Last week I had the opportunity to hear Mark Pincus, CEO of Zynga (the company that makes Farmville, in case you didn’t know) speak to a group of Harvard Business School students who were visiting Silicon Valley over their winter break. Mark and I were in the same class at HBS (class of ’93) and while he and I have both started several companies since then, he’s made something of a greater name for himself. OK, I’ll admit it – a lot greater!

Mark has started four companies – Freeloader, which was bought out after 7 months, Support.com, which was profitable and successful for 10+ years, Tribe, which never grew beyond a niche market and was bought by Cisco, and now Zynga, which at the moment is looking to be his biggest success of all. In addressing the HBS students, Mark talked about becoming an entrepreneur, his success, and the lessons he’s learned about creating a sustainable company.
Here are my notes:

• To make Zynga successful, Mark has had to learn all those management skills that bored him so much when he was in business school.
• You can’t run a company of more than about 150 people on personality alone. You have to have goals and processes.
• In his first 3 companies, Mark was being opportunistic about starting companies. With Zynga, he’s intentionally trying to create an “internet treasure” –one of those companies that’s around for 20 or 30 years, and people can’t remember life without it (like Amazon or Facebook).
• At one time, Mark thought the HBS practice of teaching each kid to be a CEO was silly, that these kids need to learn to pay their dues. But now that he’s a CEO, he realizes that he needs more CEO’s. He advocates that you be a CEO in your job, whatever it is. Your boss should be able to go away and not touch base with you for a year, and then come back and be impressed with what you’ve done. And if your boss hasn’t given you a clear enough vision for you to do that, he’s not doing his (or her) job.
• Zynga sets quarterly goals at the corporate level, and then rolls those down to employees so that each person knows his or her role in reaching that goal. Some quarters it works better than others.
• Being an entrepreneur means failing, like a batter will strike out more than he will hit. A true entrepreneur will fail often. It’s important to be able to quantify success, and let a business go if it’s not successful. Mark said he held on to Tribe way too long.


A Farmville post on Facebook. Farmville has over 65 million players.

• Mark said several times that his advice is to know your goals, although he admits he didn’t really have a clear goal until after 40. I would comment that perhaps for some people (Mark, me) it takes until after 40 to learn what your true goals are. Lucky are those who know their goals early in life!

On the funding process:

• Mark repeated a number of comments that he’s blogged about.
  In particular he emphasized that entrepreneurs should keep control of their company and should seek board members/investors who will be partners, not bosses. If an investor doesn’t like the idea of the entrepreneur keeping control, go find someone else (much easier to say when you have a few successful startups under your belt, of course. ) And of course, this rule, which is well taken by anyone regarding any document:
• Don’t email potential investors your powerpoint. Don’t email anything you wouldn’t want posted on the web for all your competitors to see.
• If 3 VC’s say the same thing about your company, you can stop there, as the next 10 will say the same as well (true in my experience.) Instead get your smartest friends together, and if they wouldn’t invest in your company, pull the plug.
• If you construct your agreements right, VC’s can be great partners. And raising money is important for security. Even if your company is profitable, having money in the bank prepares you for the unexpected – and lets you sleep at night.

On the press:

• It was important to Mark that the hype about Zynga and social gaming didn’t outpace the reality, so for a couple of years the company’s goal was to stay out of the press. Once the company’s success brought it into the press on its own, they realized that only their competitors were talking about them, and it was time to start proactively telling their story.
• Being on the cover of magazines is no fun. It’s fun the first time, and it’s fun when your mother is impressed. But the third time, you just get weird calls from people you haven’t heard from since high school. And after that, the fun wears off. But you have to sacrifice yourself to become the face of the company.

*Note: we have video, but are experiencing technical difficulties publishing it. In the meantime, this photo courtesy of Joi on Flickr.

I’m very excited to announce that I’ve taken a position as Director of Marketing at Friend2Friend. Friend2Friend has been a client of my consulting services for the past year, and we’ve mutually agreed that there’s an excellent fit between my skills and Friend2Friend’s rapidly-growing needs.

