Arnold Waldstein's Blog

The game has changed obviously…but, it’s certainly not over.

Facebook is becoming what Microsoft used to be back in the 90s…essential to everyone, impossible to beat and feeling a bit like the platform bully.

They are smart to leverage what they have to the hilt. It’s just good business and I would have done the same, but like Microsoft, they will lose  (if they have not already) the passion and commitment of those who have no choice but to use their platform, which today is everyone.  This is starting to sound like Windows to me.

You can’t beat Facebook at their game…but you can build great companies that can win around them. Anyone in the gaming or multimedia or peripheral add-on space in the 90s will tell you the same. I have personal scars from this and am a veteran of the birth of coopetition.

The announcement (I watched the livestream on Facebook) was like a webcam in a frat house. Nonetheless, Facebook Places will certainly be a monster product and hugely successful based on the massive leverage of of the platform obviously. Their reach and numbers are poetic in their size.

And yes, I’m a power Facebook user, a fan, consult on how to best use fan pages to my clients… and am excited about Places even though underwhelmed by their lack of originality. I’ll certainly use it because the Facebook platform is core to how I live, but I’m still checking in on Foursquare for now.

I’m just a big believer in the check-in space and rooting for the underdog today. I believe in people who are inventive and I think the Foursquare guys are… and with spunk, smarts and yes, a good chunk of luck can potentially carve out something that makes sense, has value to the users and the merchants.

What’s the answer? I’m not certain but here’s Foursquare’s response in SAI today. We do need more of a answer from them though.

I like the intersection of the check-in and coupon space a lot. That’s where I’m looking for the next great explosion on the streets with check-in. I’m searching for apps that are at the intersection of these because I believe that the social commerce component is key…as it creates an open market and value potentially for user and businesses alike.

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Postscript thought

I’m starting to think that Om Malik may have it right that Facebook is after the local merchants and Yelp. His post is here. Thanks to @PS 98 for surfacing this.

Even though I still believe that the check-in space is embryonic, and even if Facebook’s focus is Yelp, the swishing of the giant’s tail still makes it a difficult place for Foursquare and the other players.

With 45M internet-ready TVs shipping this year, there’s a minor land rush in process adapting the building blocks for community and social commerce from the web to the largescreen TV and communal setting in the living room.

There’s a lot of buzz around EBSNs (Event Based Social Networks), bridging web-proven viral loops and social commerce to live connected sporting events and network premieres. This is an obvious direction for flash community gatherings around live broadcasts but doesn’t address the majority of legacy media content available to viewers.

I visited with Scott Varlard (co-founder and CEO) and Philippe Pierre (CFO) of SocialBomb, a NY-based social technology company that is figuring out how to build community and bring social value to the mostly time-shifted reality of TV and webTV content. These guys are betting that brands and fans are both interested in social viewing and sharing around their favorite shows and movies.

SocialBomb, if you don’t know them, is the company that provided the community and technology platform for the HBO release of True Blood Season 2 Blu-ray DVD. This HBO release pioneered scene sharing, social incentives and on-big-screen controls for the Blue-ray release of the blockbuster hit series.

Scott and Pierre walked me through the demo…cool stuff to be able to easily pair your Blu-ray to Facebook and Twitter, share scenes and engage with a bunch of social incentivized activities. I’m a bit geeky and a huge True Blood fan so maybe I’m an easy sell for this but there is real potential here especially as this paradigm moves to streaming catalogs as well as DVD-based content.

This was a gutsy leap of faith for HBO to try this even as a ‘quiet launch’…big win for SocialBomb to pull it off so crisply. Connecting a DVD and TV to the Internet is still the domain of the few and DVDs, in my opinion, are a legacy format looking for some additional life. But…rumor is that fans liked it, scene sharing was very active (the coolest part) and both the fans and HBO have deemed this a success.

My take is that this is a small but important proof point on how to create community events around time-shifted content. DVDs are a second tier choice after streaming for many, but if this provides social proof in the small, hard-wired world of DVDs, it should work well for the mass market as a streamed, built in and easy to set up media in millions of living rooms this holiday season.

Let’s imagine the not so distant future.

Take what SocialBomb has done and apply it to streaming content and connected big screen TVs with, as well, 2nd and 3rd screens on the couch and mobile devices thrown in wherever they may be. And where every title on Netflix or Hulu or Boxee is able to connect to Facebook and Twitter with scene sharing, some social gaming and merchandizing built in. You can watch and rewatch and share media content in a social setting on any screen anytime.

