dangerouslyawesome

In the last 4 years, I’ve come up with some pretty wacky ideas for how to get IndyHall into the brains of more people and, more importantly, the coworking concept into the mindshare of the ever-changing workforce.

I’ve noticed a relatively typical trend in that the kind folks who operate places where coworking takes place seem to struggle with how to market it and build a sustainable operation to support it.

I’ve been guilty of parroting the “build the community first” as the solution to nearly every problem that brand new coworking spaces encounter. It’s not a silver bullet, and it’s not meant to be. What it does is put the person who’s in the leadership role in the right state of mind – that of a leader and not just a proprietor - of the community space they’re about to attempt to operate. Being in that state of mind puts you in the most advantageous place to solve the typical, un-special problems that you’re bound to come across. That makes solving the weird, hard problems your focus. And if you give it enough time, they will show up.

But that’s not the point of this post. Lets say you’re doing a great job of developing the community before you’ve even got a space, and now you want to start converting those people to paying members so you can support a home for them to work in.

Freemium doesn’t work with coworking.

Free trials are an epidemic with new coworking entities.

It seems to make some sense. Coworking is a new concept, so charging a new member-potential to try something new raises the barrier far too high for them to walk in the door at all.

Except now you’ve created a new problem for yourself. That member-potential has significantly diminished value associated with what you just provided them. How are you supposed to charge them for the same thing the next time they come in?

In most cases, free coworking is being offered by prepubescent coworking spaces. Those coworking spaces lack the critical mass of smart, interesting, creative people that represent the primary attraction for most of the members they don’t have yet. Once you have that, it’s easier to diminish the value a little bit because you’re starting from a much higher offering of value.

But if your goal is to get people in the door that will stick around and help you sustain the business that will operate their clubhouse, you’ve gotta charge from day 1.

Case Study – The Free Trial of Doom

I got a panicked email from a coworking space owner who I’ve corresponded with a fair amount in the past, and I have full confidence is in this for all of the right reasons. The space was only a few months old, but she felt her runway shortening and was concerned about their member acquisition rates. 8 members had joined in 3 months (which, by the way, isn’t that awful when opening a space with 0 members). She was doing all of the things I typically prescribe: get out there and meet your potentials. Find ways to support them. Get them involved. Here was an excerpt from the email:

Many come and try out the space (we offer a one week free trial) but they dont come back, sometimes even after the first day. They all say they love it, the vibe is great, etc., but wtf. For the life of me, I don’t get it. We follow up, send emails, and even anonymous surveys to figure out what we are doing wrong, and people usually respond with either “it’s too far” or, “I absolutely love your space, and will sign up soon.” Soon. Soon doesn’t come soon enough. Rent in our area is high, and even though we got an AWESOME deal on our rent, we aren’t anywhere near break even.

How many times I’ve heard this isn’t a number I care to count, and it breaks my heart.

We offer a one week free trial. Kiss of death.

My response included the following:

A one week free trial is WAY too much. In fact, I don’t believe in free trials at all. You’re devaluing your Workspace before people even walk in the door by making it free. Don’t be afraid to exchange money for goods and services. It’s the only hard rule of business You’re using free space as a “bell and/or whistle” to get people in the door, but it gives them zero reason to stick around. If you can’t get them hooked in an hour, you’re not going to get them hooked in a week.

She took my response to heart and immediately made some changes. Among them was dropping the free week trial.

A few weeks later, I got a follow up:

…over the past week and a half, we’ve gotten 13 new members!!!! I guess I may have spoke to soon… not to mention that a one day trial as opposed to one week has made a HUGE difference! People come in, love it, and sign up!

In 10 days she had more than doubled (nearly tripled) membership growth that had previously taken almost 10x that long to achieve.

These specific results are admittedly anecdotal, and your milage may vary, but this isn’t the first time I’ve seen this sort of course correction.

