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

beware, clicking on the link will take you to an infomercial!

Spam “validation” aside, this AdWeek article by provides an interesting discussion on how the ecosystem of Twitter is working to uncover and build business models from the platform.

On Thursday, Twitter launched it’s search box universally throughout the twitter service.  Quoting from the Twitter Blog announcement.

With this newly launched feature, Twitter has become something unexpectedly important—a discovery engine for finding out what is happening right now. (emphasis added)

Twitter, the business, is making important intentions known.  Search is core to their evolving model.  It’s rapidly stepping up from the original founder’s concept of people updating each other with status messages into a role as a dominating force in the evolution of the live web.

From Wired Magazine’s interview with co-founder Biz Stone last August, this has been a predictable development:

One of Twitter’s most likely revenue streams is through advertisements in search results where messages could be tied to what users were searching on. Twitter recently purchased Summize, a search engine specifically designed to sift through Twitter messages, for a reported $15 million in cash and stock.

making consumption conspicuous

Mashable did an interesting survey this weekend, which begins with the twitter headline “is RSS reading dead“?  Put another way, with the rise in Twitter as a hot new method to alert consumers to new content, RSS aggregation might be looking old school.

As more and more media is “pushed out” via tweets, the Twitter infrastructure is poised to collect up the bread crumb trail of your participation, and aggregate trends and behavior. The notion of being able to real-time track your movement and consumption patterns of content is a big deal. Especially when the content has commercial relevance and intent.

the path to follow

This is a very delicate evolution in the works here.  The simplicity and mass consumer appeal of Twitter feels very “Craigslist-like” to me.  Twitter is a very different company, building a business that feels more infrastructure-centric. However, their success hinges on the continued momentum of mass consumer participation.

The founders and investors of Twitter are demonstrating that they won’t follow the tenacity that Craig Newmark has shown in sticking with a simple destination site and ignore commercial options which risk consumer loyalty.  How this plays into the evolution of Twitter as a consumer service will be fun to watch.

Sorry, I just couldn’t help myself – to not take the opportunity to badly mix a metaphor with the “pig + bird” mashup would just be out of character!

The hot news of late has been along two intersecting themes – the staggering (dare we say) viral growth of Twitter, and the impact of this exploding conversation machine on the popular news topic of  Swine Flu.

bring da noize

However you measure participation, the Q1 growth evidence of Twitter usage is demonstrating a projectile that places it alongside many of the most successful media growth stories of the past decade.  Joe Lazerus did an interesting compilation of growth in Twitter as measured by daily posting volumes, which appears to be approaching 5 million daily.  Active usage analysis like this is far more interesting to me than the pile-on statistics of signed up users.

when swines fly

The level of buzz of Swine Flu on Twitter is staggering. It’s starting to drive worrymongering among those who analyze media, as noted by this highly circulated article “Twitter’s Power to Misinform“, and as reported as a concerning phenomenon on CNN.  Remember when Twitter was lauded for being the ultimate efficient platform for immediate news dispersal?    Well, it’s still true, but we’re now evidencing the fact that as the volume of participants rise, so does the noise of the conversation.  If you do a simple browse on the #swineflu thread on Twitter, you see a truly human range of commentary ranging from conspiracy theorists to armchair medical advice to smart ass commentary. Twitter is approaching real life, folks, where the vast majority of thoughts people have about something like Swine Flu are just random noise.

noise canceling technology

In one dimension, Twitter is an open commons for publishing thoughts and engaging people in conversations. The concerned analysts who assess these conversations using a “publishing metaphor” are giving individual words too much credit.  You have to look at individual posts as having little value in isolation. Quoting them individually, without context, is just as credible and valuable as things overheard on the street.

The interpretation of conversation is a VERY interesting theme of innovation which will advance rapidly in the coming year. Whether it’s via applied ways to monitor buzz as a collective metric, or ways to give authority to Twitterers via analysis of the reaction or participation behavior of other users (RT volumes, follow ratios, etc.), or the soon-to-be-hot world of filter-based applications, the “layer on top of the conversation” is one of the most fascinating spaces to watch in media today.

Ultimately, this holds the promise of converting the world’s fastest growing continual stream of consciousness into the things you really want to hear, from the right people at the right time.

So, yes, bring on da noize!

Denver, CO April 14, 2009 – A spokesperson for the US airline industry today announced that the Inter-airline Technology Standards Committee has paved the way for solving a congestion problem that has plagued the industry for decades.  “Consumer frustration over the inflight contention for open restrooms has been mounting.” Our Restroom Contention Task Force met with our Social Technology Platform team, and eureka!,  we discovered the perfect solution, building on our new WIFI plans – Twitter!” stated Sally De Bain, industry spokesperson.

“We envision connecting bathroom sensors to Twitter – passengers simply follow the #flightnumber to be alerted when a restroom is available.  “We’re still discussing whether to trigger the alert when the door is open, when the toilet flushes or when the sink is activated.  Before launching the beta trial, we need to determine how we support premium flier models (code named “Royal Flush”), such that alerts from toilet flushes go to frequent fliers, ahead of door alerts for  economy passengers.”

heh – hey, it could happen!

The industry buzz is rapidly forming with the possibilities for Twitter to be the real time alert engine for just about anything and everything that changes state.

If you haven’t seen the marquis local small business example it’s worth a quick read.  Bakertweet profiles a London-based bakery that worked with their creative agency (located across the street) to apply Twitter to alert followers as fresh baked goods come out of the oven.

My point with the tongue-in-cheek airlines example is to point out two emerging realities of the rapidly morphing Twitter ecosystem:

1. Twitter has a meaningful shot at become the “alert engine” for a plethora of trigger events – theoretically, whenever you have a group of people who have an interest in immediate knowledge of an event, and
2. The signal-to-noise problem potential gets staggering.

I don’t have time now to really dissect the latter, but it’s near and dear to where my head/passion is these days.  Filtering and tagging of streams of conversations and alerts is a VERY BIG THING.  Both in terms of scale of problem and potential of opportunity.

In the meantime, I’d point you to a thought provoking post by Twine CEO Nova Spivack, and the ensuing debate stimulated in the comments. Clay Shirky’s astute comment also rings very true: “the problem isn’t information overload, it’s filter failure“.

Twine Blog Post: Can Twitter Survive What is About to Happen to It?

So, fasten your seat belt, there’s some potential for turbulence in Twitter’s open blue skies!

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