Facebook’s mindshare of popular culture and it’s goal of world domination is now becoming apparent …don’t laugh, I am sure that a Facebook TV channel is not far away, and am sure that branded pens and cups are also around the corner!!

Farmville is the maybe the  most loved and hated game on Facebook but that is another story. Most of you who read this will be on Facebook and may want to bore your friends and colleagues at your next dinner party or water cooler meeting with some trivia.. here is your chance.

1. Al Pacino’s face was on the original Facebook homepage
2. One early Facebook function was a file sharing service
3. The first “Work Networks” as well as the original educational networks  included Apple and Microsoft
4. The meaning of the term poke has never been defined
5. The average Facebook user has 130 friends
6. There is an ‘App’ to see what’s on the Facebook cafe menu
7. Mark Zuckerburg (CEO of Facebook) calls himself a “Harvard Graduate” when in fact he didn’t graduate (apparently his reply is that “there isn’t a setting for dropout”)
8. California is huge on Facebook with over 15 million users (41% of the population)
9. Australian’s spend more time per month on Facebook than any other country at over 7 hours on average
10. A Facebook employee hoodie sold for $4,000 on eBay
11. Facebook has over 500 million users
12. Facebook has added over 400 million users in less than 2 years
13. If  Facebook were a country it would be the 3rd largest
14. Facebook was initially bank-rolled by Peter Thiel the co-founder of PayPal for $500,000
15. Facebook was almost shut down by a lawsuit by ConnectU who claimed that Zuckerburg stole the idea and Technology for Facebook (the issue was settled out of court)
16. 50% of users are on the site every day
17. 70% of users live outside the USA
18. Facebook is available in 70 different languages
19. It is the second biggest website by traffic behind Google
20. Yahoo offered Facebook $1 billion which Mark Zuckerburg refused
21. Facebook is now valued between $7.9 – $11 billion
22. Most Popular Facebook page is Michael Jackson (Simpsons is second)
23. Monthly time spent on Facebook is 8.3 billion hours
24. Total number of  of active applications: 550,000 plus and growing daily
25. Women aged 55 and up are the fastest growing Facebook demographic in the USA
26. Facebook makes money through advertising  and virtual products
27. This year Facebook is  on track to generate sales of over $1 billion
28. In Australia court notices can be served through Facebook
29. A Facebook court summons in Australia is considered legally binding
30. Facebook has become so popular psychologists identified a new mental health disorder “Facebook Addiction Disorder”

What are you waiting for? Get out there and bore your friends

Who’d have thought it but MC Hammer – yes you read it right – the MC Hammer gave a talk at the Stanford School of Business and it is great.

Seriously? MC Hammer? Stanford?

It should’t be surprising that he is an eloquent speaker as he has spent several years as an ordained minister and that comes through in a way that is really genuine here. Watch it, you just may like it and get some new perspectives.

My response? Can’t Touch This. (okay, bad pun, I know.)

Social media is not a trend and its use is growing exponentially. The tools will evolve and may in fact change, but the need for businesses to incorporate the Internet in general, and social media specifically, into their overall marketing strategy in order to achieve their goals is not going away. Social media will continue to change the way businesses market their brand, products and services because a savvy business is able to be proactive with its consumers, listening to what they want and need and responding to those needs quickly.

Small business owners should be excited about the opportunities available using the Internet and social media to grow your brand and become more visible to your target market. Social media will enable you to reach more people interested in your products and services faster and more effectively without the huge marketing budget that traditional media requires. Social media gives you the chance to reach out, talk with your customers, give them a reason to talk about you and happily share their recommendation with their friends or better, your community. As pointed out in the video, consumers will “no longer search for products and services, they will find us via social media“.

The good news is that according to a study by AMI-Partners, nearly 70 percent of the small businesses in the United States use social media. The bad news is that only 30 percent of small businesses perceive social media as strategically important to their continued business success because they are unsure how to best utilize the sites’ services to grow their business.

What does this mean for your business?

If you haven’t stuck your toe in the social media waters yet, you need to seriously think about doing so. If you have started to use social media but are unsure of whether it is helping, make sure you have defined your goals for social media so you have something to measure your efforts against. As with all marketing activities, you must develop a marketing plan that integrates online and social media marketing strategies and set goals for what you want to achieve.

How will your business take advantage of social media for gaining visibility and growing revenue?

Facebook Pages actually can boost sales, a recent study Rice University in Houston, Texas, recently concluded. Fans of these Pages are, overall, more loyal to a business, spend more and are likelier to spread the word. The study on the Houston café chain Dessert Gallery was done by their consultant Emily Durham, founder of Houston-based consultancy Restaurant Connections, and Utpal Dholakia, an associate professor at Rice who studies online marketing.