The simple way to explain Friend2Friend is to say that they develop applications for Facebook and other platforms like Twitter and the iPhone. But there’s much more to it than that. Friend2Friend has expertise at creating engagement for brands. They know how to create games, quizzes, wishlists, or gifts that are so well-matched with the target demographic that users participate, get involved, and actually spread the brand message. There’s a lot of detail in getting these apps exactly right so that people want to use them, and Friend2Friend does it extremely well.

So here’s my quick top-ten list of why I’m joining Friend2Friend:

1. A completely rockin’ engineering team in Barcelona, Spain
2. Fantastic CEO
3. Gallery of creative, successful case studies
4. Strong pipeline of top-notch potential customers
5. Lots of material for cocktail party conversations
6. Ground-floor entrance in a rapidly growing company
7. Office conveniently located by the best salad spot in Palo Alto
8. Will never get in trouble for using Facebook at work
9. I get to Tweet in Klingon whenever I want
10. Social applications are the future of online advertising

I expect to keep up my blog, but may not post weekly as I was doing in the past. However, I’m sure in my new role I’ll be learning a lot of interesting and valuable lessons about social media, and I’ll share whenever I can.

Who are Facebook’s biggest competitors?

Go ahead, list them – MySpace, Bebo, Hi5, LinkedIn. Then comment on how Facebook has left them in the dust with its 350 million members.

Jeremiah Owyang made an interesting comment last week at the panel on social media, saying that Facebook’s biggest competitor is Google. That’s because, he says, Google now allows you to create a profile.

Certainly, Owyang makes a point. Google is the number one site in terms of internet traffic, with a powerful grip on search marketing and a profitable business model (something Facebook still lacks). Here is the latest Alexa internet traffic graph for the top 5 sites–in order: Google, Facebook, Yahoo, YouTube, and MSN. Alexa graphs show percent of internet traffic, not actual usage numbers.

While Facebook’s strong growth is apparent over the two year period, Google’s growth trend is impressive too, and they are clearly maintaining or increasing their lead over the rest of the crowd. (As a side note, isn’t that an interesting uptick in traffic in the last month? While I’d like very much to think it’s a sign of the economic rebound-no such uptick is evident last Christmas—the cynic in me thinks it’s probably an Alexa adjustment.)

Google is also impressive in their breadth of offerings. Of course, they own YouTube, so take the #1 site and the #4 site and lump them together. Then consider that Google competes not just in search, but in email, office applications, analytics, advertising, mapping, location-based services, online payment processing—and many other things too.

Profiles

The one thing not listed here is Profiles. While Google has offered profiles for over a year, they seem to be unclear on what to do with them, and they certainly aren’t promoting them in an effort compete with Facebook.

Not that creating profiles isn’t a popular move these days. In addition to my Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook profiles, Evite is now trying to get me to fill in a profile, as well as Yahoo! and others. And Salesforce’s newly announced Chatter appears to be borrowing most of their features from Facebook, although at least I hear you can import from Facebook so you don’t have to recreate something new.

So Is Google a Threat to Facebook?

One thing I’ll say for Google—they compete creatively. When they started, no one had any idea search could be so big. Who would have thought of Google Earth? Who would have the vision to try to index all books, in and out of print? My guess is that if Google takes Facebook head on, it won’t be by using profiles to create something similar to Facebook. It will be something completely different that comes out of left field that leaves Facebook in the dust. Maybe Google Wave? What do you think?

I attended a fantastic panel discussion last week hosted by the Kellogg alumni organization, moderated by Tom Bedecarre of AKQA and featuring a great lineup of panelists including Dan Rose of Facebook, Marisa Gallagher of Razorfish, and Jeremiah Owyang of The Altimeter Group.

Within social media, the topics were wide open. For a rough set of notes, visit the tweetcloud of #smba.

