said in a blog post introducing Momentum that the company wanted to look beyond traditional paid metrics such as clicks, impressions, and click-through rates, and add the ability to track what he called owned and earned metrics, such as likes, retweets, stumbles, and people talking about this.
Sethi said Momentum enables users to evaluate how their marketing initiatives have impact their overall brand performance across all mediums, adding:

If we continue to base our paid media buys on only the paid media metrics, we are only measuring one- of the value generated. These results leave so much value on the table, and we believe there should be a better KPI (key performance indicator) suited specifically for social. Adaptly has taken on this challenge and developed a new system that measures all three channels collectively (paid, earned, and owned).

The simple hypothesis that we all can agree on is that social is a pretty good reflection of reality. As people increasingly share more of their lives on social networks and events continue to permeate the social sphere within moments after they occur in real life, we are not only able to measure the relative effects of digital, but also of offline media events, as well.

When we observe the impact of paid social media, it no longer becomes about the spikes (which we can all expect), but the lasting post-media spend lift. This becomes a more relevant success metric and powerful way to measure the impact of each dollar spent across social as we start to measure and report paid’s effect across owned media and earned media channels.

GroSocial To Offer White-Label Facebook Tab Solution

Facebook marketing technology outfit GroSocial is set to announce an intriguing offering aimed at marketing agencies and developers looking to enter the space: a personalized, branded, white-label version of the Customizer platform.
Customizer enables small and midsized businesses to create custom tabs for their Facebook pages, including promotions, polls, and contests.
The white-label offering that GroSocial is announcing this morning allows other companies to provide all of the capabilities of Customizer, but everything will be hosted on their domains and feature their logos, color schemes, and branding.
GroSocial Chief Executive Officer Zach Mangum said the white-label offering has been “quietly” operating since June, with more than 10 partners to date. He discussed small companies involved in web hosting and development, as well as marketing agencies, targeting small and midsized businesses:

They may be large organizations and have a lot of people, but that doesn’t mean any of them know a thing about Facebook or Twitter. Rather than bringing on a team to try to build something in-house that might build the right thing, we go to them and say, “we know the market, our solution works.”

End-users never really get into the platform, just the agencies and people providing the services. Smaller and midsized agencies want their clients to use the product, but not know that it’s GroSocial’s, and think it’s theirs. It truly looks like it’s their product in every way. No one in our space is really a direct competitor.

X1 Technologies Adds Robust Facebook Search Ability

X1 Technologies claims it’s been an active player in the search sector since late 2003, and the company’s latest software release, X1 Pro 7, adds the capability to search Facebook, Twitter, and Webmail to the existing ability to search corporate email and local files.
The new offering from X1, launching in beta Wednesday, will index the content of users, their friends, and friends of their friends, according to vice president of engineering Sumeet Sheokand, who added that X1 Pro 7 allows users to search their walls, their news feeds, and their status updates, as well as to archive their Facebook content.
According to Sheokand, X1 Pro 7 will also automatically fetch new comments on older posts and update its index, and users can search by keywords and filter out certain elements or users. Searches can also be saved, where they are available on the left-hand side of the page, along with the software’s other navigation tools.
Users can also play videos or view photos directly via X1 Pro 7, where they will appear in the pane on the right-hand side. And they can use the search capabilities to see what the Facebook social graph is currently talking about by searching for, as an example, Occupy Wall Street and examining the results.
We got an advance copy of the beta version and found the interface and access to the functionality of X1 Pro 7 to be extremely straightforward and easy to use. As with similar search products, the initial indexing can take quite a deal of time, but it’s a onetime task, and once it was completed, the response time of X1 Pro 7 was quick, with relevant results being delivered.
“Our goal was not to provide a better Facebook experience for its hundreds of millions of users,” X1 president Kevin Bray said. “We looked at what we do well, and we applied it. We want to eliminate as many clicks as possible.”
On the motivation for adding Facebook and Twitter to X1’s arsenal, Bray added, “It’s no secret that search hasn’t caught up to all of the other value that social media provides. We looked at social media and saw the same noise everyone else sees.”
X1 Pro 7 will be available free-of-charge during its beta period, after which the cost has yet to be determined. The current version of the X1 Professional Client costs $50, and Bray said the company will eventually offer the ability to search Facebook, Twitter, and Webmail as separate components.
Readers: What do you currently use to search Facebook?

Facebook To Roll Out Timeline In New Zealand

New Zealand is the site of the long-awaited debut of Facebook’s timeline profile.
According to a post on the official Facebook Blog, the updated profile will be rolled out to other regions of the world “in the near future.”
The post says:

We announced timeline in September and made it available to developers building apps on our platform. Since then, more than one million people have signed up for the developer beta to access timeline. The feedback we’ve received so far has been invaluable. Starting today, we are making timeline more widely available as we measure speed and other types of performance. We’ll begin by making it available to people in New Zealand and then roll it out more broadly in the near future.

