Facebook Drives Me Down Memory Lane

Today, out of the blue,  I get a phone call, a confident southern accent greets me with “Dah-ne-ese? (three delicious syllables) Do you know who this is?”

I knew that the voice was very familiar but  couldn’t place it at the time.  I felt old and anxious...  Then this energy-filled voice identified herself as “Pam” my old college roommate from a few decades ago… in rural Arkansas in the heart of “the Bible Belt”.

OF COURSE!   I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN! It’s only been forever since we spoke.  Pam said, “I found you on Facebook!”

Holy cow!

Facebook is a wonderful thing!  It allows you to quickly and painlessly re-connect with old friends that you’ve “let go” years ago for whatever  stupid reasons.  (“I don’t have the time.  We live so far away.  We’ve both moved on.  We’re not the same people.  We probably don’t have anything in common.  She probably wouldn’t like the new me.  I’m too tired to invest in “old friends”;  it’s hard enough keeping up with current friends in my crazy whirlwind of a life.”) Whatever the reason,  it’s not good enough, so you silently let things “slide” and there goes the friendship….for years…decades…  Yet, you think of them often and wonder what their life is like.  Are they happy?  Do they think of me?

So today, Facebook gave me the opportunity to experience an incredible trip down “Memory Lane”.

Pam reminded me of old girlfriends and male friends significant to the two of us.  Some I remembered and could actually picture their faces, but others were simply familiar names but no faces came to mind.    This weekend, Pam is going to our Alma Maters’  homecoming football game and will see several of these people.  At least now, she can answer the question, “What ever happened to your sidekick? (Deni-Bob as I was called by our closest pals, if they even remember me!)

I mentioned recently hearing the Carole King song “So Far Away” and recalling the time she & I hitched a ride to Memphis for a rock concert and ended up in Overland Park where we sat on a concrete wall, dangling our feet over the edge, feeling the cool southern breeze on our tanned skin, listening to music playing on a radio, watching the hippies, just talking, and being “Pam & Denise”.  That memory will last forever thanks to the everlasting musical cues.  Surprisingly, Pam remembered this experience with similar accuracy.

She said, ” I still have your old Jimi Hendrix cassette.  I found it as I was getting rid of some of my stuff from the ’60’s and ’70’s”.   (Today, my husband, a Blues harmonica player, would love hearing that ancient cassette.  He’s still a dedicated “Hendrix Fan”.  Me?  I’m more into Pink!)

Pam spoke of various college football players she admired “way back when”.  She was into the “jocks” and I was into the “freaks”.  I informed her that I still don’t know anything about football. She laughed,  “I know, but it was cute back then!”  Actually, that was one of the few differences she and I had at the time.  We loved each others’ company so much, our differences didn’t matter.

We were “two peas in a pod”.  We were innocent young co-eds, gullible, and total “Jesus freaks” or “flower children” looking for peace and only the good in the world and those around us.  We trusted everyone.   We each wore love beads around our necks.  We were good girls.

Pam had long straight blonde hair that she carefully ironed daily on our dorm room’s ironing board.   I was a brunette with long frizzy ringlet (permed) curls.  We both were skinny, gregarious, and attracted attention easily.

Our most common threads were our love of music, smiling, and believing in Christ.  We had so many friends.  Life was fun and full.   However, we both lost a parent during those two years together in college.  She lost her mother and I lost my father.  They were significant personal losses but our friendship eased the pain.  This, I’m guessing, was our real bond; the bond that keeps us forever in each others’ thoughts.   Now I know just how much we bonded.

So maybe we haven’t been connected for decades;  today, Facebook brought us back.  And it’s SO EASY BEING SOCIAL NETWORK FRIENDS.  Now, we can witness each others lives vicariously. WE DON’T HAVE TO TALK AND WE DON’T HAVE TO WRITE.  (But I hope we do!)  WE CAN SIMPLY READ AND ENJOY!

So maybe we aren’t the same young co-eds we once were.  I’m certainly no longer the “good girl” she knew, nor skinny or gregarious.   However today, we did find out that we still have lots in common.   Now, we are middle-aged women who still feel younger than we should. We both struggle to maintain healthy bodies via resistance to regular exercising and diet.   Our marriages are both lasting “solid” relationships even with their ups and downs.   And we both are non-child-bearers by choice.   It felt good to listen to a friend that shares my personal thoughts on life without children and grandchildren.  It’s a been a great way of living for me!  But most can’t even conceive the thought of life without their kids or grandchildren.   Ho-hum.

Now that Pam & I have re-connected, hopefully some day soon, we will take the risk to actually meet and spend some face to face time.  I hope so.  We would be foolish to let our friendship lapse again for whatever reason. It’s just all too easy to communicate in today’s social network world.

“GO F-A-C-E-B-O-O-K!”

TC: Measuring the Success of Social Games

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/29/how-to-measure-the-true-stickiness-and-success-of-a-facebook-app/ How To Measure The True Stickiness (And Success) Of A Facebook App   by Guest Author on October 29, 2009

This is a guest post by Nabeel Hyatt, Founder and CEO of Conduit Labs, which is the creator of Loudcrowd and other social games that help you experience music with your friends. His personal blog can be found at nabeelhyatt.com and he can be followed on Twitter @nabeel.