Some highlights:

• ddudgeon: “I believe #Facebook has more info on Gen Y than the US government.” @jowyang #smba
• jowyang: Facebooks Dan Rose is here, he says that facebook pages can now send messages by geo and language #smba note: this was retweeted multiple times. Here is the Facebook announcement of this feature.
• ddudgeon: Brands: “You’re on Facebook whether you want to be or not.” -Dan Rose, Facebook #smba
• ddudgeon: Facebook’s biggest competitor? Google. Google Profile, connect thru mail, IM, SideWiki, Wave. (and Latitude) @jowyang #smba
• larsv: RT @ddudgeon: Use privacy settings in FB to segment friends because “Our Facebook profiles represent our personal brand.” Clara Shih #smba
• jay_badenhope: #smba To engage risk-averse (and older) execs in social media, share with them what their customers are already saying online.
• ddudgeon: “You shouldn’t use FB and Twitter for the same thing. Content should be different.” @marissagallagher #smba
• marisagallagher: Fascinating reaction from the crowd -”we don’t trust the privacy settings on facebook” – and we need profiles on multiple sites.#smba
• lauren_stark: So cool! U can follow Barbie on twitter! #smba I added John Adams so why not Barbie?
• coopermarcus: #smba when I started using Facebook for business I stopped (mostly) using it with friends – because I don’t trust FB to keep them separate
• ddudgeon: BestBuy, 1800 Flowers doing a good job of letting you buy on FB. -Clara Shih #smba
• hilaryweber: #smba Use social media disaster to create an opportunity to learn and change

Privacy on Facebook and the Use (or not) of Lists

The topic of privacy – specifically on Facebook – came up repeatedly. One audience member said he’d created separate Facebook pages for his business and personal profiles. Another stood up and said that no one in her office was willing to use their own profile to set up their company fan page, so they’d created a fake profile to do it.

Panelist Dan Rose, VP of Business Development at Facebook, asked if these people had tried using the list feature on Facebook. Using lists, you can establish different privacy settings for different groups of your friends.

I do not use lists, and I don’t know anyone who does (please respond in the comments if you do – I’m very curious to hear how people are actually using this feature.) Using lists is tough, because you have to think about who’s on which list and keep it managed and organized – really, who does that? Just the instructions make me tired.

But the real reason I think people don’t use lists is that they don’t segment the right things. Friends lists let me hide or reveal different parts of my profile (eg. let some people see status updates, but not others), but what I want to do is show some status updates to my business colleagues (all those posts about my blog, for example) and other status updates only to family and friends (vacation posts, kid pictures, etc.) The list feature doesn’t allow me to do this.

An Answer

I do, however, have an answer for those who want to create a Facebook fan page. Here it is:

Don’t worry about it.

Once you are an administrator of a page, no one can tell that it’s you. If several people are administrators, they all show up under the fan page thumbnail. In short, no one can identify you.

In fact, sometimes I wish I could post as myself. On the HBSANC page, sometimes I want to post as the administrator: “Who’s coming to Friday’s event?” and respond as myself: “I am!” Can’t do it. If I post on that page, I am HBSANC, if I post anywhere else on Facebook, I’m Gillian.

I recently helped launch a Facebook page for the Harvard Business School Association of Northern California (HBSA/NC), the San Francisco Bay Area alumni organization for HBS. Unlike brand fan pages, this page has a limited audience—HBS alumni in the Bay Area—a potential fan base of perhaps ten thousand.

But like any brand, HBSANC was concerned about potential abuse when setting up a Facebook page.

Sure enough, as soon as we launched, we experienced two kinds of spam.

Soft Spam

The first was what I consider “soft spam”.

Phil Terry is, in fact, an HBS alumn—a fact I could only determine after a cross-reference between the HBS alumni directory and LinkedIn. However, he’s still not part of our target audience because he’s located in New York. He’s trolling Facebook to pick up consulting work. Not a bad strategy in these lean times.

I could have deleted Phil’s comment, but when you delete comments like Phil’s on a regular basis, people start to wonder what else you’re editing. So instead, I decided to reply and turn his inquiry into a little advertisement of my own.

