How Outgoing Are You On The Social Web?

I'm down in sunny San Diego at the Graphing Social Patterns West program for the next couple of days.

Listening to a myriad of Social Networking sites pitch, tout, and discuss features and the future.

Highlights so far:

Self Service Advertising

Facebook Platform Product Manager Ben Ling talked about their future development tools and
their growing forms of advertising to reach users on their site.

Facebook will be announcing the ability for online advertisers to login and target their users
geographically or contextually (by profile related specifics) with a Self-Service ad function.

MySpace has the same plans in the works, which also includes what they call "Hyper-Targeting" where they've grouped users into types they will hope will make it easy for you, someone who wants to reach a specific type of user, to do so.

What's the big deal?

If they built a tool that was Pay Per Performance, then I'd really take notice. And spend money.
Facebook and MySpace- wow me. Please. I dare you.


Reaching 10 Million Users In 10 Weeks

BJ Fogg, a teacher at Stanford, created the first Facebook class for students. BJ's site is at here

Students were pushed to develop 3 Facebook Apps in the 8 weeks of the course. Here are some fascinating tidbits:

-Over $500,000 in revenue generated

-The simplest Apps tended to outperform and catch on with users better than more complex ones

-3 of the students are now starting companies with the success and attention their App has
attracted

-2 of the students already had their project acquired

-3 students dropped out of school to start a business together

-The TA for the class has also left to start a company

-6 of the 20+ Apps created by the students went on to become Top 100 Facebook Apps

Take aways from this short presentation:

-Build an App quickly, test it, re-iterate, test again. The best Apps in the class went through
several iterations to get it right and start getting referred/used

-Apps are a quick way to acquire exposure and get attention, but these are "game" type Apps
or social "toys"- hardly business tie ins

-There is a lot of traffic to be acquired if you jump in and create the right app that users will
want to use/pass along


Deepening Existing Relationships

Charlene Li from Forrester outlined some of the past, present and future of the Social Network
ecosphere. More than anyone I've heard so far, she's talking about not just interaction, tech, or traffic and eyeballs... but about deepening RELATIONSHIPS through the use of Social Networks.

Translation= adding value to our existing everyday activities through the extension of social services and features.

Charlene seems to understand that the recent social network activity, while spurring innovation and investment/acquisition value, still hasn't forced companies to take a long hard look in the mirror about how to keep these users and provide them with something they'd value enough to pay for.

Or maybe I'm just the one who's too stuck on the revenue game.

More on Social Networks, Web 2.0, and video to come in the future as I put some new strategies to work. Stay tuned...