 

Yesterday, Facebook announced they are going to drastically alter the way applications can message users once again, likely throwing a wrench into every app developers’ growth rate. Hints of the coming turmoil appeared last week when Facebook changed the way feeds work. This caused enough worry that apparently Mark Pincus, Founder/CEO of Zynga, canceled his appearance at Harvard Business School so he could sit with his team and figure out what the impact would be to the viral rates of their massive hits such as Farmville and Cafe World. That’s not surprising, since getting posts in the feed is critical to continued growth, but the myopic focus on the “viral rate” by some in the industry has created an over-dependence on perhaps the wrong number.

 

(As an aside, those who complain about Facebook being an unreliable channel to build a business off of should try dealing with a retailer such as Best Buy. They will be happy to take a 50% cut of your revenue and then one week decide to eliminate your entire section of products and ship them back to you. Oh, and they’ll bill you for the shipping.)

 

In all the talks about virality the general focus is on the new, clever, and sometimes underhanded ways to increase your viral rate. What gets lost is the core message that, as Siqi Chen of Serious Business puts it, viral messaging tactics are just a force multiplier on the inherent viralness of your product. Or, in simpler terms, how good your product is in the eyes of your users actually is the most important thing. Viral messaging is just a way of greasing the skids on that user’s intent. It is an important later step, but not the root.

 

And how do we measure that intent? It turns out that in Facebook at least, the level of retention is the best public number to predict likelihood of a hit.

 

Real retention numbers for other people’s products are notoriously hard to come by, but in Facebook there is good 30 day retention data called the DAU/MAU Ratio – which can also be called Stickiness. This is the ratio of Daily Active Users to Monthly Active Users. For example, a DAU/MAU ratio of 50% would mean that the average user of your app is using it 15 out of 30 days that month.

 

It turns out this simple metric is enough to predict, with a high level of probability, the success of a product. For example, look at the correlation between the following set of Facebook games.

 

 

Here we have games that fit a broad set of criteria, in terms of brand association, demographic appeal, play style, and time since launch. See how the second column and the fourth column are almost perfectly in order? Despite this broad cross-section of games it appears there is a very direct correlation between stickiness and success. Let’s take a deeper view of the data.

 

 

For those who aren’t stat geeks, this is called the coefficient of determination (R2) and predicts whether two correlated data sets accurately predict future success. If everything lined up perfectly on the linear regression line above you would have an R2 value of 1, and then we could say there is a perfect correlation between Stickiness (x axis) and the Size of the app (y axis). Using these social games we have a rather astonishing “fit” of 0.77.

 

Stepping back, this data is quite remarkable actually, since you would expect Stickiness to go down as you get huge. It would stand to reason that your 20 millionth user, who might be experiencing their first Facebook game, is going to be harder to retain than your 1,000th. The fact that this is not happening yet, that no one has found the edge of users where suddenly retention metrics collapse, says something very powerful indeed about the potential size of the social gaming market.

 

But it isn’t the market size implications that are the big takeaway, the relationship between Stickiness and success is. This of course will also cause a messaging arms race around retention, and the prevalence of Free Gifts is a good example of that already happening. But just as with the viral rate it’s important to remember those are all simply tactics to enhance a products inherent retention. The clear inference is that building something users love to come back to is the best predictor of success.

Facebook Trying To Increase Activity

Facebook is suggesting that I write on people’s walls now. Really? Facebook thinks I need to be reminded of who to keep in touch with, huh? I notice that they’re suggesting people who have little to no recent posts on their page… I think that they’re trying to up activity levels, what do you think?

Makes sense, I read earlier today that activity metrics dropped big time after this week’s news feed updates.

Merubah Tampilan Layout Facebook

Bosan dengan tampilan facebook yang begitu-gitu saja tanpa variasi, tidak seperti friendster atau myspace yang bisa kita kostumisasi sesuai dengan kemauan kita. Kalau begitu coba yang satu ini, dengan cara ini kita dapat mengganti tampilan halaman facebook menjadi lebih bagus dan yang paling penting bisa dikostumisasi sendiri.

Aritkel ini saya buat untuk Anda yang suka dengan kostumisasi tampilan dan sekaligus memenuhi kebutuhan beberapa pengunjung yang menuju keblog ini melalui google dengan keyword tentang :
-cara mengganti layout facebook
-tutorial mengganti layout facebook
-merubah tampilan facebook
-mengubah tampilan facebook

Dan ternyata banyak sekali yang mencari artikrl tentang tampilan facebook. Setelah beberapa penelusuran website, blog dan group-group yang berisi tentang tutorial
mengganti layout facebook, saya menemukan 2 cara berbeda:

1. Merubah tampilan layout facebook dengan cara userstyles.org (untuk penguna mozila firefox)

-download add-ons mozzila

-klik “add to firefox”, installasi and restart mozilla firefox

-pilih tampilan yang diinginkan disini

-klik tombol “Load into Stylish”

-save dan refresh halaman facebook Anda

2. Merubah tampilan layout facebook dengan cara yontoo.com (untuk penguna mozila firefox dan internet explorer)

-kunjungi website Yontoo

-pilih “Start Installation”

-install Add-ons dan restart mozila

-pasang aplikasi PageRage di facebook

-pilih tampilan yang diinginkan

-lihat profile anda

Cara no.1 hanya bekerja pada komputer sendiri yang sudah diinstal add-on stylish
dan
Cara no.2 hanya bekerja pada pada komputer yang sudah diinstal add-on Yontoo dan pemilik facebook memasang aplikasi pagerege. Hal ini memungkinkan orang lain dapat melihat tampilan facebook kita jika mereka melakukan hal yang sama.

