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Thoughts About The Facebook Effect

July 1, 2010 by Shelli

Disclaimer: I LOVE Facebook. I just finished reading The Facebook Effect, by David Kirkpatrick, a veteran technology reporter who was for many years editor for technology and the internet at Fortune magazine. The book is phenomenal. In fact, for me it was a page-turner.

Me, trying to be clever by capturing my reflection in the cover image on The Facebook Effect.

Kirkpatrick provides readers with a pretty up-close and personal view into the mind and life of Facebook founder/CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and provides a history of the most popular social network in the world, and the second-most visited site on the web.

Kirkpatrick writes near the beginning of the book: The Facebook Effect happens when the service puts people in touch with each other, often unexpectedly, about a common experience, interest, problem, or cause. This can happen at a small or large scale – from a group of two or three friends or a family, to millions…

Facebook is loaded with content that is generated constantly by its users. According to the book, each month, about 20 billion pieces of content are posted to Facebook by its users, including links, photos and stories. Kirkpatrick writes that company insiders estimate status updates alone that are made to Facebook amount to more than 10 times more words than all blogs worldwide. Facebook, not Flickr, is the largest photo sharing site right now. (According to Kirkpatrick’s book, by late 2009, Facebook was hosting 30 billion photos.)

We are also spending increasing amounts of our time on Facebook. Kirkpatrick writes that the Compete research firm reports than in January 2010, 11.6 percent of all online time in the U. S. was spent on Facebook, compared to 4.1 percent for Google. If these stats aren’t staggering enough, consider that more than 20 percent of the one billion internet users in the world use Facebook. Regularly. Specifically, Kirkpatrick reports that users spend 8 billion minutes every day on Facebook. (The average user spends about an hour each day on the social network.)

My Grandma in Colorado is 86 -- and on Facebook.

In other words, everybody’s doing it. Hell-fire, even my 86-year-old Grandma, in Colorado, is on Facebook! :>

    Here are some things I got from the book that I deemed valuable enough to highlight:

• Given the aforementioned data, it’s clear Facebook hosts an astounding amount of valuable content of all forms. Interestingly, as Kirkpatrick writes in The Facebook Effect, Zuckerberg acknowledges this is not Facebook’s content. Rather, it’s the users’ content. Facebook just happens to be the platform on which we are able to contribute and share such content.

• Facebook operates in 75 languages, and 75 percent of Facebook’s users are outside of the U. S.

• Naysayers and those who may still be resisting Facebook often criticize Facebook for the many status updates that are simply reporting of small or trifling matters. Zuckerberg’s standard rebuttal to this, according to Kirkpatrick and the book, is: “Understanding people is not a waste of time.” Zuckerberg’s goal is “to help people understand the world around them.”

• Zuckerberg often refers to the “social graph,” meaning the web of relationships formed via friendship connected in the social network. That’s what Facebook aspires to be. Kirkpatrick writes that Facebook’s CEO/founder believes that the “core value of Facebook is in the set of friend connections.” He says Facebook has “the most powerful distribution mechanism that’s been created in a generation.”

• I’ve long described Facebook as being a vehicle for word of mouth that has scalability. Word of mouth has always been the most effective form of marketing. Now word of mouth isn’t limited to words. It’s also videos and photos. And the size of our networks are no longer limited by the number of colleagues we work with or friends we physically hang out with. As Kirkpatrick writes, Zuckerberg’s colleague at Facebook, Matt Cohler, described this as the “mechanism for distribution was the relationships between people.”

• On the subject of identity, Kirkpatrick writes that Zuckerberg designed Facebook so that each person has only one identity. Kirkpatrick writes that Zuckerberg said: “The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly.” Kirkpatrick writes that Zuckerberg argues that having two identities demonstrates a lack of integrity, and that “the level of transparency the world has now won’t support having two identities for a person.”

• Facebook has taken hits by actions related to changing its terms of service and privacy settings. But Kirkpatrick writes that in fact Zuckerberg says that privacy has not only not disappeared, “but become even easier to control — what I want to share I can share with everyone. What I want to keep private stays in my head.”

