Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook |
- More Info on Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011 – January 25th in San Francisco
- Facebook Tests Engagement Ads for Charities That Repurpose User Actions and Content
- LivingSocial Confirms Big New Round from Amazon, Plans More Expansion
- Facebook Career Postings: Games Partnerships, Questions, Immigration, Platform Ops and More
- New Generation of Practical Apps Launch on Facebook’s Platform
- Interview with Payvment: Funding, Facebook Credits, and a Business Model Built Around Discovery
| More Info on Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011 – January 25th in San Francisco Posted: 02 Dec 2010 11:34 PM PST
As we announced recently, Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011, our second conference on the future of monetization on social platforms, is happening January 25th in San Francisco. Between new product launches from Facebook, Google, and leading developers in the space, 2011 is shaping up to be a big year in the social platforms landscape. We're excited to see all of the developers and entrepreneurs that are planning to attend! In addition to our lineup of 21 confirmed speakers below, today we are pleased to announce our lunchtime roundtable discussion leaders at Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011: Hussein Fazal, CEO of AdParlor; Jim Ying, GM North America for 6waves; Giancarlo Mori, CCO at Glu Mobile; and Chris Smutny, VP Social Currency at Adknowledge. Finally, if you’re considering attending Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011, take advantage of early registration pricing and sign up now. A limited set of early registration tickets are currently available at the Early Admission price of $269. This price will be good through Friday December 3rd only, so we encourage you to register now. At Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011, executives and experts from Facebook, Google, leading social networks, mobile platforms, social game and app developers, media companies, virtual goods and payment services, and investors will be discussing the future of social platforms and virtual goods monetization in social games and apps from a global perspective. Who’s Speaking? We're honored to present the following confirmed speakers at Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011:
Key topics for the day will include:
Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011 – January 25th in San Francisco Social applications first emerged in 2007, and are today maturing into a global media ecosystem. With the launch of the Facebook Platform, followed by platforms from MySpace and other social networks, developers worldwide could leverage the social graph to create new kinds of social experiences never before possible. Now, three and a half years later, what started out as sheep throwing and vampire biting has quickly become a profitable billion-dollar industry, punctuated by numerous major acquisitions by the world’s leading media companies and developers. But now, new challenges are emerging, affecting big players and new entrants alike. Inside Social Apps will investigate the latest trends and challenges for social applications, and look at what’s to come for developers throughout the space – including the growth of virtual goods and social applications on mobile devices. What are the biggest uncertainties and opportunities facing the future of social games and applications in 2011, and who is leading the way? Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011 takes place January 25th, 2011 at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco, and brings together the world's leading entrepreneurs to weigh in on the future of social app and game monetization. Inside Social Apps will be a one-day summit led by Inside Network’s Eric Eldon and Justin Smith, and will take in-depth investigative approach to the day’s discussions. At Inside Social Apps, Inside Network will work alongside founders and executives of the top social networking, social gaming, mobile social gaming, payments, and virtual goods infrastructure companies to analyze the most important issues affecting the industry. Inside Social Apps is geared towards developers on Facebook, iPhone, Android, and emerging online social platforms. Inside Social Apps will be a content-rich day of critical discussion, followed by an evening and nighttime of casual networking. Register Now
A limited set of "Early Admission" tickets is available through Friday at a special price of $269. This price will change after Friday, and space will be very limited, so we encourage you to register early. From all of us at Inside Network, we hope to see you on January 25th in San Francisco!
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| Facebook Tests Engagement Ads for Charities That Repurpose User Actions and Content Posted: 02 Dec 2010 06:51 PM PST Facebook appears to be working with a number of charities to test a new type of home page engagement ad which shows actions taken by a users friends, including links shared through Facebook Connect websites, as well as Page Likes and in-app actions. The ads for apps or Facebook Connect sites show a friend’s name, a profile picture mini-thumbnail, the link they shared, a description if they added one, and the name of the entity which controls the link’s destination. These ads could allow companies to expand the reach of already compelling social recommendations of their content.
These new action ads join existing social engagement ads for applications, Pages, and Events. Facebook Ads for Applications, which show which of a user’s friends have used the advertised app in the past month, launched in September. Ads which show social context – a user’s friends who Like the advertised entity — received their own metrics in Facebook’s performance advertising analytics in September as well. Opposed to showing a message concocted by the app, Page, or site admin, the new ads repurpose content which has already appeared on Facebook in the form of news feed stories or activity stories on the wall. The ads require an existing audience, but can leverage the trust users have in their friends to increase click through rates.
