Really dude? Blindsided? C’mon…

Tim Haines is the founder of Favstar, which in late May, took it on the chin when Twitter announced that they were launching a feature set that was essentially a repackaging of what Favstar does. Except that it was now built natively into Twitter. Boom, goodnight Favstar.

Now Tim is more than likely a good dude with whom I’d have a lot in common. And I have no particular disrespect for him, or for his products. But I do think that if you build a feeder business, on the back of another host business, it’s just a matter of time before you get smooshed by the host. Particularly if the core of your business, is to essentially provide a missing feature that the host business hasn’t yet released themselves.

So not only should Tim here not have been blindsided by this, he should have been expecting it from day one. As traffic was ramping up on Favstar, all on the back of Twitter users wanting these particular features, he and the team should have been frantically thinking about ways to leverage this traffic and user-base to launch new products, that were not so dependent on the whims of a third party.

It’s more than fine to launch a business like this (in fact, some would say that this api-driven, build on top of other products ecosystem actually drives the web), but to think that this type of business is sustainable in the long term, is (in my opinion) delusional. When you build on the back of another platform, you unfortunately serve at the pleasure of that platform.

Companies like Twitter and Facebook are businesses. They have boards, and employees, and investors, all of whom have reasonable expectations that their respective companies will continue to evolve and innovate. And at various points within these evolutionary paths, it’s going to be their growth or yours. And who do you think Twitter or Facebook is going to go with? Trust me, they aren’t going to forgo launching essential features, native to their own platforms, in order to keep your little app in business.

And it isn’t just Tim and Favstar (I really don’t mean to pick on him, just needed an example here). Ubermedia had a gut-punch moment earlier this year, and now guys like Twitpic and YFrog are getting steamrolled too.

So if you are an entrepreneur whose business lives or dies by the access to (and benevolence from) another business, beware. And start thinking more long-view. Don’t wait until it’s too late.

But lately, some of our favorite politicians out there have realized that drafting legislation around this “privacy issue” is just the type of fight that can curry favor with average Joe voter. Take one part scary scenario (THE INTERNET BAD GUYS ARE WATCHING YOU), one part headline grabbing company (FACEBOOK or GOOGLE), and one part we’re-here-to-save-the-day (THE GOVERNMENT IS HERE TO RESCUE YOU!), and you’ve got yourself a bill that everyone loves. John Kerry and John McCain know that if they can draft up some really vague, uninformed, knee-jerk legislation that sufficiently sounds like it will stop all of the scary boogeyman scenarios that they’ve trumped up, voters will love it.

To hell with whether it actually does anything substantive, that’s not the point.

Anyhow, what irks me in all of this, is how poor a job the online marketing industry is doing here to counter this paranoia, and really re-frame the discussion with some…um…I don’t know, FACTS? How about highlighting what really is going on in the world of tracking and privacy, and discussing what is tracked, generally how anonymous it is, and how this tracking really improves those web experiences that we’ve all come to take for granted?

An article in Slate last week, really did a nice job of explaining this whole situation in less than scary terms.

Broadly speaking, there are two types of data that Web companies keep on us—personally identifiable information (like your name and list of friends), and information that can’t be tied to you as an individual. In our discussions about privacy, we rarely make this important distinction. While we focus on the disadvantages of companies collecting our information, we rarely look at the innovations that wouldn’t be possible without our personal data. This is especially true when it comes to anonymous data—information that can’t be used to identify you, but which serves as the building blocks of amazing things.

The entire thing is here, and it’s worth a read.

I guess if I had to make a prediction here, it’s that there will be some sort of goofy legislation passed, Kerry and McCain will get some political high-fives, and then the online/tracking/marketing industry will just make adjustments and find a new way to do what they were already doing. Problem not really solved…but problem not really problem to begin with right?

I mean, does anyone remember CAN-SPAM back in 2003? How’d that work out? Spam eradicated, right? Yah, that’s what I thought. CAN-SPAM just gave the spammers a nice rule book to work around, and allowed them to go about their spamming business as usual. Why do we think this situation will play out any differently?

And lastly, do people not realize that far more personal data (social security numbers, purchase history and spending habits, credit information, etc) have all been out there to be bought and sold now for years? Why aren’t we all up in arms about that? Long before the internet, our good friends at places like Experian and Acxiom have been tracking way more than Facebook, and selling real personal information to anyone with a nickel to spend.