This means that every time I view Godfather II or Hustle and Flow, or Entourage, I will be able to create a flash community event, share scenes and participate in extending my passion for movies, a particular movie or TV show down to the scene level. And most likely, this will inspire others to download and view and share as well.

I think there is something here…maybe not exactly as I’ve described it or precisely as SocialBomb is working with HBO. But something…significant.

People on the social graph, 500M on Facebook and millions on Twitter are hungry for content to share. On Facebook alone, an average user generates 90 pieces of shared content equaling 30B shared pieces monthly (mostly photos). With a tangible connected TV footprint coming and flash community capabilities being developed by SocialBomb and others, there will be a lot of scene sharing and social gaming around what we all do a lot of…that is watch TV. Scene clips could be the next step beyond photos as shareable objects. And everyone has movie and TV scenes that they would want to send as a video invitation to their friends and communities to join in the fun…or watch later.

This is also an innovative solution on how to take the real-time community of the social web and our social networks and connect it with time-shifted movies and TV and sports media that we love and watch and rewatch over and over again.

I can’t see this as any other than a win for everyone…including of course the content owners.

I’m very positive about a real-time social environment on the big screen around legacy content. Certainly more questions than answers exist today, but having all media content available all the time and platforms like Facebook or Twitter seamlessly tied into my ability to share…just makes sense.

Sharing in a Facebook-powered world is a common bond across all networks. Daily and by the billions of posts, we let each other know where we’ve checked in on Foursquare for the best expresso and where we are traveling to and the restaurants we frequent. It’s a natural (and significant) step forward to share movie and TV content we deeply identify with at a scene level, plugged into the social graph and shareable across all of our communities.

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Thanks to my friend Jeff Blackman for introducing me to the SocialBomb team.

A lot has changed in 30 days.

A month ago, I searched the open web and Facebook for examples of social commerce where community activity drove measurable transactions. Outside of social buying, ala the Groupon phenomenon, there was little of interest. My post on that experience is here.

But things are changing quickly.  Two global brands with innovative commerce initiatives are starting to get traction and attention.

Two examples of social commerce on Facebook fan pages that work

1. Disney Tickets Together Facebook application

The idea is built around sharing your movie going experience with your Facebook friends from the movie’s promotional fan page.

Tickets for Toy Story 3 are on sale only the Facebook fan page, weeks earlier than anywhere else. You let your friends know you are going and when, invite them to come along…and if you want, buy tickets as a group for the movie.

This provides a special incentive…and reward…to the movie’s Facebook fans as they can pre-buy early and participate in raffles for free tickets.

This is clever social selling and fun social buying wrapped into one. Reports of groups of 80 people buying this together indicate this is potentially the beginning of a trend that really works.

Tickets Together is the best example of social or community commerce I’ve seen. You are literally buying collectively with your friends on the Facebook fan page. Finally… something to do on a fan page that makes sense! And this is the first and best example of empowering a naturally social activity like shopping online in a community setting.

Disney’s market phrase for this is “…no friend gets left behind,” according to Oliver Luckett, general manager of DigiSynd, that manages Disney’s social networking presence.

It’s just social commerce to me, taking fan interest online and moving them to an offline event together, then back online to re-socialize it. An oft-repeated cycle of social proof.

2. Diesel-cam in-store Facebook runways

Live in Spain, Diesel has a fashion runway with a Facebook cam inside their stores.

Shopping is a core social activity, globally. You shop with friends and what your friends think influences what you buy. This is true for everyone; probably more true for teens and 20-30-somethings, the core audience for Diesel.

There is a Facebook runway just outside the dressing room. Customers try on jeans or an outfit, and stream a short video to their Facebook walls to show their friends what they are thinking of buying. Questions like…“Like it?” “Should I buy it?” are natural and this conversation drives sale’s decisions.

You can see a video of the Diesel-cam here.

Note that I’ve seen chatter online that the Diesel-cam is ‘stupid’ or ‘voyeuristic’. For Diesel and for the meaning of the brand, it couldn’t be more perfect.

It’s just smart commerce, matching brand to customer to commerce…and social and fun to boot.

Why I  think social commerce is a solution for Facebook fan pages

• It just works. Disney is selling tickets while building community favor. My bet is Diesel will be successful as well.
• Shopping is what we do with friends offline. It’s logical, when done with intent and creativity that it will work online.  Facebook fan pages are replete with community potential but are usually dull…maybe commerce is an answer.
• Social proof as a transaction based on the encouragement of your community is the first approach to social ROI that makes any sense to me.

Why Disney and Diesel as global brands are being socially astute

• They are taking commerce to where the fans are. Facebook becomes a channel.
• They are building commerce that matches the channel to the customer behavior…that is social commerce for a social platform.
• They understand that boring and dull doesn’t sell, and doesn’t fit their brand image. Fun and creative and social does.

