Tag Archives: facebook

The Problem With Facebook

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I came across an article today in the NYTimes describing how people are starting to leave Facebook.  While the author’s claims are anecdotal (certainly the numbers indicate impressive growth), I found myself silently nodding in agreement at some of her points.  The author outlines the feelings of being a stalker, concern of ownership of data, the “corporatization” of the site, the concern over FB’s tracking on 3rd party sites and the uselessness of it all, as reasons people have recently left the site.  While I’m not ready to jump ship yet, I have noticed my FB use has drastically decreased.

In the past few months I’ve found that my newsfeed has less relevant information, mostly from people I don’t care about.  I’m big on Twitter, the updates I get are personal, social and professional.  I’m able to learn new stuff about the web world, keep up with my favorite artists and (to a lesser degree) connect with friends.  The updates in my Facebook feed are largely spammy quiz results from girls I went to middle school with (Sorry Laura, I don’t care what Twilight character you most resemble).   Maybe I should only accept real friend requests, maybe not.

Now it seems like FB is trying to compete with Twitter head on, by making status updates public and adding real-time search.  Personally I think this is a terrible idea.  I use Facebook and Twitter for different reasons.  Facebook can differentiate itself by being the place I go to stay up with my “real” friends, plan events and share photos.  Create more useful communication applications (like video and group chat), give me better ways to share my photos and videos (like embedding slideshows) and cut down spam by 90%.  There are huge opportunities for Facebook in location based services as well.

I understand that Facebook needs to make money, and sees real-time as a huge opportunity, but they should focus on Facebook connect (already 10k+ sites using it).  Want profit?  Spread your tendrils across the web, become the universal ID then the defacto payment system for the web.  Create an app store (I’d pay 99 cents for Mafia Wars) and allow microtransactions (25 cents for some more poker chips).

Don’t be Twitter, that’s not why we came to you in the first place…

Measuring the Success of Social Media Campaigns

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Why should businesses engage in Social Media? In the end, the goal of all marketing is to increase sales/conversions. But only in rare examples can a company point to their social media marketing efforts and indicate a direct correlation with sales (one exception is Dell Outlet on Twitter). Companies should engage in social media to increase:

  • Reach – create buzz, get new customers, create awareness
  • Reputation and influence – become an authority/thought leader, improve sentiment
  • Engagement – improve customer and brand loyalty

But how do you determine if your campaign is successful? First you need to determine your objective. If you have a new product launch, you probably want to build some buzz and create awareness (Reach). If you have added new features to your product, you will want to measure it’s effect on user engagement/loyalty. If your goal is to increase your influence and reputation, you can start aggregating content or create your own (via a corporate blog for instance).

This is a rapidly evolving field and the tools and metrics used to determine success are changing quickly. Don’t be afraid to throw away metrics, the most important thing is that you start tracking. Below I list some methods for objectively measuring your success.

Measuring Reach

  • Visitors – The number of people visiting your site and the source of that traffic. This can be measured using standard web analytics tools like Google Analytics. If you want to benchmark against peers/competitors use tools like Compete/Alexa.
  • Number of Friends/Followers/Fans (applies to Facebook, SlideShare, etc…) – I don’t believe Twitter followers is a good metric to measure since there is a lot of spam. Much more important is quality of visitors (i.e. one Oprah or Michael Arrington is much more valuable then 1000 followers). Measuring 2nd degree relationships (number of friends of friends), is much more valuable (albeit more difficult to measure).
  • RSS Subscriptions – Feedburner
  • Links – When sharing links, you can use tools like bit.ly to determine how many people have clicked on it. Just add a + to the end of any bit.ly link (check out my self-referential example: http://bit.ly/16GZ6x+).

Measuring Reputation and Influence

  • Number of public mentions (Blogs, Twitter, Facebook) – To measure public mentions on blogs you can subscribe to an RSS feed for your company/product/brand/name on Google Blog Search. For public mentions on Twitter subscribe to an RSS feed from Twitter Search. For Facebook, use Lexicon (this is more interesting as a tool to compare against your competitors, though they are undoubtedly improving this tool and I’m sure will add a y-axis soon).
  • Incoming links (SEO) – This is the primary way Google measures the authority of pages when ranking search results. Use tools like Google Webmaster Tools, Xinu Returns and Technorati to track these.
  • Comments about you on other sites – Since Google doesn’t index comments on blogs (most often), you can find out using tools like BackType.
  • Retweets – Twitter Search
  • Unsolicited positive mentions – I love this metric, there’s not much you can do to actively improve this, but if you are tracking it and are open, transparent and engaging your users properly, people will speak positively about you.

