Facebook Applications - What Works?

Facebook is massive and still showing little sign of slowing down – 80 million users, the most popular photo sharing site on the internet, the 6^th most trafficked site online. Every week or so, some friend who has determinately and passionately held out against joining, joins. Either they creep in and silently make a profile and try to casually add each of their friends, as if they were always on Facebook, but for some reason didn’t have you on their list. Or, they make a big fuss about joining, like those people who talk loudly and laugh as they walk into a bar.

As with any other successful online application, Facebook draws lots of people who want to make money. You think people design those millions of applications that you are asked to add to your profile just for fun? Sure, some people do, but overall the industry is still trying to figure out what works, what doesn’t and how to make moolah.

Initially, there was lots of fuss about the power of Facebook to target your marketing to precise demographics. But as it turns out, overtargeted ads are just creepy. Living in India, when I see on-page ads that say “Looking for fun now – in Bombay” with a picture of a white model standing on a beach?? Or when the ad throws back your exact age at you? Yuck. Thankfully they don’t work very well. According to Steve O’Hear at ZDNet, “click through rates have been on the extremely low side — 0.04% based on 1.4 million impressions”.

Successful applications can be so simple. Charging Facebook users $1 to send a little picture of a gift to someone? Not even a real gift, just a picture of one. Even if 0.01% of Facebook’s users did this just once each week, you still make $416,000 each year.

No one wants content.

You don’t go to Facebook to look for information. You go to connect with people – thats it. Successful applications are based around this. Funwall, Graffiti, Sell your Friends etc. The next step is how to earn money out of these. As an example – Favourite Books allows you to share your favourite titles with your friends, along with convenient links to Amazon. Users can easily buy books that their friends recommend, Amazon sells books and pays a commission to the application developers. Everyone is happy.

So there’s the key rule for Facebook applications – they have to facilitate communication. The ones that don’t, quickly fade away. If you can develop an idea that is so interesting or fun that people will pay to use it, then all the better.

Writing Tips - Chicago Manual of Style

The Chicago Manual of Style Online (CMOS) is a great resource for when you have to write documents in formal English and need help with all those niggling punctuation and grammar issues. Unfortunately it is not free, and so not much use to people who only have to write these sorts of things occasionally.

What is free, however, is their Q&A page. Amazingly they also manage to make the answers interesting and occasionally witty and even sarcastic. You can sign up to a monthly email newsletter of that month’s questions.

Here’s an example:

Q. I’m editing a textbook that references a play. Should it be “Act 3,” “act three,” or “act 3”? A solution to this mystery would be greatly appreciated. I’ve looked at CMOS a hundred times for help with this issue.

A. Wow—a hundred times? If you can suggest how we can make section 8.194 more clear, we’ll try to do better in the next edition: “Words denoting parts of long poems or acts and scenes of plays are usually lowercased, neither italicized nor enclosed in quotation marks . . . act 3, scene 2.”

Public Speaking – Will History Remember You?

Endless management resources tell us that public speaking is an essential skill for management, whether to inspire a team, convince investors, or assuage the public when something goes wrong.

For those who are not naturally gifted in this area, all it takes is practice. There are endless courses run by every type of trainer (presentation, voice, sales) and management coach. While working at Whistling Woods, I was approached several times about hosting “Acting Skills for CEOs”, courses that cover subjects such as controlling space, projecting your voice, and interacting with the audience.

For those who wish to practice at home, a great way to start is by studying famous speeches. These pieces of oratory are in the history books, not just because of the historical context, but also because of the language, the phrasing, the imagery and the diction.

Here is a list of The 35 Greatest Speeches in History, courtesy of The Art of Manliness. Open the link and have a look.

Here’s the thing – these speeches won’t teach you that much just by reading them…. You have to say it out loud. Print one out, take it home, and pace around your bedroom pretending to be Churchill.

You know you want to.

Do You Understand SEO?

For anyone who hasn’t yet come to grips with even the basics of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), a slightly scary thought: A recent report estimates that 49% of internet users use a search engine on a typical day, up from a third in 2002.