I think that Disney and Diesel will benefit from a deeper connection with their fans, from a new strata of social proof to their image and, of course, from commerce.

How does Facebook benefit?

Having a fan page is free for brands and data storage and bandwidth cost real dollars. Maybe these brands will advertise more? Maybe not.

Facebook wins whenever anyone uses, returns, sticks around or invites friends to do anything at all on the platform. The more traffic they get, the more sharing happens and the more demographics are collected. And of course, then the value that Facebook can sell to advertisers and partners increases proportionately.

For Facebook and the brands and I think, the consumers…this is all a win.

I posted on Facebook and privacy the day after Facebook’s F8 Conference as a contrarian to the crowd hysteria.

Since then, I’ve been in numerous heated debates and found myself defending Facebook, then succumbing to annoyance over their adolescent behavior and momentarily siding with the crowd as the cavalier attitude of Facebook management became impossible to ignore.

But today, I still believe firmly as I did just post F8, that if you live in public, your life is just that…open to public record. And that acting responsibly is the coherent poise in a connected world. This responsibility is yours on the street, on Facebook, on blogs…everywhere

A BusinessWeek article lit up some interesting facts about Facebook worth thinking over:

• Traffic is 4.7% higher today than it was on May 1
• Facebook has 519.1M users, compared to 411M in September ‘09
• User activity level is still very high. An average user creates over 70 pcs of content each per month and connects to 60 pages or groups
• Facebook accounts for an astounding 8.5% of all Internet traffic

And as telling:

• The We’re Quiting Facebook campaign scheduled for mass cord cutting on May 31 has only 16,000 (out of 520M) people signed up

So what’s going on?

The blogosphere, the press and common knowledge all point to a semi-repentant Mark Zuckerberg who is hiding behind his youth and bowing to the pressure of US and European governments and a zillion hate posts.

Let’s be clear here…Facebook is acting irresponsibly and toying with its member’s feelings and trust. And there is a grating disconnect for a social network to have such anti-social and anti-transparent management.

So many ostensibly hate them but numbers and activities are increasing dramatically. Something is wrong or at least out-of-whack.

My take on why we can’t love Facebook but can’t imagine not having it

Facebook as the definition of ‘social’ just got it right.

It’s an almost perfect product because it filled a need no one knew they had. And created a situation, like we have today, where not having Facebook is an impossible thought for I bet, hundreds of millions of people. Including myself.

Most of the angst towards Facebook is expressed on Facebook itself. The news we read or videos we see about the privacy issues, rants, ‘how-to’s’ on setting privacy settings, and on and on are all done on our Facebook wall itself. Kind of like hometown politics on the only paper that people read about things that happen on Main Street.

While I support Diaspora and open social development, Facebook is not going away anytime soon. It is not going to stop growing or being an essential part of how we view the world and interact unless Zuckerberg does something truly stupid…and stupid he is most certainly not.

Or till whatever the next iteration of social, maybe unimaginable now, pops up and we migrate with our friends to somewhere else.

Our networks of friends from kindergarten playmates to people we met through our kids or worked with or dated or want to meet will never be erased. Migrated and moved perhaps, but we simply need that Facebook magic touch with friends is now natural and organic and isn’t going away. Thankfully.

What has happened is that we don’t and really can’t love Facebook like many did before. Like many loved Apple or the Mac as a solution or our smart phones when we first got them before they broke the second time.

Facebook, though brilliant and essential and integral to social life, has lost that love cause it trifled with our trust big time. It was like Bill Clinton…Oh so brilliant and oh so flawed as an individual. I would vote for him again in a heartbeat but never be surprised at enormous acts of personal stupidity. We aren’t breaking up but we are suspicious forever.

What’s inspiring to me is that Facebook added something to human social interaction. Yes, it really it has, and that is why from a mass of people in the know and early adopters who are rightfully miffed, there are hundreds of millions and hundreds of thousands joining daily around the world. Some know, some don’t. Some care, some don’t. Doesn’t matter.

And to be clear, I still hold that we need to be responsible for our own images and act responsibly. Facebook didn’t change that and that will grow as we do into a more connected social age. But, and I mean this seriously, Facebook did belittle the very attribute it created. We can forgive this but forget or trust completely…not at all.

What is great is that technology has enabled an extension of community. A new iteration of social for us all. It allowed me and everyone to connect and define relationships in new and fun and empowering and important ways.

Today Facebook is essential to multitudes. What it empowered and created is not going away but Facebook itself may when something new evolves that builds on it and really does respect what it created.

