Outsmarting Social Media: Profiting in the Age of Friendship Marketing

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Twitter popularized the status update—a shortreport on what you are doing right now. A new challengeis thus born: Who will comealong and slurp up millions of reports on what people had for breakfast, watchedon TV, and thought about the latest political controversy, and give it back to us ina format we care about? Both Google and Facebook are trying, and the stage is set for a clash of epic pro-portions between the Internet giants.

Indeed, the age we live in right now is one where our friends are soon to be thetastemakers in our online lives, the curators of all the information we care about. Whereas the holy grail of online marketing has always been a 1 spot on Google,the new environment necessitates that your company become a popular topic ofdiscussion on social networks as well. The currency of the Internet is changingfrom one based on links—the symbol of trust in the eyes of search engines—to a. Simply put, virality is the new decider of business. Instead, Google and Facebook will be actively suggesting things to us—often, things we never even knew we needed.

Simply announce to the world that you have a cold, and you will find out that your col- league from work and your college roommate recommend Cold-eez, that your friend Danny likes an article about holistic cold remedies on WebMD. While Google struggles to integrate these kinds of social recommendations into a platform that is slowly becoming a thing of the past—a traditional search engine— Facebook, the newer, cooler Internet giant, is at the cusp of technology, delivering social information directly to the profile page you keep open six hours per day, or better yet, through your mobile phone.

Indeed, the social search wars are on, and you, the consumer, need only sit back and watch. An algorithm will understand not just your social preferences, but the preferences of the people you trust. And yet, having all of this useful information at your fingertips will come with one small catch—the implicit duty to provide the same kind of recommendations to other people.

Outsmarting Social Media: Profiting in the Age of Friendship Marketing by Evan Bailyn

Think of it this way: As the amount of personal information on the Internet grows, the leading companies in the social realm will be asking you to make that data useful to the people in your life. And then, predictably but not as annoyingly as you would think , the same companies will use that information to advertise to you. Telling your friends what you like, dislike, and recommend is a small price to pay for the incredible possibilities social data will introduce. Let me give you an exam- ple. What if you were looking for a job and some- one told you that they had a friend of a friend who is the head of personnel at your favorite company?

Both of these examples are potential applications of the data that the world will be providing to Facebook, Google, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, and other Internet companies in the next few years. This book consists of nine chapters that cover all the social media concepts and strategies you need to change the face of your business forever. The chapters are divided as follows: It also prepares you for all the material in the rest of the book. This chapter explains how to build a massive audience on Facebook.

It reveals why status updates matter and how you can use them to mine valuable data for your business. What will busi- nesses need to be thinking about in ? Who Can Use This Book? On the other side of the coin, those who are on the very cusp of new technology, reading all the tech publications and attending developer conferences in Silicon Valley, might find that they are already familiar with many of its concepts. He is either a business owner or a marketer, with a desire to excel beyond his competitors using simple, commonsense tactics.

I am a firm believer that the best social media strategy is the most obvious: However, it is not easy to conceive of all the ways to implement such a strategy, which is why you need this book. The product of years of trial and error, of success and failure, of epiphany and heartbreak, awaits you. I respond to all email, and can be reached at evanmbailyn gmail. An Important Note A lot of people have asked me how I could put out a book that reveals my best social media tactics and still remain in business. Doyle Brunson, one of the best poker players of all time, wrote a book on poker that was so widely studied that it opened up the game of poker to millions more people—many of whom ended up taking money from him at the tables.

He later said he regretted writing the book. I know that very few people who read this book will actu- ally do the work required to implement my techniques. Whether because of limited time, limited budget, or a subconscious fear of success, most people will admire good ideas but never actually do anything about them. Every person reading this book has the opportunity to make their business thrive using only what is contained within.

Some ideas might be new to you, but most will be easy to grasp. The decision to use the power of social media to your greatest benefit is yours to make—and I genuinely hope you take advantage of it. It was the lead- ing search engine in the United States by a large margin, its stock was soaring, and it was innovating at an incred- ible rate. All roads seemed to be leading to Google. Social networks were a big deal back then. MySpace was extremely popular, and Facebook was a rising star, especially among college kids and twentysomethings.

Conveniently for Google, those sites had nothing to do with search. They were separate businesses altogether, whose main purpose was to connect people online. Any search functions they possessed were either rudimentary or, in the case of MySpace, handled by Google itself. Social networking and search seemed to be separated by a large chasm, sort of like news and shopping. The two were just All were in the business of returning information to users based on searches, and all made money from advertising.

The competitive landscape was easy to understand. Google was gaining market share every quarter, whereas Yahoo and MSN were losing market share see Figure 1. Indeed, this was a great time for the Big G. The situation continued in this way until late , when Facebook started to be the one you heard about in the news the way you used to hear about Google from to Facebook was becoming the next big thing.