I also included:

There’s nothing [inherently] sticky about that onboard process that you described. Show up … for free, and then a wishy-washy “I’ll sign up when its right for me”.

Not only does charging from day one give us the ability to maintain value from the moment the member-potential walks in the door, but it provides us with an extremely effective conversion point. It works like this.

Your first day is $25. But if you decide to sign up that day, we’ll happily apply that $25 towards whatever level of membership you’re interested in!

Which works nicely when our basic membership is $25, the same price as our drop in day. So you essentially get 2 days for the price of one just for signing up, and then your 2nd day lets you explore Indy Hall as a member, rather than a drop-in.

Also, because we have the aforementioned critical mass of smart, interesting, creative people, the rate that drop-ins sign up for ANY level is extremely high. We convert our paying drop-ins at a rate of 2:1. That is, for every TWO people who drop in, ONE of them typically joins at some level of membership. At our spring 2010 drop-in rates, that’s a relatively consistent 10 new members a month, and the numbers only climb as our presence grows in our region.

Other things to consider

• Not charging for drop-ins (who contribute relatively less) for the access to space that you charge to members (who contribute relatively more) is disrespectful to the people who pay their hard earned money and contribute
• What kind of people continually use something that provides value and are OKAY with not paying for it? Now compare that with people who happily pay for the things that make their lives better. Who would you rather spend your time doing business next to?

So free is bad?

Absolutely not. But it’s unwise in an early stage business to give ANYTHING away that you wouldn’t otherwise charge for. Instead, give away things that cost you nothing!

• Run free events and make them awesome and open to anyone. Work with local businesses as sponsors. Find a local bar or restaurant and make them your watering hole. They’ll appreciate you consistently bringing them customers, and you’ll love having a place you can walk into and have a good chance of bumping into someone you know.
• Partner with other local organizations and cross promote ideas, events, and opportunities when your core values align. Don’t be a logo slut: make sure partnerships are mutually beneficial, and you’re giving with purpose.
• Share knowledge. Collective knowledge is at the core of coworking and a great way to get people in the mindset of sharing is to lead by example. What have you learned that you can give away and will be interesting and of value to your member-potentials. Who else has interesting valuable things to share, and what formats can you help provide for sharing that?
• Start or support a local Jelly! Many have said that Jelly is a gateway drug to coworking, but I’ve discouraged coworking spaces from hosting Jelly in their spaces for all of the reasons I’ve outlined in this piece. Instead, participate in a local Jelly as members of your coworking space and go with the intent to meet people, not with the intent to recruit. Help a Jelly get started, but I wouldn’t run your own. Heck, even send the people who don’t want to pay for your membership to a Jelly as a free coworking alternative. Let them get hooked on a free version of coworking…there’s a great chance they may end up back on your doorstep wanting “Jelly Everyday” and decide to try out that membership after all.

P.S. Hey Alex, what about offering TOTALLY free coworking all day, every day?

That’s another post, another day.

Are two words that have been bastardized into near meaninglessness (or at least misunderstanding) by marketing drones. Thank goodness Tara Hunt, in her brand new book (just released today!) “The Whuffie Factor“, has this to say:

“Openness and transparency is a great first step, often beyond what your competitors are doing, but it is equally important to take the results of that openness – the feedback and the market research – and integrate it into your product itself. This is more difficult than opening yourself in the first place because there will be a great number of conversations to respond to.”

It’s a small segue from our Cluetrain-a-day series, but you should see a lot of similar themes to what we’ve been discussing for the last couple of weeks in this video. Great work from Michael Reissinger. Scholz & Friends: “Dramatic shift in marketing reality from Michael Reissinger on Vimeo.

I’m a developer.

I’ve spent some time catching up on videos from FOWA London 08, including highlights of some of my good friends giving really great presentations about things that they believe in and think are important.

It’s got me thinking about the audience of FOWA, and how developer-centric the audience is. I think that’s one of it’s greatest strength, really, and a large contributor to it’s ability to focus. FOWA Miami 08 was one of the best conference’s I’ve been to, hands down.