• Another form of new distribution for Facebook platform has come in the way of applications. Applications on Facebook now have a unique way of acquiring new users, which further expands Facebook’s reach and user base.

• Kirkpatrick writes an interesting segment while discussing Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s series of sessions with Facebook management to discuss strategy about the advertising opportunity. Kirkpatrick writes about how Facebook management differentiates Google and Facebook, and this section of the book provides key insights about what will surely be the future of advertising. When you search on something in Google, it presents you an ad that is a response to the world you typed into the search box… The ads you typically click on there are the ones that respond to what you already know you’re looking for. In advertising-speak, Google’s AdWords search advertising “fulfills demand.” Facebook’s, by contrast, would generate demand, the group concluded. Kirkpatrick writes that Sandberg’s researchers discovered that only 20 percent, at most, of the world’s $600 billion in annual advertising spending is spent on ads aimed at people who already know what they want. The remaining 80 percent, or $480 billion a year, was up for grabs as more and more ad spending shifted to the internet.

• Zuckerberg is not an enthusiast for advertising. In fact, his first priority at Facebook is to grow it, then to generate revenue. Kirkpatrick writes that Zuckerberg feels “The basic idea is that ads should be content…”

• Facebook contains the most targeted marketing potential of any medium in history due to the wealth of data is generates. Kirkpatrick writes that Josh James, CEO of Omniture, a major internet ad-targeted service, says “Facebook has the richest data set by a mile…It is the first place where consumers have ever said, ‘Here’s who I am and it’s okay for you to use it.'”

• Kirkpatrick says of traditional media organizations: if they are to most benefit from the Facebook environment they have to learn to function within it as if they were individuals. The playing field has been leveled by the site’s neutral way of treating all messages as similar. Any media company, newspaper or TV station can create it own page on Facebook. But then it faces the same mandate to generate interesting, relevant, and useful messages that an individual does.

• Facebook founder Zuckerberg wishes for a more transparent world. Kirkpatrick writes that one night over dinner with Zuckerberg, he asked the CEO about Facebook’s effects on society, including politics, culture, government, media and business. Zuckerberg responded by talking about the potlatch, which is a traditional celebration of indigenous people in the Pacific Northwest Coast. Each celebrant contributes what food and goods they can, and anyone takes what they want. The highest status goes to those who give the most away.
“Are you familiar with the concept of a gift economy?” Zuckerberg asks. “It’s an interesting alternative to the market economy in a lot of less developed cultures. I’ll contribute something and give it to someone, and then out of obligation or generosity that person will give something back to me. The whole culture works on this framework of mutual giving. The thing that binds those communities together and makes the potlatch work is the fact that the community is small enough that people can see each other’s contributions…”
Zuckerberg says Facebook and other forces on the Internet now create sufficient transparency for gift economies to operate at a large scale. “When there’s more openness, with everyone being able to express their opinion very quickly, more of the economy starts to operate like a gift economy. It puts the onus on companies and organizations to be more good, and more trustworthy.”
“… A more transparent world creates a better-governed world and a fairer world.” This is, for him, a core belief.

• Peter Thiel, who co-founded PayPal and is a well-known entrepreneur and venture capitalist who is viewed by many as a financial genius, was an early investor in Facebook, and is among its board of directors. Thiel has offered expertise and advice to Zuckerberg and Facebook. In a chapter toward the end, called “The Future,” Kirkpatrick shares with us more differentiation between Google and Facebook when considering the future of the two iconic companies. “Google in many ways is an incredible company with an incredible founding vision,” says Thiel. “But a very profound difference is, I think, at its core Google believes that at the end of this globalization process the world will be centered on computers, and computers will be doing everything. That is probably one of the reasons Google has missed the boat on the social networking phenomenon. I don’t want to denigrate Google. The Google model is that information, organizing the world’s information, is the most important thing.
“The Facebook model is radically different. One of the things that is critical about good globalization in my mind is that in some sense humans maintain mastery over technology, rather than the other way around. The value of the company economically, politically, culturally – whatever – stems from the idea that people are the most important thing. Helping the world’s people self-organize is the most important thing.”

