I'm here with all my friends! (from Barfly)

tag, you’re here

Facebook views the success of photo tagging as one of the most brilliant product moves behind its’ growth. Continuing to seek out and expand on personal hooks that take it deeper into the life and times of users is a central goal of FB’s new product development.  The feature of letting any person check-in their friends to a Place (the way you can tag people in photos) is the most controversial of the released features.  IMHO, Facebook is very unlikely to back off this functionality unless user backlash becomes a ton more prominent.

While the first thing I did when the product lunched was turn off the ability for friends to do this, I think it’s a very smart feature.  I learned awhile ago that the slope towards open life sharing is downward facing and indeed slippery. Facebook gleefully applies just a little more grease with every product release.

From a product viewpoint, the potential for place-based gathering and collaboration is tremendous, and bringing active friend sharing into the mix is a high quality product move – no matter how much I personally view some elements to have stepped over the line [notably, the pre-selected opt-in for applications your friends are using to have access to your location status.]

fun vs. function

Dennis Crowley is right in calling Facebook Places boring, when viewed side-by-side with the engaging experience of Foursquare. For me, Foursquare was JUST beginning the get interesting – it was beginning to reach a level of critical mass to occasionally find a friend unexpectedly nearby, and the content in “tips” was shifting from lame to mildly interesting.

I think it’s already game over for friend discovery.  However, the current user experience of FB Places for attaching comments and “stories” to a place is pretty stale. The “inside Facebook” user experience of Places may be an impediment to success, particularly for such a new visual user experience.

So, will FourSquare’s ability to engage consumers via competitive and fun user experiences be sufficient to sustain its’ growth and create the preferred place for check-in?  FourSquare will have to step up their game on user engagement (over monetization).  How new users introduced to location sharing via FB choose to adopt or ignore the service is mission critical.

Facebook’s Places API presents a double-edged sword in this equation.  On one hand, it allows the aggregation of all check-ins to Facebook’s Places, effectively giving FB the trump card of check-in data consolidation. On the other hand, it opens up a way to “layer” the fun and (potentially) commercially interesting activities on top of location notification to friends outside of Facebook Places.

turning off your friends

Google researcher Paul Adams’ epic discourse on real life social networks nailed what I consider to be a significant shortcoming of the current generation Places check-in. I have a couple of hundred Facebook friends, probably only half of which live in my state, and of those only a fraction of which could give a rat’s derrierre about where I am located day by day.

I’m interested in a more personalized way of sharing my location with friends and businesses I like (and trust); there are a group of friends who I’d like to know where I am when I choose to share it.  Until now, the concept of grouping friends into sub-segments seemed like an intangible effort with little or no return. Perhaps this changes that dynamic.

So for now, Places misses the mark for me as a blunt instrument that fails to capture the nuance of personal location sharing.

*as a sidenote, I’ll blog separately on blog.closely.com on the business impact of Facebook Places.

We’ve grown up to view online business reviews and recommendations as something that gets accumulated into organized sources of browsable content. TripAdvisor and Yelp represent two highly successful cases-in-point of the power of critical mass to reviews.

The dominating model of shopping behavior goes something like this…

search > initial select > search again for opinion to test your decision > transact

As noted in Search Engine Watch, “the search continues because search engines aren’t the consumer’s most trusted source of advice”. As we all know, we’re spending more and more time socially connected.  This creates a new whole stepping off point for shopping behavior. In theory, the potential exists to invert the experience and infuse trust and recommendations into the front end of shopping.

when your friends are always live

So, as the new generation of  live + social + local approaches – will it make these models increasingly obsolete?  It’s creeping up on us – perhaps the most visible example today is seeing your friends instantly react to your Facebook posts from their desktop and mobile positions. Clearly, your social graph is a live organism, becoming more and more ready to add value to your shopping experience every day.

But, do we really believe NextWeb’s headline? “Facebook Acquires NextStop, It’s Lights out for Yelp“. The message is basically that once Facebook turns up it’s Question application for organized Q&A, it will begin accumulating opinion at a breakneck pace, and facilitate personalized opinion content and live Q&A with your social graph.  Combining this initiative with the team who created Nextstop, and you begin to get a picture of how Facebook aims to collect and apply a richer model of relevant opinion content.

inside or out?

Facebook’s bold Open Graph move, to invert itself and be embedded into any web site or service, implies that it’s a neutral party in the question of “where will the consumer prefer to engage”.  To their credit, Yelp boldly stepped forward, with a Microsoftesque “embrace and extend”  approach with this new dev utility.  Yelp is clearly aiming to extend the lead it has with a large base of consumers and their organized opinions. It’s model will allow you to integrate your own social graph and sift and interact with your friends viewpoints, whenever you want.  Best of both worlds is the theory.

Facebook will ratchet up its owned and operated product approach to live question services. As NextWeb implies, Facebook will probably aim to convince consumers to not bother “stepping outside” to the Yelp consumer experience, employing low resistance user experience techniques together with some new tricks (virtual currency, etc.).   Since opinion content is most valuable for a few months to a couple of years (depending on the category) an advantage today can systematically fade with time.

The evolution of both of Yelp and Facebook  on the parallel inside vs. outside paths will indeed be worth watching closely, as a bellwether for the evolution of socially-engaged local shopping.  And, it will presumably shed a leading light onto Facebook’s “neutrality” position and business model.

Out with “fan”, in with “like”.

So, Facebook is officially mothballing the terminology of Fan, in favor of the kinder, gentler Like.  According to All Things Digital, the decision has been made.

Sometimes subtle changes in terminology can drive meaningful impact and unintended consequences.  My commentary below  is on how this might impact a Business’ Fan Page marketing.

a soft handshake?

