350 million+ Facebook makes changes : I think these are good!

by sanjay on Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009

Facebook users today were greeted with a message that a letter from founder Mark Zuckerberg was waiting for them. As this is not your every day occurrence, most of us ended up checking it out.

And while we found out that the galloping giant had moved beyond the 350 million user base number, it was also bringing about some significant changes in the coming days, to the way it has been functioning. While details about the exact implementation will be known over the next few weeks, there is enough information to generate many early reactions, to these changes.

I have a slightly different view to the opinions in that story in Business Standard.

1. On the subject of the regional networks which will not remain anymore, I have not seen any serious value to this so-called regional network, including the one of India. Networks, groups, communities are worth if they truly unify, generate exchanges and interactions, and are active. The specific Facebook Fan pages or groups that actually engage its members are the kind that are actively managed, have reasons for engagement, and have a common passion. Not the kind where you just ‘belong for the sake of belonging’. Regional networks were largely of the latter type.

2. The privacy factor, on the other hand is very crucial. As a father of two daughters who are active on Facebook, and as a consultant  and speaker on Social Media, this is one fact that I have highlighted many a times.

Let me explain with an example.

You go to a vacation at a beach resort, and have a rollicking time. Fun photos of the trip, including several in your two piece bikini find their way to your Facebook page. You are comfortable sharing these with your friends. After all, you have been selective about choosing your friends on Facebook. And as always, you get a lot of comments from your friends, on your photos.

Now few of your friends have large friend groups of their own, on Facebook. As they comment on your photo, a status update goes out to their friends, that <your_friend> has commented on <your> photo album. And in that status update, the ‘photo album’ is a link, that your friend’s friend can click on, and view!

Oops..that is not something that you expected / wanted / anticipated. And yet, you did not even realize that this could happen, because there were no apparent warnings (current version of Facebook also has selective privacy settings for many of its features, but often the default sharing is ‘everyone’ and most users do not realize the need to change it!).

And while that friend’s friend cannot comment on your photos, he can definitely view them, and should he have mal-intentions, he can do worse.

Not your best case scenario and something that is very real and happening, right now. I must admit for example, to not have any major celebrities as friends, but some of my friends have such friends. And once in a while when I see my friend commenting on their celebrity friends’ pics, I have been curious to check the pics out. I am sure the celebrity did not mean to share those with me, or many others like me!

So considering these risks, it is indeed a move in the right direction, to enable and basically prompt users to choose the level of sharing, for any piece of content that they update on Facebook. In a growing and large space, where abuse is so easy, even if it means a little change that we have to deal with, I think the privacy changes being proposed are a step in the right direction.

3. But does that mean that I will need to go and look over my hundreds of friends, one at a time, and set privacy settings for each of them? Surely that would be very tedious?

No, I don’t think that will be necessary at all.

Consider again:

a. At this time, the higher level of privacy was not present. It is being introduced. So whatever content you uploaded on to Facebook, you were comfortable to share that with whoever (largely, your friends) had access to it via your Facebook page. Just because you now have a choice to be selective, you do not HAVE to go and change privacy settings for your existing content. It was visible to your existing friends, and if you don’t do anything special, it will continue to be visible to them.

b. What is a choice for you is the NEW content that you will start uploading hereafter. At that point, while uploading, you may have a choice to decide if you want to share with friends, of friends of friends, or everyone. Again, as I read the open letter, it does not state anywhere that you will get to make selective permission settings within your friends. As long as someone is a friend, he is equal to all other friends. So you do not go and set levels of permissions to your various friends.

After all, Facebook wants to continue to remain a common user’s utility, and does not want to become a techie application. Multiple level of permission settings on users, is a techie activity, which I am sure, Facebook will not indulge in.

So what kind of consequences do I see as a result of these changes?

1. As an individual user, your privacy settings are certainly better protected. I would then recommend users to set their settings correctly, e.g. have private photo and video albums to be only shared with your friends and no one else. But if you post a link to your blog, which you actually want more people to reach, then that content can be allowed to be accessed by ‘everyone’. And of course, if it is just someone else’s content (like a neat video that you see), fell free to share it with ‘everyone’ again, as you have no need to protect that further!