Readers, will you choose to upgrade to the new advanced profile when it becomes available in your region?

Only Excess Use Of Facebook Harms Students, Slightly

Students’ grades drop by about .12 points for every 93 minutes above the 106-minute average time spent per day on Facebook, according to the latest study on the topic.
Indeed, studies about the effect of Facebook on students’ grades come out every month. This latest one we’re referring to here is based on a survey of 1,839 college students conducted by Reynol Junco, in the Department of Academic Development and Counseling at Lock Haven University in Pennsylvania.
OnlineEducation.net compiled the findings in the infographic reproduced below. Let us know what you think in the comments section.

Gingrich, Romney Use Video To Gain Facebook Fans

Fans of GOP presidential candidates Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich have launched two video campaigns to boost their Facebook presences, and hopefully their fan bases.
Gingrich, who has catapulted to the top of the national polls in recent days, shared a video clip — using the YouTube for Facebook app — from his appearance in Mike Huckabee’s Presidential Candidate Forum, where he compares himself to George Washington, his favorite Founding Father.
Mitt Romney, on the other hand, launched a new fundraising drive, “Grab a Bite With Mitt,” through Facebook. For as little as a $5 donation, you too, can grab some alone time and grub with the former Massachusetts governor.
How are these new video initiatives affecting the Facebook fan counts of each candidate?
Since posting the video this morning, Gingrich has added 1,711 new fans to Facebook, according to our Election Tracker 2012. He continues on an  upward trajectory in Facebook fan growth while he continues to fare well in voter polls taking place off of Facebook.
By contrast, Romney’s sagging poll figures don’t seem to be affecting his fan base on Facebook, yet. He still leads the other GOP hopefuls by a wide margin in Facebook fans, with more than 1.2 million. And in the last day, since posting the new fundraising video, his fans grew by 1,165.
Do you think videos are an effective way to add Facebook fans?

2 In 3 Facebook Pages Deck The Halls For The Holidays: Exclusive Study And Infographic

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas. But how is that translating to the virtual world we make our living in?
Our team of market research elves at ShortStack formulated a series of holiday-specific questions about page layout and design, discounts, contests, and sweepstakes, and posed a survey to our users. They came away with some pretty interesting data:
Of the 1,020 page administrators who responded, a whopping 68.6 percent are decorating for the holidays.
Some are going all out, like Marimuthu D., of Balti Curries, “We changed our profile picture, the photo strip and tabs to suit the Christmas holidays.”
Others, like graphic designer Lorann Snow, are taking a more subtle approach: “I like understated graphical changes to celebrate holidays. For example, I will add some snowflakes.”
At 34.5 percent, more than a third of those surveyed are implementing some kind of holiday photo contest, like Bronwyn E. of Barnes.com.au: “We’re running an ‘upload a photo of a Christmas gift you’ve made by hand’ tab for the holiday season.”
A Couple of Chicks e-marketing is adding numerous holiday features, according to Christy H., “We’re allowing people to post about their favorite holiday traditions, upload favorite photos, post recipes, what causes they support, etc.”
Not to be lost in the numbers are the pages bringing the true Christmas spirit to Facebook. Giving to and helping those in need was a common theme among those polled.
The infographic below offers more details on what admins are doing this season. How does this compare with your own holiday activities online, readers?
Guest writer Jim Belosic is president of ShortStack.

WARNING: Facebook Users’ Private Photos Exposed

The tool that allows Facebook users to report inappropriate photos is backfiring in a big way, allowing users to see other users’ photos that are marked as private.
ZDNet’s Between the Lines blog reported that users who click on “Report This Photo” and choose “Nudity or pornography” from the pop-up menu are then offered the opportunity to “help” Facebook by adding additional photos to their report.
Upon selecting that option, users gain access to additional photos, including those that were marked private by the users who posted them.
The ZDNet blog cited a forum on BodyBuilding.com, since deleted, for being the first to report the issue, saying that users on that forum were able to exploit it to access the private photos of Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, posting a picture of him and President Barack Obama at a dinner party (see below, via Between the Lines).
Users of the forum also reported that the private photos could be viewed at their full size.
A Facebook spokesperson addressed the issue Tuesday afternoon, saying:

Earlier today, we discovered a bug in one of our reporting flows that allows people to report multiple instances of inappropriate content simultaneously. The bug allowed anyone to view a limited number of another user’s most recently uploaded photos, irrespective of the privacy settings for these photos.  This was the result of one of our recent code pushes, and it was live for a limited period of time. Upon discovering the bug, we immediately disabled the system, and will only return functionality once we can confirm the bug has been fixed.