And, far more than its predecessors, Friendster and MySpace, Facebook truly seemed set to change the Internet.

OUTSMARTING SOCIAL MEDIA: PROFITING IN THE AGE OF FRIENDSHIP MARKETING

The Rise of Facebook I wish I could tell you that I knew how important Facebook would become even a year before I decided to write this book. It kind of snuck up on me— on everyone, really. It seemed everything it touched turned to gold, and it touched some incredible things. Do you remember the first time you saw Google Earth, which opened with a sat- ellite picture of the entire planet and then, within seconds, zoomed down into accurate pictures of your city, your neighborhood, even your house?

Google was giving me easy accessto all the data I could ever need, and I was impressed. Compared to all of that, what was Facebook? It was really just a profile like the oneI used to have on AOL in , with a screen name, a list of interests, my favoritequote, and some pictures. Okay, so it was a supercharged profile, but not muchmore than that.

The first thing that alerted me to the fact that Facebook was a big deal was its sheerpopularity. I kept reading about how tens of millions of people, and then hundredsof millions of people, were using it. And people were using it for huge amounts oftime—up to 6 hours per day, which is far above the Internet average for a websiteof 1 to 2 minutes per day. When Facebook officially became bigger than MySpace,I realized that the company was worth watching.

It seemed that people were start-ing to integrate it into their lives in a way similar to other cultural staples, like tele-vision. Facebook has an internal social graph, which is basically a huge map of how every-one on Facebook is connected to one another, as well as to their own interests. It is a visualization of your friendships and interests, and the ways in which yourfriendships and interests overlap with those of other people, both inside and out-side your social circle.

It could, for instance, tell you how many degrees of separa-tion you are from Justin Bieber hopefully, many. At the most basic level, the open graph works like this: Imagine if websites knew asmuch about you as Facebook does. They could serve you a far more relevant expe-rience. As a bonus, it could take into consideration the temperature, humidity, and pollen count.

Your experience with this site just went from generic—that is, purely informational—to personal see Figure 1. This hiking site utilizes social data and other available data in an intelligent way. When Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, announced the open graph in April , he used three popular websites to help explain what the graph meant, and I think they demonstrate its importance: However, with the open social graph plugged into CNN.

At the very least, you probably read a review. This is why the IMDB. Chapter 1 The Clash of the Internet Giants 11looking at any movie page, you can see which of your friends like thatmovie. If you think the friends who like the movie share your taste, youvery well may choose to see it. This is a great example of how socialinformation can drive purchases—one of the reasons why social searchand discovery are such exciting new technologies.

Put in a song you like and Pandora will find similar music, much of which you may never have heard, and play it for you, free of charge. It is an excellent way to discover and enjoy new music. As you can see, the initial applications of social data to websites are pretty neat. More than just a social network, Facebook is becoming a kind of standardfixture for all the websites on the Internet. Make no mistake about it—that kind of universality is what Mark Zuckerberg and his core staff spent most of their time thinking about in , , and One reason it is so valuable to show up on as many websites as possible is data.

Sure, Facebook wants to help personalize websites with its social data, making a better experience for Internet users. But far more than that, it wants to spy on us. When you are logged in to Facebook and surfing a site that has Facebook code on it, Facebook is collecting data about you.

After all, it may know a lot about you, but Facebook can learn far more by observing which websites you visit and how you behave on those websites. Facebook gets its code onto websites—and thus collects data about you—in many ways. The data that Facebook is collecting by appearing in one form or another on so many websites is helping it catch up with Google, which has been doing the same thing for a while. Google incentivizes webmasters to add special code to their web- site using its Google Analytics and Adsense programs. But more on that later. That two hours you spent on Facebook this morning?

Google would have preferred you spent it on a Google property instead. If you had, you would have seen more of its ads and it would have made more money.

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That 45 minutes you spent watching Japanese game shows on YouTube during your lunch break? Facebook would have preferred you spent that time reading wall posts and browsing through pictures of your friends on Facebook. That way, it could have had your attention on its ads. Boiling down what is becoming a battle of epic proportions to its simplest components— a competition for your ad-clicking potential—reminds me of a conversation I had with a board member back when I owned my kids website, Cartoon Doll Emporium. We were discussing whether to add an elaborate and expensive virtual world to the site.

I knew little about virtual worlds at the time and was reluctant to do it. Chapter 1 The Clash of the Internet Giants 13only reason a virtual world is appealing is because it keeps people interested in thesite longer. If you could keep people interested just as long with a celebrity blog, dailypoetry contest, or—hell, by reprinting pages from the telephone book—you should dothat instead.

When a company makes its money from advertising,time and attention is all that matters. With Google, we have a company that hasgained your time and attention by being the most incredible information retrievalresource on Earth, a company that is now realizing that people are more inter-ested in the mundane activities of their friends than in the sum total of everythingGoogle has spent billions of dollars to create.

