This Week: Ancestry IPO, FamilyLink goes viral, Navigating Facebook Platform changes
Filed under: Facebook, Facebook Applications, FamilyLink.com, Genealogy, IPO Watch, Social Networking Watch
This week is going to be amazing. Possibly, the most interesting week of my career. I’ll explain.
Ancestry.com is slated to go public on Wednesday. I always dreamed of being part of that IPO, but I’ve been out of the company (7 years) longer than I was in the company (6 years). But my excitement about watching a company I helped create trade on a public exchange is mounting. I cannot wait to see what happens when ACOM debuts on the NASDAQ this week.
I’m thinking about holding an IPO party at my house on Wednesday for the early Ancestry.com employees who are no longer with the company. It would be fun to reminisce a bit and see where everyone is now. If “public demand” for a party is high, I’m sure we’ll be able to pull it off on short notice. Between LinkedIn and Facebook, my blog and twitter, we should be able to get at least a dozen or two people to show up. If you’re interested already (and qualify as a “former Ancestry employee”), shoot me an email. (paul AT familylink.com) We’ll watch a couple of old company videos and hopefully some Tivo’d coverage of some of the business news about Ancestry from Wednesday.
This week is also exciting because FamilyLink.com is going viral. Our FamilyLink.com Quantcast chart shows that we’ve had more than 6 million unique visitors since we debuted last month and we are just getting started. We think our Flash-based family tree tool is the funnest online tree ever created, and it is getting tons of usage. We hope to be a top Facebook Connect site soon. In fact, Facebook’s Wiki shows FamilyLink as an example of how to create invites and requests using Facebook Connect. Facebook has been an incredible platform for our company to build on.
Even though Compete.com shows us as having more unique visitors than Ancestry.com, and even though we are classified by them as a genealogy site, we are actually a totally different creature. We are a family social site. Users of our Facebook applications (we have about 60MM users) can easily navigate to FamilyLink.com and enjoy an enhanced family experience there. We connect you to your living relatives. We help you share content and life experiences and memories with your immediate and extended family. Family trees are a fun part of our overall experience (because everyone loves to see how they fit into their family) but we are not currently a deep research site for ancestral records.
About 15% of our users consider themselves genealogists (which means 85% do not). Many of them already subscribe to paid services like Ancestry.com or use free genealogy web sites for research. We believe that genealogy will likely be an important advertising category for us in the future, since we are attracting millions of families to our service and as the saying goes, “there’s a genealogist in every family.” But you can also say there is a photographer, event planner, scrapbooker, top chef, health nut, sports fanatic, vacationer and couponeer in every family. When we ask customers what additional features they want us to build into FamilyLink, we get everything from photo albums to recipe sharing to online chats and event planning tools. We will generate ad or product revenue from a lot of categories as we try to meet the needs of millions of families worldwide.
This week is also intense and interesting because of all the upcoming changes Facebook announced for their Platform last week. Here are some links:
- Video of Facebook’s platform changes. Ethan Beard, who heads up the Facebook Developers Network, describes the product roadmap in this nearly one hour video. Mark Zuckerberg introduced him.
- Facebook’s developer policies have been condensed from 17 pages to 3 pages — all policies are now in one place
- Nick O’Neill’s This Week in Facebook post shows how much is going on at Facebook right now. The pace of change is incredible, and it is hard to keep up with everything, but the pay off for being in the Facebook ecosystem can still be amazing.
More information has been coming out in the last few months about the best ways to monetize social web sites than I have ever seen before. The Social Ad Summit in NYC provided a lot of good information, especially about virtual currencies and virtual goods; PeanutLabs followed the Mike Arrington “Spam Facebook Like a Pro” blog post with some great survey data about how users prefer to pay for in-game virtual currency; and this article from VentureDig covers monetizing social networks with recommendations for 2010.
It’s a great time to be in social networking. Investor interest in social networking related companies seems really strong. For years the conventional wisdom was that social networks could not be monetized, but it turns out that for most of that time the fastest growing social networks (like Twitter today) weren’t even focused on monetization. They were sacrificing revenue or deferring even thinking about revenue to capitalize on the fact that millions of people would be joining social networks and that the network effect would lead to a few winners, with a winner-take-most outcome. That was a very good bet.
It is well known that Facebook has turned cash flow positive, Twitter raised money at a $1 billion valuation, and Zynga is generating a ton of revenue, some say about $250 million this year. But it is not so well known that teen social network myYearbook turned profitable this year (in Q1 according to CEO Geoff Cook) because of “Lunch Money” and virtual goods. There are other under-the-radar social networking companies and app/game developers that aren’t well known at the moment that will breakout in 2010 and become widely known.
Here’s to hoping that FamilyLink.com will be one of them.
OnDC 09: panel on politics and social media
Filed under: 2008 Election, Politics and the Internet, Social Networking Watch, Uncategorized
Moderator: Peter Corbett, CEO iStrategy Labs
Kevin Merritt, CEO Socrata, Inc. (A venture backed startup in Seattle that helps government agencies get data online and it social)
Vijay Ravindran, was at Amazon 7 years, @catalyst, now at Washington Post
Tom McInerney, Lt. General U.S. Air Force (ret.), Fox News Analyst
Mike Allen, chief political correspondent for Politico
Panelists were asked what was impressive to them so far about technology in politics and government. One mentioned the Pres. Obama campaign’s use of social media. Someone else said how IdeaScale and Google Moderator are being used in town hall meetings.
