The promise of the social web is juicy and inspiring and confounding.

Be interesting. Be smart. Work like a maniac. Create value and your customers will find you.

It’s a socially brushed off sequel to “Build it and they will come”.

But even interesting becomes noisy and ineffective without context and connection. The truly great promise of democratizing access for all is eating its own tail as more and more noise creates less and less connections that lead to value.

This problem seems endemic of late.

We all use filters to personalize information to our own needs. A few dynamic blog communities and early smart curation platforms like ensembli and eqentia start to make sense of the noise and put immediacy and relevance into the social information stream.

As a business owner and marketer, pinpointing context creates value and connections. Firehosing information is akin to interrupt push advertising, spraying the already noisy world and creating social spam as exhaust.

All businesses and brands are faced with the same drive to rise above the noise, create connections and build momentum. And all of us are finding ourselves at communications crossroads.

What do our Facebook fans really want when choosing to ‘like’ us? Is this content or friendship? Many ‘friends’ with good intentions and divergent interests ask me to ‘like’ their causes. I do more than not, and each ‘like’ creates noise and spam.

Many of us are shyly guilty of the pure adrenalin approach to social communications where marketers and community managers are treating the world as an open Facebook page, equating coy with clever, chatter with info and volume with value.

And generally, across brands big and small, there is a misconstruing of the applause for the real connection. Mistaking supporters for true early adopters and fans as a contributing community.

It’s not really all that easy to sort out.

Companies need to connect with their customers. Want to be interesting to their fans. Want to be ‘liked’ and shared and rise on the positive strength of their customers and fans good will.

Almost as if in the drive to have conversations, we put chatty conviviality before context and interest. It’s just easier…but it’s noisy and unfocused.

Part of the problem is the power of the social medium itself, so fraught with democratizing empowerment that we live in a more aspirational reality and busyness is masquerading as focus and market intent.

So…what to do?

Business owners and marketers need to rethink how the social web intersects with value creation and marketing. It’s not one or the other, it’s an interlaced new order.

Two ideas help me navigate the always murky intersection of social web savvy and market building intentions.

Focus on the Interest not the Friend Graph

There are lots of ways to parse the internet. Most focus on friends’ connections. I like to focus on the superset of this, the interest graph.

On all social nets, metadata becomes valuable as more friends vet it. The crowd is the curation principal.

For example, coffee shops on Foursquare rise to the top of the list as ‘recommended’ because your friends went there and checked in. The equivalent of liking in a geo-connected world.

There are two inherent gotchas with this approach.

You need lots of friends to make the sample data valid. And while potential relevance and context is created, the byproduct is a roar of social noise.

Our ‘friends’ are friends for a multiplicity of reasons, not always because they are experts in everything we are interested in. They may have no taste buds for coffee or palate for wine even though we may want to meet to drink coffee with them or enjoy a flight of natural wine.

That’s the friends graph crowd sourcing point of view. That’s also its basic fallacy from a marketing perspective. The friendship graph is broad and narrow and noisy and anti-contextual by nature. This is the social web equivalent of ‘boiling the ocean’, the perennial marketing non-starter.

The interest graph takes the polar opposite starting point.

It begins with common interests (wines of Arbois, raw desserts, travel in Paris) and builds friendship under them, because of them, around them. It is grounded in contextual information that connects through interests. Not expertise necessarily but common passions around pursuits.

‘Like’ a fan page on Facebook sponsored by an organic wine zine or travel club. If I get real information, for example, an app for finding organic wine bars in Paris and NYC with tasting meet-ups highlighted, this is spot on. I’ll find new places, make new friends, and create a new contextual network around a common interest thread. Virality is given. Context and interest in this case is the superset of the friend networking machine.

So…businesses need to find those target connections, those alpha sharers and dream early customers.

If it’s me, focus with intention on intersecting interests and context. Offer interesting info in digestible bites. I’ll share it forward and connect the string from your business to my interest network.

Sharing it forward is not a phrase; it’s a behavioral reality

The need to share value forward is the behavioral key to channel social connections…and create community.