Sampai saat ini masih belum ada cara mengubah tampilan facebook untuk dilihat semua orang

Ingat Facebook tidak sama seperti Myspace/Friendster yang secara resmi dapat mengubah tampilannya sesuai dengan keinginan kita. Cara ini hanya akal-akalan dari pencipta add-on yang kreatif.

untuk mengembalikan (remove) tampilan facebook seperti semula baca disini

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Taming the Social Media Beast Wrap-Up

Last week was a great week for us as we were able to connect with most of our customers and partners in Asia Pacific at Web in Travel, ITB Asia, and our 1st half-day workshop, Brand Karma Day.  We shared our thoughts on the social media phenomenon and how businesses can best leverage it to turn it into a strategic asset for their brands.  Below is a recap of the top 10 ideas that we recommend for brands in the travel industry who want to venture into social media.

1. Understand your true differentiators.  Sometimes what you’ve identified as differentiators don’t mirror what customers think.  It’s important to monitor what is being said about you and reconcile your customers’ opinions with your story so that the brand message is consistent and credible.
2. Maintain operational excellence around your differentiators.  Your brand differentiators can’t be temporary.  Unlike ads, social media has permanence.  Since what’s expressed about your brand is permanently searchable, changing the differentiators constantly will confuse your audience.
3. Set up your social network hub where your customers are.  We recommend minimally a presence on Facebook because it is the largest social network with over 300M users and is one of the top-trafficked site in many countries.  The volume and the intent (sharing, lifestyle) makes it suitable for just about any consumer brand.
4. Use content about your differentiators as “landing lights.” Guide interested consumers to your hub with great content.  You want consumers (current and future customers) to be attracted to and stay loyal to your brand because of your differentiators.  If the content is timely, all the better.  Of course, point #2 above is of the utmost importance.
5. Make fans not friends.  Fans on Facebook and Followers on Twitter give users the power to opt-in to being associated with you, which is exactly what you want.  It’s low risk for your fans, and you can stay focused on sharing the great things about your brand.
6. Engage, not advertise.  The impression ads and click-through ads of the portal/search paradigms don’t work well in this channel.  Think of your fans as people who are already or will eventually be in your CRM — and use your hub to please them digitally.  Share things that would interest them, do things that would please them, reward their loyalty, and personalize whenever possible.
7. Link to allies.  Chances are, brands in other parts of the world tout the same differentiators.  Why not ally with them by cross-linking your hubs?  The narrower your niche, probably the easier it will be to find non-competitive allies that can cross-authenticate what your brand stands for.
8. Partner with brands that complete you.  Travel is a holistic experience involving many components.  In your hub, introduce the partners that complete the guest experience.  Depending on the business your brand is in, points of interest, transportation options, accommodation choices, local eateries, and ticketing agencies are all possible partners to complete the experience your brand offers.
9. Respond immediately, and with empathy, to negative posts.  Brands, like people, show their true colors when they’re under attack, so complaints, though unpleasant, can be opportunities for you to shine.  Unless it’s a systemic problem, other fans will likely ignore the complaint, rise to defend you, or understand that the issue is between the complaining fan and you.  In all cases, they will appreciate that you did something, even if all you do is to request to address the issue offline with the complaining fan.  Doing nothing makes observing fans wonder what happened.
10. Develop a social media policy for your employees.  How many of the 300M Facebook users also work for you?  Chances are, quite a few.  Employees can be your biggest promoters… or unintentional detractors.  As you venture into social media, make sure that your employees are on the same page as you.

Parnormally popular?

This past week I went to see Paranormal Activity in theaters. I had heard so much about the movie so my hopes were pretty high– I had even heard that it was the “scariest movie ever made.” However, this movie is a joke. It’s completely fake and there is not much to it, and it made me begin to wonder if this is what all movies will come down to. But aside from my personal opinion, it was a $15,000 budget movie that has now grossed over $3.2 million. It is simply a couple video taping themselves with a spirit in their own house, with a few special effects. The Paranormal Activity trailer was a video of the audience screaming inside the movie theatre. This was easy PR for the movie– pay an audience to look scared. In addition to all of the strangely simple things surrounding this movie, it wasn’t even released everywhere around the country. Movie-goers had to “Demand It” and call and request that it be brought to their home theaters, another great public relations strategy for the movie, as I even thought that it must be good if it had been demanded to play at the Cobb Theatre. Paranormal Activity also has Twitter and Facebook pages and is staying linked in with the social media scene.