Fan has always felt like a term derived of celebrity worship, that has morphed unnaturally into business and brand following terminology.  While I do believe Fan is far from a natural term, the act of fanning a business feels like a more meaningful statement of support than does the term Like.  When you Fan a business, it feels like an implicit statement of loyalty.  Saying you Like a business is akin to a soft handshake, positive but less committed.

As pointed out in Mashable,

The change could make it easier for brand advertisers to accumulate fans quickly. But it also means that users might not totally understand what they’re opting in to.

While building a larger social graph is arguably good news for brands and businesses, I tend to be in the contrarian camp.  This creates a new problems that I feel will make it more difficult for businesses to know how far they can go in leveraging their Facebook connections. It will likely raise the overall noise, and it introduces uncertainty as to the implicit contract with your social connection.

i <heart> follow

Personally, I prefer the Twitter term Follow, when it comes to business-consumer relationships.  To a marketer, a follower feels more like a genuine opt-in consumer than someone who likes you.  It feels like an implicit request to expect offers or news. I feel this is most acute for small and local businesses, where the majority use case for your social network interaction is around promotion and simple information sharing.

Could this move potentially cede competitive ground to Twitter when it comes to small business marketing?  Perhaps.  As the Facebook user base revises their behavior, the new ambiguity will present challenges.

Meanwhile, Twitter followers feel like a more predictable lot, when it comes to their intention.  At the end of the day, business value will be driven by performance, and predictable intention in marketing is a definitive edge.

You may know I’ve been working on a new start-up for the past 6 months, pretty much heads down – stealth by default, not design.  Actually we’ve been very active in our market, just totally focused on product, not business cards or websites!

In a couple of days, we’ll be taking the wraps off.  We’ve been chosen to launch at the DEMO Conference, which is a great venue to jump off the ledge with new products.  I’ve done this once before; it’s a pretty intense and fun launch pad!

the evolution of an old idea

I was fortunate to be around for the formation of Jabber, with a group of visionary friends whose ideas still inspire me – guys like Doc Searls and Tim O’Reilly.  A decade ago they started my mind spinning about the future of the real-time web, where real-time data and geo-presence empower applications, people and crowds.

Over the past few years, I’ve been deeply entrenched in the local search space, as local advertising evolved through the lens of search services.  In the back of my brain, I’ve always been curious about the “other side” of local – direct marketing.  While the whole industry was busy adapting to the Google search ecosystem, promotion marketing seems to have been pretty much ignored, chugging along capturing tens of billions in local marketing spending.

With the emergence of the Twitter ecosystem, Facebook’s rise to ubiquity, and the mobile local world finally showing real formation, I knew it was time to put my energies in a new direction.  With my prior business operating nicely in good hands, I was so ready for a new adventure.

marking our territory

I’ve become a big fan of GroupOn, along with a few million other consumers! GroupOn has done a tremendous job of creating an audience for daily local offers, to which it sells placement slots.  It’s really a traditional direct marketing business, smartly pimped up with time-limited offers, social sharing, and the illusion of group buying. [Earlier on, you had to gather up your friends to win buying power].  To me, the real magic is in deep discount deals to cool places – it delivers a way for consumers to feel great as they save money getting out to interesting places.

I’m also a big fan of Twitter – not for its’ current consumer proposition, but for the budding beauty beneath.  This awkward teenager will continue to blossom into a central role in content distribution and following.  And, of course, Facebook, as commander-in-chief of the social graph, is equally critical in driving live consumer + friends connections.

I’d be remiss to not mention email marketing pioneers, Constant Contact. I’ve watched them since the early Roving Software days, admiring their tenacity in engaging small businesses, winning over 300K users on the value in maintaining constant contact with your customers.

Finally I’d bracket our space with the LBS darling, Foursquare.  I salute their bright discovery of game-based ingredients that triggers consumers to share their location and favorite places.

deep roots, firmly planted

I’ve pulled together a 7-person team, that I’m very lucky to be working alongside.  My two co-founders, Tom Bender and Karyn German both have worked with me before in the Jabber era.  Tom, engineering lead, is a serious math brain who has led engineering teams and architecture in Jabber/Webb, Digital Globe and Tendril Networks.  Karyn fearlessly led Product Management at Jabber followed by a four-year stint leading Product Development and Client Services at Newsgator.  The rest of the team, Jeff Davenport, Scott Davis, Brian Doyle, and Noel Graham all bring deep engineering and design chops rooted in small business marketing, real-time messaging, feed networks, email platforms, mapping and social media. It’s a wicked smart team, with a matching sense of humor, as you might expect!

I am also very excited to have the support of a group of top tier Angel investors and advisors who bring wisdom and insight to the space, led by Kendall Fargo, who remains very active with the company.  Kendall most recently ran Small Business Marketing Tools at Intuit, after their acquisition of his previous start-up, Step Up Commerce.

we’re close.ly

So, to pull this all together, Closely, Inc. is engaged around this problem/opportunity…

How will businesses create, disseminate and engage with local consumers around live offers?  How does a business reward their best customers, their customer’s friends and their neighbors for coming in or buying product when their demand is most valued.  How will consumers follow and and swarm around these specials?

Ultimately, live socially-connected marketing will extend deeply into the tens of billions in direct marketing media spending. It promises to turn direct mail, promotion advertising, and email marketing on their collective heads.

We chose the brand Closely because it captures the shared desires of local consumers and businesses – the desire for a business to be closely followed, and the desire for a consumer to stay close to offers that fit their interests.

Next week we launch our first step into this emerging world of live marketing.

If you’re interested, do follow closely