Facebook’s Stream of Consciousness

Today Facebook unveiled new changes to profile pages and also to the Pages (yes with a capital P) that marketers and public figures can maintain.

The changes are complex but essentially boil down into allowing people to have more control over what information they see from their Facebook friends, and to make it easier for people to post whatever they want to and spread the word to both friends and fans. For marketers, the changes mean closer integration into the News Feed that people see when they use Facebook.

One of the biggest changes is to the status update box, which will simply say “What’s on your mind?” instead of “What are you doing right now?” It’s a nod to the fact that people no longer use the box to say what they’re doing, but what they are feeling, thinking, reading, watching, interacting with.

The net net of all of this is that Facebook wants to capture and disseminate the ongoing bits of information that people, companies and public figures say, and the actions that they take. Said Mark Zuckerberg in a note on the Facebook blog: “People will no longer come to Facebook to consume a particular piece or type of content, but to consume and participate in the stream itself.”

It’s a bold, philosophical statement, but it also says a lot about where Facebook thinks it should participate in the stream of discussions and activities of the social Web. And that position it aspires to is right smack in the center.

What does all this mean for social network marketing? I’m honestly unclear at this point. In one sense, the changes Facebook is making to Pages will effectively put a more personal face on a brand. As Zuckerberg describes in his blog, “You can find out that Oprah is reading a book backstage before a show, CNN posted a breaking story or U2 is working on a new song, just as you would see that your friend uploaded new photos from her trip to Europe.” All this information will be pushed to your News Feed, if you are a fan of the brand or person.

This gets into obvious Twitter territory, a place where Facebook very plainly wants to be. Much to pay attention to here.

Tropicana’s Fans Sound a Sour Note

I noticed the weird new packaging for Tropicana orange juice right away and hated it. But I never said anything about it to anyone. I still bought the juice.

But other Tropicana consumers took their displeasure one step further — they took their viewpoints online, to Twitter and other outlets. And thanks to their efforts (and perhaps some additional focus group testing by Tropicana) the brand has decided to go back to the old packaging. As the New York Times reports, Tropicana executives just didn’t see it coming with the traditional kinds of research they do.

“What we didn’t get was the passion this very loyal small group of consumers have. That wasn’t something that came out in the research,” said Neil Campbell, president of Tropicana North America, in the Times article.

We’ve seen this before; UK fans got Cadbury to reintroduce a brand called Wispa by lobbying on Facebook.

“If consumers are speaking, you have to listen,” Tropicana’s Campbell told the Times. And more and more, you simply have to listen online.

A History of Twitter

The LA Times has a nice oral history of Twitter, from Jack Dorsey, one of its founders. Key points:

- The idea for Twitter started in 2000 (and had the working name Stat.us)

- Dorsey started germinating the idea by thinking about taxis, ambulances and bike messengers that automatically transmit their whereabouts in a given city. But the people connection was missing.

- Originally, the terms was “watching” — which evolved to “following.”

- On the Twitter name: “Bird chirps sound meaningless to us, but meaning is applied by other birds. The same is true of Twitter: a lot of messages can be seen as completely useless and meaningless, but it’s entirely dependent on the recipient.”

Littlest Pet Shop to Launch Yet Another Kids Virtual World

They keep piling on. Hasbro and Electronic Arts are linking up to launch a virtual world themed to the Littlest Pet Shop toys. The site is purportedly aimed at the tween market, but I know plenty of 5-year-olds who love LPS, so I bet the demos trend way younger than tweens.

LPS has been a big success for Hasbro, with sales up 26% in 2008.

According to Kzero’s latest virtual worlds universe tracking study, the 8-10 age group is a sweet spot for virtual worlds, with more than 40 worlds active or in development, including Webkinz, Barbie Girls, Neopets and Club Penguin. Very few worlds target kids younger than that, so LPS may be among the first, even if Hasbro claims to be reaching the tween segment.

I’ll be publishing an eMarketer report on kids, gaming and virtual worlds in the next few months.

The Evolution of Widgets

I’ve been following the changing widget business with some interest lately. While I have doubts about the future of little boxes of purported entertainment that you can cut and paste into your blog or social network profile page, I am pretty excited about widgets that mesh shopping with advertising.

Yesterday, I had an extended conversation with PaidContent, which ran an article questioning the future of the widget economy (and quoting me). I do think there will be a shakeout in the business, and the companies that can create and track widgets that do more than merely entertain you have the best chance of survival.

CNET’s widgets, for example, which are powered by Gigya, provide relevant reviews and shopping deals. Other widget providers such as WidgetBucks create ad units that update automatically with content that relates to the topic on the page.

WidgetBucks ad

I should back up and clarify the difference between widgets and applications, terms that are often used interchangeably. Widgets are chunks of content (often rectangle-shaped) that you can “grab” (by copying some code) and embed into blogs, start pages or social network profile pages. Applications are more full-featured and are designed for a specific platform, such as Facebook. They can use data from a person’s social network profile and take advantage of the connections between friends. I’m not talking about applications here (they have their own issues to contend with).

Much has been written lately about the waning fortunes of the display ad. Widgetized display ads have the potential to bring new life to the format.