This lets Phil (and anyone else who visits the page for the same reasons) know where we stand on our Facebook consulting needs.

Real Spam

With only 38 fans signed up, I spent a little time looking at who had become a fan. Some were friends I knew personally, others not. I could look up the names in the HBS alumni directory to verify that they were, indeed, HBS alumni. Sure enough, with only 38 fans, we already had 3 imposters.

What was so interesting, though, was that these 3 fans had already been disabled by Facebook. When I linked through to their profiles, there was nothing there except for the name. The account had been deleted.

It’s nice to know that Facebook is out there protecting us from spammers. In fact, aggressive deletion of spammers is, I believe, one of the reasons Facebook has grown so much. People feel safe here. Let’s hope that protection continues!

Despite all the buzz about social media, FAR more people are using email marketing than are using social media marketing.

Email Marketing is Sophisticated

Email marketing is highly developed, inexpensive for brands, and—for many—it works. Collect email addresses from anyone who orders online, enters a contest, or joins a rewards club. Then blast out thousands of emails and see your web traffic jump each time. If you have the sense to target people who actually like your products, it’s not considered spam.

In case you’ve never done email marketing, let me share with you that email marketing has become highly sophisticated for those who pay for the right tools. You can send thousands of emails and see how many people opened them, clicked on each link, or marked it as spam. You can test different subject lines or delivery times, or personalize the content with the recipient’s name or other details. You can even look at an individual and see which of your emails they’ve opened over time.

Of course, many emails are deleted or, even if opened, aren’t read. An open rate of 10-20% is considered good. But email has proven to be a successful way of keeping a brand in a customer’s awareness over time.
Take Chico’s, for example. Chico’s is a women’s clothing store that I sometimes frequent. I’m not a raving fan but I do like some of their styles a lot. I like them enough not to mark them as spam or unsubscribe. I get a LOT of emails from Chico’s. Occasionally I even open them.

Checking my deleted items box, I can see that Chico’s is sending a mailing to me every 2-4 days. Of those, I open and read one perhaps once a month or so. (Their stats probably show me as opening much more often—my reading pane in Outlook triggers a false “open”).

What’s Different About Social Media?

Why bother to move to a place like Facebook? Chico’s probably has tens or hundreds of thousands of email addresses they can reach, and only 1,580 fans on their Facebook page.

There are two answers.

First answer: Times Are Changing.

People are spending more time on Facebook, and less time reading email. They are opting-out of more emails, and creating stronger spam filters.

It has taken Chico’s years to collect their email lists. Building a fan base on Facebook will take time too, so starting now makes sense.

Five years from now, reaching people on Facebook will likely be far more effective than email marketing, even though that’s not the case today.

Second answer: You Can’t Top This

How else can you get your raving fans to make public testimonials about your products? You certainly don’t get this through email. This alone is enough reason to be on Facebook.

I’ve been reading the excellent Startup Marketing Blog by Sean Ellis. Although Ellis doesn’t specifically talk about social media in his blog, he does talk about various free and paid “channels” for growth. The various forms of social media are some of these channels.

Product/Market Fit

But Ellis does not advocate working on growth right away—in fact, he advocates spending no resources on marketing until a startup has found what he calls “product/market fit”. Ellis, who is very metrics-oriented, defines product/market fit as the point where 40% of customers say they would be “disappointed” or “very disappointed” if they could no longer use the product.

Imagine losing your iPhone or your internet connection. Feel lost? Ok, that’s product/market fit. If customers feel that way about your product, you’re in good shape. Ellis even has a survey tool you can use to measure this.

Until a startup has reached product/market fit, the focus is on product development. Social media can be used as a source of customer input, but it should not be used for growth or to generate company awareness. Indeed, generating awareness about an immature product is not only a waste of money, it can create the opposite of what you want – a bad reputation.