Vijay. Wikipedia’s announced move to use moderation in high profile pages, will ultimately make them more useful. At the Post, we’ve had success with whorunsgov.com, that shows government structure down at a lower level than Wikipedia.
Peter. This is about influencer identification and analysis. What other technologies are used for this? How can this harm or help our democracy?
Mike. There is great commercial value in being able to identify the right people and communicate with them. 3121 [an initiative of National Journal] is like Facebook for Congress. It’s named after the Congressional switchboard phone number. The idea is that someone will emerge in that community who will be the place you go if you are Rep and want to hear about immigration or if you are a Demo and want to hear about climate. It could be a low-level person. To be able to communicate through that person, to other higher level people, might be very helpful.
Vijay. It seems like Comcast’s customer service policy on Twitter is influenced by how many followers a customer has on Twitter. That has interesting implications if it spreads. Before, you had a broadcast mechanism to talk to voters; in our new social media world where you might be connected to 1,000 people and myself to 5, talking to a bunch that are connected to 1,000 — the multiplicative value makes you more valuable than you used to be. It changes the value in campaigns with young people, and it won’t be purely connected to turnout percentage.
Peter. So a young person may be willing to share a video or write a blog post or give $1?
Peter. How will things be different in the next election cycle? Anything you are excited for?
Mike. We are concerned about the fact that even though the technologies are billed as connecting people, they are in fact, sometimes isolating people. As more people get news from HuffPost or Fox, we aren’t having the common conversation we used to have. If a national campaign wanted to really move a story, have a big splash, they used to have to deal with AP, or Washington Post, or NY Times, but now there are a million places they can go to break a story. Politicians don’t need the Post or Politico. Their own content is now accessible. As we look ahead to 2010, the campaigns will have less and less worry about what we write about them, and will put more energy into reaching them directly. Campaigns are worried about their TV commercials being TIVOed (and skipped).
Peter. So is our democracy being strengthened by this or not? Is this better?
Mike. We love the fact the there is more you can get, and more premium quality. You used to have to read what your local news gave you. Now you can click away. You can see the raw speech, the raw materials for my story. You don’t need my account. There is a premium on understanding, explanation, things you can’t get from the raw materials yourself. I talk to journalism students. More smart people are reading more than ever.
Tom. Pres. Obama didn’t have a track record before, but now he’ll have a host of things about bills, etc. He’ll now live on what his accomplishments are. But he’ll have to justify what unemployment is, what the debt is. I don’t read the papers I used to read, I just get everything online. People consume a lot of content. It’s going to be interesting in the 2010 election, to see what role online plays vs. what the facts are and what people have to depend on. I’m in the TV business and everything is based on a 4-minute segment. You get 2 and the anchor gets 2. Your points have to come across quickly. It’s not in the depth. They do put a lot of background material up. Visual, sensual images have a powerful role to play. They can be quick and decisive.
Peter. How does the democratization of data play a role in our daily lives?
Kevin. Social media topic is an important one. I’m personally not very focused on the election process. We don’t look at that. But with regard to the use of social media, a couple of thoughts and concerns. One is: social media in general makes politicians more approachable than they have ever been. I went to an event 4-5 months ago Congressman Honda was there. Maybe it was because I had visited his page on Facebook, his feed on Twitter, I approached him, probably because I had the tangible sense that he was another human being. I don’t have a crystal ball on technology, but someone will take advantage of FB as a platform. Many people use Facebook Pages, but underlying this is a way to get into the social graph of influencers, people with large networks, there will be creative folks leveraging the platform for campaigning or fundraising. Vijay made a good observation on young folks being neglected, to them becoming a core central focus in the election process. We shouldn’t do that to the exclusion of those folks not comfortable yet with social media. Google Moderator had hundreds of thousands of logins during the Presidential Townhall. Kudos to the Sunlight Foundation for creating some interesting data sets that look at the political process, fundraising, lobbying, etc. I see interesting work in the future as more of these data sets come online, like Congressional calendars, as transparency comes into the process, you’ll see interesting ways of combining this data. We’ll get new learnings from this.
Peter. On the topic of transparency, exposing relationships, lobbying etc. Something was reported recently about lobbyists not having to register.
Mike. Pres. Obama is thinking of extending his lobbying restrictions to boards…. White house put out a letter today about lobbying rules. Facebook as a platform for candidates in 2010 — how little the surface has been scratched. David Plouffe, campaign manager for Obama, his book is coming out on Nov. 3, anniversary of election. He will say their key driver was email. FB and Twitter was helpful for the optics. But it really didn’t change things. Texting and raising money online is why he is president.
Q. Has the quality of news coverage suffered because of sound bytes?
Tom. You have to be on point and talk in sound bytes. On the radio you can do 15, 30 min, an hour.
Mike. Who covers the expensive stories? Few reporters travel with the president now. Few cover the wars. It’s because of the economics. When a paper loses $1 in paper, they gain $0.10 online. So we have more talk, but not necessarily more facts.
Peter. Last week a discussion started happening around news organizations converting to non-profits.
Mike. Pres. Obama said he would be open to it.
Tom. Mike Young can give you views from Iraq and Afghanistan that are very informative. Online, you can get good stuff and bad stuff online, but how can you tell which is which?
Audience question: how will fund-raising change in the next election cycle?