Measuring Engagement
You can use standard web analytics tools (Google Analytics) to measure:

  • Visitor Loyalty – The number of return visitors over 1 month
  • Recency – The number of return visitors over 1 week
  • Duration – The length of time spent on the site
  • Actions – The number of actions taken on the site: downloading, posting, commenting, playing, etc…

The absolute numbers are not important. Track these numbers month over month and look for an upwards trends.

Off-site engagement metrics include:

  • Facebook – You can use FB insights to measure the number of actions on your fan page: comments, likes, wall posts, etc…
  • YouTube – Youtube has it’s own analytics for measuring video plays.
  • Trendrr – Trendrr is an awesome tool which let’s you measure public mentions and music/video plays across a variety of sites.

In short there is no easy way to measure your success across social media. Sure there are short cuts like Twitalyzer, which is nice for at a glance metrics, but if you have the time coming up with your own set of metrics is far more valuable. This all assumes that your brand is small enough that you don’t get thousands of public mentions a day. If you do, you’ll have to call in one of the big boys like Visible Technologies or Sentiment Metrics.

Anything I missed? Anything else you track? Let me know on Twitter or in the comments…

Slides from Social Media Training Sessions

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Last week I gave a few training sessions to new joinees in our company covering Social Media, Online Advertising and Analytics.  From talks I’ve had with new joinees, I’ve found this information isn’t covered in college/graduate coursework. I’m planning on turning this into a longer course and teaching at one of the business schools here.

Part 1: Introduction to Social Media

View more presentations from amitklein.

Part 2: Twitter, Facebook and Social Data Portability

Recommended prior reading:

View more presentations from amitklein.

The video on the second slide is:



Part 3: Introduction to Online Advertising

Recommended prior reading:

Agenda:

  • Overview of buying/selling models
  • How to compare different models (with examples)
  • Intro to Google Adwords
  • Intro to purchasing ads on Social Networks (FB/LinkedIn)
  • Future of online advertising (social ads)

Note: My collegues did this talk, I will get the slides eventually and post

Part 4: Introduction to Analytics and Measuring Marketing ROI

Recommended prior reading:

View more presentations from amitklein.

As a course, I would structure this a bit differently, and some of the issues glossed over would receive their own dedicated section. For a longer course I would also include topics like Monetization Strategies for the Web, Data Driven decision making using Analytics (A/B Testing, Optimizing landing pages, SEO), The Future (Convergence, Social Ads, The Importance of Real-Time, The concept of life streaming). Any thoughts? I will flesh out a course outline and post some notes online soon…

An Intro to Social Data Portability

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Social Data Portability allows you to bring your friends, interests and relationships where ever you go across the web.  For users, it means not having to create a new account on every site, and having immediate access to your network of friends.  For businesses, it gives you more demographic insight into your users, as well as let you leverage the popularity of existing social networks to promote activity on your site.   In this post I will discuss the strengths and differences between Facebook Connect, OpenSocial and Sign in with Twitter and show a few examples.

Facebook Connect

Simply put, Facebook Connect allows you to build a Facebook application outside of Facebook. You can integrate with Facebook’s authentication, retrieve profile information about your users, allow your users to find their friends who have “connected” with your site, as well as selectively publish actions to a user’s activity stream.   Developing a Facebook Connect application requires software development chops but gives you access to Facebook’s 200m users.  Digg and CNN both demonstrate different approaches to integration.

CNN
CNN offered a live video stream during Obama’s inaugration.  It included a Facebook Connect application which allowed users to sign in with their Facebook credentials and participate in a live global chat.

Chattin' bout Barry

The participation numbers are staggering.  According to Mashable:

1. 600,000 status updates posted through the CNN.com Live Facebook feed
2. Facebook averaged 4,000 status updates per minute during the broadcast
3. 8,500 status updates were posted during the first minute of Obama’s speech
4. “Millions” of people logged into Facebook during the broadcast

These numbers would’ve never been achievable if users had to register with CNN to participate.  Recently, the Whitehouse has taken a cue and announced a similar application for it’s live video events.