Then Growth

Once a startup has found product/market fit, the focus shifts to finding growth channels – any channel where the cost of customer acquisition is lower than the lifetime value of a customer is acceptable. The role of social media here is that acquiring customers through social media—having them find you through natural search because of your blog, or having them discover your product through a friend’s post on Facebook—is often cheaper than advertising. But, if your customer lifetime value is high, then you should use all channels—including social media AND advertising—to generate high growth.

An Example: Enounce

I thought I’d illustrate this with an example startup, and chose Enounce, a startup selling MySpeed, software that allows you to watch video faster or slower than its recorded speed. I know nothing about Enounce other than what I’ve learned from their website, although I am scheduled to talk to someone at Enounce next week so this was an opportunity to review their product and work on my blog at one time.

Using Ellis’s formula, the first question to ask is:

• Has Enounce reached product/market fit?

There’s no way to tell just browsing their website, but the Enounce execs have some excellent tools to answer that question. In particular, there’s a 14-day free trial of MySpeed. While it’s a slightly different metric than Ellis’s, I would say that if 40% of people who take the time to download and try out the software don’t end up buying it, there’s still work to be done on product/market fit.

Of course, many factors play into the purchase conversion, including price and target market as well as how the product works. In addition to working on the product features, Enounce should be exploring markets – where is this product valued? Most of the examples seem to be education, which makes sense – but perhaps the entertainment or publishing industries would have a greater need and deeper pockets. This is a great time for Enounce to use social tools – forums, fan comments, a blog – to gather as much customer input as they can get.

After product/market fit is reached, the next question is:

• What is the lifetime value of an Enounce customer?

At $29.99 for the basic MySpeed, an individual customer who buys only once is still worth quite a bit – let’s assume product costs are $9.99 and the lifetime value is $20. This means a Google Adwords campaign that returns anything below a $20 conversion cost is worthwhile. Sending the ads to a Facebook page, where users can read honest testimonials from users who love the product, may increase the conversion rate and make convert a campaign from unprofitable to profitable. See how it works?

Through all of this, Ellis advocates careful measurement of the right things (eg. how many people purchased, not how many became fans) and experimentation to see which factors affect performance. Does the conversion rate increase if the software is $5 cheaper? Does one industry repeatedly buy the Premier version? Of course, this is much easier to do in a web business than in many business where sales are made offline through a relationship-based sales cycle. But the principles are the same. If you can learn to follow these formulas carefully, and measure the right things, it’s a clear path to profitability and growth.

Next week: A dentist’s office, and the difference between a newsletter and a blog.

Spurred by a delicious burrito lunch the other day, I decided to check out Chipotle’s social media and discovered Chipotle’s Facebook page just a month after its official launch. Chipotle is exactly the kind of brand that can leverage social media, because it generates raving fans.

Chipotle Mexican Grill is a different fast food chain. Chipotle serves “Food With Integrity”, which (according to their website) “includes things like unprocessed, seasonal, family-farmed, sustainable, nutritious, naturally raised, added hormone free, organic, and artisanal.” When possible, they do things like using naturally raised pork instead of pork from CAFOs (Confined Animal Feeding Operations) or locally grown produce, and they build restaurants with a simple yet efficient design that allows customers to create their own burrito and still be served quickly.

Chipotle is definitely dipping its burrito in the social media arena. They have

• A cool, flash-driven website
• A recently released place-your-order iPhone app
• A recent contest for the best image/video about your favorite burrito combo
• A Facebook page just launched on August 31st

Since I can’t possibly review all these things here, I decided to visit the Facebook page and see how it’s doing.

The site was created by combining several unofficial sites, giving Chipotle a jump start to its almost 500,000 fans. Compare this to Taco Bell, perhaps one of the country’s largest fast food brands, which has about 20% more fans than Chipotle despite being far, far larger (did I mention Chipotle is a natural brand for generating fans? Taco Bell is cheaper, but when you eat at Chipotle, you’re saving the planet, dude!)