Vijay. They didn’t abandon the big fund raisers, but they incrementally added new ways to raise money online. There hasn’t been a lot of innovation in getting money through social. Like what examples of making money from Twitter. There have been donation apps on FB that have raised like $28 and have gone no where. With all the tools in the platform, you’ll see people taking a cut. It’ll be done as an additive. If they think they can run their whole campaign this way, it will be a short shelf life.
Peter. If you have someone’s email address, a couple of companies can analyze their social graph and target their friends.
Tom. The Obama campaign did that and those that did it have turned it into a commercial effort.
Kevin. Medicare, and all the procedures that take place in it, one of the big pieces that is not visible is the cost of these procedures. At Socrata, we were up for renewal on our medical plan. One item was $5 m lifetime maximum benefit, the other was $2 million. I have no idea how much things cost, like open heart surgery. So we are taking medical transactions, and stripping out all the personal identifiable information … you can do some trending and analyzing. With an Attorney General office, we are looking at the cost per unit of a prescription drug at any pharmacy in the state. Some places may charge twice as much per unit. So as we think about health care reform, part of it is giving people some sense of what things cost.
Kevin. We have 35 years experience working with email, we consider them records. But is a Facebook comment considered a record. Am I allowed to moderate it, or is it a violation of a freedom speech issue? White house is taking every social interaction as a record and they print it off and send it off to an archive. Once there is more clarity about what a record is….
Vijay. Most politicians use social media to broadcast their message more inexpensively and not really as a two-way exchange. How many comments from politicians have you read on their message boards or fan pages?
Peter. How many blog posts does it take to kill a tree? [Referring to the Obama administrations printing and archiving of all online comments]
Peter. You used to be able to target for political affiliation on Facebook, but it was taken down about a year ago. I don’t know why.
Vijay. In 2008, one side used social media a lot more than the other side. My sense is that it’s much more of a political leaning element as much as it is the age group, their social circles. I see as many libertarians using social media effectively as liberals.
Peter. Gallup poll showed 63% favorable for Obama, but I used ScoutLabs which showed bloggers were only 52% favorable to Obama–why the difference?
Someone mentioned a Twitter hashtag #tcoc to follow “top conservatives on twitter”
Vijay. The media doesn’t know how to cover these trends.
Q. what is the political killer app of 2010?
Peter. One thing I’d like to see is a very sound, fantasy candidate system. Where whoever wins, all their money goes to their candidate.
Vijay. I’d like to see something like Google Wave to be able to parse the unstructured conversations that are occuring …
Kevin. Micropayments and virtual goods might be tied together to raise funds on Facebook.
Q. Will republicans reach the level of sophistication like demos did in 2008?
Peter. A very specific candidate ran and won. Brand Obama was good. He had about 3MM subscribers to his SMS.
FamilyLink Climbs Facebook Developer Leaderboard
Filed under: Facebook, Facebook Applications, Social Networking Watch
Sorted by Monthly Active Users
Name DAU MAU Daily Growth 1. Zynga 47,142,368 161,442,415 1.11 2. Playfish 12,136,211 57,661,305 -0.04 3. RockYou! 2,493,761 41,616,918 -1.41 4. 11,868,141 32,375,076 -0.26 5. Causes 2,135,480 31,881,017 0.72 6. Slide, Inc. 1,234,691 24,757,153 -0.05 7. Familylink.com 1,266,743 22,096,540 0.72 8. SlashKey 5,830,463 18,709,422 -0.08 9. 3happybytes 549,065 18,643,657 -4.07 10. LivingSocial 708,836 17,740,792 -1.30
If you don’t count Facebook’s own applications, FamilyLink.com is now the #6 developer in the Facebook ecosystem, based on Monthly Active Users. It won’t be easy to climb this chart, but with some of the new features we are launching soon, there is a chance that we will.
Posted via web from Paul’s posterous
Social Media and Elections: The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, revisited
Filed under: Politics and the Internet, Social Networking Watch
A few years ago Howard Dean’s campaign manager Joe Trippi published a book called “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” I attended the AlwaysOn Summit at Stanford in 2005 when he came and spoke about his experience managing the Dean campaign. (And I bought three signed copies of his book, for me and my two friends who were trying to launch a political site called iCount.com — we never pulled it off.)
Trippi shared amazing stories about the real-time nature of the first web-savvy presidential campaign. The Dean campaign was electrified by smart use of the web for organizing volunteers and responding to them–making it their campaign, their candidate, their election to win or lose. Dean raised huge amounts of capital from small donations, but lost the primary, ironically in large part because TV helped turn the tide against him.
Trippi recalls his experience with the campaign as they went from long-shot to front runner in less than a year:
For the better part of a year, I have been the one person inside Howard Dean’s presidential campaign saying that we could actually win. Back when I signed on as campaign manager, back when we had seven people on staff, $100,000 in the bank, and only four hundred thirty-two known supporters, back when you answered the phones yourself or they just kept ringing, back when Howard Dean was little more than an asterisk, the last name on a long list of Democratic presidential candidates, I was the one looking people in the eye and telling them: Look, we’re gonna win this frickin’ thing. Now, here it is the end of 2003, and we’re actually on top, ahead in the polls, in the process of raking in more than $50 million, $15.8 million in this fund-raising quarter alone—a record—most of it from small donations of $100 or less. And whose fund-raising record are we beating? Our own! From the quarter before. We have an army of almost 600,000 fired-up supporters, not just a bunch of chicken-dinner donors, but activists, believers, people who have never been politically involved before and who are now living and breathing this campaign. Through them, we have tapped into a whole new vein of democracy and proven the Internet as a vibrant political tool. Now everyone is paying attention.