Who cares about Facebook? No one.

But everyone cares about friendship and community and platforms to build that on.

Today, that is Facebook for a global population of over half a billion people. Where those people are in 5 or 10 years, is up in the air. The fact that sharing in communities is important and will persist is undeniable.

Social commerce is a compelling idea that has been floating around for awhile. I first engaged with it on AVC.com (thanks Fred!) and have been thinking and talking about it as a way to explore how the community itself can become a business model.

With Facebook arguably the new desktop for the connected social world, all the reasons that fan pages should work as promotional websites for brands, make them work equally as well for social commerce. Huge population of users. Hours spent online per day per user. And social etiquette as the behavioral norm.

What is social commerce?

It is a dynamic online version of shopping with friends…but on the global, real-time Facebook stage. The intersection of community, commerce, social dynamics…and fun, where the influence and opinion of friends drives the transaction. A pure community referral-based economy.

Did this start with social media? Sort of…but I think it is important to make a distinction between social media and community elements that will make social commerce a success. Commerce will come out of community. Social is simply the design language that defines the interaction within the community.

Community storefronts as the commercial doorway for Facebook fan pages

Is social commerce and community shopping the next big leap for Facebook and the social web?

Commerce on Facebook fan pages is popping up more frequently but most pages are not really social in their orientation. More catalog than community. The Gap Lookbook and Travelocity Travel Deals are two interesting ones to check out though. But examples are scarce, and even moreso outside of the large global brands.

But I do believe that social commerce is coming like a storm to Facebook. And sooner than we think.

Three reasons why social commerce could become the new e-commerce platform for Facebook

There are no certainties but these are the top reasons why I’m a believer.

1. Shopping is a large part of socialization…and it’s mostly absent as a community activity within Facebook today. There are hundreds of millions of users spending hours online per day. Why aren’t they shopping with friends? The social need is certainly there.

Marc Pincus, founder of Zynga, created Farmville and a social gaming empire to give people on social networks something to do. Shopping is as natural as social gaming, universal in its appeal and crosses every segment of the Facebook population.

2. Social commerce as a community driven referral-economy is already working today on the open web. The best example is the exploding social selling, deal-a-day, local, discount markets.

Popularized by the Groupon and LivingSocial, scores of people (including myself) are engaging in socially-driven, deal-a-day discount local commerce. Social commerce in the guise of social selling is most certainly thriving on the open web.

Common sense indicates that this approach, adopted to a community brand strategy, could work equally as well (or maybe better) within already established brand communities like Facebook. It’s fun and social on the open web…why not on a Facebook fan page?

3. There is a natural synergy between e-commerce catalogs on the open web and Facebook. The logistics systems and catalogs are in place, all that is needed is to bring it to the community with social understanding and community dynamics. Not very simple but certainly doable.

The basic rule for businesses and marketers is to bring your product to where your customers are. They are already on Facebook in mass numbers. They are already fans of your products and services. And already referring your brands to their friends. It is time to start to figure out how to build a community-based commerce system for your fan page community.

Social commerce today is a big idea but it will become real…and quickly

In a recent post, I called Facebook fan pages the Wild West for brands and businesses. It’s still early and there are no guidelines for success. Social commerce may be even more embryonic.

Or maybe not.

Today most Facebook fan pages are boring. We Like them more out of courtesy and the need to belong, rather than the community value that we participate in. It’s hard to make them interesting because there is little to do there. For an inexplicable reason how we socialize with our friends on profile pages doesn’t seem as natural or fulfilling on fan pages.

Travelocity putting commerce on their fan page is not brilliance…it’s logical (although their design approach is questionable). But purchasing their next trip may be exactly what fans want to do, while they post pictures of their vacations and chat with their friends about where to go.

Maybe social commerce with its built-in ROI is a missing link for the social graph. Transactions are measurable by nature…and the goods and services that we built our allegiance to brands on, were in many cases, based on our purchases and the buying experience itself. Figuring out commerce and its intersection with community is a potential way of building some measurements into the social paradigm. And nothing is more measurable than revenue.

Social media and communities have immense value in their own right. No denying the importance of community for brands and businesses. But if we can figure out commerce as the natural offshoot of community, then truly everyone wins.

Companies will build more brand loyalty and stronger communities. Fans will socialize and shop. And businesses will do what they do best… build value for themselves from the value they provide through their products and services.

I tweeted this and posted it on my Facebook Wall this morning.

All the fuss and kvetching about Facebook and privacy. I think it’s time for all of us to get over ourselves a bit.

We all live in public. Each to their own degree.