Engagement ads for actions users take within applications and then share with their friends offer a unique opportunity. Facebook Ads for Applications only show the names of friends who have used to app, and don’t include anything about how they’ve used the app. Seeing that a few friends are using Causes might not be that interesting, but showing what charity a friend is raising donations for could inspire users to click. This new ad unit takes the burden of creating relevant content off of advertisers, and instead utilizes a user’s content which is inherently relevant to their network. Instead of having to write special headlines or copy for an advertisement for Causes targeted to 40-60 year old women, these engagement ads would automatically show that one of these women’s friends has donated to a breast cancer charity. Similarly, the Movember ads include the context a user entered when they shared the link. This means the Movember ads display slang, vocabulary, or colloquialisms familiar with those that see it, drawing more attention than general ad copy. Application and Open Graph site admins should be eager to see these action engagement ads rolled out further. They allow advertisers to not only take advantage of social recommendations and trust, but language and behavior that resonate with their targets. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| LivingSocial Confirms Big New Round from Amazon, Plans More Expansion Posted: 02 Dec 2010 06:45 PM PST LivingSocial got big on Facebook by creating applications that allowed people to list and share their interests, but it transitioned to provide group deals as that concept — led by rival Groupon — exploded. The switch is paying off, as LivingSocial today announced a huge $175 million round of funding from e-commerce giant Amazon, plus $8 million from Lightspeed Venture Partners. The deal, first rumored a couple weeks ago, comes as Groupon considers a purchase by Google in a deal worth between $5 billion and $6 billion, according to many reports. LivingSocial says it is bringing in around $1 million a day now, and expects to make above $500 million by the end of next year, although it’s not clear if that’s gross revenue. The new funding reportedly values the company at $1 billion. Groupon, meanwhile, reportedly has revenues of more than $500 million already, and by some measures appears to be getting the majority of group deals traffic in at least the US. LivingSocial says the new funding will go towards product and business expansion worldwide. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Facebook Career Postings: Games Partnerships, Questions, Immigration, Platform Ops and More Posted: 02 Dec 2010 02:15 PM PST
Two interesting positions appear to have been filled — at least they're no longer appearing on the Careers Page — one for Head of Games Partnerships and the other for a Questions Community Manager position. We wrote previously about the Questions and the Partnerships jobs, it will be interesting to see who these new employees are and how they impact their respective departments. Other positions that no longer appeared on the Careers Page include: Quantitative Business Analyst, Producer, Platform Marketing, DSO Account Manager LATAM in New York, Security Engineer and Business Intelligence Engineer 1010002. Facebook is seeking an attorney to fill the position of a Corporate Immigration Coordinator, who will develop, revise and implement human resources policies pertaining to the company's immigration policies. This will include not only employees, but interns; the ideal candidate will have at least five years of experience with U.S. immigration law. The Hyderabad, India office is currently seeking a Platform Operations Manager who will work with Credits, plugins and policy enforcement to manage functions, projects, teams and generally lead in that office. And Facebook is also seeking a DSO Account Manager for Latin America, to be based in Miami, Fla. Other positions added to the Careers Page this week include lots of recruiting positions, analyst and ad positions in Dublin, Palo Alto, Calif. and Austin, Texas. For more Facebook-related jobs, check out the Inside Network Job Board. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| New Generation of Practical Apps Launch on Facebook’s Platform Posted: 02 Dec 2010 11:46 AM PST Gaming companies have become entrenched on Facebook’s platform, while non-gaming apps have for the most part not broken through. But a new group of more practical, utility-like apps is starting to emerge. In the last few months, we’ve seen a spate of Facebook-connected job hunting sites, professional referral services and e-commerce apps launch and raise money.