Digg
Digg’s Facebook Connect implementation allows you to link your Digg and Facebook accounts.  Each story you digg, shows up on your activity stream (for all your friends to see).  For Digg, the beneifts are immediate, more people will see that I am digging stories and click back to the site.

Facebook Connect Digg

Signing Into Facebook Connect

Facebook Connect Digg2

Digg story on my Facebook activity feed

Facebook Connect is now also available for the iPhone.  This is huge and will create a whole new world of mobile social applications.

OpenSocial

OpenSocial is similar to Facebook Connect but allows you to build applications that run in orkut, MySpace, Hi5, Friendster, Ning and Yahoo! and other 3rd party sites.

Virgin Global Row
The Virgin Global Row is a one crazy dude’s story about circling Antarctica in a boat by himself (and raising some money for charity).  OpenSocial integration allows you to login, connect with other people who have joined the site, and push your actions on the site to your various social networks.

Open social options

Open social options

Google Friend Connect
Google has also release a set of plug n play widgets based on OpenSocial called Google Friend Connect.  Currently there are about 10 widgets available including sign-in, comments, polls, reviews, events and recommendations.  This is cool because it allows anyone to quickly and easily incorporate social elements to their site (no coding required).

Sign in with Twitter

Yep, you guessed it, sign in with Twitter allows 3rd party sites to publish activity to your Twitter stream.  One example of this is Spymaster (the Twitter game which equally amazed and pissed people off).

Spymaster
Spymaster is a game which allows you to go on missions, raise money, buy weapons and attack other spies (Twitter users).  Success is based on how many of your followers play the game and how often you send out updates through your twitter stream.   IMO the game is pretty boring although it is undeniably attracting a huge following and a really nice example of a successful viral campaign.

Bribing you to tweet about your activities

Bribing you to tweet about your activities

Real time spymaster activity

Real time spymaster activity

Conclusion

There’s a big battle over who will become the defacto social OS of the web.  In the future sites/widgets/apps will be social (and location aware), the question is where your data will be sourced from.  At this point Facebook is clearly in the lead, but Google has deep pockets and Twiter is making huge strides.  As Facebook and Twitter launch payment platforms, the opportunity to monitize through social ads and microtransactions presents a huge opportunity.  Got friends?


http://virginglobalrow.com/

Advertising Is Not a Sustainable Business Model for the Web (unless you are a Search Engine)

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The long-held myth that web companies can achieve profitability through free products, services and content solely based on advertising is fading.  The diminishing rates of online ads, and the slowdown of venture capital and IPOs, has led to a realization that a sustainable business model for web companies must have multiple, diverse, revenue streams.

VC Slowdown

Over the last few months I’ve seen a growing number of companies offering alternative strategies to generating revenue.

Subscription Services / Premium Content (Blizzard, New York Times, GigaOM, Forrester)

The most straightforward revenue source is paid subscriptions. Blizzard, makers of World of Warcraft, absolutely crush it.

“if [their] 10 million subscribers were to pay the regular $14.99 month-to-month fee, then Blizzard would fill its pockets with almost $150 million every single month… that means a revenue-target of more than $1.7 billion for FY 2008.”

While many media companies have experimented with paid subscription models, very few have been able to do it successfully.  The exception is research focused companies like Forrester which banks on corporates with deep pockets shelling out $700 for a 12 page report.  GigaOM and TechCrunch have also recently launched similar premium research and analysis services.

The New York Times recently released it’s TimesReader 2.0 Adobe Air client. While the client offers an improved user experience, I can’t ever imagine shelling out $3.45 a week for content I can get for free.  Though I would pay for their $3 iPhone app.

It’s possible that with the success of the Kindle, these paid content services will flourish in the future.

Freemium (Wetpaint, Pandora, Google Apps)

A variation on premium content services is the freemium model. Give away 80% of your service for free, and charge for heavy users who want more functionality or a better experience. Pandora, a music discovery product, recently launched a premium services which, for $36 a year, removes ads, provides higher quality streaming music and offers a desktop app.  A compelling offering for their top tier of users.