The amazing thing about the Dean campaign was that it had to create a lot of online community organizing tools from scratch. They did take advantage of Meetup.com, but that social network has never really gone mainstream. Facebook wasn’t even founded until 2004, and even then it was limited to college-aged students. It wasn’t opened to the general public until September 2006, and now there are countries where almost half the population are Facebook users. In the U.S., there are now 85,526,360 Facebook users. That is 28.1% of the population. And the continuing growth of Facebook in the U.S. is staggering. In July, that number was 69 million.
Last night I bought the “revised edition” of “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” on my Amazon Kindle so I could see what Trippi had to say about the Obama campaign — he was on the Edwards team — and to read his thoughts about the rise of Facebook and Twitter, and the impact of these social media on elections.
Commenting on the 2006 election cycle, Trippi says:
By the time 2006 was over, at least two U.S. senators—Tester in Montana and Jim Webb in Virginia—owed a large part of their victories to early support from online activists.
But by 2008, online (YouTube, Facebook, Twitter) made a huge impact in the presidential campaign, and Trippi thinks politics will never be the same again.
He shared one story of how an individual Facebook user could help energy a campaign:
Back in February, before I joined the Edwards campaign, Farouk Olu Aregbe, a twenty-six-year-old in Columbia, Missouri, was so excited about Barack Obama’s candidacy that he started a group on Facebook.com named “One Million Strong for Barack.” I didn’t know who the hell the guy was—no one knew who the hell the guy was—but by the time I joined Edwards in April, just six weeks later, more than four hundred thousand people had joined Farouk’s quest to bring one million supporters into Obama’s camp.
Trippi clearly feels awe for the massive growth of social networks and how easily campaigns can now engage with voters and be directly influenced by their democratic power. He makes it clear in his book that he feels extremely grateful to have been a part of the Dean campaign–the first major online presidential campaign, even though it ultimately lost–and for all the opportunities to consult worldwide that his leadership there has given him. But I can tell that he would have loved to have been on the winning team this time around–the first presidential election that was really fought and won with social media. He says:
DeanLink and DeanSpace paled in comparison to MySpace and Facebook and the millions and millions who were members of social networks as 2008 approached. Where Dean had had a photo gallery, now Flickr.com allowed millions to post photos, “tagging” them so that if you searched your favorite candidate’s name you could view every picture taken at a rally and posted just a few hours before. Our primitive text messaging network on Upoc.com may have been visionary at the time, but just four short years later it was nothing compared to Twitter, the hot new mobile social texting network.
Trippi believes that future candidates will be elected not from traditional “top-down” “big donor” party-insider based campaigns, but rather they will be chosen and funded by the grass roots, which he calls the “netroots.” In other words, We The People, who can now self-organize, choose our candidates, attract volunteers and raise gobs of money from small online donations. He seems quite optimistic about the chances for the people to take back politics after 50 years of corrupt transactional politics that have resulted in more and more TV ad spending and less and less voter turnout and activism.
This phenomenon will certainly not appear in all races at all levels at the same time. Famed science fiction writer William Gibson did say, “The future is already here. It is just unevenly distributed.”
But during every subsequent campaign cycle there will be a greater and greater chance that grassroots candidates who are truly skilled in using social media will emerge. They will be able to capture the imagination of large voter blocks, create new engagement with volunteers and voters, and win elections with less money needed for television ads and direct mail. Last year a 21-year old in South Carolina was elected to the school board after running a Facebook-only campaign.
Of course all campaigns are eager to reach large online populations with their message and raise money.
In 2000, presidential campaigns raised $528.9 million. In 2004, that jumped to $880 million. And in 2008 the campaigns raised $1.74 billion, an increase of 3.29x in just 8 years. During that same time, the number of Internet users in the U.S. more than doubled. Today almost 3/4ths of the U.S. population are online and more than a third of them are now on Facebook.
Barack Obama raised $745 million during the campaign. (Source: OpenSecrets.org Barack Obama Page) Obama campaign spokesman Ben Labolt said the campaign had more than 2.5 million total donors.
That really is amazing. Fund raising online is a very smart thing for campaigns to do. But that is not Trippi’s point in talking about a revolution in politics and it is not what interests me either.
What is most exciting of all to me is the prospect of elected representatives using social media not only during campaigns but after they are elected. They have the potential to make the act of governing open, transparent and accessible to all. They have the ability to use social technology to energize the citizenry to solve major problems, whether through the agency of government or from private initiative.
I started college as a political science major, but after college I’ve been in high tech for the past 20 years. Like Trippi, I’m a gadget guy and fascinated by technology, but I also love politics. I have a deep passion for our country and its founders, for our constitution, and for the liberty and justice the founders sought to secure for all by forming the union, with all its checks and balances.
As I study history, I find that many of the most important checks and balances are now gone. The federal government has usurped over the past 100 years many of the powers that were originally left to the states and the people. Today, a few people in Washington wield enormous power and influence and are subject to almost no checks and balances. Can you imagine what the founders would have thought — after all they risked to defy King George III for his abuses of power — when the US Congress voted in late 2008 to give a single individual — the Secretary of Treasury — the ability to use $700 billion of taxpayer dollars to try to prevent an economic collapse? He had the power to to pick and choose which financial institutions to bailout and which to let fail. I think giving such power to one person is unprecedented in American history. We definitely need a revolution from this kind of governing!
