The ENTiPping Point

With a potential announcement coming about Facebook and video chat being integrated to compete with Google+'s "Hangout" feature, I took a gander at Facebook's main page source code this morning.  Scrolling down to the area that loads the Facebook "Chat" functionality, I found these curious bits of code (highlighted).  Have they been there and we just haven't noticed?  Will we see Facebook video chat soon?

Facebook has finally hinted that it will be integrating some sort of Foursquare-like “check-in” functionality in the near future.  My friends on Facebook would see my check-ins.  However, Facebook would do itself a much greater service by leveraging a more valuable asset in its arsenal:

…the weight I place on my friends’ opinion in my personal network.

You see, it may be fun to see where my friends check-in.  I can identify with the places that they go and may even be able to find some folks when I am out on occasion.  This certainly can be used in various forms by marketers who want to leverage these announcements and turn them into loyalty programs or contests.

But I think that Facebook should really take a shot at looking at a total acquisition of Yelp.

Yelp and Facebook already have been integrated in the “social graph”, with Yelp becoming one of three of the first “instant personalization” services that Mark Zuckerberg announced at this year’s F8 Facebook Developer Summit.  With Yelp and Facebook connected, you can visit the Yelp site and see which of your friends are on Yelp.

So why is Yelp functionality so much better than a check-in feature for Facebook

Because I value the opinion of my friends, not just their location.

Yelp is a great service for finding services nearby my current location.  It’s extremely helpful in unfamiliar cities to find restaurants and other services.  I can easily pull up a list of nearby restaurants and see how users have reviewed them on a 5-star rating system.

This is where Facebook has leverage.While I value the opinions en masse of people that I don’t know, how much more weight would I put on the opinions of people that I do know?

What if I could easily pull up Facebook on my mobile device, let it locate me and then see what my Facebook friends had to say about the services in the area?

Even “that guy” that you’re friends with on Facebook who you tolerate has an opinion and that opinion carries more weight than a stranger’s.  Why?  Because you know just how much you aren’t like him and you can make a choice based on what he likes and dislikes.

My network has weight.  The network’s opinion has weight.  And those opinions may be more likely to drive me to one business or another.  In a recent focus group conducted at my employer, we found that when people need a service, they tend to go to “friends and family” first before looking in the Yellow Pages or even online.

My connections and their opinions matter.  Where they happen to be, to me, is merely static.

So I suggest to Facebook something that they've already thought about time and time again and that Robert Scoble mentioned even back in March of 2009: go after Yelp.

Do you think that Facebook is better served with check-in functionality over "friendsourced" reviews?

(Photo by limaoscarjuliet)

Social media discussions seem to be overloaded these days with growth and saturation statistics about the meteoric rise and popularity of this new channel. I have personally been to at least three presentations that have featured the Socialnomics "Social Media Revolution" video in some form. People are fascinated by statistics that show mesmerizing and explosive change. But as a marketer, we're always looking at deeper analysis and trends to see where our market lies and how we can best reach it.

In January, iStrategyLabs released the chart below showing Facebook demographics as of January 2010 and comparing that to January 2009. These numbers were startling as Facebook growth numbers always are, but an interesting conversation with a coworker recently made me question the possibility that there is hidden information that may not be so obvious based on the way the data is grouped.

Meet Melissa

Melissa is a 28 year-old college-educated woman here at our company. When I recently discussed a Facebook project we were working on, she replied that she and her friends "didn't really use Facebook anymore". When I probed her to expound on this, she told me that she and her friends used Facebook when they were right out of college to keep up with each other, but that since that time they really didn't use it all that much. In essence, she was telling me that she was "over" Facebook. Been there, done that.

Melissa and her friends had been part of Zuckerberg's revolution when it opened to the masses in 2006. She was there and a part of it. She and her friends used it, got tired of it, and now aren't on it much anymore. Of course, Facebook has changed significantly since then and there might not have been quite as much to keep their interest in those days. Who knows. But Melissa's story tipped this marketer off to something...
 

Marketers: Beware of Toyboxing and the Facebook Gap

Look at iStrategyLabs' data again and notice that between 2009 and 2010, that the least growth took place in the age 18-24 segment at 51.7%. Go one step up to the age 25-34 bracket and the growth was 127%.

After hearing Melissa's story, I would submit that these two age ranges could be changed to 18-22 and 23-30 and that the statistics would show a hole of growth in the latter category. We could call this the "Toyboxers" category - they've played with the toy, put it back in the digital toybox, but just haven't had that rainy day when they've gone back into the toybox to find the cool toy at the bottom again.

So why break up these categories?  Because I would theorize that the <22 year-old population has discovered the tool for the first time within the past two years.  More of them also have better smartphones which allow posting of Facebook statuses much easier than Melissa's generation.  Facebook is a great tool to post photos, videos and keep people updated and is made much easier by today's technology.

On the other side of the Facebook Gap is the population segment now sharing photos of the kids with their parents, who have also been swarming to Facebook for this very reason -- to keep up with their kids and maybe engage a few friends. 

Mind the Gap

But somewhere in the middle, is the gap -- a void of potentially disengaged Facebook users.  So as marketers, how do we grab the Toyboxers back? What can we do to re-engage this "been there, done that" generation?  How do we make them find value in a technology that has been thrown back in the digital toybox?