Wetpaint is another company that has found success through the freemium model:

“When Ben Elowitz formed Wetpaint in 2005, it was intended to let anyone create a Web site free… Wetpaint typically offers advertisers space on a few Web sites with a few hundred thousand visitors. But last fall, many of their advertisers raised their sights to publishers with more than five million readers, Mr. Elowitz said. Rates for leftover ad space fell to 25 cents per thousand views from $1… Now, Wetpaint charges its big company customers, like HBO and Fox, a fee in exchange for providing extra services like site promotion and moderating reader forums… Smaller customers can pay to keep their sites free of ads. Wetpaint plans to add more paid services, including additional storage for big files and personalized domain names. It is also considering selling virtual goods on its sites. “

Finally Google Apps is another nice example of successfully upselling premium services. The communication and collaboration platform is free for up to 50 users, but for $50 per user per year you get access to a whole range of services including: additional storage space, email security and archiving, video sharing, phone support and access to API’s.

App Stores (Apple, Nokia, Blackberry, Google Android)

It’s tough to argue against the game-changing success of the Apple App Store.  Rival companies like Google, Nokia and Blackberry have launched their own stores (the Android Market, Ovi store and Blackberry App World respectively).  A cursory glance on the Blackberry store only showed about 20 apps, and none of them were paid.  While they won’t be competitive with Apple (at least for some time), it’s at least showing that this model is profitable and worth pursuing.  I’m sure this is now central to how mobile handset makers and software developers plan on monetizing phones.

Interestingly this model is now being extended beyond just phones (and why not!).  According to the Sun CEO, Jonathan Schwartz:

“Vector is a network service to connect companies of all sizes and types to the roughly one billion Java users all over the world. Vector (which we’ll likely rename the Java Store), has the potential to deliver the world’s largest audience to developers and businesses leveraging Java and JavaFX.

Our runtimes reach more consumers than just about any other company on earth. That ubiquity has obvious value to search companies, but it’s also quite valuable to banks looking to sign up new accounts, sports franchises looking for new viewers, media companies and news organizations looking for new subscribers – basically, any Java developer looking to escape the browser to reach a billion or so consumers.

How will it work? Candidate applications will be submitted via a simple web site, evaluated by Sun for safety and content, then presented under free or fee terms to the broad Java audience via our update mechanism. Over time, developers will bid for position on our storefront, and the relationships won’t be exclusive (as they have been for search). As with other app stores, Sun will charge for distribution – but unlike other app stores, whose audiences are tiny, measured in the millions or tens of millions, ours will have what we estimate to be approximately a billion users. That’s clearly a lot of traffic, and will position the Java App Store as having just about the world’s largest audience. “

I believe that a paid app store is also a viable business model for social sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Microtransaction (Tencent, Zygna, Facebook)

Tencent, the largest Chinese social network, focuses on microtransactions as their primary revenue source.  Users pay for subscriptions, virtual clothes for your avatar, new weapons, cute pets, etc… From their ’09 first quarter results:

Internet services (digital goods, game subscriptions, micro-transactions) – $279.9 mil (76% of total revenues)
Mobile Subscriptions – $64.5 (17.6% of total revenue)
Online Advertising – $21 mil (5.9% of total revenues)

Online advertising only 5.9% of their total $350mil revenues?  Impressive.

Another company successfully generating revenues from social gaming microtransactions is Zygna.  According to TechCrunch:

“Zynga, the online gaming publisher, is making a ton of money… [close] to $100 million. And clearly, it’s accelerating… There looks to be a bright future in the online gaming sphere and specifically around micro-transactions. That’s how Zynga makes most of its money. With some of its leading games on MySpace and Facebook, it charges users for playing time or for things like chips in poker. These small purchases which usually amount to only a few dollars at a time, start to add up quick. And that’s only with a small percentage of overall players opting to buy them.”

Facebook finally launched it’s much anticipated payment platform for testing.  Facebook hopes to be the OS for the social web.  They are banking on companies like Zygna figuring out what it the masses want and developing social applications on top of their platform.  App developers will be able to charge for subscriptions and create opportunities for in-app transactions. Facebook will get a cut of each transaction.  Cha-ching!

Another interesting company in this space is Tipjoy, which facilitates small payments on Twitter. I haven’t seen this used effectively yet, but I imagine a micropayment based Craigslist Twitter app could be successful.

