I’m listening to a playback of Jeremiah Owyang’s (of Forrester Research) Webinar on marketing opportunities at Facebook that was put on by MarketingProfs.
Facebook, for you noobs out there, is a social networking Web site that was originally created for college students but has been opened to anyone w/an email address and a pulse.
A few things I found really interesting:
- People put the greatest trust in friends when online. In fact, 83% of people trust the opinion of a friend or acquaintance who has used a product, while a lowly 30% trust a blogger’s review. The only question I have is why 17% of respondents have untrustworthy friends whose opinions they don’t respect.
- Email is for old people. And by old people, I mean those who were able to vote in the last election. As Jeremiah notes, as these young’uns move into the work force, they’ll be forced into using emails most likely, but they’ll also be likely to continue using Facebook and other social media sites.
- Social Media mores are still being written. Jeremiah mentioned that his policy is to accept every friend request, and he currently has over 2K (or was it 5K?) “friends” on Facebook. He later mentioned the recent story about famed blogger Robert Scoble being temporarily suspended from Facebook for trying to take all of the emails of his Facebook friends and moving them over to Plaxo, another service. Jeremiah felt that he had broken the “social contract” by doing that. Others feel that he was just moving his contacts from one tool to another. Personally, I think if you allow everyone who asks to be your friend, you should expect this behavior.
- Facebook Pages are for products or companies. If you have a product or service, you might want to create a “page” for it (which is free) and then people can join and become your “fans.”
- Facebook isn’t the end all and be all. While social media is probably here to stay in one manner or another, Facebook may or may not succeed. A strong, fluid strategy for social media sites is more important than putting all your eggs in the Facebook basket.
A lot of the content seemed to be more targeted to large companies as opposed to small businesses, but I still think there was a lot of interesting information. Whether watching the entire webinar is worth it to you depends on who your target audience is.