Starting the fan page this way also creates some challenges. Official fan pages typically have lots of posts by the brand, and hope to get fan responses to those posts. Unofficial pages are usually a lot of fan posts– good, bad, or irrelevant – with no brand response. Chipotle has a TON of fan activity and is doing a truly impressive job in responding to all that fan love.

• A Chipotle representative is answering every single post by the fans, and signing his name (Colin). These aren’t canned answers – he’s got license to be cool and even make a joke here and there. Great job, Colin!
• The fans are talking – and how! There are 10-15 posts from fans each day. Some of them just say how much they love Chipotle, but a large percentage are asking when a Chipotle will open in their city.
• Colin, diligent guy that he is (he was answering on Sunday) “checks his list” and lets people know whether a Chipotle is scheduled for the town they ask about. If it’s not, he lets them know that their vote is counted and not to give up hope, things can always change.

So the page has kind of turned into this “where is Chipotle opening stores” app powered by Colin with his list. A few other topics come up, but it keeps getting back to “when are you opening another store in Smithville, North Carolina”. This is a great resource for fans, who now have a place to ask, and to Chipotle, who can use this input to gauge where there’s a lot of interest in a store.

This is a great start to the transition, and clearly the fans are asking for this information. Here are some more things Chipotle could do to create a stronger brand voice on their fan page and offer more than just answers on future stores. I’d like to see Chipotle posting a bit more often – even a couple times a day is unlikely to annoy fans. Some of the content they might post includes:

• What is Chipotle up to? Sponsored events, store openings, bike races – anything Chipotle is willing to sponsor is likely to interest fans
• What’s CEO Steve Ells doing? Since he is the figurehead of Chipotle, talk about his latest ideas and events
• Feature a supplier of local produce or naturally raised hogs from time to time. Share the challenges and delights of raising food organically. (I could actually see a great blog here– there is a lot to say about the challenges of bringing organic and natural foods to a nationwide chain, and great learning for the future of our planet.)
• What other “green initiatives” are going on? What ideas do fans have for going green? What can fans do at home to follow the same guidelines Chipotle uses in its stores?
• What other suggestions do fans have for the chain? There was an interesting exchange about breakfast burritos, where a fan asked for breakfast burritos, and Colin asked the fan whether he meant breakfast for breakfast, or breakfast food at lunch hours. This could have generated more responses if it had been an original post by Chipotle instead of a response to a fan post.
• Extensions of other marketing activities – it would be great to talk about the iPhone app, and I’d love to see how many more votes that contest would have received if it had been run on Facebook as well as the Chipotle site.
• Finally, while I think the tunein newsletter lists is useful (Colin directs fans to sign up for the newsletter covering their regional area to get updates on local activity) I’d love to see some social media tools to cover this as well – perhaps Twitter accounts – as many of the younger generation are tuning out, not in, from email as a source of information.

Well, that’s enough for now – I’m off to get myself a Chipotle burrito – Sunnyvale location!

Added note: For more information on Chipotle and an interview with Colin, read Rick Liebling’s blog EyeCube. Rick and I were thinking along the same lines!

Last week I gave a talk to the Norcal BMA about “Six Social Media Strategies You Can Start Today”.

All the strategies I shared were designed to meet this simple business objective: Increase awareness of my company with my target customer base.

The strategies are:

• Blogging
• Blogger outreach
• Video
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Forum Interaction

10…11…12… strategies

My talk evolved from a white paper that I hope to publish here on the site, if I ever find the time to finish it. My original title was “Ten Ways to Get Started in Social Media”. In addition to the six topics in my talk, I’ll be adding Wikipedia, LinkedIn groups, Facebook App, Facebook Connect, Flickr, and iPhone app. Who knows how many strategies I’ll have by the time I’m done.

After I finished the talk, someone came up to me and said, “I was surprised you didn’t mention Ning.”

“Aha!” I replied. “Ning is an excellent service, and I didn’t mention it for two very specific reasons.” Ning, by the way, is a platform you can use to create your own social network for free.