Despite this massive growth in search engine useage, many freelancers, and even design agencies that are building websites have limited awareness of how search engines actually work. When browsing websites of Indian companies, I am constantly amazed at websites that are actually negatively-engineered for SEO. A new company in a competitive industry with an all-flash website? Pages with headings and keywords imbedded into images? There is nothing to search for. How useful is a beautiful website that no one can find unless they remember the exact company name?

Even if the designer does understand SEO, it is easy to place it in the too-hard basket. If the client doesn’t know to ask about SEO then it is a far easier task to design a pretty website and hand it over. Initially the client will be happy, until they realize that they don’t show up in search rankings and someone points out that they have to redesign their website.

Even if you aren’t actively working on a website, you still owe it to yourself to understand how SEO works. When you search for something in google, the pages that appear are not necessarily the best possible results, or the most up-to-date information. Often, they are simply the websites who have best mastered SEO techniques.

By knowing what to look for, you will better appreciate whether a search result is appearing because of its respected content, or because of SEO manipulation.

Here are a couple of resources to get you started:

Search engine optimization, from Wikipedia

Beginner's Guide to SEO

Some advice from Google

Creative Industries and the Online Fan- How to Balance Your Time?

Three great posts here from Merlin Mann (best known for his ‘Inbox Zero’ methodologies).

Creative workers, whether writers, artists, musicians etc, are increasingly working online, or at least on their computers, and within easy reach of email, skype, web forums, social networks. At the same time, they are being encouraged to engage with new media as a way to ‘get personal’ with their audience (readers, listeners, viewers). At what stage can this start interfering with your actual work? Merlin’s posts discus where to draw the line.

Many large advertising agencies or other companies where creative thought is encouraged, will provide ‘thinking spaces’ – rooms where people can think and work uninterrupted by the normal office clamor. How can a self employed artist translate this into their own work? How do you productively divide your time between generating new work and developing relationships with fans of your current work or other practitioners in your field?

Enjoy!

Part 1: Making Time to Make: Bad Correspondence

Part 2: Making Time to Make: The Job You Think You Have

Part 3: Making Time to Make: One Clear Line

Exciting Careers - Interactive Producer

Guinevere Orvis at Aboutnewmedia has a great post answering a question that she is often asked: “What is an Interactive Producer?

Previously, when you wanted a website, you hired a website designer. Then, when you wanted more traffic, you hired an SEO expert. Then, to make it more customer friendly, you hired a usability expert. Now, you want to add a facebook app, twitter feed, a podcast, management blog and you are considering a mobile phone app. Who do you turn to?

An Interactive Producer!

The range of responsibility is pretty much comparable to a film or television producer, in that an interactive producer doesn’t need to have detailed technical knowledge regarding each aspect of their job. Instead, they need a broad overview of each technical area and the project management skills to pull together the work of disparate and possibly unconnected team members, on time and on budget. Often these are client-facing positions so people skills and good presentation are essential. If that isn’t enough responsibility, senior interactive producers are often called on to provide strategic advice on marketing and interactive technology, as agencies look for new angles to keep their clients ahead of the pack.

How do I become an Interactive Producer?

While the job title was first used 6-8 years ago, for most companies this is still a fairly new job description. As such, specifically tailored courses are still uncommon, but are evolving out of multimedia and web design programs at a range of schools. Technically, skills in MS Office, MS Project, MS Visio, Photoshop, After Effects, HTML, Flash, XML, SHTML, JavaScript and CSS may be required. Professionally, most companies will look for at least 3-5 years in webdesign/multimedia/online journalism, preferably in project management roles

In developing countries, such as India, both the number of people with internet access and the available connection speeds are booming. Greater online audiences draw companies to establish a greater online presence, creating demand for professionals who can guide corporate managers through the web 2.0 minefield. A specific challenge in a society as multicultural as India’s is ensuring usability and appropriate content across multiple cultural and language groups.

What are your experiences? Are you an Interactive Producer, or looking to get into this field? How does this role change between developed and developing countries?