Facebook vs. Google: Why Facebook is Succeeding

Today’s NY Times article on Facebook’s rapid success in global reach serves to show that the battle between Google and Facebook is in full swing. Google beat out Microsoft and Yahoo! in search and now it faces an even bigger threat from Facebook.

Google has failed lately with every attempt to become a “social network” to tie in it’s search strength. Given our research we spend a lot of time looking at these two, amongst many others. I see pluses and minuses to both these companies and their services. Here’s why I think Facebook will lead the social network battle, unless Google thinks in similar ways.

Facebook is a little like AOL was 12+ years ago – a closed network aiming to provide content. AOL died because people prefer to decide on what they want to do and see online.  What Facebook provides is simply a “framework” making it easy for people to shape their “content experience” in the same way humans behave offline in groups. Facebook fits well into human social interactions. Google does not.

Google is all about “open” and in this sense is “non-linear”. Buzz is an interesting service concept, but it’s not that easy to use. It takes a fair bit of effort to figure out. Facebook does not. It’s more complex to move about Googles services, they don’t “combine” easily. I’m a huge fan of GoogleApps, and they’ve done well with how you can manage and access GoogleDocs. If they took that approach into a social networking format, they may do better.

But the biggest challenge Google faces now with regard to Facebook is portability of peoples networks. People don’t have the time for multiple social networks. Once they build their profile and connect with people they want to connect with, it’s done. If Google finds a way to “import” all your Facebook data, including all your friends, fan pages, groups pages and such, then they may have a hope. That is unlikely however. There will need to be a a very compelling reason to switch. The switching cost is just too high for the average consumer.

Google made a huge mistake with Buzz – they assumed everybody wants to connect with everybody. They don’t. Most people connect with only those they want to; friends, family, co-workers. In the Gen X to Lost Generation segments, they don’t randomly add people. They tend to cultivate the relationships they have. Millenials will quickly and easily add people to their network, but they restrict carefully who they closely communicate with.

There are over 100 cultural, ethnic or nationalist oriented social networks around the world. Facebook is getting people to move over. How? I’m not sure, but they’re doing it. Perhaps because of how well Facebook provides a framework for people to work from?

This battle for eyeballs and consumer time will be an interesting one. Google has some phenomenal resources in terms of human smarts at it’s disposal and now so does Facebook. For now though, when it comes to massive global penetration of social networks however, I’ll put my money on Facebook.

Are Behavior Awards Effective in Social Media Marketing?

I haven’t seen much evidence of success in three years of developing strategies and research for clients across a number of sectors. Yet it seems to still be happening – Huffington Post today is riding the FourSquare hockey stick upcurve of success; they’re giving out “badges” for good behaviour.

Are we secretly craving that return to elementary school days and getting those gold stars for good behaviour? Perhaps deep in our psyche we are. Or not.

Our attention for media channels is so fractured today. It would appear that when a new app comes out (i.e. Twitter) and begins an ascendancy in popularity, other Web services jump on to attempt to cash in – the halo effect.

But what are the expected and acceptable returns? A 2% uptick in traffic? Direct Mail campaigns are considered successful with a 2% return, 3% is knocking it out of the ballpark. Email campaigns have slid down to the 2% mark for a success metric.

Microblogging service Plurk gives you “Karma points” for building friends and engaging in conversation. Plurk has failed to garner the traffic and growth of Twitter. By a long-shot. I don’t know about you, but I have enough trouble managing my karma as it is without someone else messing with it.

While I see increased use of FourSquare and Yelp, they too rely on rewarding you for activity. The simple reason is creating loyalty since the more eyeballs and activity increases the value of the ads sold on the site. But is it sustainable? Games like Mafia Wars and Farmville are but fads.

The question is, will loyalty marketing behavioral promotions be effective? Modifying peoples behaviour through marketing techniques is never easy and often a losing proposition.

(Author: G. Crouch, MD)

Social Media Marketing – Understand the Channel Culture First

Or perhaps, second. First before you engage in a Social Media marketing effort, you need to “listen” to the conversations, to understand them and what channels they are taking place in. Secondly, you need to understand the “culture” of that channel; the way it is used, the “tribe leaders”, the expectations from engagement, the beliefs of the participants and the form of the content.

Understanding this Channel Culture is as important as listening. It’s one thing to know the desired destination, it’s another to know how to engage. Going to England? Are you ready to drive on the left hand side of the road?