The privacy of our users’ data is a top priority for us, and we invest significant resources in protecting our site and the people who use it. We hire the most qualified and highly skilled engineers and security professionals at Facebook, and with the recent launch of our Security Bug Bounty Program, we continue to work with the industry to identify and resolve legitimate threats to help us keep the site safe and secure for everyone.

Readers: Does this issue make you want to delete photos from your Facebook profile?

4.74 — Facebook Wins By Getting Us Closer Than Six Degrees

Facebook users are getting more connected to each other as the service grows and matures, according to a new study by the company’s data team and the University of Milan. Instead of the traditional “six degrees of separation” that researchers have historically observed between all people in the world (and Kevin Bacon), the number of degrees has been dropping since 2008 on the site, from 5.28 then to 4.74 now.

This isn’t just an interesting factoid about the modern world, it highlights Facebook’s long-term strategy, and its dominant market position in social networking. Founder Mark Zuckerberg has proclaimed for years that his goal is to make the world more “open and connected.” In practice, that’s meant features across the site that do things like reveal what friends you have in common with any other user, and suggest that you become friends with people you’ve never met in person and have no friends in common with.

Those features have a big impact on the average user. Let’s say you meet a stranger in real life who you want to know more about. For example, you can Google-stalk them to try to find out anything interesting they’ve done over the years, but you’re going to go to Facebook to see if you have any mutual friends. Then, you might friend them. Repeat that process for its 800 million-plus users over the years and all these connections are just getting tighter and tighter.

Facebook’s big goal is to be the social layer for everything in the world — the way you get recommendations for music, news articles, products to buy, and anything else. These closer social connections mean that Facebook is getting more and more information about what you, your friends, your friends of friends, your friend of friends of friends of friends, etc. like or don’t like. It uses all of this information to make smarter recommendations for all of the ads on its site, and to create a more valuable platform for any third-party developer. Any rival that hopes to offer its own separate social layer is going to have to work harder and harder to beat these ever-strengthening connections and the possibilities they create.

Facebook’s IPO Motive: Keeping Employees, Not Compliance

Many people have believed that Facebook’s initial public offering is due in 2012 since the company announced its giant funding round from Goldman Sachs at the start of this year. At that point, the company said in a press release that it ”expected to pass 500 shareholders at some point in 2011, and therefore expects to start filing public financial reports no later than April 30, 2012.”

Public filings don’t necessarily mean a company has to make its stock available for public purchase, but most usually do anyway.

But our understanding is that it will be going public sometime next year for a different reason: rewarding its large roster of talented employees, who have been waiting years to cash in. Compliance isn’t the primary motive.

Purely from a financial perspective, the pressure for an IPO has been building internally, even as chief executive Mark Zuckerberg and other leaders have downplayed the  idea. (In fact, for a while I was wondering if maybe Facebook just wouldn’t IPO, or at least not for years, something others who follow the company closely, like David Kirkpatrick, have also speculated about.)

After distributing standard stock option plans to employees in its early years, Facebook switched to restricted stock units in late 2008. Instead of vesting into stock that employees owned like options had, RSUs could only be sold after an IPO. Meanwhile, Facebook restricted current employees from selling any stock they owned, although it couldn’t stop former employees from doing so. Instead, as a stop-gap liquidity measure, it allowed employees to sell a small portion of their options in late 2008 through 2009. Newer employees who got RSUs haven’t had the same opportunities.

But over the last couple months, I’ve heard from sources close to the company that it could file as soon as early next year, and no later than the end of next year, which matches widespread reports that have come out already. That Zuckerberg has started setting expectations along these lines with employees, as Business Insider hears today, is not too surprising.

Facebook has worked hard to recruit or acquire some of the top engineers and product leaders in the world, even as most of its early core employees have left for early retirement or to start their own companies. Between the flush funding environment and trendy image of doing startups these days, along with big offers from rivals like Google and Twitter, a vague promise of a big exit has become a harder sell.

So despite fears that an IPO would introduce the pressure for short-term profits instead of long-term value or spoil employees to the point that they lose the edge they have today, delays have gotten harder for Zuckerberg and Facebook to justify. The 500-shareholder rule is often cited as the main rationale for why the company will go public next year. But between Facebook’s ability to file public documents without going public, and a new bill working its way through Congress that would raise the minimum requirement to 2000 shareholders, it actually isn’t as big of a concern.

In any case, an IPO is going to be one of the company’s biggest tests. Can it maintain its talent pool and grow revenue like Google, Amazon, Apple and other top tech companies have been able to do? Can it maintain its vision for being the social layer across everything in the world? We’re about to find out.