So looking over the roster of presenters, and thinking about their roles…and then comparing them to my own interests to the tune of, “if Ryan Carson asked me to present at FOWA, what would I say”, I came to some important conclusions.

If you’ve had the pleasure of talking to me sometime in the last couple of weeks, there’s a good chance that you’ve been met with a wicked tongue spitting some admittedly harsh words in the direction of social media, social marketing, and PR “two point oh”. There’s an important distinction that I’ve pointed out repeatedly, and it’s that I came from a different background. Having been a developer prior to…whatever I am now…I spent the time building, or building with, the tools that social media marketing is infatuated with. It’s a lot harder for me to be distracted by shiny objects because, to me, those shiny objects are just tools. As I always did, I’m looking for ways to use those tools, assemble the most powerful toolkits, and doing things with them.

I’m most fulfilled when I’m doing.

I’m not a hater, really. I DO hate playing bad cop, and consciously aware that being a cop at all doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. No matter how strong your police force, people will keep committing crimes.

So while I’ve made a decision a few months back to step away from software development on the code side and put my focus on consulting the in the industry of social technology, I’ve inadvertently slipped into the “social marketer” role for a number of the projects I’ve gotten involved in. Whether or not this a strength of mine is not something I even wish to see through, as I think more about the skills that I’ve had historically.

I’ve been a developer in one way or another for the majority of my life. A problem solver. An analyst. I’ve had a knack for marketing myself and the projects I’m involved in. But when that’s the only role I have – being a megaphone – I’m unfulfilled.

Honestly, I don’t think I could ever be an independent marketer long term. I don’t hate on it, I just don’t get off on it either.

So do I need to be a “coder” in order to be a developer? I don’t think so. I never want to step away from code 100% because I truly love writing code, but there are others who are even more whiz-bang than me. If I have something else to offer, I want to give it a go.

I’m still pretty open about the fact that I’m transitioning, and I’m not 100% sure into what. I’ve been admittedly following demand, for the sake of my bank account not bottoming out. But I’m also admittedly desiring fulfillment. I’ve got an undeniable knack for examining a specific market problem, and acting or advising based on the values of openness, authenticity, permissions, community, and social interactions. You can ask some of the people I’ve shared ideas with, formally and otherwise. I enjoy that work, but the closer it is to being a “marketer”, the further distanced from the project I feel.

If I think about my career path in terms of “What would I present at FOWA”, I realize that I should put focus back on development. Not necessarily on code, but on developing concepts, solving problems, developing relationships and opportunities for collaboration. Focusing on the values of coworking as applied to business. Focusing on the values of collaboration as applied to business. The lessons that Geoff has taught me, and the lessons we’ve learned together.

That’s what IndyHall has been all about for the last 2 years, finding better ways to collaborate. We’ve discovered many, we’ve blindly stumbled upon many, many more. How do I share what we’ve learned, share what I believe in, with others and make that my livelihood? I believe that the discussins surrounding IndyHall Labs is an important step in that direction.  I think that it’s based on an a blend of business plus organic creation, software or otherwise. My hope is that it’s a solution worth sharing at FOWA.

Important Update: Alex’s involvement in Round3 has changed.

They say (good) things happen in 3s

A few months back I marked the 1 year anniversary of my independence. Along the way I’ve made contacts and friends across this wide and amazing industry, and even built a home for some of them to spend their time during the work week.

I’ve alluded to, in various places, a new project that I’ve been working on since not that long after that 1 year announcement. Not that it’s been much of a secret but as of today, there’s one more tangible piece to the puzzle in my hands, and those would be my new business cards for Round3Media that you see above.

Over the last year, the types of and scale of the projects I’ve gotten involved with has changed dramatically. Lucky for me, there’s always opportunity for growth when you’re willing to take some initiative and be challenged. Through the year, I’ve had the privileged of working with a number of extremely talented folks, and in an effort to scale things properly, we’ve formed Round 3.