Make no mistake—Google is jealous. To be fair, Google is far from blind to the power of social expression on the Net. Besides the obvious benefits of video as searchable data, YouTube is an increasinglyimportant way that people communicate with one another. However, it remains to be seenwhether users will embrace search results that are personalized by a social networkthey rarely use and a browsing history they never meant to share.

Facebook, on the other hand, is as good at social as Google is at search, and thatmakes Facebook a huge threat. I once had a chat with a former classmate of Google co-founder Larry Page. As such, I am willing to bet that Facebook will always be great at providing users with a social experience, and Google will lag behind in that area.

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Google will instead have to focus on organizing social information from multiple sources, Facebook among them, and serv- ing it to users in relevant ways. When you do a Google search, you are transmitting to Google only two pieces of data: When you log in to Facebook, on the other hand, you are constantly sharing information that reveals who you are: On a personal level, Facebook knows you about as well as a computer script can know someone. Google, on the other hand, is probably only familiar with the more formal side of you—your researching and buying habits.

As the Web becomes more social, we have begun to require a way to represent ourselves on various websites without having to log in to each one of them. Classically, social interaction on the Internet has been anonymous.

Websites, no doubt, love it because it gives them more information on their visitors, keeps people on their best behavior, and generally improves the quality of conversation. Eventually, most big sites will require users to log in if they want to partake in the discussion. This presents a fascinating revenue opportunity for both Google and Facebook. You see, whichever site becomes the default sign-in for most of the big websites will also be lurking around when you are purchasing something at one of those sites. Being present at the point of purchase is only a hop away from participating in that purchase.

The key to this whole thing is, the company that helps you pay always gets a small percentage of the pur- chase price, either from the buyer or seller. It would be an easy transitionfrom personalization partner to payment partner. Now, which site will users choose? The answer goes back to the concept of identity. Of the two sites, which one do you trust to always have running in the background,to be the filter through which you socialize online? Because Facebook is alreadytied into your social identity so closely, it has the clear advantage.

Google knows this, but it will not allow Facebook to win the identity battle withouta fight. Google is seeking to become synony-mous with your identity. I doubt Google will win this battle though, as it has never succeeded at being ahighly personal company, and the concepts of identity and payment are both quitepersonal.

Equally importantly, Facebook is an ambitious company that has a hugehead start at being the de facto social destination. Google points you to spe- cific websites when you are looking to buy something—in effect, referring more business to online companies than any other entity on earth. That is a very power- ful position.

Ebook Outsmarting Social Media Profiting In The Age Of Friendship Marketing

When it comes down to it, Google is there for you when you need to do anything economic. It is a fresh, incredibly popular upstart that people expect a lot from in the future. So, too, goes the story of Facebook and Google. This is the same advantage Microsoft has classically had over Google. Although Google has prob- ably never been worried that Microsoft would create a better search engine, Google probably has been worried that someone, somewhere in the world would create one and Microsoft would buy it.

Heck, Microsoft could have even bought some of the infrastructure that Google relies on. The wireless spectrum is the network that allows cell phone companies to provide phone service. Winning the auction would have effectively made Google into a wireless service provider. Although Google did not win it was about a hundred million dollars behind Verizon , its ability to participate in the auction changed the rules of wireless access permanently, paving the way for Android cell phones to become as popular as they are today.

Even after its IPO, Facebook is still behind Google inits ability to make such seismic business decisions. Having Googleads on millions of websites for many years has given it a stack of data that is mileshigh. What will it do with all that social data? Will it change the way we discover new products and services? Will its ad product become so personalized that we begin to enjoy advertising? Will it alter the way humans interact in a way we never could have imagined?

As with any two companies that have similar long-term goals and are constantly compared, Google and Facebook are deeply competitive. When it first became apparent that Facebook was a company with far-ranging potential, Google made some hasty moves to embrace social. One of the first, enacted in December , was Realtime search, which allowed people to search through status updates that were posted moments ago see Figure 1.

This made for a nice-looking, but ultimately useless product, because people could perform the same search on Twitter. Note that every result inthis search came from Twitter. Of course, the majority of status updates onFacebook are written on private profiles, so a major piece of the puzzle remainedmissing. Now, Facebook could have granted Google access to the status updates ofits hundreds of millions of users.

But it specifically chose not to. Finally, in June ,Twitter and Google ended their partnership, forcing Google to suspend its real-time search service and leaving them without any major allies in the social space. With both real-time search and social search basically handed to Bing by Facebook,Google was left to stew in its rejection.

It had very much been the Queen Bee, thepopular girl in high school who is used to getting everything she wants, until a newgirl came to school and rose to an even greater popularity—and then dissed her infront of the whole cafeteria! The thing is, there was not too much Google could have done aboutit by way of retaliation. The two companies do not partner with each other onanything significant enough to give Google leverage. One minor thing that Google could have taken away from Facebook is access tothe conduit called an API that allows Facebook users to invite their Gmail con-tacts to be friends on Facebook.