2. But what if you are a brand? The one thing that brands found favorable about Facebook was its viral nature. Where good content could potentially fly on account of features like ‘share’ and ‘like’. Will Facebook become less viral now with these changes? Will your content not move that fast?

I would think not. Unless users make mistakes in their personal settings.

As a brand, the content that you produce, you will anyway want maximum people to see it. So you will not put any significant privacy protection levels on the same. You will set your content to be accessible to ‘everyone’ (as against only fans, or friends of fans or something like that). With that setting as your content moves out from your fans to others, there are no stops really. The viral aspect remains.

Unless.

Unless some users have made their settings such that “all that they share is only accessible to friends” and no one else. Ideally they want to protect their personal privacy, and would protect personal content, photos and all. But a mistake in user settings could well make ALL content that they share, only reachable to friends. In SUCH cases, the content that passes through such friends may perhaps stop flying as much, as it will not go to the level 2, beyond their friends.

This should not happen, but if it happens to a small degree, to that extent, the viral flight of good content may be diminished to an extent.

Other than these factors, I do not see major consequences of these new features of Facebook.

What are your thoughts? Have I missed something? Do you agree? Love to hear your thoughts on this.

02.12.2009 General, Sanjay, Services, WebsitePlus, facebook, social media View Comments

Was this Social Media in the Web 1.0 world?

by sanjay on Sunday, June 14th, 2009

Two things have prompted this post.
There was some chatter, I think on Twitter, or perhaps on some blog, about how long one has been on “social media”. There were responses that mentioned periods like few months, 1 year, and going upto 3 years or so, on the outside. I did not participate in that chatter / discussion, because I felt funny. Have I been on Social Media for last 2-3 years, or last 12 years?? I know I would have raised a lot of eyebrows if I had mentioned 12 years there! So let me put up the facts here and allow you to decide. By the way, most of those people in that discussion must have still been in school 12 years back :-)

The other reason that prompted this post was the slide that we put in our corporate pitch. We write there that:

Social Wavelength is a startup venture, incorporated in April 2009.

Social Wavelength though, has been many years in the making!

This is an effort then, to explain the idea of the “many years in the making” that we mention.

So here it is. Way back in 1997, when there were just a handful of websites in India, my first entrepreneurial venture, Homeindia.com, was one of those sites. And although later on, from 1998 onwards, it moved towards the e-retail space that was to be it’s focus thereafter (and continues to be, as on date, although the business is run by it’s new owners after we divested our stake in 2007), in those early days of 1997, Homeindia.com had a different focus. Here is a screenshot, without images, that I was able to pick up from archive.org:

In 1997, the government of India, under Finance Minister, Mr. P. Chidambaram, had announced this Voluntary Disclosure of Income Scheme (VDIS) that enabled unaccounted income (from tax point of view) to be converted to accounted money. There were a lot of questions that people had, in this context. We had enabled a Bulletin Board on Homeindia.com, that time. While we had empaneled some experts to respond to people’s queries, but in addition to the experts, it was also open to any user, to respond to another user’s queries.

Over the few weeks when this scheme ran, there was large amount of interaction, and it became a veritable case of “user generated content” and a “community” of sorts, although those terms were not really fashionable those days!!

So did we run a Social Media application in those Web 1.0 days, in 1997? I think we did. What do you say?

In fact, over the next 9 years that we ran Homeindia.com, there were many other applications that we built and launched, which had high engagement with the users.

But to go back to the original two questions, I do believe that I have been engaging in ‘Social Media’ for a long, long time. And also on account of that 11+ years of hands-on experience in running these consumer facing online businesses, I have reason to state that Social Wavelength has been many years in the making!

Do you agree? As usual, welcome comments and feedback.

** For information of readers, I co-founded Homeindia.com in 1997-98. After the initial efforts in areas like VDIS, the site quickly regrouped to focus on offering services to customers outside India, including Non-resident Indians and others. Homeindia.com had the honor of being awarded “India’s Most Useful Website”, and subsequently took the onus of being “India’s Most Reliable Online Store”. I divested my stake in Homeindia.com in 2007. **

- Sanjay Mehta

14.06.2009 General, Sanjay, WebsitePlus, social media monitoring View Comments

Can Social Media Make Your Invisible Site Visible?

by sanjay on Tuesday, June 9th, 2009

There was a lot of discussion generated around my earlier post, about the Invisible Website Syndrome. Besides the comments and discussions on the blog here, there were many interactions on other forums like LinkedIn, where the content was shared. It brought forth several perspectives on the subject. I am summarizing my thoughts now, with the added learning from those interactions.