Sharing is not a platform derivative of Facebook or Foursquare; the platforms gave expression to this behavioral drive. They made it easy and ubiquitous and the common language of our connected lives.

The drive to share value forward is the core tenet of the social web.

Sharing is power pulse, the passionate heartbeat that makes social a transformation, a complete game changer for everything from commerce to education.

Our incessant need to check in on our nets, looking for push out stuff we like and think is important, is not lip service to a trend. Sharing makes people feel good.

Sharing is the social change agent of our times.

Wrapping up

I’m really inspired by the business possibilities of the social web and humbled by the challenges to harness it. It’s replete with potential but elusive to grasp.

Figure it out (with a lot of luck) and the marketplace is truly your oyster.

Approach it from a distance without understanding its unique social gravity and you create noise and spam and just churn.

It is powered by honest communications. Fueled by the passion of people to connect with ideas and product and causes, and share that connection forward.

Can these really be the guidelines for a business platform?

Absolutely.

Do you ever wonder why everyone posting on your Facebook wall is happy or tan and interesting? Always eating at fabulous restaurants…or in my case only drinking the very best wine?

Welcome to the ‘other’ social filter.

Social information filters allow us to see what interests us, find more relevant information quicker and connect to people or causes of like mind effortlessly. They are core to the value of the social graph and of course Facebook.

They are magic of sorts. We hang around Facebook because it is relevant in a world we define.

But we also feel at home on Facebook because we are the architects of our physical identity which is inextricably tied to our social identity. We filter and control our physical image and persona. It’s human nature and part of socialization to look our best. Facebook understands this and let’s us easily architect the info we show. Everyone of us deletes posts from our wall that we don’t like.

We can “control the lighting” if you will on how we are perceived.

In an interesting post by Om Malik yesterday, “Now Starring You, in a Movie about You” talks about what he calls MeTV that ties into this perfectly:

‘I always thought millions of us were living inside our own weird version of reality television. But reality television can be ugly and sometimes too stark. Movies are curated, edited and have a sense of polish. That is one of the main reasons why Ratcliff (developer of the app“100 Cameras and I”) believes apps like his and Hisptamatic are selling briskly on the iTunes store. “The filters can turn ordinary into extraordinary.”

Turning the “ordinary into the extraordinary” is a potent phrase. This is about the intersection of identity management and personal fashion on our Facebook walls and blogs. It’s naturally what people do on Facebook, at a party, in a meeting and in life.

Om is mostly talking about photos and points to the massive growth of Instagram as a photo filter as an example. He is talking about images and filters…I’m thinking about live social video and chat.

I’ve been an enthusiast for social video for as long as video has been pushed around online.

All the infrastructure barriers to social video are mostly gone. Cheap bandwidth and free storage abound. Handheld mobile play and capture. And we have Facebook and Twitter identities as the social glue to tie us all together in a world where sharing is a behavioral norm.

Despite a host of interesting early products and a focus on the less self-conscious Y generation, social video and chat are still a juicy promise but a very early reality.

Even I, with all my passion for the medium, infrequently use any of the services except Skype for international business calls. Something has been missing.

I think Om, by identifying the ‘why’ of the boom in photo filters has found at least one important key to the puzzle. Social video chat feels and acts and looks like a dorm room video cam. Home-movie like. Awkward and overly self-conscious and glaring.

This is a filterless, uncontrolled reality. From childhood on we look in the mirror to see how others see us. Suspending the ability to control this seems antithetical to human nature.

For a long time I believed that the social and video chat market was waiting for a behavioral change in people to share more visually. I now feel the core human tenet of filtering our image to control our persona and identity may be the missing link.

Adding filters to video is not easy. It’s simpler for a B roll edit or filter, very challenging for a live stream. That’s why broadcast studios are what they are…expensive and complex and few.

To borrow a few words from Om’s terrific quote, in order for the ordinary to become extraordinary, we need to filter and stylize the video stream. And in order for that to be part of the social graph, everyone needs to be able to do this on the fly.

Seems possible in the face of all the other barriers that have been erased.

On the heels of Om’s post, the media was abuzz yesterday with the launch of SocialEyes, a well-funded startup with Rob Glaser of Microsoft and RealNetworks fame as the Chairman and product guru Rob Williams as CEO.