When the $700 billion become available to the Treasury department, the rule of law was out the window, and the politics of influence were in full force. On Nov. 11, 2008 the New York Times published an article entitled “Lobbyists Swarm The Treasury for a Piece of Bailout Pie.”
Jeb Mason, who as the Treasury’s liaison to the business community is the first port-of-call for lobbyists. “The government shouldn’t be in the business of picking winners and losers among industries.”
Mr. Mason, 32, a lanky Texan in black cowboy boots who once worked in the White House for Karl Rove, shook his head over the dozens of phone calls and e-mail messages he gets every week. “I was telling a friend, ‘this must have been how the Politburo felt,’ ” he said.
I personally believe in limiting the role of government and simultaneously unleashing the creativity and philanthropy of the private sector to solve problems. French philosopher Frederic Bastiat’s “The Law” describes what he viewed as the proper role of government — to protect life, liberty and property. He criticized governments that engaged in “legal plunder” by taking goods from one group of people and distributing them to another. As fellow Frenchman Alexis d’Tocqueville admired US citizens for their civic and religious involvement and self-government, Bastiat admired the United States for limiting its government for the most part to its “proper domain.” But he criticized the US for two abuses of governmental power, slavery and tariffs, and was prescient about the risk that these could “bring terrible consequences to the United States.”
… look at the United States [in 1850]. There is no country in the world where the law is kept more within its proper domain: the protection of every person’s liberty and property. As a consequence of this, there appears to be no country in the world where the social order rests on a firmer foundation. But even in the United States, there are two issues – and only two – that have always endangered the public peace. Slavery and Tariffs Are Plunder What are these two issues? They are slavery and tariffs. These are the only two issues where, contrary to the general spirit of the republic of the United States, law has assumed the character of plunder. Slavery is a violation, by law, of liberty. The protective tariff is a violation, by law, of property. Its is a most remarkable fact that this double legal crime – a sorrowful inheritance of the Old World – should be the only issue which can, and perhaps will, lead to the ruin of the Union. It is indeed impossible to imagine, at the very heart of a society, a more astounding fact than this: The law has come to be an instrument of injustice. And if this fact brings terrible consequences to the United States – where only in the instance of slavery and tariffs – what must be the consequences in Europe, where the perversion of law is a principle; a system?
As in Europe, the role of government in the U.S. has now expanded in virtually every conceivable way. Government spending as a percentage of GDP has grown from under 10% in 1900 to more than 40% in 2009-2010. (Source: usgovernmentspending.com)
I am personally optimistic and enthusiastic about the role of social media in future elections and in government. Efforts like the Sunlight Foundation, Project Vote Smart, and GovTrack.us hold great promise. Now imagine when these and many other citizen-empowering web sites become social by using Facebook Connect or other technologies! Imagine if government data and actions become so open and transparent and social that millions of Facebook users every day could actually be involved in self-government, instead of merely playing Farmville and Mafia Wars.
At FamilyLink.com, we are taking our first baby step to participate in the intersection of social media with politics and government by launching SocialFire.com. Our politics page will track the number of Facebook supporters and Twitter followers for every major election in the U.S.
We have the ability to help campaigns attract thousands of additional supporters and followers and to run “flash polls” that can get hundreds of immediate answers to any question that political campaigns want to ask. We have used our internal survey tool since March and have gotten more than 30 million answers from our site visitors to help us decide what products, services, and features to develop next.
Our Socialfire team is talking with several candidates who could jump start their 2010 campaign by using our poll and advertising capabilities to attract hundreds or thousands of supporters/volunteers/donors.
If you are in politics, you should draw an important lesson from the Dean and Obama campaigns. You should realize that campaigns will be won and lost based on how effectively you use social media, in particular Facebook and Twitter, to engage with your potential supporters, volunteers, and donors. Since the average Facebook user now has 130 friends (source: Facebook press room), if a political campaign gets 10,000 active Facebook supporters, then through those 10,000 they actually have the ability to reach 1.3 million people!
Only 6 current Senators or challengers for the US Senate in 2010 currently have more than 10,000 Facebook followers, including Senator John McCain. Two of these are high profile challengers, Peter Schiff (running against Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd) and Rand Paul (Senate candidate in Kentucky), son of former US Presidential candidate Ron Paul, have more than 10,000 Facebook followers.
And the funding is already starting to flow to these social media savvy campaigns. Paul has raised more than $1 million already for his Kentucky Senate race from more than a thousand donors. Peter Schiff’s campaign is approaching $1 million as reported on his official Facebook page.
oh my gosh, facebook is for families
Filed under: Facebook, Facebook Applications, Families, Social Networking Watch, Uncategorized
On Feb. 2nd, InsideFacebook reported that the fastest growing demographic on Facebook is women over 55.
In just the past 120 days, usage of Facebook by women over 55 has grown by an astonishing 175.3%.
Our team at FamilyLink.com is particularly excited as social networks attract older users because our mission is to connect families to each other using technology, and the glue that keeps most families (and extended families) together often happens to be the older female family members–moms and grandmas.
As they come into social networks in droves, a very large percentage of them do so with the primary purpose of communicating with their children and grandchildren–and not necessary just with their friends.