Facebook investor Accel Partners recently backed e-commerce startup Yardsellr in a $5 million round and chipped in on a $6 million Series A for job search startup BranchOut. Another company, Stik, which helps users find lawyers and realtors based on the social graph, also opened to the public last month. And Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers recently launched a $250 million social fund on the premise that all industries will be redesigned from the ground-up around people’s relationships. “Any kind of interaction where a person is making decisions based on trust is an area where Facebook can help facilitate,” said Nathan Labenz, who co-founded Stik, a site where people can log on with Facebook and pull up mortgage brokers or lawyers connected to friends. Yet, three years on, Facebook’s platform essentially has only three breakout areas — gaming, marketing and local group deals. Third-party Facebook integrations are promising and widespread, but cosmetic. The company’s popular social plug-ins help users find content shared by friends, but have yet to fundamentally alter the experience of reading a news site, for example. Most of the startups that came out of Facebook’s fbFund incubator haven’t seen broad traction outside of successes in social media marketing space like Wildfire Interactive.
Labenz says that unlike social games, many of these applications rely on making two-sided markets and Facebook has only just become a truly mainstream product with north of 550 million users — enough to support critical mass for these types of services. On top of that, viral channels were well-suited to push notifications about daily use apps like social games. Apps designed around rare but high-value situations would get crowded out, he said. Facebook has since pared down viral channels over the last years, making it harder for non-gamers to hear about new games. It also simplified its graph application programming interface, giving developers a more consistent way to access a wide range of user data from photos to events and people. “It’s not surprising that games would pioneer use of the platform,” said Daniel Leffel, an eBay veteran who founded Yardsellr. “I definitely am somebody who views what’s happening with Facebook as the beginning, not the peak.” His company is an online marketplace that uses Facebook to connect buyers and sellers. “Commerce is inherently a trust-driven exercise and having a real identity tied to a Facebook profile lends itself to this really well,” Leffel said. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Interview with Payvment: Funding, Facebook Credits, and a Business Model Built Around Discovery Posted: 02 Dec 2010 08:00 AM PST
Josh Constine: How fast is Payvement growing?
What’s causing this growth? The driving feature helping adoption is that when you launch a store, your products are available via search from any other Payvment storefront. We’re building the graph of shopping where one store is connected to another. If one store doesn’t carry what you’re looking for, you can jump to the next. The technology that makes us different is a persistent shopping cart that follows you across stores so you don’t have to checkout separately from each. Other companies are trying to build a Facebook shopping cart, but each store they launch is a walled garden.
So the shopping cart saves your added items even if you log out and log back into Facebook? Yes. And if your website has Facebook Connect, you can copy and paste code into it so a customer can add an item on your site and it will appear in their cart on Facebook. Payvment recently released an API allowing websites to sync their product database with their Facebook storefront. How has that been received? Good. For larger brands, if you have 500,000 products, you’re never going to add them all manually. We released a CSV importer which lots of brands are using to import their databases. There’s a REST API for CMS ecommerce platforms, so when a brand adds a product to its database, it’s automatically added to their Facebook store. Also, there’s a sales API, so instead of being emailed information about who to ship items to, you can bring that info directly into your shipping system. How do you measure success of a Payvment storefront? We’re seeing brands and retailers doing different things with the store. Some brands want all their products on their storefront so they’re available in search.
One measure of success is generating new Facebook Likes. A core feature is that your storefront connects to your Page’s Like Button, and you can offer a discount to anyone who Likes your Page. Instead of dumping 500,000 products on your store front, some brands offer just a few items but with deep discounts, sometimes up to 80-90% off, for Liking their Page. There’s so much value in that Facebook Like. Similar to traditional ecommerce, where if you can get someone to purchase once, they become a lifetime customer you can communicate with, Facebook is a marketing tool and a great way to acquire new customers. What’s your conversion rate for people browsing a storefront? It’s about more than just browsing, with Facebook its about sharing. That can’t be mimicked anywhere else. We’re trying to push users to share when they haven’t found something that they want to purchase but which a friend might. One unique thing we’ve found is younger users using search to find odd ball products, like a humorous t-shirt and sharing it to their news feed like a free virtual gift, but that goes a step further since it links back to the store. We’re looking to somehow build more gaming into Payvment.
People are taking shopping on Facebook seriously. On Black Friday, sales increased by 3x, and 4x on Cyber Monday. Which of Facebook’s communication channels have been most effective for customer and client acquisition? Our success with adding retailers has been purely viral. Retailers are a tight knit group and they share the tools they’re having success with. At the bottom of every store there’s a link to install your own store. We don’t do anything with the news feed to acquire new retailers.