Trend Analysis (Twitter, Zensify)

It’s undeniable that Twitter has achieved massive popularity, but that doesn’t always translate to profits (see YouTube). I believe Twitter’s most effective strategy for monetization will be mining and performing trend analysis on the millions of thought bubbles created by users daily. Both companies and individuals would pay big money to answer the following questions:

  • What are people saying about me/my product right now?
  • How has the perception of my brand changed recently and in what direction is it trending?
  • Geographically where is my biggest, rapidly emerging and diminishing audiences?
  • Who are my biggest evangelists, in what demographic do they fall in, where are they located?
  • Who are my biggest naysayers, how can I change their perception?
  • What is the perception of my product vs. my competitors?
  • What are the trending (in both directions) topics in my industry?

On a smaller scale the new iPhone app Zensify:

“Shows the user trends within your social graph in the form of a tag cloud of key words. In other words it brings a lot more intelligence to your social graph. Suddenly, you can see a big trending topic amongst people you follow… “Wouldn’t it be cool if “trending topics” were localized to the people who are followed by the people you follow.” Well Zensify does this… And it doesn’t just do it across Twitter. It does it also does it across updates from Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Digg, Delicious, Photobucket and 12seconds.”

Zensify Tag Cloud

I believe that providing a set of tools to monitor trends amongst your social graph (and public timelines), will be a huge revenue opportunity for companies looking to monetize on social and real-time.

Conclusion

When the internet was originally created the “page metaphor” mimicked the existing print industry. It followed that the way to monetize was through advertisements. As we move from pages to activity streams we’re starting to see entirely new, innovative ways to profit. We are still in the infancy of this new stream based revolution and while companies like Twitter and Facebook have achieved huge valuations no one (especially the Newspaper and Music industries) has yet figured out Monetization 2.0. Put on your thinking hats…

CodeChef launched!

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For the last 2 months or so I’ve been working on setting up an India specific, online coding coding contest: www.codechef.com. The goal of the site is to identify top technical talent, promote our brand and foster technical competition. It’s a cool project for me ’cause I get to use my existing web project management skills, as well as manage the marketing side (which I’ve never done before). I’ve taken a real interest in social media marketing and am pretty pumped to test out some ideas I’ve had. We will be building a Facebook app, integrating with Facebook Connect, running Twitter contests and doing some other new media-ey stuff.

Last week we soft-launched at a big student festival at the top engineering school in Mumbai IIT’s TechFest.  We setup a booth and asked students the output to three code snippits, if they could answer and explain, we gave out some t-shirts.  It turns out people will do anythig for free stuff.  The booth was packed the entire time. It was a really great experience, interacting with students, talkin’ up CodeChef and walking around wearing a giant chefs hat. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive and I’m looking forward to seeing how big we can make this.

Some random pics from techfest below (look for the cool chef’s hat)…



Why Would Anyone Advertise Online Without Google/Facebook?

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As part of my new job I’m in charge of developing and executing a marketing plan for a new website.  I’ve been doing a lot of research into online advertising and trying to figure out the best way to allocate my budget.  There are a number of ways to purchase ads online.

  • CPM (cost per one thousand impressions) is the cost to display your ad one thousand times.  For the sites I contacted the range was from $20-$70 per 1000 impressions.
  • CPC (cost per click), instead of purchasing ads which do not guarantee clicks, Google Adwords and Facebook both allow you to pay only when someone clicks on your ads.  Better.
  • CPA (cost per action), you only pay when a user clicks on your ad, comes to your site and does something (i.e. fills out a form).  This is obviously the best for ad buyers, but worse for ad sellers (since it depends on how convincing you/your product are to get someone to take that action).  I haven’t found any advertisers willing to sell on CPA basis.

There are also a number of other factors that allow you to specify your audience better.

  • Facebook allows you to specify where (to the city), what sex, age range, keywords, education (even to the specific college, year and major), relationship status and sexual orientation of your target audience (so that’s how my profile info is used).  In my example below, Facebook tells me there are 220 single college women between 18 and 23 in New York who like Pizza (hey ladies!).  You only pay per click, set daily limits on how much you want to spend and a maximum you want to pay for click.