At the outset, let’s ask the tough question? Do you really need a lot of traffic to your website at all? Do you need high visibility for your website? Maybe not. Yes, indeed, you need good visibility for your content. But that is not the same as good visibility for your website. Simply because content is mobile. Your content could be delivered to your readers / viewers via RSS feeds, widgets, embedded video players, and you may even choose to give summaries or full content replicated at higher traffic locations like social networking sites. That being the case, your content is visible, but not necessarily your website. What you need to be sure about, is to ensure the mobility of your content. Don’t constrain it.

There is no getting away from the fact that your content has to be good. Whether through advertising, whether through social media, whether through search engines, whether by putting a gun on someone’s head, whichever way, if you get traffic to your content, that is only the beginning. Will they stay and read? Will they want to see further updates? Will they Digg you, will they tag you in Delicious? Will they share your URL? Will they tweet and retweet your URL? All of those decisions impact further visibility of your content. And those decisions, in turn, depend on the quality of your content. So there is no getting away from creating interesting, relevant, useful content for your target prospects.

This is akin to the customer acquisition process in a store. The first time customer acquisition cost is high. But it is justified by the life time value of the customer (the repeat purchases, where there is no spend on customer acquisition anymore) or the referral cases that the customer brings. If those repeat purchases and referrals do not happen, then the customer acquisition cost is typically a loss to the company. Same is with generating visibility of your content. Good quality content, that is mobile enough, will ensure that amortization of the ‘customer acquisition cost’.

So what become the key pointers to a strategy, once you have good content and you have set up the mobility factor on your content?

  1. Ensure that the basic HTML code (typically) of the pages is done “correctly”. There are many tools available to test the compliance of the code, and it is a good idea to ensure those efforts are taken. This is because, a page can easily look right on a browser in spite of the HTML not being correct. This is on account of your browser ‘covering up the errors’ and showing the page correctly. But for a search engine bot that may come to crawl the pages into the search engine, may not be able to move into your page and ‘read it’ well, if there are HTML errors. And that will prevent your pages getting into the search engines. It is a very fundamental point but I mention it here, only on account of the number of pages that we see, where this has been ignored.
  2. Ensure that the page is basically done well, in terms of on-page SEO effort. A large part of the on-page SEO effort is good common sense, e.g. giving relevant page title, giving a descriptive URL to the page, using relevant H1 links, putting proper meta tags for keywords and description, etc. An experienced HTML programmer should usually get these aspects right, and should not need specialized SEO effort. Doing this makes the site fundamentally search-engine friendly. It does not ensure immediate search engine placement, but it is a start.
  3. Having done all this, and having got your site ‘ready’, now is the time to get started on the process of visibility generation. A good start is to send out the URL to friends, family, business associates, etc. who may be interested in having a look at the website. Several of them may come and take a look and few of them may end up bookmarking these, at any of their favorite sites like Delicious, Digg, Reddit, etc. This enables sharing of the content at those bookmarking sites, with a possibility of discovery from there. And hence traffic.
  4. It is also assumed that you are already active on social networking sites, Twitter, etc. Also that you are part of relevant groups or communities on these social networking sites. If you are not, then it is a good idea to become a member and then mingle in those relevant groups and communities. As one who has been a member for a while and been a participant in the groups and communities, it is alright then, to share the URL of your new website, with the group / community. You can also tweet about it. It is a good idea to share a small note on why it would be good for people to go and see your site (“what’s in it for them?”). You may also request folks to ‘RT’ your tweet about your website.
  5. Once you have shared it with your friends and groups on Social Networking sites, and you have tweeted the URL, you have to hope that it spreads further. You have to remember and appreciate this quote of Mike Arauz: “If I tell my Facebook friends about your brand, it’s not because I like your brand, but because I like my friends”. If your content is good, your friends will tell their friends and so on. You also have to hope many of the viewers coming in via these viral means, will also end up bookmarking and tagging your site, and the spread of your site will increase further, through those tools.
  6. I did mention in my previous post how tough it would be to penetrate the SERPs in Google, on account of the sheer congestion. However there are opportunities left out elsewhere, e.g. a) you can run a corporate blog, and there are better chances of it getting linked in, either at Google itself (thanks to WordPress, for example), b) besides just posting links to social networking groups / communities, you could consider getting a social networking profile for the business itself, c) put up pictures related to the business, with necessary descriptions and tags, on sites like Flickr and Picasa – those could get searched faster and better, and drive traffic back to the rest of your content, d) do the same with videos – create good corporate videos and plug them into variety of video feed sites like YouTube, Metacafe, DailyMotion and others, with your branded channel, proper tags, descriptions etc. Like the images, this will also drive traffic back to the rest of your content.
  7. Last, but certainly not the least (and I must mention this, before the SEOs strangle me!), there is the SEO factor. Once you start generating traffic inwards to your website from these various places, and such traffic is coming in, on basis of specific keyword phrases, it is a good idea to reinforce the site’s standing for those very keywords, with a structured SEO effort, including off-page activities like link building and others. This works to cement your place in the higher positions on the search engines.

