Thinking through Facebook (for marketers)

Facebook's momentum can be described as any sort of a number of analogies involving velocity.  I've been meaning to write a post but with so much great insight popping up, I'll leave it to aggregation and attribution.

Strategy:

• "I advise marketers not to invest too much time in creating 'a Facebook strategy' as much as they don't have 'an NBC strategy' or 'a New York Times strategy.' Instead, I encourage them to people watch, learn and then plan based on their audience and the big picture." - Steve Rubel
• "Wal-Mart has the opportunity to build a community with these students, but has to resist the temptation of treating this group as yet another marketing channel." - Charlene Li
• "I want to know what's happening in the world faster than anyone else...If someone says something, I want to see it first." - Robert Scoble via Pete Blackshaw

Tactics:

• "Join or build a community, deploy an application (widget), invest in advertising, gather intelligence from profiles, and extend one’s network." - Jeremiah Owyang, "What the Web Strategist should know about Facebook." 
• "Employees are more likely to view important company information when it is just one click away from their Facebook page than if it is on something totally different."  - Shiv Singh, Avenue A/Razorfish
• The annual cost of a sponsored group is $1.2 million - Valleywag

And with all good things comes spam.  The malicious-minded can create fake profiles to mine profile data.

Comments

[Kristasphere]

Peter:

How does Facebook's membership expanding to "grown folks" (non-students) play into these strategies?

Do you think FB will lose it's core audience by catering to non-college and high school students?

[Peter Kim]

Krista - I think that expansion is critical to monetizing the site. Who should FB's core audience be? It's a fun story to focus on students, but there's more at stake when a site becomes *the* platform to network a community - witness Toronto.