The Name

We kicked around naming and branding for quite a while, and as I expected, the one we fell in love with was the one we least expected.

Ken, Bart, and myself (founding partners of Round3) have all started multiple companies. For all of us, Round3 is our 3rd company. There are 3 of us (supplemented by a well rounded talent pool). There are three phases (or rounds) to most web projects: discovery, design, and development. Round3Media just made sense.

There are some strangely exciting coincidences that have happened while we’re starting up surrounding “threes”, so we’re pretty sure that’s a sign we made the right decision.

The Team

Round 3 is comprised of myself on the technology front, Ken Rossi on the design front, and Bart Mroz on business and project management. Ken’s designs and clients combined with my code have comprised a large portion of my portfolio in the last year. Frankly, Ken was the designer who convinced me that I had what it took to go out on my own in the first place. Bart’s been a huge part of day to day operations of IndyHall and continues to run a successful freelance project management operation.

To supplement our “core” team, we’ve brought Johnny Bilotta and Jason Tremblay on as contract-to-hire associates. Johnny’s designs have appeared ALL over the place recently, from the initial creative for the IndyHall website and business cards, to a number of branding initiatives we’ve done together. Jason’s been active in IndyHall since early on as well, and has been behind the technology for a number of local projects including www.wcdish.com and some of the tech behind the West Chester Restaurant Festival. We’re excited to have these two incredibly talented individuals who are interested in joining our mission.

As far as structure of the team, it’s our goal to keep things as flat and low to the ground as possible. There are three “disciplines” we’re representing (design, development, and business/project management). Beyond that, project and company goals will be discovered together. For as long as we have the ability to keep communication open and not end up with a super-tiered ultra-mega-globo-corp type mentality that I’ll get into a bit later, this seems like a step towards an ideal working situation. Why? Well there’s some problems that need fixing.

The Mission

What’s the mission, exactly? The way we see it, there’s a huge gap between the independent contractor and the agency. And don’t get me wrong, they both have their place. What I’m interested in experimenting with is the space between them.

Working as an indie is great. You have freedom, you have flexibility and agility. You have independence. You can keep your overhead low, and deliver high quality products for a great value.

On the flip side, it’s difficult to be held accountable by larger clients for larger projects. Also, if there’s a need to collaborate, there tends to be some scrambling to get things together and unify the communication for the ad-hoc team. It’s doable, and it’s a very powerful thing (i’ve done it for a long time and we do it every day at indyhall). It just takes more time and energy than most are willing to put out.

Agencies have a high level of accountability and structure. To their credit, the additional organization necessary to pull off larger projects and accounts are absolutely necessary as a supplement to the talent they employ. Certain clients and project types simply cannot be handled by a solo talent.

On the flip side, that additional organization adds cost (both time and money, as projects become more expensive and take longer to execute as information moves through the ranks). This also means that there’s a rather large amount of “whisper down the alley” between a project coming in, and the person executing the tasks.

Finally, as an indie, you rely on collaboration. There’s very small group of superheros who are actually good at hybrid skillsets. You may KNOW HOW TO wireframe, design, build XHTML/CSS/Javascript, as well as back end data driven architecture, but the odds of you being REALLY, REALLY good at all of them are much lower than the chances that you’ve lied on your resume and listed every piece of software you’ve ever heard of as a “skill”. It’s OK. I’m not chastising you. I’m encouraging you to pick a skill to be a rockstar at, and find other complimentary rock stars to work with. If you put 3 rock stars together, you’ve got the makings of a band. That’s what I want to see on a project: less drum solo, more collaborative singing/songwriting/performance pieces. And a little cowbell never hurts.

So really, what’s the mission?

Its our hope that over the next several months, Round3Media will give us an opportunity that a number of other very talented groups have begun to explore. We’re going to dig deep and find out what can be done in the space between indie and agency. Rather than scramble at each project to figure out who’s working on what, and what pieces we need to pull together, we have some stable business process that over arches over our individual indie “practices”. Its a step towards unity, but not so far away from the individuality or freedom we crave.

