Creative Agency Secrets

Well, thanks to the lovely Janice Cable, I was there.  The debate was hosted in BT’s sumptuous auditorium in their City Business Centre.  Great gig.

Three speakers followed by a formal debate. 
Take-outs from the speakers

Hugh McLeod - Social media is about meaning.
1 - Social Objects are key.  people socialise around objects, church, clothes, technology a.k.a. "sharing devices"
2 - It is cheap and easy
3 - Hyperlinks subvert hierarchies - you can bypass traditional structures.

JP Rangaswami - Enterprise software has 4 pillars

• Search
• Subscribe
• Fulfilment
• Converse

Facebook is this plus community.that’s why it works. 

Chad Wollen - Facebook is putting together all the components to make a marketplace = the Social Graph.  This social graph of value to users provides not much systematic value to advertisers.  There’s a trade-off between keeping it controlled and closed c.f. AOL until recently and opening it up and accepting that spam will happen.

Hugh - This is a ‘political bargain’ the open or closed system.  It’s a compromise

JP - we recognise that the world today does not allow monopoly rents
BT is experimenting using Facebook for knowledge management and internal communication.. it has a group of over 6000 employees online and is the third largest enterprise group.

Sam Sethi - Facebook is an aggregating lifestream. 
Poking someone on Facebook is a social gesture.  It’s like primates grooming each other(!)

i spoke later to Sam and he has some fantastic ideas on where some of these ‘possible futures’ may take us.  I am going to check out his APML workgroup later on…. watch this space.

There was a good debate and some useful discussion but I was mainly looking for take-outs on how businesses can use Facebook.

5 learnings
1 - open up your system and embrace the opportunity in Facebook.  Let staff use it, recognise your employment as part of their lives
2 - Trust your staff not to ‘waste’ time online in Facebook.  Get their ideas about how to use its features to further your business needs.  If BT is trying it out for internal communication and knowledge management, what can you do?
3 - Trust the Facebook privacy statements.  Most of the attendees had fully open profiles and many said they would accept a friend request from their boss (JP has an open door policy and so this is an extension of his normal way of working).  Read the privacy pages and see how detailed you can go with permissions e.g. tagging in photos - you can refuse to allow this.
4 - Look at the possibilities in the advertising.  Now they’ve opened up the opportunity for improved targeting for ad serving, it definitely is something I’m going to try out.  Graduate recruiters are now regularly checking Facebook for candidates both as ‘background’ and to see who else they know
5 - Watch for the un-sexy apps.  There are some neat ones e.g. enabling reading spreadsheets online.  Filter the bad or faddish (zombies) and find those that work for your needs. 

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 18th, 2007 at 8:59 am and is filed under Customer Relationship Management, Marketing, Web 2.0 for business, business development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.