Om’s ideas and Glaser’s new company connect in an interesting way.

Rob Glaser understands the intersection of digital and audio video with the mass market better than most. And he has the chutzpah and connections and vision that few in this segment have. And first glimpses of the product coming out of Demo yesterday are interesting. SocialEyes looks like it has separated itself from the crowd and has learned from the companies that pioneered the space.

I believe that social video is the next communication’s frontier and have been blogging on it almost since the beginning. I want SocialEyes to get it right. I want someone to leap the chasm and unlock the gate for social video communications. Rob Williams, a really smart product guy, has mashed up some cool features. Adding B roll and content feeds with what looks like curated publishing channel on YouTube creates a semblance of dashboard and video publishing control. He knows that the market needs something more.

My only question is about you and me and how we can control the filters of our appearance, which is our social identity online.

Call this segment video chat or video conferencing or social video…it’s a lit image of ourselves nonetheless for all to see during the event and shared across the web in snippets of your live image.

The utility of live chat and the fun of connecting live with friends and partners is very compelling. My sense is that the more you can controlling the lighting and airbrush the image so we look like ourselves, the faster the mass market will grab this and make it their own. All the other components are in place, just the filters have been missing.

Community and communications are two parts of a social whole.

The Facebook and Skype merger rumors are a perfect backdrop to relook at the Facebook community paradigm and how it will change with Skype as a partner.

To hundreds of millions of people, Facebook is the web. The first place they go in the morning and their principal source of news information. What’s remarkable is that while Facebook has defined social, you can’t really have a conversation there. Share of course; talk not much. This has been a missing link.

Today, on Facebook, we can post and comment but real conversations are not possible. Comment strings get moved to email or blog posts or a phone call or to a coffee shop for a meeting. Facebook is a check-in portal to see what’s going on. To do anything beyond sharing, you need to leave.

Facebook wants “To mesh communications and community more tightly together and add more tools to allow users to do so.” According to Kara Swisher who broke the merger story. Adding deeper communications capabilities in voice, text, and video are naturally the next step for Facebook and an evolving need for the ever growing group of people who run their lives from their profile pages.

Facebook fulfils that unique promise of a place to hang out at the intersection of our off and online lives where you share…and to many, create your life.  It is the ‘homepage’ to the global and flattened mass market, the news source of reference to most, and fast becoming a merchant mall to most global brands. Google is where you go to work and look stuff up. Facebook is where you share it.

The merger would add a communications layer (Skype) to Facebook’s community network that makes sense on at least three levels:

1. Voice and text

Voice communications is a ‘gimme’ for the social graph. It’s been overdue in arriving.

Why say “I’ll call you”, jump off of Facebook…rather than make that call immediately? Having an integrated phone book built off of Facebook membership seems like a no brainer. Skype is great alone. Integrated without an extraneous Skype phonebook is considerably better.

No one likes the phone company. If we can make calls from our social homepage…we will. And since many of the Skype calls we make are international, this feature has the added benefit of accelerating international expansion to the Facebook network. And to the members, the more people on the network, the more useful it is.

Texting is an obvious missing link

Most notices from Facebook and my blog communities come through text.  Texts are our rapid alert system from our networks.…”At the store.” “Meet you at the movies.” “Sign on to Facebook to chat.” Why have a one-way text pipe? On Facebook, on my phone…I would simply send text from within my profile…so would hundreds of millions more.

With Skype integrated, this issue is resolved…and of course, from a single Facebook address book.  The sub 25 year-old, mini-millennium generation, would jump on this en masse as text on the phones is their principal communications jargon.

And with Skype’s partnership with Avaya (think VoIP PBS) it is possible to conceptualize a fan page as a business center with conference calling and call analytics. Powerful in its possibilities. Your fan page could become the portal into your VoIP-based, Facebook centric global BBS system.

2. Video chat and social video are the big promises that just haven’t materialized

Social video has been stumbling forward in fits and starts. I expected it sooner, but it has eluded the mass market’s momentum…so far that is.

