As I think this through I realize that with my first title, Facebook For Your Small (or not so small) Business, I actually did write a kind of software manual for setting up Business Pages on Facebook. The fact that it looks at the business model for using Facebook makes it somewhat different than a straightforward manual. That’s because I wrote the book for people who have no time or inclination to become Facebook experts though they understand the need to get involved with it as a business promotion tool. They just need to know enough to delegate the task in most cases.

It comes down to the value of one’s time. If I am restaurant manager my time is best managing the restaurant, not digging around trying to learn about Facebook. If we can save that person a few hours we’ve done our job. If our information helps them meet interesting people, reach out to customers or teach their employees to sell (all forthcoming subjects), the value is much higher. That’s the goal.

The important piece of that value proposition is the value of your time, as a reader and manager. Ten bucks is not a lot to acquire immediately useful knowledge. In fact, one executive who I discussed this with responded like this:

“If you can get it down to ten pages I’d pay $20!”

He gets it.

The other driver of this idea (and the business is really a very simple extension of a simple idea about the value of time) was our (my business partner Mike Johnson and I) work with small business owners. Without exception they simply don’t have the time to spend learning complex things that are peripheral to their business. They may understand that something like Facebook, and social media in general, are things they need to know about but they simply don’t have the bandwidth to read a Dummies book or search through Facebook’s various (and excellent) tutorials. With the 24PageBooks approach those links are found in the context of when you need them. If I’m writing about Groups, there are links right there to Facebook’s Groups help pages. Instant indeed.

Having written five titles in the last two months I think I have my proof of concept- most subjects can be covered in reasonable depth within the constraints of 24 pages. As a former writer, in the 90s, of how-to business guides, I know that publishers dictate the length of the books based on trade paperback shelving requirements- not the need for depth. As a result, many of these books are filler and repetition. Distillation is the metaphor. We’re removing excess water and concentrating the essence, the same way distilled spirits were invented to avoid transporting large quantities of wine. Distill it down, then add the water back in when you want a drink. Only people discovered they liked the distilled product as is…

Naming things is hard. I’ve been paid to create business and product names over the years and it is a big challenge. A great name must be unique, memorable, protectable and compelling. For a business it also really cannot be a common word or phrase. When you add in the need to own the name as a dot com URL you really narrow the field. Buying your URL has become a start-up expense for many businesses and it can get expensive.

Because my start-up is a project rather than a typical business, my title needs are a little different. The need to find a new title has worked out however because it helped solve another issue that came up. I was given input by a publishing insider that using the words ’social media’ in the title and sub-title was a problem as there are a rash of books out there on the subject. This jibed with my thinking as I’m increasingly realizing that social media is just a piece of the revolution, albeit a significant one. So right now my draft title and sub-title is: Real Time: Redesigning Your Business for a Socially Connected World.

Disclaimer: This title is subject to change at any time!

With the privacy controls a user can completely change Facebook to serve their own ends. If you only want to use it as a private club for your friends, set limits on everything. If you want it to take on a Twitter-like functionality, open everything up to a public conversation. By giving us these expanded options, Facebook has taken a direct shot at Twitter. Twitter is a public forum. Anyone following you can see your conversations unless you block them individually. This works great as an ongoing stream of news, opinion, links, etc., that can be tracked and searched. With the ability to open our Facebook privacy completely you can duplicate this aspect of Twitter with the broadly expanded capabilities inherent in Facebook: videos, pix, blog posts, links, conversational threads, etc.

For me this means I probably don’t need Twitter at all in the long run. As it stands Twitter is almost useless as a tool without a third party app set up to track certain keywords. Is there any reason I should be using both Twitter and Facebook if Facebook offers everything Twitter does and more?

All Facebook has to do is give me a stream on my page that lets me track keyword usage in all public conversations and I’m done with Twitter.

The Facebook strategy is to own the online communication space- and they are nearly there.

Update: Facebook has 300 million users and is now making money.

That’s a good question and I think I can partially answer it. Facebook is all about real time. You literally can’t save things that are hours or even days old without a lot of searching. It’s a stream, not a content manager. So when you need to store content that you and others want to recover in the future, FB is probably not the place.