To follow the band metaphor from above, think of Round3 as a jam session for talented ‘artists’. The session is always at the same place at the same time, but what happens at each jam session is totally unique and special. We’re going to create a construct for business to take place in, but the creative side of web production and marketing will all be more like a pick-up “jam session”.

At the core, for me, this is all about scaling indie methodology.

Process vs Results

When the NotAnMBA guys were in town a few weeks back, they were inspired by the culture at IndyHall and similarly, speaking with Tony from CoworkingNYC. They made a post about a common theme that came out of our conversations and that the majority of us put much higher value on results than process.

Rather than caring when you get to work, where you’re working from, or that you’re “following the rules”…we’re actually more interested in people who are willing to bend or break the mold, try new things, innovate, and get to the highest qualty end result by “any means necessary”.

That openness and freedom for the people that we’ll be working with as Round3 grows is key, I think. It’s the type of process that an indie works on, because they don’t have a boss to answer to. Instead of worrying about the process that I had in mind when I delegated a task, worry about the end product that I had in mind. How you get there, how you meet or exceed my expectations (as an employer or a client)? So long as communication stays open, I’m a happy camper.

So where do we go from here?

Up, is our best guess. We’ll continue to work at IndyHall as we have been, and honestly, not much is going to change. Individually, we’re bringing some really interesting client work to the table that we’d have turned to the talent that sits around us every day for collaboration.

There’s going to be some transitioning of our existing client bases as we try to bring as many of them on board as we can. We’ve all worked hard to build client relationships over the course of our careers, and nothing would make us happier than seeing them served by the results produced by Round3 talent.

For me, personally, I’m going on the road. The next few weeks are travel heavy, as I attend Future of Web Apps in Miami this upcoming weekend and SXSW Interactive 08 in Austin, Texas at which I’m presenting (more on that soon). All along the way, I’ll be showing off not just the cool stuff that I’m directly involved in (IndyHall, Round3, etc) but will be spreading Philly love in any way that I can. I’m so excited to get to show the world, even in these two venues alone, what the talent in Philadelphia is up to. If you see me at either of these events, ask me about what’s going on in Philly. I’ll give you an earful of excitement, for sure.

The IndyHall community is one of my proudest accomplishments of my entire life. Round3, though only at its inception, is yet another moment in time that I’m insanely proud to be a part of, and I’m so excited to see grow from the seeds we’re planting.

[tags]alex hillman, bart mroz, business process, creativitiy, indyhall, jason tremblay, johnny bilotta jr, ken rossi, round3media, scaling indies[/tags]

Preface: I have no idea when I took such a strong liking to marketing, or markets, or strategy…but it’s been on my mind a lot recently so you can expect lots of stuff in this tone to come…I hope, anyway. Back to the post at hand!

IndyHall member Dave Speers passed over the following excerpt from a content and advertising blog that he frequents:

“OVER LUNCH RECENTLY, AN ONLINE publisher shared with me an RFP that he had received. The advertiser wanted to know how many impressions they could get for a million dollars.

The publisher looked at me and said, “See, they still aren’t getting it, are they?” When I asked what he meant by that, he said, “Broadband isn’t about building reach. It’s about building relationships. Broadcast is all about how many saw the advertising. Broadband is all about how much time they spend with the advertising.

“What advertisers should be asking is not how many impressions they can get for $1 million, but how much involvement they can get for that amount.”

“And you can tell them how involved viewers were in their advertising?” I asked.

“Absolutely,” he said.”

from How Much Involvement Will $1 Million Buy Me? by Gregory Wilson, Monday, November 26, 2007

The article goes on to calculate some of the costs and metrics. It estimated 47 hours of customer engagement for a video spot that cost $3000 to produce. Using those metrics, you get a lot more bang for your buck when you’re talking about engagement (also read, time that the customer ISNT looking at your competition’s brand).