• Posting on Facebook
• Tweeting
• Updating LinkedIn
• Commenting on blogs and services from The Economist to Techcrunch to Curbed to Eater to YouTube and Flickr
• Writing reviews on Amazon, Yelp, Travelocity, high school and college boards

Unless you are a spook or off-the-grid, you are there. And happily.

Google has been tracking our cookies for years, and gathering and sharing every utterance with whoever cares to set an Alert. Now Facebook is doing some of the same and more. It just happens to be on a social platform that everyone belongs to and spends countless hours a week on.

We are all socializing, sharing….and need I say, loving it. Expecting and craving attention. Benefitting from the connections. Disappointed when we are not found or recognized or Shared or Liked or Retweeted from a photo or phrase or link.

I, maybe more than most, embrace this social connected net. I see the connected upsides as inspiring and powerful and hard to imagine being without. This is life and I’m really happy about it.

I might have preferred Facebook to communicate better (they never do!). Or broken with standard service practice and asked for us to opt-in rather than opt-out (but nobody does this). Or done a better job of telling the millions how to set preferences or groups that almost no one understands or uses.

My advice to myself…and what I try to live by…is to accept that we are all in the spotlight and act as smartly as we can. We are all on this stage together.

The rules are really simple. We all know how to act in public or at a party. At work. Or on email. You never say or do what you don’t want to hear or read back. Nothing new here.

I’ll admit, things have become bit wackier and complex because not only what we publicly state or post goes on record, but also what we buy, our music playlists on Pandora and on and on. The definition of public just got super-stretched and is feeling momentarily unfamiliar. So it does with each new technology when it starts to change how we socialize and interact.

I like to think that we’ve all become celebrities of sorts to our own social world and have a personal paparazzi-like problem.

As long as we understand that most everything is transparent and that we live in the public’s eye… and act accordingly, everything else will work itself out.

It’s the Wild West for brands and businesses figuring out how to use Facebook as a platform for marketing and promotions.

The potential is significant to move away from websites for movies, stars and retailers to Facebook fan pages where the fans are already congregating in mass numbers.

But somehow, so far, the social connector from most Facebook fan pages is missing. The fans are there and easy to aggregate. But the content and social campaigns that work within the Facebook ecosystems are still being discovered through trial…and a lot of errors.

This problem defines the next great opportunity for businesses on Facebook. Those who discover how to build a viral, social funnel with their fans on Facebook are mining a great new frontier. Truly opportunity abounds here.

Some background on fan pages

They have been around since 2007 and were created to clean up the confusion between people and companies on Facebook. People have profiles and brands have pages. Fan pages are basically a profile page for a business with some built-in marketing and search capability.

The numbers per Facebook on fan pages are starting to grow after a slow start.

• More than 3 million active pages on Facebook
• More than 1.5 million local businesses have active pages on Facebook
• More than 20 million people become fans of pages each day
• Pages have created more than 5.3 billion fans

Top 5 reasons why fan pages are such fertile ground

1. The fans are on Facebook and easy to round up.

Approximately 500,000 more people are migrating to the platform daily. And it is so much easier (and cost effective) to find your fans on Facebook then on the open web. Think of the pain and cost of PPC and SEM over spurring viral spread through friending.

2. Liking and Fan-ing are part of the Facebook community culture and powerful expansion channels.

People like to like and share those likes. This is a brand dream world. There are also some astounding facts that show that on Facebook becoming a fan actually drives buying behavior.

3. We live in a world of earned social respect.

Facebook is the sandbox for social behaviors, and the infrastructure and the culture for social sharing is already in place.

4. The fan page is free…well sort of.

You can buy widgets, build apps, port media but honest hard effort and connections with the fans is what really works. There is a democratization at work that levels the playing field and rewards honest and interesting communications.

5. Facebook advertising is a powerful tool to drive both fans and prospects.

Not only is the demographic targeting powerful but new abilities to target friends of friends redefines and expands earned support to a great degree.

The two problems to solve to make fan pages work

1. Boring content on the web makes unacceptably boring content on Facebook.

Most brands are simply porting over and reusing content from their open web URLs to their Facebook pages.

Photos, YouTube links to videos, Twitter and RSS feeds. Nothing new here. There is little or no acknowledgement that the social web requires social activities. No understanding that a brand is a personality and that on Facebook, and on the social web, people communicate with people, not companies.

A list of share buttons with some streamed video does not a community make. You may attract some fans but you are missing the bigger and more powerful connection.

2. The Facebook platform is more comment-based than conversational at its core.

The things we do on profile pages to deepen our relationship with our friends work less well on fan pages. Person to person communications is not the same as person to brand. There is a twist that is not fully understood.

