Facebook Developer Garage: What not to Do in Social Media!
Another month, another Facebook Developer Garage in London, but this one was even better than usual. First because the event keeps gaining traction and new people (developers, marketers and entrepreneurs) were present last night, which is really helpful to get fresh views on the industry. Secondly, speakers were just great.
Joshua March and Iskandar Najmuddin kicked the event by talking about changes on the platform. The former mentioned the buyout of FriendFeed, the new search function, the better Inbox and joked about the Twitter mimic functions that are Facebook Lite and the @ referencing status tagging. He also briefly explained the most important thing for virality regarding a Facebook app: the retention rate! The higher it is the better as people that continuously spend time on your app are likely to keep attracting new users from their own network.
Iskandar talked about technical changes: the release of the API for Notifications and Inbox; the possibility to create desktop and web applications that push updates on a fan page; the Tornado release; The Twitter integration for Fan page; the new engagement ad that uses samples.
Then Clara Shih, author of The Facebook Era, exposed us her view on how Facebook completely transformed sociability and marketing. People share more information with a higher number of people that it takes less time to meet, befriends and keep in touch with. This is not one-to-many or many-to-many communication, this is everybody-to-everybody. And as more information is available to marketers, people will expect us to adopt more targeted, subtle ways of reaching them. The most interesting part was when she explained how this changes the Customer Lifetime Value equation. Here is her view: CLV_new = CLV_old + (Level of influence x Size of Community) + (Level of influence x Size of Network) + (Sales resulting from idea contributions). This truly shows the value of the most important asset of the Facebook Era, the social capital.
Mat Clayton and Simon Stewart took care of the technical part of the event, explaining what not to do for developing a Facebook app and coding. The latter used a word that in my opinion truly shows the problems encountered by social media in many corporations: mumpsimus. It means that you keep doing things in a certain way because you have always been doing it like this. Sounds familiar right? I guess this is the challenge many developers and marketers can face with clients or within their own company. Finally Hermione Way closed the evening with the five biggest “epic fails” in social media, the winner coming from Denmark.
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