The one missing part of the equation/discussion is energy over time.

If you look at most advertising campaigns, the ones coming to the game with the mindset of “massive numbers of eyeballs in the shortest period of time”. When you’re measuring engagement, you need to factor in more time. “Engagement marketing”, or whatever you care to call it, isn’t for short timeline projects. Consider the time frame that a “traditional” marketer would normally spend pushing their content to a 1,000,000 people on days one and two, only to have 4 people look at on days three and four. From there on out, you’re always playing catch-up, trying to come even close to the numbers the first time around. In most cases of “viral”, interest dies off. Any fish you caught in the net are either eaten or tossed back, and you need to expend the full amount of energy for the second round of the campaign.

In that same timeframe, the engagement marketer would be out talking to 5 people one day, 10 people the next…with the intent to make a lasting impression and turn the 15 people into marketers themselves. Ultimately, the people you are marketing to in one of these relationship-building style campaigns should become your street team. Your energy devoted to finding good seeds to that street team lead you to be able to utilize them as an extension of, or an amplifier for, any energy you devote in subsequent rounds of marketing.

[tags]engagement marketing, broadband, broadcast, marketing theory[/tags]

Since this doesn’t exist anywhere except in the admin, I think, I thought it’d be handy to have a list of the payment gateways supported by Shopify.

P.S. This is NOT my grand re-entrance into blogging at dangerouslyawesome.com. my drafts folder has been growing, and the majority of my regular posting has been going on over at the IndyHall website. That will be changing, you have my word.

As of 10/11/2007:

External Payment Services
ChronoPay
GestPay
Nochex
PayPal Website Payments Standard

Credit Card Gateways
Authorize.net
Braintree
CardStream
CyberSource
DataCash
E-xact
Efsnet
eWAY
Linkpoint
Moneris
NETbilling
NetRegistry
PayJunction
PaymentExpress
PayPal Payflow Pro
PayPal Website Payments Pro (UK)
PayPal Website Payments Pro (US)
PaySecure
Plug’n Pay
Protx
Psigate
PSL Payment Solutions
Quickpay
Realex
SecurePay
TransFirst
Trust Commerce
USA ePay
Verifi
ViaKLIX

Checkout Replacements
Google Checkout

[tags]jaded pixel, shopify, payment gateways, nodocumentation? [/tags]

and for some it’s a win, others a loss. Shopify is a RoR based hosted eCommerce solution that, over the last 9 months, I’ve fallen in love with and done over a dozen shops with.

First, lets focus on the win.

The 2nd screenshot from the right is the first Shopify store I ever did, Surfer Supplies online surf shop.

Shopify’s “brochure” site is now at a .info domain. The content is a cleaned up, reorganized version of the previous marketing site, and I quite like the look/feel. I also rather like their screenshots page, which currently has 2 shops I worked on (NoonaCo and Willotoons), though I’m a little sad it’s not paginated. What happens when the current featured screens get pushed out? I’d like to see them archived.

The new Shopify DOT COM site is featuring a screenshot of a global product search…interesting move, I wonder how this will pit competing Shopify store owners against each other. A cool move from a visibility perspective, a questionable one from a community perspective.

In fact, while I’m on the topic of community…thats one of my favorite things about Shopify. The development community has always been awesome, and incredibly supportive of each other. It was a great place to send newbie Shopify developer. Today, Shopify released a new pricing scheme. Previously, their service was free until you made a sale. At that point there was a 3% commission. While this was a tough sell to large volume stores, it was perfect for the MAJORITY of what Shopify is used for…small, boutique shops. Minimal cost until a sale was made. Beautiful. And for me, the sale was easy-as-pie. I had so many people geared up to use Shopify for their next shop.