Creative startups like Vpype, and even Facebook with video wall posts have tried to make it easy to use video as a new social form of communications. They’ve succeeded in making it easy; they’ve been unsuccessful so far in making this a mass market need…or want for that matter. All the pieces are there…cams, free usage, address books, but human behavior hasn’t made the leap.

Video Skype calling to friends and for business is already a well accepted behavior. Integrating this capability within the social graph from a branded and trusted provider like Skype could possibly push behavioral usage to fruition. Maybe we needed a communications brand to kick start this.

My sense is that if you add video Skype calling into the social ecosystem of Facebook, the dream of party-line video calling, interactive video presentations and distance learning just might take off. Social video may go from a good idea to an explosive reality…and drag along the work of start-ups who are verticalizing the video pipe for all of us, with apps from entertainment to business.

3. The Facebook social TV channel

Live conferences from Facebook corporate are streamed frequently, and free. Boring stuff but there is already the concept of TV within Facebook. It works pretty well actually on the small screen.

TV, the holy grail of home entertainment is a living room paradigm. Skype and Facebook are already built into millions of connected TVs and DVRs coming out this holiday season. Add Facebook Connect, Skype’s SDK, a connected TV broad footprint and Facebook may be the network for content consumption, including TV as a social medium. I’ve blogged on this here.

“Facebook is the equivalent for us to what TV was for marketers back in the 1960s. It’s an integral part of what we do now.” This comes from Davide Grasso, CMO from Nike. Facebook could well become the new social TV platform, where people watch and share video content in a brand new way.

A Skype and Facebook merger or partnership makes sense to me. Check out Om Malik’s piece on GigaOm for a positive view and Rick Aristotle Munarriz in The Motley Fool for an aggressive anti-merger point of view.

Regardless of the outcome of the Skype/Facebook saga, integration of community with communications will occur in the Facebook network and deepen a whole social reality that is greater than the sum of its community and communications parts.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my mother lately.

She’s 91 years old. Healthy. Spunky with a large extended family of kids, grand kids and great grand kids. There are people all around in her retirement community. In spite of this she appears lonely and bored…achingly so at times.

I sense she feels isolated from her past and trapped in an ever-shrinking present. Not abandoned certainly–but friendships and networks outside of immediate family that come to visit are just not there. And there is little productive to do.

Her communities, once very large, are evaporating. Connections outside of the family are gone mostly. And to someone whose father drove a horse drawn cab in NYC at her birth, computers are just not truly a part of who she is.

And she is not unique, but an example of many who live between the extended family structure of the immigrant family and the social reality of a networked world that many of us inhabit.

For most of us, social networks have flattened the world and community has taken on new forms, providing a huge umbrella of support. We have Facebook walls, niche interest groups, blog communities, and offline/online connections. We have numerous lingering touch points with contacts and friends in a way that my mother never had.

This is not about richness of life…my mother’s life has been very rich. It’s about something new and extraordinary that the social web has empowered. This ability to create community as a hedge against location, a hedge against aging to some degree and certainly…a hedge against isolation as it engenders friendships in new ways.

My mother’s world has been one of astonishing change…world wars, the great depression, air travel, empowered middle class, electric powered everything, but for her, it stopped at the networked world. We spring off where she stopped and nothing is more compelling or revolutionary that what the social web empowers around people and friendships and community.

My mother sends (some) emails. Plays computer solitaire…so it is not simply technology where we spring beyond her generation. It’s networks and the social possibilities that are the great chasm here. And while we understand intellectually the power of social and community, my sense is that it is just beginning and its power is just getting tapped.

Maybe when I’m my mother’s age…when the baby boomers succumb to old age…the body will not hold us back as much. And will not create isolation or lack of productivity as our physical reality becomes less limber and more confined.

Science has extended our lives and made the middle of life longer, more productive and not much different from the decades preceding. I’m thinking that a networked and community driven, intertwined off and online world, will extend that even further, enabling connections, productivity and support for an even longer, richer period.

Add the science of health aging to the empowerment of community and socialization in a connected world, and we have something new and powerful. Technology usually evolves from one thing to another. The social web and community is a revolution in how we live better…for far longer.

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.

______________________

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.

______________________________________________________

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.