And the Facebook platform itself makes it easier to link out to a conversational blog than to build a dynamic structure within Facebook on the fan page. This has created a void that is starting to get filled by new start-ups with a variety of approaches to social brand marketing.

Something is missing and it’s the authentic social connection

Think for a second about the power that the social web brings. It’s about connecting. About authenticity. And about transparency. Standard fare, even basic share channels aren’t enough.

I’ve blogged on the Star Connection. That magic on Twitter where millions of fans can connect and converse with a star like Shaq or John Mayer or your local politician. This one-2-many personal connection is what fan pages haven’t discovered how to accomplish yet. Sure you can chat but Facebook requires a face and real-time connections.

Fan pages need something new and fresh and social. Something different that takes advantage of the power of the social graph. Something that connects personally with the stars or the faces behind the brands.

One of the solution areas will be under the umbrella of what I’ve termed social video. I’m an advisor to Vpype, a start-up company who is innovating in this area on Facebook and providing commercial solutions to most of the examples I outline below for brands.

Other points of conversational video are starting to crop up all over the web, especially in the online dating world.  Most are pretty rough in format but social video without a doubt and a directional marker for what is to come all over the social web.

Some examples of what  ‘might be’ may stimulate some thinking

-Facebook variation of ‘video Twitter’ connecting stars to fans

A Twitter star like Ashton Kutcher broadcasting live to his millions of fans and having a video chat conversation. Impromptu, authentic and fun conversation that just happens on his Facebook page.

-Interactive reality-TV Facebook connections

Think of Survivor and Project Runway and Top Chef. Countless reality shows with weekly interactive conversations with the fans. Not boring chat, but a light as air conversation with the star that was ‘cast off’. There are scores of possibilities for these every week.

-Self chronicling star vblogging from Facebook fan pages

Ongoing video conversations to the fan page wall, interactive with any fans that happen to be around. Storable. Sharable. Reviewable. Think Miley Cyrus or John Stewart or Chris Rock.

There are innumerable options and solutions not yet thought about. Or even imagined.

My point…social media is authentic. Real. Interactive. And fun. Our relationships to our brands needs to be with real people in a new way that suits the platform it sits on.

Facebook is where the populations are. Brands need to find a way to communicate not just broadcast if they want to unlock the keys to a dynamic brand community.

This is a great challenge. A huge upside. And something new to be invented.

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For more information:

-See The State of Facebook for Business Report from the Hubspot blog.

-Check out Inside Facebook Pages from Sysomos.

My thanks to Tyler Willis, a smart guy and head of brand strategy at Involver.com for pointing me to some of these resources and being open to my questions and opinions. Involver is one of the innovative start-ups that is building solutions for brands on Facebook fan pages.

I spent most of last week in London at the Social Media World Forum talking about social video and Facebook as a platform for businesses and brands in Europe.

It was great fun actually sitting down with MPs, bank and music company executives, advertising and marketing consultants, writers and vbloggers from the Netherlands to Turkey.

For background see my post and my keynote on YouTube.

After endless conversations and two auditorium-sized keynotes, my thoughts sum up below.

Europeans just get video and collaborative communications

They really do.

The very issues that make doing business in Europe challenging and interesting, make them very open to new means of communications. Many corporations, advertising agencies and start-ups have people working from different countries. Communications and collaborative work tools are necessary parts of a distributed workforce.

Most everyone uses Skype and video Skype. Video conferencing is not the exception but the standard here.

In the U.S. when I was demonstrating my client’s social video application Live Broadcaster on Facebook, it was a ‘wow’ of something new and unexpected, like a hybrid car before they were convinced that the car was both environmental green and fun to drive.

In London, using video as a communications medium seemed like the normal thing to do. At the conference, they grabbed the spotlight and jumped in the broadcast window, invited their friends and started a video conversation. It was the natural thing to do. They culturally just get video, distance communications and the need for video as a collaboration tool.

Skype set the groundwork for video as a conversation to move quickly up the adoption curve in Europe and into Asia. Skype made video conversations a natural form of communications. Vpype takes it one step further and integrates it into the social graph. The Europeans understood this at a glance.

The reaction was very similar across the spectrum of businesses, from MPs, bank executives, ad agencies and social TV GMs from all over Eastern Europe.

Europeans, especially in the UK, haven’t embraced Facebook yet as a business platform

Facebook user growth in the UK is falling behind in Facebook adoption from the rest of Europe and into Asia. The data proves this.  An estimated 30 meetings and many emails and DMs on Twitter confirmed this to me at the event and around London.