If Google blocked that feature, new userswould build up a base of friends a lot slower, which makes them less likely to gethooked on Facebook. The company is simply too cocky, andmore importantly, probably can live just fine without it. With the reality of its lack of access to valuable Facebook data acknowledged,Google was left with a hard decision. Should it keep trying to strike some sort ofpartnership with Facebook, or attempt to manufacture its own social data? Although the service grewrapidly in its first few months, its usage was limited to mostly men and technically-oriented people.

It still remains to be seen whether Facebook will eventually share social data withGoogle. I asked many people inside Silicon Valley what they thought would hap-pen and got very few decisive answers. Others believed that Facebook would never hand over the data, as thatwould be akin to ceding a major strategic advantage to a rival. Both companies stand to benefit if they can strike the rightdeal. It would be very useful to have Google power such a search, given that Google understands the search itself—that is, what people tend to be looking for when they type words into a box—better than anyone.

The combination of a search engine that knows what you are look- ing for Google and who you are Facebook would be an incredible resource and monetization opportunity. Google will not be able to dominate social by itself, and Facebook will not be able to dominate search by itself, so they will need to rely on each other. The idea that a single answer could exist that satisfies all people is an antiquated concept, one that relies too heav- ily on a one-size-fits-all philosophy.

Today, we are at a unique moment in history where this possibility is close to becoming a real- ity—online, at least. Because we have not yet perfected artificial intelligence, we rely on algorithms to solve our problems. Algorithms have their limits, but now they have a new data set that is making them more powerful than ever: The Google results page of tomorrow may still have 10 results and a bunch of ads, but those results will be personalized to the searcher based on her likes and interests and the likes and interests of others, both inside and outside her social network.

The company is striving to be more like a knowledgeable friend who listens carefully to you and answers questions in the context of who you are. Although Facebook has always been a personalized experience, it will soon be making more and more sophisticated suggestions: All these recommendations will comefrom what Facebook has learned about you and your friends.

The Rise of Tastemakers on Facebook Although Google is groping for that highly desirable social data, Facebook is bath- ing in it. Because Facebook knows so much about you and your friends already, it is experimenting with new ways of serving relevant information to you. This intimate piece of informa- highly desirabletion was not possible to determine algo- rithmically until this moment in history, social data, Facebookwhen people do as much socializing online as they do in real life.

Facebook is bathing in it. Trendsetters—or tastemakers, as I like to call them—are the people in your online social circle whose opinions matter the most to you. You know that friend who always manages to have the right clothes, or the one who has the most enviable travel experiences? These are the people you will be hearing the most from in the future. These people will become the new advertising.

Actually, it may not be so bad. A system as organic as getting recommendations from friends has its roots in a natural part of human behavior. The tastemaker concept comes down to this: It feels good to be an expert in the eyes of the people you care about. It appeals to the part of you that wants to be heard. Do you remember those surveys that used to get passed around on AOL in the late s?

Smiled for no reason? Laughed so hard you cried? The friends who always have a new restaurant to clue you in about, a great book that you just have to read, or a hilarious video you absolutely must watch are more likely to influence your purchases. These people are like the concierges of your social circle. My brother Russell is a tastemaker in my social circle. I am constantly hearing about cool new restaurants, hot nightclubs, and fascinating people from him.

Because he is so much like me, I often share his enthusiasm about the things he recommends. I trust his opinion so much that I call him up whenever I need an idea for a night out. Russell, of course, is not an expert on everything I care about. My mother-in-law, however, has an uncanny ability to pick out books that I absolutely love. Still other experts exist in my life in various categories: Rozzy and Brett for travel, my dad for legal advice, Jon for music, and Stephanie for wedding planning.

After Facebook has gathered enough data on our social actions, this type of information will soon be at our fingertips. Facebook is kind of like a celebrity magazine where your friends are the celebri- ties. It seems obvious that if you are interested enough to read about what your friends are doing, you are probably also interested in their recommendations.

Tastemakers will be used in the same way. A friend who is known to have good taste in a certain area will offer, through Facebook, the chance to be like him or her. Off the bat, it sounds like a win-win situation because both advertisers and people will like it.

About the author

Zach happens to wear a lot of Diesel jeans. That advertise- ment would be a simple story, maybe with a picture of Zach in Diesel jeans, that says: Buy a pair now at www. This would be an early version of social discovery, which I address more fully in the next chapter. The trick—the thing that will truly make certain people influence others—is affin-ity.

How close am I to Zach? The way for this advertising technique to backfire is ifthe friends featured in the ads were not true tastemakers in the category the ad istargeting.