Crest’s 3-D Web Ploy

In a tongue in cheek (or would that be tongue on teeth?) effort, Crest’s KissMeIn3D.com gives visitors a taste (sorry, I love puns) of kissing a virtual character. In this case, a mustachioed Latin lover named Fernando or a wholesome cutie named Olivia.

It’s not exactly virtual world love (see: Second Life), but it is definitely strange. And, to best experience the Website, you need to have kept those 3D glasses you got to watch the Super Bowl ads. I didn’t, so the experience wasn’t quite as fulfilling for me. Especially when Fernando ripped off his new White Strips after he mimicked three kisses. Funny, ehh. Ewww, yes. Even if White Strips Advanced Seal does stay on while kissing, as the ad says. And especially if you read the fine print, which says kissing with the White Strips on can cause white spots to form on your teeth.

In an Adweek article, Crest rep Laura Brinker said, “We noticed there was a lot happening with 3-D. That was a relevant trend to latch onto. We thought we could bring the benefit of the product to life in a relevant way.”

Despite the ick factor, the idea of incorporating 3D into a Web marketing campaign is ingenious. For that I give Crest props. But Fernando and his White Strips can stay far away from me.

Twitter’s User-Generated Business Model

Twitter needs a business model and it seem everyone BUT Twitter is trying to figure it out.

It’s amazing, really, to see so many people raising their hands to offer up their ideas of how Twitter should make money. Market research. Search. Contextual ads. Paid recommendations. Questions and answers. Silicon Alley Insider is running an entire contest devoted to helping Twitter. Eleven of the best presentations are available for anyone to see.

Obviously people have a strong attachment to Twitter and I agree that it represents a turning point in how people communicate. I personally expect that its user base will grow substantially in 2009. But I can’t fathom the amount of time and energy the Twitter community is investing to help it figure out the revenue problem. Has this ever happened with any other company, and so publicly?

If and when Twitter comes up with an actual plan, who gets the credit?

Update: In the San Francisco Chronicle, Twitter CEO Evan Willams has this to say about his company’s revenue efforts: “We don’t like to make too big a deal of it. We don’t want to rush it.”

Two Months of Silence

There’s overload and then there’s overload. I subscribe to a couple dozen newsfeeds, not counting my Facebook feed. It’s too much. I mean, I have 200 Google News Alerts waiting for me in my inbox. Who has time for that?

I’m sure you feel the same way. So in an effort to cut down on information overload I took a break from writing this blog. At first I didn’t miss it, but over time, I’ve been feeling guilty. Kind of like how I feel about not playing the oboe anymore even though my parents paid for me to get a music degree in college. Don’t worry, I won’t be uploading clips of great oboe performances. But I digress.

I’m back to posting.

Bebo chief: “You would have to trip to not succeed at this at some point.”

That’s what Joanna Shields, Bebo’s chief executive, said in a Wall Street Journal article today (subscription required) on AOL’s plans to relaunch Bebo. AOL bought Bebo for $850 million earlier this year.

The headwinds are firmly against Shields and AOL. Ad support for social networks is not rising nearly as fast as expected, and Bebo, as the WSJ article points out, got just 5.9 million US unique visitors in October, compared to 46 million for Facebook and 76.3 million for MySpace, according to comScore.

Somehow I think Bebo’s “some point” for success has already happened. It was when Michael and Xochi Birch sold it to AOL and headed for the hills.

MySpace Needs a Big Q4

Dismal news from yesterday’s News Corp. earnings call — but most of the bad news wasn’t at Fox Interactive Media. Revenue at that unit was up 17% year-over-year to $220 million. That’s not a bad showing compared to competitors like Yahoo!, AOL and MSN. But by other measures, it was definitely weak. 17% was the lowest y/o/y growth recorded by FIM since News Corp. started providing that data back in early 2007. Back then revenue was growing by leaps and bounds, reaching as high as 87% growth y/o/y in the fourth quarter of 2007 (News Corp.’s fiscal Q2 2008).

Now things are trending downward, and given the softness in the economy it’s certain that FIM will not see a huge bump in the calendar fourth quarter anywhere near the one it got last year. In fact, it will be lucky to match last year’s revenue in that quarter, which was $233 million.

What does this mean for MySpace revenues? News Corp. doesn’t officially break out MySpace from FIM, but my rule of thumb has been that MySpace accounts for about 80%. So far this calendar year, FIM has generated $655 million in revenue, which translates to about $525 million for MySpace, if you use the 80/20 rule.

The good news for MySpace is that it has several new revenue engines that will kick in in the calendar fourth quarter – including the MyAds self-serve ad system and the newly launched MySpace Music, which will also bring in some e-commerce dollars. But there’s only so much it can do in a dwindling worldwide economy.

Once upon a time (way back in August 2007 – an eternity ago, it seems) Rupert Murdoch had predicted that FIM would reach $1 billion and MySpace would bring in $800 million in revenue in News Corp.’s fiscal 2008 (which ended in June). It didn’t meet that target (FIM generated just $856 million in the period), and such grandiose predictions are a thing of the past at News Corp.

FIM revenue quarterly growth, calendar Q2 2006-calendar Q3 2008
Q2 06 11.6%
Q3 06 13.7%
Q4 06 20.2%
Q1 07 8.0%
Q2 07 35.6%
Q3 07 2.7%
Q4 07 23.9%
Q1 08 -9.9%
Q2 08 7.1%
Q3 08 -2.2%