No top Facebook apps from brands either…

Posted on May 7, 2009 by Antony Mayfield

Just as you won’t see a “viral video” from a brand in the blockbuster list for this genre, you won’t find any apps from brands in the top Facebook apps list.

As Dirk at News from the Herd notes, it’s about certain kinds of useful when it comes to hitting the sweetspot with Facebook users:

1- Produce addictive but simple to use games that don’t force ad messaging down users throats

2 – Give them a way to organise their lives, and/ or:

3 – Provide them with mildly competitive ‘social comparison’ tools vs their friends.

As Inside Facebook noted, the recent redesign of Facebook shook up the developer leaderboard, bringing the likes of LivingSocial to the fore.

Interesting to see Causes in the top 5 apps out there on Facebook. Reminds me of the excellent Brita “Filter for Good” campaign in the US, to reduce the amount of bottled water being consumed. The Facebook app and the Facebook group for this were just a couple of the parts of the approach.

The brand benefit is direct in this case – but it is a brand behaving like a movement, and benefitting (in terms of awareness) from helping people acknowledge, pass on a call to action around an issue, without having to commit to a great deal of effort. If they want to talk about it more, get involved more they can and Brita will give them a little more data and tools to do so (if they’re smart, which they seem to be).

Dirk asks if brands can ever win in Facebook:

It will be interesting to see if brands manage to make much head-way here, or whether it really is a case of as P&G’s head of interactive said last year, you can’t monetise a space where someone is breaking up with his girlfriend.

It’s a nice, pithy, provocative question. But monetising, advertising, interupting, branding up these spaces are far from the only option for brands. I think that as more brands develop their social web literacy we’ll see them feel more at ease with spaces like Facebook, find their legitimate, useful places in them.

I’m not sure if they will ever be blockbuster app hits that make it to the Appdata leaderboard. I think that should probably not be an objective for a brand. That “big is best” attitude is another one of those hangovers from channel thinking.

: : You can keep an eye on who is winning on Facebook by apps and developers at AppData.

Communities of purpose

Posted on May 7, 2009 by Antony Mayfield

big-bird-is-watching-you

I like David Cushman’s take on the way that the web disrupts everything it touches.

My main focus has been in thinking about the shift from channels to networks in media. Reading David reminds me that it is everything that looks like a chain, especially value chains, that are things that networks will rip apart.

Then, as he should, he makes it personal:

If you can find part – a kernel – a piece that is truly yours and which you truly believe in, congratulations, that is something of great valuable, which others will find value in and join you in building on. (image courtesy cayusa)

That is your contribution to the new creation webs which will emerge as communities of purpose become the business units of the 21st century.

Communities of purpose. Yes – that’s something to remember. And those purposes might last a few hours or a few decades. That purpose might be the marketer’s fantasy of grouping around the purpose of buying a product, celebrating a scrap of content, or a politician’s nightmare of an organised poplace come to dictate terms on a piece of legislation.

Daily Mail on why the web is a waste of time

Posted on May 7, 2009 by Antony Mayfield

The excellent thing about this pile of nonsense is that from now on, whenever anyone says nonsense along the lines of “I worry that people are forgetting about relationships in the *real* world” or “the web is killing the art of conversation”, I can say: “Yes. There was an article in the Daily Mail that said almost exactly that. You should read it.”

Via Drew B.

Q: What have the most popular “virals” of all time got in common?

Posted on May 3, 2009 by Antony Mayfield

A: None of them was an advert (if you don’t count movie trailers).

I’ve taken to bookmarking excellent viral videos when I see them. Reason being, whenever I’m asked which viral videos are my favourite (journalists, conference panel moderators and analysts seem to ask this most often) I can never seem to recall one.

Maybe my recall for “virals” is like jokes – I’ve basically got three slots in my long term memory and once they’re full, I’ve not got much to go on.

This obsession with “viral videos” is a legacy thing, a hangover from the channels model of media. People projecting their wish that the world were still simple eneough that a 30-second video (easy concept to understand, recall, make money out of) still sat at the centre of it all.