And the adoption of Facebook fan pages as a business platform appears to be lagging behind this. I can’t find a reliable source of fan page adoption numbers so please share if you know where to get them.

The big but here is that European businesses are looking for solutions and are amazingly practical and ready to leap when the solution works. I found myself being the evangelist for Facebook first; the demonstrator of social video second. Video conversations were an easy step; Facebook as a business community was a bigger leap.

Facebook themselves is the issue here. Not the video conversation format. Certainly not the community but the lack of education and marketing about privacy and specifically around how businesses and brands can use fan pages.

Facebook is the Wild West with no roadmaps. But the the power, the cost effectiveness and fact that the people, the fans are there makes this a natural place for the brands to move to. European businesses are lurking and looking. They are sharp and will leap when comfortable.

Facebook simply needs to help and provide information. And to focus on the small and large businesses alike. The market is here and lack of information and communications is holding the brands and businesses in Europe back.

Niche and private communities have traction in Europe, but this will change over time

Privacy. Trust in the integrity of the network. The interweaving of fans and brands on Facebook. These were large topics of conversation in my meetings in London. There is simply not enough work being done to make the population and the businesses comfortable.

The first questions from corporations about the Vpype solution on Facebook was “How can I get it on my website?” or “How can I get a secure link between Facebook and my database?”

Geographical and language diversity seemed to drive individualized networks more than a move towards shared platforms. The closed umbrella of multinational corporations in Europe, at least from my exposure last week, was very niche oriented. Consequently, a lot of small community platforms were being created for specialty groups and companies. And considerable interest in my client in exporting functionality to private communities.

In the U.S. I see platforms like Involver and scores of agencies and consultants focused on Facebook fan pages. And new platforms for teens and specialty groups seem driven by new requirements not available on Facebook.

In the UK especially, I saw private and closed and specialized as the first thought. Creativity in using technology to communicate in new ways but rigidity in moving businesses and brands onto open platforms with a business component. I believe that this will change as the economic practicality of Facebook and the fact that the populations are moving there make it a given over time.

Europe poses an interesting dichotomy around social media and Facebook. On one side there is a hesitancy to embrace the Facebook platform across companies and brands and sticking to the old niche community paradigm. On the other there is incredible flexibility and creativity in embracing video especially as a new way to have conversations on the Internet.

This is my snapshot after a deep dive into the social media scene in London last week.

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A personal thanks to all of my new friends in Europe for their time and input. The honestly and openness of the conversations were inspiring.

Hitwise numbers reported last week by Barry Levine in Sci-Tech Today, indicated that for the first time, Facebook not Google was the dominant driver of traffic to the Internet.

He captured this fact in a great phrase: Facebook is now the center of gravity for the Internet.

This is really a significant shift. No longer is search what drives the majority of internet users to launch their browsers in the morning, but it is now replaced by the need to go to our Facebook pages, visit and get our information from our communities. And undoubtedly hang out online longer and be social.

Is the big change here that we choose social over search? Obviously the numbers don’t lie and now Facebook leads as the driver of online activity. But this goes deeper and speaks to how we are finding information online and from a different vantage point. I’ve blogged on the shift to the power of our networks here and the wisdom of the community here.

Think about Facebook for a moment. We choose our friends, populate our communities and determine the content of the Facebook Newsfeed we see. For myself, the Newsfeed is my principal information source for many topics. New post by Fred Wilson…there. New post by friend Mark Essel…there. What’s new in the wine world…there. Tech news, art news, world views, silly points of views…all there in the feed from trusted folks I’ve chosen to allow into my community.

Most every topic that I’m interested in is in my feed when I log in for my first click of the morning and many times during the day. This personalized channel doesn’t miss much and it is constantly changing as I join clubs, add friends and post myself.

This information and news is all in-network, all referral, all from trusted sources that I allow to be displayed. With the new numbers from Hitwise and the astounding fact that 500,000 a day are joining Facebook, I’m presuming that the majority of people on the web daily are doing the same thing. Determining their communities, getting information from friends and doing just what I do. Which is in essence personalizing the information they see and adjusting the filters of who they trust.

The big question for me is not why we are there or what we are doing. But where does the search function live and what does it look like moving forward? Certainly with communities as the majority base, search can’t remain extant from those communities, with importance and popularity determined externally.

We search for information. It’s a natural state that drove us to Google originally. For data. For dictionary understanding. For all the stuff that inspires our imagination. Our hunger for facts.

Search is essential but importance ranking or popularity of information shouldn’t be determined impersonally. My community should be determining link popularity, not the open web and keyword densities.