Run some queries here, and then let’s talk about how scary it is or isn’t that Zappos shows you an ad because you looked at some sneakers.

If you are even a casual user of Twitter, I am sure you have seen the social media expert more than a few times. The profile looks something like this: Following 20,545, Followed by 20,100, and 10,000+ Tweets. This user’s tweet stream is populated by a steady stream of retweets and tweets of well-publicized articles from publishers like Techcrunch, Scoble, GigaOm, etc.

I’ve always hated people like this, but could never clearly articulate why it was that they bothered me so much. They always gave the appearance of adding value, but in the truest sense, they just weren’t. And today, Quora’s blog dropped a fantastic post that just plain nails it.

These people are called “reputation arbitrageurs”. And they (Quora) are exactly right.

The reputation arbitrageur then hopes by tweeting and retweeting sources with strong reputations, users will read these tweets, associate the source with the reputation arbitrageur and quite possibly even retweet the link. With each tweet, the reputation arbitrageur manages to claim a small piece of credibility from what is essentially a costless and riskless transaction. It doesn’t cost them anything (other than time in curating followers) and they never assume risk of an opinion since they generally select highly credible, semi non-controversial, mainstream sources. It’s the Twitter way of building reputation and influence.

The irony here I suppose, is that this very post could be sneered at as a light form of reputation arbitrage in and of itself. And I get that. But I had to share this, because this is the explanation/thought I’d been struggling to articulate for so long. Well done guys.

Full article here.

Here are ten things (in my opinion) that if Facebook addressed, would make the Facebook Pages platform, MUCH more powerful and useful for brands.

1. Target Landing Tab By User Type – I believe I saw this feature leaked out this past month when Facebook accidentally rolled some buggy code live, so it looks like this IS coming, which is great. Because there are generally two types of people that are hitting a Facebook fan page (existing fans and potential fans), and those two types of people should be presented with much different messaging and a much different funnel. Currently, admins can set a landing page other than the wall, but it’s an all or nothing setting. Being able to show potential fans one landing tab, and existing fans another, will be a huge improvement.
2. Non-Public Communication w/Fans – Every so often, a Facebook fan will pose a question, or voice a complaint, that requires the conversation be moved “offline”. Not necessarily because there is anything nefarious to hide, but sometimes personal contact information needs to be exchanged, the issue needs to be probed further, or there is just some other general interaction that is best not to have on a public wall with tens of thousands of other fans watching. But as a brand, there really isn’t any good way to initiate these private conversations. I, as an admin, could message the fan from my personal Facebook account, but that isn’t sensible. It would be fantastic if there was a private messaging function that allowed brands to initiate contact with fans in the event that there was some information exchange that needed to happen outside of the wall.
3. Photo And Video Responses – This is something that I’m surprised Facebook just doesn’t have in general, for all users (not just brands and fans). I’d love to be able to respond to wall posts and comments with photos or videos on occasion. Or even just initiate threads where users could respond to US with photos and videos. Both photo and video are such enormous parts of Facebook, it seems to reason that they could and should be able to exist within threaded conversations.
4. Special Styling For Admin Comments – This is something that has existed on blogs for a long time, and is extremely useful. When an admin or author responds to user comments within a giant thread, their comment is generally styled in such a way that it sticks out as being an admin/author response. Right now, if there is a Facebook wall post that has hundreds of comments, the admin responses are lost within the conversation, and other fans have no simple way of distinguishing “official” responses to a post, from those comments coming from other fans.
5. Threaded Replies – Again, something that might make sense for ALL of Facebook, not just fan pages. Within those aforementioned long comment strings, there is no way to reply to specific comments from fans, in threaded form. If a post has say 350 comments, and an admin wants to specifically address comment #47, the only real way to do so is to clumsily throw an @[username] in front of the admin comment, which ends up at the bottom of the entire string, and is so abstracted from the original question, that it’s really useless.
6. Page Merging w/Organization Pages – These auto-created, Wikipedia powered “Organization” pages are completely obnoxious. Their official look and feel, serves only to confuse users and potential fans, and cause headaches for brands and the page managers of actual official pages. At one point recently, there seemed to be a “merge with official page” function on these organization pages, but the process did literally nothing. And now it appears that this feature has been removed altogether. In our case, the “Organization” page for our brand has over 7,000 fans, and is growing daily. These users are fans that we’d love to engage with (and presumably want to engage with us), but unfortunately are out in some alternate bizarro brand page universe, lost forever.
7. Human Support – This is a pretty simple one. I know, that like Google and other big online companies with self-serve systems, it is near impossible to individually service every customer with a human. However, perhaps once a page reaches a certain fan threshold (50,000 fans? 75,000 fans? 100,000 fans?), a more official support channel could be opened up. Even an automated ticketing system that ROUTED to a person. I don’t need a dedicated account manager that I can reach 24/7, but it would be nice to be able to put in a support request, and have an actual person respond in a timely fashion when really needed.
8. Comparison Within The Category – Maybe this is a stretch, and maybe this is actually not good for Facebook to ever really offer, but I think there is great value to knowing how your page metrics compare to your category averages as a whole. One of the biggest complaints that I hear from almost every page admin I speak to, is that there isn’t a good way to really guage how their efforts and metrics stack up against the competition. Facebook pages could easily be categorized (“Hotels” or “Fast Food” or “Athletic Apparel” for instance), and then Facebook could theoretically show you how your page performs versus the rest of the category. Right now, I can manually look at number of fans for a set of competitors, but that’s about it. Other than that, I’ve got very little (or no) sense as to how we are faring versus, or compared to, the rest of our category.
9. Places Stats – Am I totally missing something here, or are stats for Facebook Places, completely useless? The “Insights” (and I use that term as lightly as can be) for our Places page shows three top-line stats in the reporting: “new likes”, “lifetime likes”, and “monthly active users”. Where the hell is the check-in data? Where are those stats? On the public front of the page, I can see total check-ins, but there doesn’t seem to be any way to look at check-in stats over time, or on a more granular basis. It seems to me that Facebook literally just dropped in the same crappy “Insights” dashboard to the Places pages, that exists on the regular brand pages, even though the data a Place owner would want to see, is materially different. This I just don’t get.
10. Stats And Reporting – Aside from being delayed AT LEAST a full day, if not more (this morning, which is the 30th, I can only see data through the 28th), the metrics are just uselessly terrible. If Facebook is serious about Pages (and Places) being a platform for brands, they NEED to overhaul their page reporting in 2011. There are a ton of good little analytics companies out there. Buy one, integrate it, and for the love of god, give us some data that we can actually use, and make informed decisions with.

