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.