Great questions are starting to surface:

-Where is the search function going to live? Are we going to have to leave the community and go elsewhere to get answers?

-Is the search mechanism itself going to start taking the preferences and the value of the community into consideration on what is trusted or more important?

-And is search going to be a function of Facebook? Of Google? Something completely new like Hunch? Or a hybrid?

It seems that the numbers from Hitwise are stating a priority. And that priority is community. Likewise, it’s logical that social and community search are the next steps. We simply require that our communities become the new filters.

To me these are the critical questions that the shift from Google to Facebook dominance raise.

Search we must have but personalized and community filtered and centered it must become.

The answers to these questions are unknown as yet… but they are interesting and important and will change the online experience as they work themselves out.

Making video easy…is hard. But it is starting to happen and adding a new dimension to socialization on the Internet.

On the social web and on Facebook, the trend towards sending and sharing video is growing at enormous rates. Internet TV viewing in the US alone has increased more than 50% year over year. But there is a difference between sharing a video on YouTube, viewing a concert on Facebook through Ustream and what innovative startups are calling social video.

The social aspect of video is blurring the boundaries between real life and real experiences online. But more interesting, it is letting people connect with celebrities, brands, politicians and leaders in a powerful new way. This is the game changer.

The state of art for socialization around video today is in three buckets.

With YouTube, you capture a video moment, upload it and share it by sending it around. Fun stuff and we all feel good when we get comments like ”Looking good” or ”Great vacation” or “Can’t wait to see you.” Similar to a video post on your Facebook wall. While richer content than a photo, not really that different.

With the streaming companies like Ustream, Livestream and JustinTV, we are finally getting events and shows delivered digitally to us on our laptops and phones inside of Facebook. It’s cool to watch a show, comment on the wall, or Tweet out what your thinking to your friends. Similar to Social TV. Their goal is to create a virtual living room or concert hall around the shared experience. The event is streamed, the comments are to your friends via chat. This is less about changing socialization than about changing the delivery from analog to digital.

The third, more embryonic and more interesting is what is termed social video and is finding a home on Facebook.  In the spirit of full disclosure, I am an Advisor to Vpype, a social video startup. Social video, from Vpype’s application, lets an individual or a brand or businesses create a video conversation with their friends or fans on Facebook. You use your Friends Lists and Event Manager to decide where and when, you broadcast live and share the broadcast channel with your audience who can ask questions, interact and shape the content of what you are presenting or talking about.

So social video is a two-way, one-to-many shared channel of communications where the broadcaster interacts live, unscripted with their audience. The entire event is saved, shareable and reviewable. The content of this video conversation is the combination of the broadcasters video and the viewers’ comments. The sum of both defines the experience. Think of a live TV show with an audience that interacts freely with the host.

OK…so we have a live two-way channel between brands and fans. It’s authentic because you can see the broadcaster. It’s real because it’s live and free flowing. And it’s more intimate and compelling because it’s personal. Yes, this is where real life and real conversations online start to come together.

But the game changing power of this comes from something special that is only available on the social web. And that is connecting with stars (from your local politician to a movie star) in real time in a personal way. Think for a second about Twitter and one of the many reasons why it’s so powerful. You can message Ashton Kutcher or John Mayer and potentially get a response back from them in seconds. For millions this is beyond a wow experience. This could also be Gavin Newsom, Mayor of San Francisco, your Senator, Yankee baseball slugger or your local celebrity chef.

With social video, this connection between brand and fan could become a video conversation on Facebook from a Fan Page or a personal profile. With these celebrities talking to their fans or customers through their Fan Pages directly.

Vpype’s Live Broadcaster is pioneering an interactive video conversation application for Facebook brands and businesses. I will do a follow-up blog post on early beta testers for Vpype as they come online, which include a Hollywood Screen Writers Pitch Contest, Evangelical Ministers, Auto shops, DJs, virtual online assistants and one public company planning on doing its Earnings Call via the social video product.

This is what is starting to happen on Facebook. Having a cloud-based architecture, a global massive audience that grows by 500,000 a day and a proven model for friending and socialization makes it a natural. Not to mention monetization from its advertising model. I’ve blogged on this here.

Today, social video is a conversation defined in a video and gravitar-based chat environment. Voice channels and split screen (Larry King-like) environments are being tested now. And with 4G networks within reach, the paradigm will go mobile for broadcasting as well as interactive video chatting.

It is still early days for this dream but it is really starting to happen. It’s empowering for all of us to be on the brink of another chasm-leaping breakthrough in technology and behavioral change.

As much as I’ve embraced the social web and Facebook today, this leap is really something to get excited about.

I’ll be online broadcasting and trying this one out.