Here’s how we define the elements of Channel Culture from our research;

1. How It’s Used: Twitter is used essentially as a news push. Whether you’re expressing what your doing or sharing breaking or interesting stories.The nature and types of content may change as well, based on time of year or week and more.

2. Behaviours: How one “behaves” in Facebook versus a more closed environment such as Instant Messaging is crucial to developing your brands “tone of voice” in that channel. Listening helps to understand the way your marketing team can engage in the chosen mediums.

3. Tribe Leaders: In Twitter and in the blogosphere, there are those seen as “leaders” by the way they engage and how respected they are by their peers in that channel. There are always leaders. Always. How they lead varies. Some may be obvious, others simply through sheer presence and subsequent influence.

4. Beliefs or Values: In Social Media channels, people develop sets of values and beliefs that are evolved as the channel evolves. These may be the type of content encouraged or discouraged, the length of the content, acceptable responses and an understandable link to the nature of the channel with your product. Trying to sell freezers at a golf course is not a smart marketing move.

5. Rules of Conduct: Yes, they exist. Always. They may be established “rules” by the administrator of a chat room or forum (i.e. the moderator) or they may be very informal. But breaking them can get you banished and instantly dropped causing reputation management issues and a potential crisis leaking over into other channels; kind of like Facebook and Nestle.

These elements come together and form the nature of the culture of the channel. Understanding them can help mitigare failure, guide content development, creative opportunities and process of engagement for marketers.

(Author: Giles Crouch, MD)

The 60% Social Media Misses

Those who study human communication habits say that 60% of our communication with each other is body language (hand movement, facial expressions, posture etc.) so other than using video chat tools, essentially, Social Media is missing 60% of the message in text and audio tools. Video enables this to some degree, but unless you’re in a two-way video chat/conference you’re only communicating one-way.

As is our nature, we compensate to some degree in text-based tools by the use of “emoticons“, changing font sizes and using perhaps bold or italics. which helps to a degree.

It’s also still a leading source of communicating in Social Media channels. Video still has issues such as connections, poor images, incompatible systems/camera’s, bandwidth hogging and sound delays. All of which is to say, we’re still missing something.

We’ve kind of hit a plateau with Social Media I think (more on that later) and we’ve adopted these tools. But where does it go from here?

Will text-based social tools still stay dominant? If video starts to take over eventually, how will we deal with the critical aspect of linking to reference each others work?

(Author: Giles Crouch)

Social Media Behaviour: The Kid Phase?

There’s a lot of nasty behaviour online – understatement of 2010. A tweet from a smart communicator, Lauren, lead me to a post about Richard Dawkins feeling slighted over improper behaviour on his forums. The irony of the subsequent comments on that blog post were rather enjoyable.

We’re facing a complex set of new issues around social rules on the Web; in Social Media channels and other online channels. As humanity, these technology tools give us an ability to express ourselves unlike ever before.

Given all the research we do on Social and Digital Media, behaviour is something we look at regularly. We wade through an immense swampland of comments and discussions daily. And probably 85% of it is junk. Spam, nasty comments that are destructive rather than constructive. Porn spammers and the rest. The problem is, we face a challenge in moderating this behaviour in Cyburbia that we don’t have in the real world.

In the real-world in a group of people gathered for whatever reason, a naysayer or nasty person can be quickly shut down and asked to leave. In forums, newsgroups or blog/newspaper comments, there are moderators or a person can be deleted from a forum (but they can easily re-register.) So there are limits to what can be done effectively in Cyburbia. Then you get to issues like Richard Dawkins’ and the final result is to shut off the channel altogether, then we all suffer. Something that can be avoided in the real world.

We often call this online behaviour “childish”. Perhaps because that is exactly the phase we’re in with Social Media; we’re just finding our “Voice of Humanity” and so much of our behaviour is immature. We haven’t established many social rules yet. The “culture” of the Web is unsettled and as yet not entirely defined. It’s easier too when we can hide behind anonymity in these instances – another issue that will need addressing?

Over time I suspect, we’ll develop rules. Ways to shut out overly negative behaviour. It will take time. So meanwhile it’s just part of the “noise” that we have to learn to self-filter or we all suffer for one rotten apple. Issues like this is part of the reason governments are starting to look more closely at online regulations and legislation.

What do you think? What stage are we at?

(Author: G. Crouch)