For customer acquisition, the share button on every product has been big. There’s also comments and reviews, which are automatically posted to your feed as well. We haven’t done anything at all with wall posts or messages. What’s been your biggest challenge? Facebook is a startup too – they move just as fast as we move. We have to constantly stay in sync. If you have something tied to specific features of theirs, it can break, which can be stressful. Our communication with Facebook now is day and night compared to a year ago. We’re given a heads up if they’re making a change, and we communicate with their engineers directly. One thing Facebook is doing completely right is letting the ecosystem pick its own winners. They don’t want to bless one game company, and have the rest be like “What the hell?” Some developers take this as Facebook ignoring them, but they’re trying not to show favoritism. Things change when a developer gets to a critical mass of users. If FarmVille goes down, or if Payvment goes down [because Facebook isn't notifying us of Platform changes], the users don’t blame us, they blame Facebook. At that point, [to keep users happy] Facebook needs to have a closer relationship with that developer. Are you still considering offering Facebook Credits as a payment method in addition to PayPal and major credit cards? It’s a no-brainer. Our goal is to become the de facto shopping cart on Facebook, so it makes sense for us to eventually use the de facto Facebook payment method. Facebook Credits isn’t there yet. Right now they’re focused on in-game purchases, virtual goods, but we’re communicating with them about realigning. Your payment system could come with you just like your shopping cart. It will be a much more streamlined purchase experience when that day comes. It’s probably the thing I’m most excited about right now — how Credits will affect shopping. What do you think of Facebook ecommerce tools which lead users away from Facebook to complete their purchase? Those are pretty much dying out. Before us, ecommerce on Facebook was really just marketing, advertising products. True ecommerce is being able to shop and complete the purchase. Trying to get people to leave and go to your website – nothing frustrates people more than pushing them away from [Facebook, where their friends are]. Retailers are realizing that if they can remove five steps from the process, people will become customers. Other companies don’t have our shopping cart technology, but their spin is “retailers spend so much on their website…”. What do you think about Yardsellr, who recently received funding? They’re going for a different section of sales. Similar to Facebook Marketplace, it’s classified ads. If you have an apartment to rent out, you don’t go to Payvment. It’s more for one-off items, not selling a whole stock of lawnmowers, just your lawnmower. From what I’ve seen, I think they’ll be big. Yardsellr has a Superman Bin for comic books, t-shirts or anything related to Superman. Would you consider creating groupings of stores for different specific product types?
What are you going to use the $6 million for? A year ago we raised $1.5 million when there was no real ecommerce on Facebook, and they said “tell us if people want to shop on Facebook or not”. This round was a blessing, “you definitely have something, retailers are signing on en masse”. There are ten of us for 40,000 retailers, and we have one support person who hasn’t slept in six months. We need engineering to build out social features, and better support. We’re building a shopping mall on a platform that already has a half a billion users, so we need to beef up the company. With that investment probably come questions about a business model. How is Payvment going to make money? We definitely know now that we’d like Payvment to always be free, and our VCs believe we don’t need to charge retailers. And if we mark up items, people will buy them elsewhere. Facebook doesn’t have to charge you to have your business Page, but what Facebook does to monetize is offer discovery through Facebook ads. We want to stick with that philosophy and build a model around discovery, but we can’t dump advertising on people’s stores. We’re not really at the point where we talk about it, but we’re in full agreement of what we don’t want. But if Facebook can make a billion dollars off of discovery, I think it’s very viable. Would you consider something similar to Yelp with sponsored search results or placement? Yes, something more along those lines. |
So far we’ve seen these ads running for actions taken in the Causes app, for Likes of the Page for music education charity 
Facebook has filled some interesting jobs since our post last week and has added several new positions, according to the company's 
Yesterday, Facebook Page 
Christian Taylor: We’re adding more than 250 retailers and roughly 10,000-20,000 products daily. We recently passed the 40,000 retailers mark. Setting up a store is a completely automated process. The main goal when we started Payvment was to make it dead simple for anyone to use, even if you don’t have technical knowledge.
We’re working on discoverability for retailers. Right now there’s search, but we need to find more unique ways for people to start the purchase process. We’d like to be able to put a value on a share. No one has a metric for that right now. If I had to guess, probably about 50% of sales come in through a share from a friend.| You are subscribed to email updates from Inside Facebook To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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