Then, today brought change. And the people, oh, they’re pissed. The new pricing model is definitively geared towards volume sellers. Great…for them. But what about the little guys? Shopify’s Cody says:

I don’t think that paying $24 / month puts Shopify out of range of low capital startup projects. Installing, securing, backing up, and hosting your own server with Zen cart will surely be a lot more costly, either in dollars or man hours, than having a Shopify subscription.

That will help the sell…but nonetheless, I’m confident I’ll be losing customers to this. Luckily, current customers are grandfathered in. But if you haven’t put your credit card in yet, you’re lost. Never mind the fact that I had the old selling points memorized…this grid is MUCH more complicated, and makes it much harder to make a decision and a sale.

At this point, I’m going to be keeping a close eye on this. I’ve come to love Shopify as a product, and as a selling point. I was able to enable my customers in a way no other product could, and consistently impress. Shopify’s staff has been incredibly responsive and supportive since day 1, so I’m hoping that they take the community’s interest and coming to a middle ground.

This is a great example of creating a passionate community and then, when they could have been involved with the discussion of the direction of the product, they weren’t and now the community is in dissent. It’s only a matter of time before someone starts posting HD DVD encryption codes all over the forum. sigh.

In the mean time…while the community and Shopify’s staff come to terms, I regret to say that I’m forced to look for an exit plan…and at this point in time, I’m really, really stuck to find one that fits as good as Shopify does. Well….did.

Scott, Tobi, Daniel, Cody, Paul, James, and the rest of Jaded Pixel: I’m a devoted fan of Shopify, and hope to stay one. Please, please do best by your community, your users, and your customers.

Wild and crazy final thought: what if Shopify had this plan as a hosted option, and then…open sourced the platform. That is, for people who want ease of hosting, deployment, maintainability, etc…you pay monthly for that service. For those capable of deploying patches, arranging hosting, security, backup, and all of the other costs that go along with e-commerce, provide a self-hosted and open source option. This would be an awesome way to go back to the community roots that you’ve served and have served you, and calm the community down by making every-body-happy.

[tags]shopify, jadedpixel, changes, community, dissent[/tags]

Not only is Brian sharp as a tack, but he’s incredibly cool and way supportive of the things we’re doing here in Philly. Feel free to spend 12 minutes listening to his thoughts (this was moments after he and I met, actually).

Bit of Trivia: Brian’s the guy responsible for connecting me to Annie for BlogPhiladelphia.

[tags]brian oberkirch, marketing, social, SXSW07i[/tags]

There has been a LOT of buzz about Facebook’s F8 application platform since it’s release on thursday night. And don’t get me wrong, I think this is a REALLY cool opportunity to leverage the tools AND the community that Facebook has in place to spread usership and awareness of web apps. Facebook has opened up some ridiculously cool tools to a very large audience. But maybe..it’s too large?

I’m scanning my “friends timeline” and noticing a clear division.

My geek friends are adding Facebook apps left and right.

My school friends (current undergrads and recent grads) have ALMOST no app usage, with the exception of the most popular app on facebook, iLike.

What does this mean? Well, at this stage in the game it means that geeks are bleeding edge and the rest of my friends aren’t as tech savvy. Fine. But long term, will the adoption rise? Depends on the app. I see things like last.fm getting a lot of traction. Music listening habits are always popular conversation on college campuses, and that data will become increasingly valuable to record companies and the artists, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the next step was INCENTIVES from the labels and artists to share your listening habits. Just my own speculation.

But beyond that, I’m having a hard time seeing F8 apps take facebook by storm. Even though facebook has opened beyond the “University Only” model, they have a stigma. In time, that stigma will likely go away, and if F8 is Facebook’s team being forward thinking enough to prepare for it, that’s interesting and awesome in itself. But I think that the Facebook audience at large (the large concentric circle of a large percentage of students in the US) compared to the rest of us who are really excited about F8 (a.k.a. “social networking geeks of the world”) still has huge opportunity for market penetration, like the Last.FM example above.