Facebook Groups and Pages are quasi-websites that can be information sources but they are not searchable by the engines and you must join to get updates- so they don’t replace conventional websites. My recent project for an area business association was built on a wiki platform as that was the easiest way to handle the type of info it distributes. I was asked about a Facebook Page for them and we may do one just for event announcements- and embed it into the wiki site.

Though it isn’t perfect as an informational site or a transactional site, Facebook is rapidly becoming the point of entry onto the web for many, many people- a sort of infinitely expandable portal. If they can’t build a major business around that they should give me a call!

Money quote:

“I’m going to quote a competitor to Mediapost, Advertising Age, but its packaged-goods reporter, Jack Neff, said it best: “BlogHer helps solve the mystery of how marketers will manage to spend money on social media despite showing relatively little interest in ads on Facebook or MySpace and the numerous free opportunities available everywhere.”

Neff than goes on to quote Jill Beraud, the Global Chief Marketing Officer of PepsiCo, who explains that wooing the mommy bloggers is a long-term ROI effort. As for the entire roster of advertisers at BlogHer, it reads like a who’s-who of the blue chip: Wal-Mart, Procter & Gamble, General Motors, Gymboree, Unilever, Kodak.”

This deal interests me because I believe that Facebook will be at least as dominant a force as Google in the next few years due to two factors: Globalization and the rise of locally targeted marketing.

Becoming the de facto global connection between like-minded individuals

Facebook is growing much faster outside of the US than here and it is growing pretty fast here. Like Google it is borderless, a business state that never existed before the rise of the web. Nothing stops them from growing across the planet. Countries may chose to block them as Iran did recently (though it quickly removed the block after public outcry that it was politically motivated) but most users can find workarounds.

Facebook, unlike Twitter, takes the connection paradigm to a much higher level. We don’t tend to connect to just anyone who requests a connection because it devalues the experience. When we connect we are sharing a lot of information with each other, again unlike Twitter. It is possible to build meaningful relationships on Facebook regardless of location or cultural background- if there are shared friends or interests.

The significance of this is that Facebook is building its own network that could be equivalent to the Internet itself- but based on far stronger connections. We’re no longer six degrees apart, more like 2-3. This is not insignificant. The more we are connected on a personal basis the more difficult it gets to start wars, block international business and suppress human rights.

Building global ‘villages’ of like-minded individuals with trusted connections

The paradox of this is that it makes everything a lot more local and that’s where the revenue model gets interesting. First, when I define ‘local’ on Facebook I’m talking about virtual villages. Connected groups who are active effectively live near each other and share information on a very granular level. I know when my friends are traveling, how their businesses are doing, what they’re buying and much more. I see pictures of their kids, kids I may never meet. This implies a degree of trust that Twitter and Google can never acquire- their models are built on a much more anonymous connection.

Facebook’s revenue model will be based on its enormous scale, not marketing

Marketing to a like-minded village is very highly targeted marketing- and very risky marketing. The degree of quality, transperancy and honesty required is frankly not easily grasped by most marketing professionals. In fact I believe that an entirely new group of marketing people will emerge who don’t care a bit about branding, advertising or any other ‘broadcast’ model of promoting goods and services.

Facebook is raising money so it can bide its time

All of this is why, for good reason, Facebook is being glib about their revenue model. They’re raising money so they can continue to grow to the point where they can generate huge amounts of income from very incremental sources, simply because they are the planet’s marketplace.

Craiglist, local marketing and how it changes the landlord business

Both activities involved thinking locally rather than globally. Apartment hunting takes place entirely on Craigslist these days and this is a very good thing. Landlords don’t pay for listings in our area (they do in major markets, in part to stop scammers) and the listings can contain long descriptions and multiple photos. The old classified print ad model was based on paying per word so an apartment hunter was very limited in what you’d know before calling. Now it’s easy to screen out the dumps and get a feel for places before you contact the owners.

The net result of this local search mechanism is that landlords will be forced to clean up their places, upgrade and take better photos, a net win for the consumer and the community. After I found my new place, I mentioned it on Facebook and that I’d seen several nice units in the same building. Two friends contacted me for contact info so they could look. It turns out that the management company pays referral fees of $200- I did not know that when I posted. So with a few emails I may stand to make several hundred dollars and have some friends as neighbors. All via social media.

