Yesterday was Facebook. Most are very familiar with Facebook as a user but most are not using it for business. I do have a student in class that uses Facebook for their fan page functionality. Chris demoed (yep; that’s how it’s spelled) the “back office” functionality of Facebook fan pages and discovered that out of all the languages represented in the world, they (Icelantic) had only 9 users speaking Pirate English. (I love the Internet.) We then talked about the ways people can increase their fan (here also) base since only 77% of Facebook fan pages have under a 1000 fans. Icelantic has over 2300 and are successful because they update their page at least every other day while those in the 77% column, update it on average once every 16 days! Make no mistake: social media is a corporate-cultural commitment.
Some of the other things we discussed are as follows:
- Social class differences between Facebook and the artist formerly know as MySpace.
- Facebook allowing you to send ads to your fans friends
- List of preferred developers for Facebook application creation
- Facebook privacy tips
- Facebook geo-tagging your life
- A browser for Facebook called Rockmelt
We also talked about how companies like Slide are making more money from virtual goods than they are from advertising (video below). We covered the concept of Facebook as a walled garden, almost interdependent from the Internet. Judging from Facebook’s traffic, more and more people are staying on Facebook the entire day and I’m curious to see if they can avoid becoming the next AOL. We are going to try and get a virtual product into Facebook and I need to do some research.
I’m waiting on hearing back from the CEO of Brightkite to see if he can come in and speak. Next class we’re going to talk about personal brands.