  • Google also allows you to specify location, keywords, daily budgets and how much you will pay for a click.  The graph below shows me how many clicks I am likely to receive and how much those clicks will cost me (in Rupees):

In comparison the Google and Facebook models will give me a lot more value for my budget.  Here’s why:

  • Cost (CPC is better then CPM) – The number of clicks I get is much higher per dollar with Facebook and Google.  One of the major tech sites I contacted (can’t give their name but you’ve heard of them), offered me 174,000 impressions for 4k over two months ($23 CPM). They estimate a clickthrough rate of .25% which would equal 435 clicks.  In comparison I can set a maximum bid on Google and Facebook ads (let’s say .50 cents – $2 per click), giving me  2,000-8,000 clicks.
  • Targeting - While the tech sites I contacted gave a lot of demographic information about their users (what percentage are IT decision makers, developers etc…), it doesn’t mean the individual viewing my ad actually is in that bucket.  With Facebook, I can guarantee that the people who are viewing my ad are in the target audience I want them to be.  With Google, it’s up to me to define good keywords that people are searching for in order to reach them.  Assuming I can do this (there are a lot of tools out there to help as well), I’ll know my ads are only seen by the right people.
  • Analytics - There is no way for me tell how many times the ad publisher is actually displaying my ad.  They can tell me they showed it 100,000 times but I have no way to validate this.  All I can see is the number of people that actually click on that link.  Google and Facebook give me tools to see how well my keywords and ads are performing, guaranteeing my investment.

In short I can understand if you are Coca Cola you don’t really care who sees your ad.  In fact you don’t even care if people click on your ad. You are huge and all you want is to continue reminding people they are thirsty, your target audience is everyone. But for anyone else why would you advertise with someone who doesn’t offer targeted CPC ad purchasing? Your thoughts appreciated…

The Transition to Real-Time, Social Search

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John Batelle recently wrote a great post about the shift from static to real-time search.  To paraphrase he says that Google is/was awesome because for the first time, you could quickly and accurately get static information about any search term.  Though this strength is also a flaw.  By nature, newer content will have a lower page rank and thus appear farther down in search results.  The emerging “liveweb” will be able to answer the question “What are people saying about X right now?”  The current best example of this is Twitter Search.  But this isn’t enough.  The question I really want to ask (and the real moneymaker) is “What are people I trust saying about X right now?”

A few examples where static search is insufficient:

  • Breaking news/current events (we’ve seen many examples where Twitter breaks news stories first – i.e. San Diego Fires, Mumbai Terrorist Attacks, etc..,)  Many times Twitter is able to provide (arguably) more accurate real-time reports that the news that traditional news outlets later pick up on.  While Google is incorporating News Results at the top of it’s list:

It’s still not enough if I want to get a grasp on the current situation/perspective/events occurring now (though interestingly enough the NYTimes ad on the right is incorporating real-time content).

The equivalent of this is Facebook Lexicon (interestingly no label on the y-axis, not useful for an actual research tool) and Twitter Twist (been down for quite a while).  This is huge for PR and Product companies who want to be able to monitor how much buzz a person/event/product are receiving.

  • Product Reviews / Social Shopping – When most people want to buy a product online, they head to Google.  This is why advertising on search is a big moneymaker (as opposed to advertising on social networks which is seriously struggling – people go to Facebook to waste time, flirt, look at pictures of their friends drunk and write each other stupid messages, not buy products).  There have been a bunch of entrants into this market but none so far has provided a compelling product and achieved critical mass.  Hopefully now with Facebook Connect/Google Friend Connect, someone will make this possible.  If I’m looking for a camera, I want to know which camera my friends use and love, then find the cheapest place to buy it.  The first person who makes this easy to do (using my Facebook social data) is going to make a killing.

Google dominates static search, Twitter knows what you are doing, Facebook controls your social graph and Apple knows where you are.  The company able to blend all of these services (static, real-time, social, and location), while maintaining the strictest privacy controls, which will dominate the next era of the web

The Razorfish Consumer Experience Report

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Every year Ave A/Razorfish puts out a yearly report highlighting research and trends in digital marketing. The focus this year is on the expanding role of social apps and how people use them. Not only is the report extremely insightful and provides a glimpse of where the internet and it’s users are headed, it also is beautifully put together.

There are 13 articles including, Designing Experiences for the Facebook Generation, How Micro-Interactions are Changing the Way We Communicate Online, How Tiny Applications are Remaking the Future of the Web, A Look at Games as Tools Not Toys, and Data Visualization for the Online Era. Below are some key takeaways – this is not meant to be a complete summary, just an excerpt to give you an idea of the contents.