My mom started using Facebook actively just a few days after Christmas. During the holidays we had a big family discussion about how we could all keep in touch better. Everyone talked about their Blackberries, iPhones, Facebook and even Twitter.
I am now friends on Facebook with my mom, my siblings, my 82-year old aunt, and dozens of cousins, children of cousins, nieces, nephews, and other extended family. And we all use We’re Related. In fact, the primary way we found each other was through this application.
Time Magazine published a “Nerd World” column this week titled “Facebook is for Old People” in which author Lev Grossman listed 10 reasons (all in jest) why older people love Facebook. Reason #7 was:
We have children. There is very little that old people enjoy more than forcing others to pay attention to pictures of their children. Facebook is the most efficient engine ever devised for this.
That’s pretty funny. But more based in reality than Grossman’s claim that old people want to force others to see pictures of their children is the fact that most older people care more about their family members than younger people do and they themselves want to continually see new family photos.
Young people are busy with school, friends, and work. All of life is ahead of them, and they are optimistic about the future. It’s well known that college students phone home mainly when they are out of money. 
On the other hand, as we grow older, everything changes. What once was important in high school, college, and in our work years, no longer seems to matter so much. We have so many more memories to think about and we become more thoughtful about the past. As we age, watching children (and from what I hear, grandchildren) grow, and learn, and experience life, and staying in touch with our own remaining family members, becomes the most interesting and meaningful part of our own lives.
I think there is quantifiable evidence for this. While working at a previous company (from 1998-2002) my team discovered that the older people were the more times per month they logged into their private family web sites. It was pretty astonishing to see this hold true even for people up into their 80s.
Because older people are flocking to Facebook, the We’re Related application (by FamilyLink.com) has jumped in the last few months to become the #2 most popular application on Facebook as measured by Weekly Active Users. For a few days, it was #1 in daily active users, but that number fluctates often as various apps experience occasional surges in traffic.
When we launched We’re Related in October 2007, we reached our first million users in 29 days, and our second million a few weeks later. We were surprised that our application spread so quickly, especially because Facebook had already clamped down on the “unlimited invites” that had helped the first successful apps reach millions of users in just weeks or months. Our cap was 20 invites per user per day, so Facebook users with a thousand friends couldn’t tell all of them about our app at once. And yet we still grew like crazy.
But what surprised us even more was our discovery that half of our first two million users were from Canada, and that 17 of our top 20 cities were in Canada. We teased our product manager (who is from Canada) about making this happen on purpose.
We discovered, through further investigation, that even though the US population is about 9.1 times greater than the population of Canada, at that time there were actually more women over age 55 in Canada using Facebook than here in the US.
Then it made sense. Older people, especially women, love the We’re Related application. In fact, it might be the primary reason they use Facebook — like it was for my mom.
We weren’t 100% sure why Facebook had more members 55+ in Canada than in the U.S. But this is our theory: since Facebook was originally for college students (first at Harvard, then at 60 Ivy League schools, then for all US colleges and universities) and then for US high school students, and only in September 2006 was opened to the general public, the perception was widespread in the U.S. was that Facebook was for young people only.
In fact, the famous NY Times article from June 7, 2007 titled “omg, my mom joined facebook” reflected a reality at the time in the U.S. that young people didn’t want older people (especially their moms) to see what they were doing online.
For some reason in Canada Facebook spread quickly to all ages. Maybe it hadn’t really taken off in Canadian universities. Maybe Facebook had launched in U.S. high schools but not in Canadian high schools. Or maybe Canadian youth don’t have as many things to hide from their parents.
Who knows? But whatever the reason, there were literally more men and women over 55 in Canada than in the US on Facebook.
When We’re Related launched, it became especially popular in Canada, probably because the large population of moms and grandmas embraced it and shared it.
We don’t know if our growth will continue at the current rate, but if it does we will have more than 50 million users by the end of this year. Not bad for an app that will turn 2 years old in October.
The challenge for us now, is to design a user experience that meets the widely varying needs of millions of families. Families come in all different shapes and sizes.
We are anxious to create an experience that works for your family, that helps you stay in touch regularly with your siblings, parents, children, and extended family, in meaningful ways.
We would like to know what you want We’re Related to do for you and your family. How can we make it better?
Please comment on this blog about what features or design changes would lead you to use We’re Related regularly to keep in touch with your relatives.
We would really appreciate your suggestions.
Or, if you want to vote on each other’s ideas, please visit our customer feedback forum on Uservoice, where thousands of our active users are suggesting ideas and voting on them.
Please let us know what we can do for your family.
Twitter’s Cosmic Powers
Filed under: Connect Magazine, Social Networking Watch
I originally wrote this article for Connect Magazine’s December 2008 issue.
It’s been said that brevity is the soul of wit; it is also the soul of Twitter.
Twitter is the world’s most popular tool for “micro-blogging.” Every day, millions of people use Twitter to answer the question, “What are you doing right now?” As soon as they post a “tweet,” everyone who follows them can see what they are doing right now. It’s similar to updating your status in Facebook.
It’s called micro-blogging because you only have 140 characters per tweet. But you can pack a lot of info into 140 characters. Like Genie said to Jafar in the movie “Aladdin,” “Phenomenal cosmic powers … itty-bitty living space!”