Any other Facebook page admins out there have anything to add to this list?

Here are my immediate download/installs. In no particular order:

• Advanced Task Killer – Crap runs in the background all of the time. This kills that crap.
• Shazam – Awesome, and awesomely useful app for tagging music you hear while out IRL (in real life). I use this a lot when I hear a song and want to remember to download it later.
• Foursquare – I am bullish on Foursquare. Anyone who knows me, knows that. You can even stalk me here.
• Twitter – My old phone didn’t run the native Twitter Android app. This one does. I am going to try this over Twidroid for a bit.
• Google Voice – I use my Google Voice number to handle all of my voicemail. Nice little app.
• OpenTable – I love the OpenTable app. I use this frequently when I am out somewhere already and want to make a quick reservation for later in the day/evening. So simple and so useful.
• Phone Flicks – Netflix doesn’t have a good native Android app. This is the next best thing for simple queue management.
• StickyBits- Just grabbed this. Haven’t used it yet, but I LOVE the idea of this and the possibilities.
• Delicious- I use this mainly for quickly bookmarking things I see on my phone, that I’d rather read on a regular monitor later.
• Yelp – Crossed up with OpenTable, I can find a place, and book a place, on the move.
• Pandora – Best streaming music app there is. I used to be a Last.fm guy, but I love plugging my phone into my audio jack in the car, and streaming Pandora.
• Bank of America – BOA’s Android app is fantastically simple. Check balances, make transfers, pay bills, all on the move.
• Facebook – Obviously. They just redesigned their app this week as well. Looks sharp.
• Starbucks Card Balance – This is a unitasker app, but I love it. One tap and I know my SBUX card balance before going into grab a coffee.

Anyone have any more suggestions?

Loved this. Via David Karp’s Tumblr.

One of the first thoughts I had upon seeing this account, was that this (Old Spice guy) is the new “Most Interesting Man” (from Dos Equis). The second thought I had, was to find the twitter account for the Dos Equis character.

What I found was…that it was really hard to find. It seems like the Dos Equis character had become so popular, that dozens of people have created phony twitter accounts for The Most Interesting Man, blurring the line between the brand controlled version of the character and the audience controlled version(s) of the character.