Skip the long strategic discussions, this is local and social

The other project is a large wiki site for a local business association- hundreds of pages covering Rochester’s downtown entertainment district with photos, video, mapping etc. (Yes, we do have a thriving downtown entertainment district with dozens of restaurants, clubs, theaters, galleries, museums, etc.) I was late to the game with the RFP process but got the project because of my social media experience. Two ad agencies were finalists prior to me but both lost when they came in with proposals that included a lot of strategic brainstorming mumbo-jumbo. The group of club and business owners were bewildered by this stuff.

My approach was to take available web 2.0 tools (Wetpaint, Flickr, YouTube and Google Maps) and show them quickly how we could organize a lot of information in a relatively short period of time at a reasonable cost. No complex strategy- my strategy statement was simple:

“The purpose of this site is to put Rochester’s East End on the map as a major entertainment destination in Upstate NY”

No brainstorming required.

Local is pragmatic and all marketing is local

The point in both of these examples is that social media must be approached with a great deal of pragmatism, particularly with projects that have a local component- and I’d argue that all marketing must have a local component. Whether I’m looking for a place to live or a place to dine, I’m not concerned about strategy and branding. I want information and input from peers.

Forget everything you know about marketing

As a marketer this means that everything you know from the past is bullshit. Advertising, publicity, brand promotion, logos, graphic design, copywriting, hype, market research (the directed kind), everything. There are no logos in social media. No one really cares what a blog looks like as long as the info is interesting. Those people who fill their Twitter page backgrounds with pitches and links don’t get followed by me. Facebook is entirely about conversation, even photos and games are designed to encourage comment streams.

Marketing was a guessing game

Am I being glib with the ‘bullshit’ distinction? No, because its true- we never really knew ahead of time what marketing strategies and tactics would actually work. This was always the not very well-hidden ’secret’ of marketing: Marketers, in spite of all their creativity, focus groups, panels and strategic brand management, never actually know why some things work and others don’t. Until now.

The market tells us what to make and how to improve it, so listen up. Go beta.

To be a conversational marketer you have to be a part of the conversation, a participant. That means you start on the sidelines and listen to learn what others want, need, wish for and dislike. Then you go back to our company or client and you tell them so they can make those products. In the meantime you identify influencers and you share beta prototypes with them, emphasizing that these are beta because they still require the market to test them, to kick the tires, break the interface, find the bugs and suggest changes. Google, for example, excels at the beta release model, in fact they don’t take most products out of beta- they continuously improve based on input and how customers use the products.

Transparency is your only choice

During this stage you enter the conversation, making it totally clear that you are on the product team, and you convey the input back to your design team and your customer experience team. You also set them up to start listening and conversing. That’s the entire conversational marketing model.
No ads. No logo or branding. A simple name that’s memorable. No radio, TV, outdoor or banners. No girls in bikinis handing out freebies to drunken idiots.

Are we really abandoning creative? No, we’re substituting discipline.

Can you do videos and white papers? You can do anything you want as long as it adds to the conversation in a positive manner. If an ad gets you talking about the product with others then it may be valuable. However, that ad must have been conceived within the context of an existing conversation. Here’s an example:
Apple is running an iPhone ad on the back cover of New Yorker. It targets small business users and consists of an interface shot with application icons. There are call-outs to each icon that feature a quick description of the app and its small business value. I read the entire ad because I’ve been having an ongoing conversation with friends about using an iPhone to run my business from any location. Apple knows that conversation is going on and they made that ad specifically for me (and the thousands of mes out there participating in that conversation). It is a highly targeted, value-adding ad that supports the conversation.

I’d suggest that anyone in the marketing business think this through. It is not a change you have any control over. You can’t slow it down or influence it. You can learn from it and enhance it.
Join the conversation.

This is the real value of FB and the reason it has grown so rapidly- it is a closed network. Only those you choose to associate with are in the loop of your social interaction. The other major social platforms like Twitter and blogging are open, public forums where anyone can participate. It is appropriate, where you add relevant value, to  be businesslike there. But not in my ‘living room’.