Many people think Twitter is silly or a waste of time. But most of the people that I follow on Twitter are not posting what they just had for lunch or what they are watching on TV. Instead, they are smart people answering the question, “What did I just learn, read or think that is important to share?”
I don’t follow people on Twitter that post inane comments. But I do follow dozens of venture capitalists, employees at Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Amazon, Web 2.0 startup companies and even a congressman from Texas. By carefully selecting whom I follow on Twitter, I have chosen to tap into an information stream, a constant flow of ideas and links from hundreds of the smartest (and most vocal) people on earth.
Twitter recently passed Google Reader (with my carefully selected blogs) as my most important source of business information. Partly because of their brevity I can consume so many tweets quickly.
The keys to success with Twitter are: 1) Getting the right client software and, 2) Selecting the right people to follow.
I use Twitterific software on my iPhone and Twitterberry on my Blackberry. And of course, Twitter on the desktop.
From Twitter I learn about things going on in Silicon Valley and New York and elsewhere that people I follow are planning to attend. Last month I learned about a social advertising summit in New York City, and within a day was signed up for it. This event was crucial in shaping our current business strategy.
Twitter, which raised $15 million in venture capital in May, recently purchased a search engine that indexes the hundreds of millions of Twitter posts. It is a powerful way to find out what thousands of people are thinking about any topic.
And it’s not just about following the conversations; it’s about starting them as well.
If I post a tweet, the 300-plus people who follow me on Twitter can read it. But it also automatically updates my Facebook status, so my 800-plus Facebook friends can see it as well. Some people using Twitter have tens of thousands of followers. If they link to a Web site or make a comment or break a news story, imagine how quickly the news can spread.
Follow me on Twitter at www.twitter.com/paulballen.
The Power of LinkedIn and The Speed of Trust
Recently, my team identified 189 high-traffic web sites that we want to approach in the coming months with a very innovative partnership opportunity. We think we can increase their web site traffic and that our proposal makes a lot of sense.
But cold calling 189 these companies would likely be frustrating. Who would we ask for? How many calls would it take to find the right person, or to find a helpful person who could direct us to the right person?
And then, even if we found the right person to talk to, how interested could they possibly be in a startup company from Utah, even if we do have a few million monthly visitors to our web sites? In a phone conversation where we are hunting around for the right person to talk to, trying to catch them at a time when they are interested in hearing our proposal, well, the odds just aren’t good at all.
But then there’s the LinkedIn approach. Since I’ve been investing time regularly over since LinkedIn first launched in building a trusted network of connections, and since I’ve worked in so many companies over the years, and lectured, and taught, and blogged, and networked, and continually refreshed my loose social connections via LinkedIn, I happen to have a mind-boggling LinkedIn network.
My Network Stats show the following:
- 139,600 Two Degrees Away
- 986 Trusted Connections
- 5,715,400 Three Degrees Away
Out of more than 25 million LinkedIn users, I can reach 20% of them through a friend of a friend. The success rate for me of LinkedIn requests has been probably greater than 90%. I never abuse the system. I carefully read profiles before sending requests. I carefully choose who to send the request through. And I always have a legitimate reason for contacting them that I sincerely think they will be interested in.
I’ve used last minute LinkedIn requests to get meetings in London with a top investment bank with less than 24 hours notice. I used it last week to make sure I got an invitation to attend the invitation-only Social Ad Summit in New York City. I’ve used it dozens of times with great results.
So recently I invited one of my (trusted) employees to login to my LinkedIn account, and to search for “marketing” or “business development” employees at the 189 web companies that we want to partner with in the not-too-distant future. Here’s what she found:
- I have 3 1st Degree Connections
- I have 31 2nd Degree Connections
- I have 48 3rd Degree Connections
I actually have LinkedIn connections at almost every one of the 189 companies, but we were only looking for employees who had “marketing” or “business development” roles within the company.
She put all her findings into a spreadsheet, which I shrunk to 6-point font, and printed it out, so I can have it right by my computer and look at it every day. When we are ready to proceed, I’ll budget a bit of time every week to reach out via LinkedIn to some of these partners.
In the past week it has become apparent that FamilyLink.com, with our super popular We’re Related app on Facebook (5 million monthly active users and growing fast), is ready to reach out to brand advertisers and marketers who want to reach some of the families who are using our app.
I just searched for “media buyer” and “internet” on LinkedIn, and found that there are 390 matches that are within my network.
We think we can provide media buyers “the best way to reach families through social media.” Next week we’ll start using LinkedIn to reach the ones that really do seem most likely to be interested in placing relevant ads on social networks.
In the past, when I’ve tried to raise capital or advised others on raising capital, I’ve been amazed at how many thousands of people in the Venture Capital and Private Equity category are using LinkedIn. Since almost all angel and venture deals are done by referral, it makes a ton of sense for an entrepreneur to invest adequate time in building their LinkedIn network, and then when they are ready to find potential investors, to spend serious energy in reading the profiles of all the angel investor or VCs in their network. And then, to choose carefully who to send each request for a meeting through.
Stephen MR Covey wrote a best-selling book in 2006 called The Speed of Trust. I believe wholeheartedly in his premise that when there is trust, business can move at a very fast pace. But without trust, there can be infinite delays or gridlock.
