Value of a Facebook Fan

An interesting post calculating how much a Facebook Fan is worth. It's interesting because of the wide range of values attributed to a fan: $3 dollars up to $136.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure I buy the methodology behind the calculations. I just don't see how you can have a universal value attached to a Fan. It would vary so much depending on the brand, what it is selling, the level of engagement and the strategy behind the Facebook Page.

I'm not just saying this because I can't work it out myself, but I don't think you can generalise such a calculation and apply it to all Facebook Fans. I think you have to work it out for each individual brand and its presences on Facebook.

New way of doing old ideas

As more pioneering brands move to socially centric campaigns, we are seeing traditional ideas being implemented in new ways to take advantage of the power of social technologies.

A great example is the recent campaign Coke did with Maroon 5. Basically, Coke used a famous band to get people to engage with the brand. A very traditional tactic. However, they used social technologies to enhance the idea - Maroon 5 created their new single from tweets and status updates. [The link to Coke was that for the first 100,000 downloads Coke gave a donation to charity].

Here is a short video on the initiative:

I can't help thinking that we will see more and more of these type of socially centric campaigns that use traditional tactics.

Social Media Maturity Curve by Forrester

Forrester has announced a new piece of research and an update to Groundswell that looks at the social media maturity of organisations. A post by the author describes in detail the stages.

It seems a very neat way of looking at how companies progress in their use of social media and what kind of things they need to do to get to the next stage.

My feeling is that the majority of UK organisations are at the Testing or Late Majority stage, where they are focused on Talking applications such as Facebook and YouTube for marketing objectives. It's interesting that Forrester state that most social media in the Testing stage is run by PR depts. IMHO this is where companies are treating social media as a channel for engagement, rather than an integral part of the business.

It appears that organisations move to socially centric thinking and social business models in the Scaling and Optimising phase - where they use different social applications to meet different business objectives e.g. Home Depot using twitter for customer service and YouTube for marketing. I think this is where the UK is heading, but to get there, we need to stop treating social media as a channel and make it more central to how we do business.

Amazing collection of Google Street View images

This is an amazing collection of images from Google Street View called 9 Eyes. Amusing and disturbing in equal measure. Check it out.

My fav photo is this one:

Google using our own tastes to decide what we see

An interesting talk by Eli Parisa at TED on Filter Bubbles got me thinking how Google and Facebook are taking over the role of traditional media in deciding what we see and read - but by automating our own tastes rather than human judgement deciding what we should see.

Eli's premise is that the more Google and Facebook tailor our search results and News Feeds to match what they believe we want to see, the more we just see very limited stuff. The video is ten minutes and definitely worth a watch.

It does get you thinking how scary it would be if Google and Facebook decided to deliberately control what you see and read - you wouldn't know they were controlling your information flow. But that's just paranoid.