The Facebook Effect is fascinating and insightful. The way we communicate and share and document our lives as a people is dramatically changing, in very large part due to Facebook. Reading the story behind Facebook and its brief-but-significant-history is not only exciting, but important.

    LINKS:

Buy the book.
Become a fan of The Facebook Effect.
Follow the author, David Kirkpatrick, on Twitter.

NOTE: I received permission from author David Kirkpatrick to excerpt portions of the book.

Filed Under: Frontier Life, Marketing, Media, Technology Tagged With: books, facebook, mark zuckerberg, social networks, the facebook effect

Why I Love Facebook

June 27, 2010 by Shelli

I just finished reading The Facebook Effect, by David Kirkpatrick. It is a phenomenal book. In fact, it was a page turner for me.

Kirkpatrick provides readers an up-close and personal look into the mind and life of Facebook CEO/Founder Mark Zuckerberg, and provides a history of the most popular social network in the world and the second-most visited site on the internet.

Facebook enables a person like me, who lives out on the lonely frontier of Wyoming, to still have a pretty social life.

I’m working on a pretty in-depth review of the book, which I will post here before week’s end. Please check back here for it or subscribe to my blog feed so you get it in an email. This book was great, and I will share many excerpts and highlights from it in my upcoming review.

But for now, the many reasons I love Facebook:

  • It is a platform that enables me to communicate and keep abreast of my friends’ and family’s lives.
  • It is an easy-to-use “life streaming” tool that enables me to document and “journal” with words, photos and videos important and special moments in my life, and to share these moments.
  • It allows me to manage and correspond with more people than I could ever maintain relationships with offline. (In short, it makes it more manageable and practical to have, and enjoy, many different friendships.)
  • Its technology (the “like button”, link-adding features, etc.) makes it super easy for me to share information, both that which is generated by me, but also, and more importantly, the many articles or photos or other types of content I stumble upon, on Facebook, or off Facebook (via the “Like” or Facebook share buttons) and wish to share with my Facebook friends.
  • It makes it easy to discover common interests among my friends, family and acquaintances that would be otherwise difficult, impossible, or impractical for me to discover.
  • It tells me when a friend or family member has a birthday. I love this feature. I can share Happy Birthday wishes with my friends and family, including relatives and colleagues. Without Facebook’s Birthday reminders, many of these birthdays would be oblivious to me.
  • By the same token, Facebook provides a platform that enables me to become aware when a friend or relative or colleague is going through a hard time, be it a death in the family, a lost job, an illness. And, I get to learn when exciting things happen, such as the birth of a child, or a successful adoption, or a job promotion or new home.
  • And, I have really enjoyed reconnecting with old classmates, colleagues and friends.
  • I live in Wyoming. Much of my beloved state is still considered “frontier” and not even rural. It’s lonely. There are only a half a million people here — fewer people than animals. And, the country is big and expansive. Facebook allows me to lead a pretty social life despite the fact I live in a pretty remote place.
  • Filed Under: Family, Media, Technology Tagged With: facebook, social media, social networks

    Facebook: Personal Lives Unveiled

    November 13, 2009 by Shelli

    Compared to all other things technology, which I usually embrace early, I was a late adopter of Facebook. The reason is I don’t prefer to be very social. I’m busy and tend to be selfish with what free time I have.

    But then one day I surmised that because of this very realization, Facebook could be ideal. I could be social without physically being social. With Facebook, I could be social without leaving home or even picking up the telephone.

    That was a few months ago. Now I love it. It’s my favorite social network. And although I belong to Twitter, LinkedIn and Friendfeed, and utilize YouTube and have this blog, Facebook is, hands down, my platform of choice for “life-streaming.” It’s where I go to post all of my most meaningful updates, including simple thoughts or videos and photos related to my family, friends and travel.

    This doesn’t make me special. Facebook is the most popular social network right now. For crying out loud, my parents are now on Facebook, as is one of my Grandmas, and she’s 85 years old! You know the saying, “Everybody’s doing it.”