LinkedIn is without a doubt the most powerful “Speed of Trust” tool ever invented in the history of the world, and I think modern entrepreneurs and business people who learn how to fully utilize its capabilities and help others in their network to benefit from it in appropriate ways, will find like I have that it it creates a wrinkle in time where all of a sudden you find yourself through some kind of invisible transference of good-will doing business with people you’ve never met before but that you feel that you have, because you’re friends of the same friend.
Does any of this make sense to you, LinkedIn user or not?
In San Francisco for SnapSummit 2.0
I’m looking forward to hearing keynotes from Dave Morin, Senior Platform Manager at Facebook and Jim Benedetto, VP Technology at MySpace, as well as from 20 or so panelists who are succeeding with their social networking applications and investments. My last major dose of social networking content from industry insiders came at CES in January where I attended (and then bought mp3 recordings) of virtually every session on widgets and social networking. When I went to order my mp3 recordings, they just copied all the ones I wanted onto a thumb drive and gave them to me. It was the first conference where I have purchased the audio that way–very cool.
I am starting to see more and more how social networking will completely change the world of genealogy. Very few genealogists use social networks today, but that will change. One interesting fact that you can discover using Facebook Ads (www.facebook.com/ads) is that there are more people over 50 in Canada using Facebook than there are people over 50 in the U.S. using Facebook. Since genealogists tend to be older, the power of social networks won’t become evident to the 15+ million genealogists in the U.S. until more and more of them embrace social networks. But what they really need is a social network designed for genealogy.
FamilyLink.com is a close to launching our first feature that could make this social network essential for all serious genealogists. It’s a feature that has never been tried before on a massive scale. We are excited to roll it out.
What is interesting to me is that ever since last week when I blogged about 10% time, and as I have been contacting relatives and gathering information about my own ancestors, I now view everything that we are doing at FamilyLink and WorldVitalRecords through the lens of "how will this help me and my family with our genealogy?"
Just this morning, as the sun is rising on "my city by the bay", I had two breakthrough ideas that I think could be implemented quite easily that would make my life so much easier. I want to find my ancestors and connect with my relatives who have already gathered so much information about them. A social networking concept that is becoming more popular but has not been applied to genealogy would really help me out.
Social Networking Strategy for Utah Companies
Filed under: Facebook, Social Networking Watch, Viral Marketing
I recently organized a Facebook group called Utah CEOs with a Facebook Strategy. Now I wish I had named it better. It should be something like Utah Executives who Have or Want to Have a Social Networking Strategy. The first event had more than 30 attendees. One of them blogged a summary of the Facebook Strategy lunch that we held this week, and said it was very worthwhile.
If you want to join this group which already has 125 members so you can be notified when we schedule our next event, click here.
As we (at FamilyLink.com) increase our expertise in building applications and making them both viral and scalable (which has taken us months of effort and investment) we are planning to select some key strategic partners–companies who have content or services in the family space–and develop some co-branded applications with them. These applications can generate revenue and click-throughs for both our partners and our own web sites.
We will sign our first co-development deal next week and announce the application shortly thereafter. We believe this new application is unique and will spread to millions of Facebook users, and that is related to our business of connecting families. Our We’re Related application has had more than 2 million installs, and our next two applications are growing very, very quickly. Both should reach into the hundreds of thousands of installs within a month.
If you are interested in talking about partnering with us, please use the Contact Me form on my blog, and I’ll get back with you shortly.
Facebook Strategy Lunch for Utah Executives
Filed under: Facebook, Social Networking Watch, Viral Marketing, Widgets
I organized a Facebook Group for Utah CEOs who have a Facebook strategy or want to develop one. I wish I could change the name of the Facebook Group, but Facebook doesn’t allow that. I can see why. What if someone set up a group called “Mothers Against Drunk Driving” and got a million members, and then arbitrarily decided to change the name of the group to “We Love Beer.” The creator of a group can control a lot of things, but can’t change the name after people have joined it.
If I could change the group name I would broaden it to include any Utah Executive (not just CEOs) and also to broaden it to include Facebook, OpenSocial, and other major web sites such as Yahoo that are opening up their platforms to third-party developers.
At CES I heard a forecast that 1.2 billion people will be using social networks by 2012. On Wikipedia’s excellent list of social networks I count 26 that have nearly 10 million users already.
There are opportunities everywhere you look to build social networking applications or widgets that can spread throughout the web. And there are companies that can help you get started:
- Widgetbox, a VC-funded company (Hummer Winblad), helps companies build and distribute widgets. They claim that 10% of the Facebook applications started as widgets that have migrated to Facebook. They announced last week a Bebo accelerator that can help a widget turn into a Bebo application. (Bebo is a massive social network that opened up last week to third party applications, just like Facebook.)
- KickApps has raised $18 million to date. It provides widgets and social networking components for a fee. I spoke with a KickApps executive at CES. He said they charge for their applications and widgets based on page views/usage. So if you need a video player with social networking functionality built it for your web site, you don’t have to build it from scratch. It also appears that they can provide you with your own white label social network like Ning.
- Ning allows anyone to quickly build their own social network on its platform. Founded by Marc Andreesen, Ning reached 100,000 social networks hosted back in September.
- FBFactory.com claims to be the first company that exclusively builds Facebook apps for customers. They have a growing list of applications they have built.
So, if you are a Utah Executive and you would like to learn more about how to develop a strategy that can help you reach the 1.2 billion people who are going to be using social networks in the next 4 years, and how to do it inexpensively and virally, sign up for this Facebook group, and plan on attending our lunch meeting next week in Provo.
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