“In a nut shell: Facebook fans visit more, they spend more during their visit, they have a higher attachment to that brand,” Dholakia tells us.

Dessert Gallery is a Houston-based café chain with two locations, that’s been around since 1995; the company’s Facebook Page went up in June of last year and currently counts 654 fans. Dholakia points out that, while there has been a lot of anecdotal evidence as to Facebook’s effects on revenue streams, this study had an element of control, as it looked at Dessert Gallery’s customer feedback before — and then after — the Facebook Page was used as part of the café’s marketing.

Dholakia and Durham surveyed Dessert Gallery’s customers via its email list of about 13,000 in June 2009 before the Facebook Page was up and running, and then surveyed the same list in October, after it had grown to about 14,000. The survey in October was also advertised on Facebook. The initial evaluation queried basic store evaluations and shopping behaviors and received 689 responses; three months later, the second evaluation asked similar questions, but also about the Facebook Page, and received 1,067 responses.

Facebook fans, it turned out, are excellent customers.

According to Dholakia’s research, after three months Dessert Gallery’s Facebook fans: made 36% more visits each month, spent 45% more dining out dollars there, spent 33% more at the café’s locations, had a 14% higher emotional attachment to the brand and had a 41% greater psychological loyalty towards the café. Facebook fans also generated more word-of-mouth marketing than non-Facebook fans.

But, Dholakia points out, there are several reasons why this is the case.

First, customers that became fans of Dessert Gallery’s Page were already more interested in the café to begin with and so the Page became sort of a self-selected pool of hard-core customers. However, once the Page began promoting the café’s specials, this group of customers became even more likely to participate or make purchases. Facebook is an excellent and low-cost niche marketing tool, and should be used in conjunction with other media — not as a substitute for a substantive marketing plan, Dholakia tells us.

“You’re not going to get every customer to participate on Facebook. A select group of people are going to be influenced by the Facebook marketing you do,” he tells us. “But you can’t rely just on Facebook itself.”

Dholakia said a more advanced statistical analysis of the customer responses is in the works to control for the fact that data was self-reported and should be available within a month.

A website is a way of communicating what you do to a wider audience. People, sometimes very random people, visit your site, see what you do, how you do it and who you do it with.

Sometimes, if you’re lucky, they stay around awhile and find out more about you. And sometimes if you’re really lucky they will contact you. They make up their mind quickly whether to pursue further reading about you and your business.

But, of course, your website says you are the best in your field, or the cheapest money can buy, or the longest lasting or whatever …. but so does your competitors!

So how do your customers differentiate between you and all your competitors? They take a look at your Social Capital – they ask their friends, colleagues, acquaintances and their family. We all know that our reputation matters but it is becoming increasingly important in the online, as well as the offline, worlds.

Online, your Social Capital equates to what Tara Hunt described in her book ‘The Whuffie Factor’  as the residual outcome, or the currency, of your reputation. I think that sums it up nicely – your ‘standing’ at the Social Capital Bank is a direct consequence of the effort you have put into your community. And the good part is that the more you ‘pay out’ ie the more input you give to your community, then the greater your bank balance.

It is this Social Capital that is becoming increasingly important in helping your customers make an informed decision about whether to buy a product or service from you. Personally, I am using search engines less to find information on the best widget to buy or the best company to get a service from – I use Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Social Bookmarking sites to dip into the collective wisdom of my trusted network. The experience is better as I get real reviews, in real time, by real people whom I TRUST.

Of course, WEBSITES ARE STILL REQUIRED – especially transactional sites because currently there really aren’t alternative digital platforms for the buying of selling of goods and services online. There are, however, moves on Facebook and others, to bring ecommerce and Social Media together and that is a VERY interesting space to be in

BUT, I think the emphasis may shift from your website being THE destination to direct all your customers to, to being more a destination that customers can find ways of connecting to you. This is nothing new – word of mouth and personal recommendation have, and always will be, the BEST way of securing new customers, it’s just that word of mouth is rapidly moving online.

I certainly hope that websites are still a valuable asset for at least a few more years but I recommend that, if nothing else, you keep one eye on the future and ensure that your website is built to be fully integrated with current (and future) Social Media platforms.

Mike Georgeson
I’m an online exponent whose 15 years experience of the internet has seen me successfully define, develop, manage and implement projects for both the Private and Public sectors.

Passionate about how the digital world can help businesses succeed, I am the founder and Director of Netdesk.co.uk, a company dedicated to helping clients gain competitive advantage by enhancing your digital presence.
Connect with me:
twitter.com/mgeorgeson |  facebook.com/mgeorgeson