Meet the Connected Consumer

  • All signs point to the continuing disintegration of “one-stop” digital destinations… We’ve found that [consumers] don’t want a one-size-fits-all solution for their needs. Consumers prefer using multiple destinations, and then aggregating media and services, via simple tools like RSS, into a highly personalized view of their digital world.
  • We were most surprised to see widespread acceptance and frequent consumer usage of Web site widgets… This development reinforces our belief that distribution of content and services will trump destinations, as both consumers and Internet technologies continue to evolve. Additionally, it will provide significant challenges for publishers (primarily media and entertainment companies) who currently have no clear path towards monetizing content distribution across the Web.
  • Digital Behavior Defies Age: We found today’s connected consumers equally distributed across all age ranges, with a slight skew to older segments. No longer are we seeing Internet technology adoption rates limited to only certain segments. Our study found widespread acceptance of these new service offering and finds older consumers much more likely to spend money online.

Designing Experiences for the Facebook Generation

  • What is happening is that the concept of social networking is evolving and morphing. It’s now about making the entire Web social instead of just creating a ghetto of destination sites where people have to go to socialize (a la Facebook Connect).
  • People want to feel special and tend to reach out to the things that make them feel that way. So, it’s no surprise that people flock to social networks in droves; they make users feel like the star of their own lives.
  • The most recent rapid expansion on the Facebook and MySpace sites came when they opened up their systems and allowed developers to make applications for their sites
  • Design for multiple levels of participation
    • Low-level: rating, poking, tagging, commenting, subscribing
    • Mid-level: writing statuses, twittering, playing games, adding widgets, uploading photos
    • High-level: making videos, writing blog posts and reviews
    • Expert-level: moderating groups and message boards, creating applications, running feeder businesses on the social network’s “economy”

Putting Jakob Back on the Shelf

  • Stop launching your design activity around pages as the medium… We need to build frameworks that power both storytelling and answer-seeking to occur.
  • Design the new customer experience as a map of interactions. The new experience might be a conversation; it might be a series of decisions made by the user; it might be an interactive storytelling session. Understand what the customer needs, and just design that.
  • Let’s not limit our vision to effective Web editorial styles, properly ordered Cancel and Save buttons, and left aligned lists of mixed capitalization blue links. Let’s design customer experiences that start and end with, well, the customers’ goals and needs—and let’s start with a blank slate. Use storytelling and interaction building blocks—not the building blocks of desktop publishing.

How Micro-Interactions Are Changing the Way We Communicate Online

  • At the heart of micro-interactions is the belief that immediacy, simplicity, voyeurism and constant communications matter. The success of the tools lend credence to the notion that quick, possibly frivolous, short bursts of communication are just as useful as more measured, reflective communications.
  • Web experiences will need to support communication dynamics that allow users to engage in something and report back to their communities in a Twitter-like fashion. Because they have the portability of a social graph, these micro-interactions will take place anywhere on the Web as people interact with their friends in more locations.

How Tiny Applications Are Remaking the Future of the Web

  • One could argue that we are seeing a third wave of software properties—propagated by RockYou—that is differentiated from previous waves based on customization, interactivity and viral distribution.
  • We believe that widgets provide the purest glimpse into the new, improved networked future. It’s an interconnected world where people will select, personalize, share and consume Web services wherever and whenever they choose. Effortlessly.

A Look at Games as Tools, Not Toys

  • Get to know the product by imagining it as a game… Use game-inspired techniques to create a better experience in non-game products.
  • People love instant feedback. It creates a sense of reward through a series of small, doable steps. In games, the steps to “winning” are visually represented and easily accessible. This may look like a coin-counting meter, a halo around your avatar or many other things. Mint.com’s dashboard provides instant feedback on your financial goals. It monitors how every swipe of your card affects your budget and net worth, and even how your spending compares to others in the same city.

Data Visualization for the Online Era

  • The next time you are tasked with providing users with consumption or performance information, or a way of comparing the past, present and future, think of the questions the users are trying to resolve. Then get creative and provide the answers visually. Consider how quickly they can use the information to decide to buy, change, stop or reconsider. Ensure the style of the visuals reinforces a brand personality. The result? Users who will feel empowered, engaged and appreciative that you have saved them precious time and allowed them to make a decision with confidence.

In case this report isn’t enough reading for you can download last year’ report: Desigining for Constant Change.