App developers: try thinking like a student. What do students need and use? I can easily answer the question because I was an on-campus undergrad very recently. Here’s a short list:

• Take-out Food
• Textbooks
• Music
• Nightlife
• Discount ANYTHING

This is hardly the end of the list, but a couple of quick, easy to illustrate examples. I’ll hit them one at a time, and how I think integration with Facebook would boost usership of Facebook AND the service being provided.

When I lived on campus I had little interest in walking to the dining hall to get lousy food that was going to eat a hole in my stomach. Cheap pizza places (2 large pies for <$10) and hot wings (40+ wings for $12) were all over campus, and they all delivered. And the best part? When CampusFood.com came out, I could browse a menu, and then with saved credit card information, click “order”. Cheap food delivered to my door with minimal human contact, and no cash transaction, every college student’s dream. Campusfood (or someone else) needs to integrate this into Facebook. They already claim to support transactions, so that part should be easy.

Scenario: I come home from a party, a few beers in, browse facebook to add my new party friends, poke a couple of the girls that I think are cute, and order a pizza, all in one workflow. And best of all? In the morning I can browse the public timeline to see what all of my OTHER friends have ordered…maybe there’s a new spot on campus that I haven’t tried yet, and Johnny’s sandwich order sounds really tasty…boom. You have personal recommendations without people even needing to talk to each other.

This one’s easy. Facilitating a textbook exchange on Facebook is easier than ever. Someone should do this RIGHT for a change. I’d love to see a Netflix for textbooks, though I understand the challenges of varying versions/editions of textbooks. Still, seems possible. The ability to announce when I’m done with a book via the public timeline and have someone come along and snatch it up seems pretty plausable.

Music

The success of the Last.FM plugin is encouraging, and I already mentioned my thoughts on incentive-based scrobbling. If nothing else, the publicity of “I’m listening to…” being announced on the “News Feed” is free publicity. I’m not looking to get paid for my data in cash, but something from the label to say “thanks for providing us with some of the most valuable market research info we’ve had in years” would be nice. Maybe an album or two of mainstream music that doesn’t blow? Discounts on itunes, etc seems to make the most sense, but again…I’m open to suggestions.

Nightlife

One of the most successful features of Facebook, in my observation, has been the party planning tools. Set a time, place, and invite a pile of people. RSVPs. Privacy from the guest of honor, if you need. Conversation about what to bring. Etc. College kids love to party, but once they grow up past the legal age to drink, many of them move form house parties (where they sit around and drink apple juice, i promise) to the local bar scene. These bars need to be taking advantage of Facebooks new open-ness. Promotions and event invitations with incentives like drink specials, guest list only open bars, theme parties…etc.

I’ve been using Philly2Nite.com regularly (and recently had the pleasure of lunch with one of the co-creators Chris Nagele, who has an awesome eye for the kinds of strategy I’m describing), and think that other city-based niche nightlife sites could benefit from Facebook’s new open platform. Philly2nite has it’s own social network and has come up with some cool ways of leveraging it, but tying the two together seems like a match made in heaven. PLUS, that network extends past graduation because we all know that people don’t stop having social lives when they graduate (at least, I hope they don’t stop). Announcements of friends attending a particular event is easy incentive to get someone to come out to a party that they might not have otherwise, and the Facebook mechanisms are perfect for that.

Discounts/Bargain Shopping

Slickdeals, Restaurant Coupons, FatWallet(and other cash-back deal sites) all NEED to recognize the opportunity to hit a target audience of kids who want to have the hippest, coolest, trendiest WHATEVER but are on a tight budget. Cash back and discounts are quick wins in the eyes of a college student. Take advantage of that, and work it right into my facebook account.

I could go on and on with this list, and if I had more time myself I’d build every single one of these apps, or pursue the means to make them exist. But I’d love to see the mechanisms provided by F8 really recognized better by the greater part of the social economy that comprises Facebook. Let’s see where this goes, and if anyone sees any of my app ideas (or anything similar) please let me know in the comments!

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