    My Grandma Sniffin is on Facebook. She's 85.
    My Grandma Sniffin is on Facebook. She's 85.

    But, I digress. This post is about how our relationships can benefit from Facebook’s biggest strength: the personal profile. Sure, with Facebook we can learn about the personal side of our friends and family. But that’s not all. Now, we can also connect more personally to our business partners and colleagues.

    I am Facebook friends with some of the tourism clients we work with.

    For example, I know that John, the marketing director of my favorite ski resort, Grand Targhee, in Alta, WY, is a die-hard Red Sox fan and that he loves ice hockey. I know he has two kids who are about the same ages as two of our sons. I know he moved to the Idaho side of the Tetons to take the marketing helm at Grand Targhee following a similar position for Colorado ski resorts a little over a year ago. (BTW, I can’t help myself. I might mention here that Grand Targhee is my favorite place in the world to ski and snowboard. I learned to ski there, our kids learned to ski there and it has the best powder anywhere. But that’s another post.)

    I am Facebook friends with Eric, the marketing director of the Salt Lake City Convention & Visitors Bureau. As a result of this connection, I know that he’s not only an avid cyclist, but a pretty darned high level one. I know he likes yoga, and I know a little bit about his familyincluding that his son has the same name as our youngest son. I have learned he’s into endurance biking and bike racing and has a good line on interesting events my husband, Jerry, and I will want to consider in the future.

    Another long-time client I am Facebook friends with was diagnosed with cancer this past summer. Thankfully, he’s doing remarkably well following treatment, and his prognosis is good. But I’m grateful to my Facebook connection with him because it enabled me to keep updated on his health in a more personal way and enabled me to reach out in a more personal way to let him know he was in our thoughts, and to ask him if there was anything we could do to help. I also came to learn he recently got married. This is all stuff I felt lucky to know given this is a business customer I care about.

    All of these insights help me shape a conversation that is no longer limited to “do you want to do business with us?” Thank goodness we may have more to talk about and form a relationship around than only the business at hand. We are people, after all, with meaningful lives. Certainly, we can serve our partners and customers better if we know them better personally, right? Plus, thanks to Facebook, I know when to wish a client Happy Birthday. That’s pretty cool.

    Of course, this means we need to be on our best behavior. In the current social media landscape that we’re operating in, we don’t have the luxury of having two personas, one for our personal life and another for work. Our personal and work lives are increasingly blurred. As Erik Qualman so aptly reminds us in his great book, Socialnomics, when it comes to social media, one needs to “live your life as if your mother is watching.”

    In the old days, if we were lucky, we’d get a face-to-face appointment with our prospective client. It was during this meeting, while seated in our client’s office, that we could take note of family photos, trophies, certificates, posters, artwork, or other items on display, in an effort to try and get a glimpse of the “person” we were dealing with. It wasn’t much, but it was valuable.

    Today, Facebook provides that, and more.

    Filed Under: Family, Marketing, Media, Technology Tagged With: communicating, facebook, friends, social media, social networking

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    About Shelli

    Hi. My name is Shelli Johnson. I live on the frontier in Lander, Wyoming. I’m a wife, a mother, an entrepreneur, certified life/leadership coach, wellness coach, keynote presenter and inspired speaker, leadership development facilitator, personal development strategist, writer and adventure guide. This blog mostly includes stories about adventures and travel, but other passions are reading/books, technology, fitness, nutrition, and national parks, so you’ll find a wide range of articles here. I am founder of Yellowstone Journal and YellowstonePark.com, and NationalParkTrips.com, which was my first business. My current company, Epic Life Inc., is in its 7th year, and going gangbusters. If you’re interested in learning more about my current work, I hope you’ll jump over there and learn more about that. I have a more personal blog, more directly related to life and living and leadership, at YourEpicLife.com/blog. I’d love it if you’d also check out that collection of my writings. Thank you for stopping by! Finally, if you’d like to connect with me directly, please email me if you’d like to connect.

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