• “First, creating a community is not a beginner strategy. It’s more advanced.
• “Second, communities are not typically useful for increasing awareness for your company. They serve other objectives very well, (customer support and brand loyalty, for example) but not that objective.”

Carecourses – Does a community meet their objective?

I’ll explain more by sharing an example with you. I have a good friend who is the owner of a company, Carecourses, which provides distance learning courses to childcare providers. Carecourses offers over 50 different courses and has trained over 100,000 childcare providers.

I recently talked to my friend about her desire to develop a community for her customers. “That’s great,” I told her. “A community will build loyalty among your customers, and keep them coming back to Carecourses.”

“We don’t really need to increase customer loyalty,” she responded. “Once someone takes our courses, they realize that they are the most interesting, highest quality, easiest, and least expensive way to get their annual hours. So typically, our customers stay with us for life.

“Our challenge is to get people over the hurdle of trying distance learning. Many people have a perception that distance learning – correspondence courses – are lower quality than classroom learning. Those people won’t even try our courses.”

“Here’s the problem: ” I told her, “if someone isn’t even willing to try distance learning, they’re certainly not going to sign up for a community about distance learning.”

Typically, the people who join a community are those who are ALREADY fans or customers. Getting people to join your community usually requires advertising – perhaps piggybacked on advertising you’re already doing. Of course, there are exceptions to this – communities like Ravelry (a knitting community) which has grown virally, but the chances of hitting viral success are small, and the investment is very high.

My advice for Carecourses – and for anyone trying to reach non-customers in their target market– is to leverage existing communities that are already successful (and someone else has paid to develop) and match your target demographic. For Carecourses, I suggested CafeMom, since most childcare providers are also moms. Within CafeMom, Carecourses could pay to advertise or start a group. They could try my “forum interaction” technique – answer questions raised by others, on a regular basis, and use a signature line with the Carecourses tagline and web link.

Facebook and the Customer Testimonial

My friend also pointed out that Carecourses gets lots of customer testimonials, but those don’t always make a difference with skeptics. Great point, and one that shows why Facebook is such a powerful force – testimonials have much more impact if they come from someone you know. By creating a Facebook fan page (which is not a community – but that’s another post) and recruiting existing customers to become fans, their loyalty – a testimonial in itself – is shared with their friends automatically via their newsfeed. These personal testimonials on Facebook carry more weight than a lengthy story by a stranger.

If you have loyal fans, a Facebook fan page will help spread the testimonials throughout your existing customer base’s network.

My friend is pretty sharp – check out the Carecourses Facebook Fan page!

What do you think? Have you seen communities increase awareness and bring in new customers?

In my continued research on video, I’ve been exploring examples of Zoos and Acquariums, which you might expect to have some of the best general-audience video around.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium has a YouTube channel with 19 videos that range from 182 thousand views to below a thousand. It’s interesting to note which ones have the most views – certainly not those with the most professional production.

Both of these videos are cute, but the first one has 105k views while the second has just under 22k.

While there are some features of the first that perhaps are better (the second one has a boring soundtrack – good/interesting sound is an important feature of video) I expect that the second also had more promotion from the aquarium – for example, posting on its website or sending to members in a newsletter.

I was also read about a missed opportunity by the Georgia Aquarium. They hadn’t gotten into social media, but could see what they missed when a video taken at the aquarium by a visitor received over 900k views and a lot of press. Watch this video and you’ll see why it’s so popular – short, clever, and makes you laugh out loud. (I read about this in a great article by Computerworld on Twitter ROI)

Of course, most marketing departments still have a hard time putting out a video this un-conservative (with some exceptions – see NetApp’s spoof on Eminem)

My final thought about video this week is that the most powerful videos are those that touch an emotion – whether it’s laughter, sorrow, or poignancy. Whatever your company is doing, reach deep into the purpose behind the company and figure out how it affects human emotion, and try to capture those feelings on video.

Here’s a very simple animation put to a great piano piece, which is a heartstring-tugger (and has over 2 million views).

What about you? What are your favorite videos, and what do you think makes them powerful?