I don’t really have a fully formed thesis here, but maybe some of my other social media and marketing thinker friends do. Is this type of imitation the ultimate measure of a viral campaign’s success? Is this loss of control dangerous? Any thoughts?

And for what it’s worth, I never did find the “official” Twitter account for the Most Interesting Man. There is a Facebook page, but no Twitter account as best I can tell.

UPDATE:

Ok, so this is absolutely fantastic. Turns out OldSpice is doing customized Youtube video mini-commercials responding to Twitterers. Really well done.

In longhand, I think they say “I know there may be typos or I may have been a bit terse, but gimme some credit. I’m typing this on 5mm keys with my thumbs while waiting for my sushi, so be happy I triaged your email to be important enough to respond to right away instead of making you wait until tomorrow when it might get lost in my email pile. Gotta go … mmm, this food looks delicious …”

For a while now, I’ve been using this as my mobile signature. It may be equally annoying, but it makes me laugh and I’ve amused a few other people along the way as well.

Even if this signature is just as clowny, it at least serves as a good reminder to me, each time I type an email on my mobile device, to make damn sure that I keep it tight with the grammar and spelling. Or at least as tight as I would keep it when writing in my normal email client.

Friend: So you have to be IN the place to check in there?
Me: Well, you are supposed to be.
Friend: How does Foursquare know you are actually IN the place?
Me: It uses GPS to see where you are.
Friend: But can’t you just check into places nearby, even if you aren’t really in them?
Me:Yah, technically. Well, yes.
Friend: Well that seems kind of stupid.

And I had no response for that last line. She was right, that is kind of stupid.

Whenever I find myself explaining Foursquare to someone that doesn’t give a shit (there are bazillions of people like this by the way, lest us nerds forget), they initially think it’s completely stupid and don’t understand why on earth you would ever bother checking in someplace on your cellphone.

That is, until I explain that through Foursquare, businesses are able to reward their best customers (frequent checker inners) with cool freebies and specials. For instance, “Mayors” of Starbucks get a coupon…albeit a really lame one. Then these people who didn’t get it a minute or two earlier, start to see the value to them, as potential Foursquare users.

And as a side note, forget the pitch that you can use Foursquare to “see where your friends are”. My informal market research says that about 98% of non-nerds (and about 100% of non-nerd females) think this is totally creepy and passionately explain to me that this is a very strong reason for them to NOT use Foursquare.

ANYWAYS…so back to the value proposition that actually can attract new users. The freebies and discounts and rewards.

The big problem is the cheating. If your whole value proposition to the user is based around earning rewards for participation, but the mechanism for tracking participation is COMPLETELY full of holes and totally game-able, you’ve got a big problem on your hands. Namely in that people will get quickly disillusioned, angry, and quit. Foursquare game over.

So how can this be fixed? I saw the other day that businesses are going to be putting up Foursquare window decals (a lot like the Yelp decals you see around now), and my initial thought was that perhaps those decals would have a barcode that users could scan in order to check in. Which would be one slightly imperfect and slightly clunky way to solve the problem of check-in cheats. But it appears that these are merely endorsement/marketing decals and that’s about it.

But it got me thinking more about how and where the barcode scanning technology could work more elegantly within the check-in space. And more importantly, where could the check-in scan happen so that it effectively locked down cheating, and also upped the value of the check-in to both users and businesses?

What I ended up with was the idea that POS receipts in stores could include unique barcodes that Foursquare users could scan in order to get credit for a check-in. This wouldn’t necessarily have to fully replace the GPS based check-in system, but it would be a way for businesses to tie some subset of check-ins to not just attendance, but to ACTUAL purchases.

Within this sort of receipt-scan-based check-in system, there seems to be a lot of possibility for users, for businesses, and for Foursquare…

Users could get some sort of “verified check-in” credit, which perhaps could carry more weight than non-verified check-ins in terms of how these check-ins affected mayorships for retail stores.

Businesses again, would be able to start to really quantify, track, and understand the value of Foursquare users and tie check-ins to actual dollars. There is also the obvious potential for Foursquare to provide business with some generalized customer profile data here as well, which when tied with purchasing behavior and patterns, starts to get really really interesting for businesses.

And lastly, Foursquare gets into a better position where they start to lock down the cheating issue and develop a more effective system for pulling all of this together in a way that both users and businesses can really benefit from.

Obviously this idea works only for businesses and locations where an actual purchase can and would take place…but when it comes to cheating and rewards, this is the segment of businesses on Foursquare where this problem matters most. Isn’t it?