By no means are the above suggestions an exhaustive list. But these are all tried and tested, and these can be a good set to get started. Good ground will be covered only by meticulously following these guidelines. Once you get going with this set and develop the initial visibility, a higher level of effort may be put to sustain the visibility, and grow it further.

Do you see any major fundamentals missed out of this list? Share them via comments, then.

09.06.2009 Sanjay, WebsitePlus View Comments

The Invisible Website Syndrome

by sanjay on Tuesday, May 26th, 2009

Few weeks back, we considered the option to outsource some routine, simple web development work. With that in mind, we started interacting with web development companies, all of whom had some stature, viz. they were at least 50-100 person teams, and they had a client list that was at least in 3 figures.

In my meetings with them, I would ask them to name their best website work, which I could review. Just so as to understand how good are the sites which they consider to be their best. And as I saw those “best” sites of theirs, all of them ‘looked good’ (typical flash work, great graphics, etc.), but none – repeat none – were SEO friendly. When I queried them about this fact, they defensively claimed that “oh, these clients just wanted a web presence and were not concerned about SEO”.

What is the meaning of “just wanted a web presence”?? And ALL of them had the same defense??

So I went to the next step – asked them to show me their OWN websites. The company website of the web development business. Disaster! None of them would ever get a lead from being found on a search engine!!

That sadly is the story of the day. When web development companies and their clients are in such deep mess, think about what can be the status of a typical new business, going out and putting up its website?!

Indeed, this is a phase of the ‘invisible website‘.

Let me drive home the point. Say you are in the business of diamond jewelry, and spurred by all the noise on going digital, you decide to put your business online, and create a website. Now you would need to get your target customers to visit this site, right? And you would expect search engines to drive traffic to your new website, right?

Well, that’s not going to happen!! WHY?

Try searching for ‘diamond jewelry‘ on Google. You get nearly 20 million matches.

Okay, so you are in India. So you say that you don’t care for the entire world to find you. If someone is searching for ‘diamond jewerly India’ and if you can get found that is good enough for you. Well, ‘diamond jewlery India‘ returns around 800,000 matches!

Compromise time. “Let me get Mumbai at least”, you feel. Next stop ‘diamond jewelry mumbai‘. About 335,000 matches!! Yeah, you would wonder about it, no? I am sure there are not so many jewelers selling diamond jewelry in Mumbai, but the search matches are surely there!!

Is there ANY hope at all? Let’s try ‘diamond ring 0.2 ct mumbai‘. Finally – a smaller number of search results! But still around 18,500.

Now you get the concept of “the invisible website”?

So how do you STILL make an impact with a website. Here is where Social Media comes to the rescue. Whether you reach the entire world or not, you certainly want to reach a far higher number of people beyond those that get your business card and who want to then, check your site out.

So the subject of my next post will be (and leave your thoughts about this in the comments): “So how exactly can Social Media make the invisible site visible??”

26.05.2009 Sanjay, WebsitePlus View Comments