Or all you ever needed to know to avoid being referred to as a jackass

Some of you might be new to the Internet or new to social networks or just need some light suggestions, so this is for you. Every day millions and millions of people sign on to the internet for the first time, or join social networks such as facebook or twitter or myspace and aren’t necessarily privy to the social conventions that are already established in these spaces. Its my goal to teach you them in the next 5 minutes. So let’s get started with the basics.

Email:
You might wonder why I even need to include this, but you’d be surprised at how wrong some people are when it comes to email.
Do’s:

• Write a clear and concise subject
• Make use of keywords in your email (think SEO for email) to make it easier to track down later
• Use a custom signature (i.e. don’t send EVERYONE the same salutation at the end of your email – aka “Love ya boo, John Rockefeller CEO”
• Reply to emails you get within a timely manner (my theory is 36 hours max if you aren’t on vacation. 48 is pushing it. – if you are in a service business, try for under 24)

Don’ts:

• USE ALL CAPS WHEN YOU TYPE (its considered yelling, and you can turn off caps by hitting the caps lock button above your shift key)
• Send an email asking about something that you could have googled yourself.
• Don’t reply to an email with only a link to a google search for said question
• Send an email and then call ten minutes later to make sure I got it (unless it’s an important document attachment).
• Forward me useless nonsense (aka chain letters, wtf is this, 1996?)

Twitter:
I could write a whole post about the kind of jackassery going on right now on twitter, and maybe I will, but for now this will have to suffice. Following these simple guidelines will make you a more interesting Twitterer.
Do’s:

• Follow people you find interesting, or actually will care to hear about their lives later.
• Respond to people you follow when they say something interesting
• Share interesting links when you find them.
• Look at the person’s profile and recent tweets before you follow them or send them a direct message.
• Be genuine and authentic, not canned and dull
• Respond to direct messages in a timely manner (think halfway between email and txt messages – so under 24 hours)

Don’ts:

• Send automated direct messages to people who follow you. – at least not when they are sales or marketing messages
• Post only links to your site in your twitter stream (its like spamming)
• Demand people follow you, you aren’t that interesting, and its kind of obnoxious
• Get mad when people don’t follow you back, maybe you aren’t as special as you thought (I know, the horror!)
• Assume everyone who follows you is actually reading every damn thing you post (statistically, maybe 5% really are)
• Use one of these silly pyramid follower schemes, they really only benefit the creator, and are lame, they make you seem less genuine.
• Overtly ask for people to retweet everything you post. A retweet is a powerful thing, be subtle about it.

Facebook
I did a video on this a year ago, will likely follow this up with a revised post for 2009. So here are a few basics.
Do’s:

• Find your friends (real life and people you interact with) and request their friendship
• Share stuff about yourself
• Keep up with old friends
• Add your kids or parents as friends (you can always filter what they can see)
• Reply to messages in a timely manner (if you are under 21, less than 24 hours, over 21, treat it less seriously than email so 48 hours)

Don’ts:

• Add unknown random people just because you want lots of “friends” if you wouldn’t want to talk to them or haven’t interacted with them before, why would you now (send them an email first at least)?
• Spam your friends every day (the fewer things you send out, the less “noise” they become)
• Create a personal profile for a business or a product. There are special fan pages/public profiles for those things. Trust me.
• Poke people you don’t know (its like flirting)
• Request a friend, then not respond to their message back asking who you are (if you are asking them to SPEND attention on you, then it’s the least you can do)
• Ask people to donate their status to you, its cheesy, and not that effective. Much more effective would be to ask them to share a link you had shared (re-share) or “like” it.
• Publicly write pickup lines on girls or guys pictures you are trying to pick up. Send them a private email if anything.

Note, all these rules have exceptions. If you’re traveling, on vacation, or just not near the web, you don’t need to keep such a close tab on the situation.

A LOT of fuss has been made over the transition to the facebook design in the last 60 days, and understandably it is a big change to make to over 100 million people. However, most of those complaining really don’t understand why they are complaining, they just want an excuse to create a group and get a million people on it (so they can possibly spam you or use it to promote other things).

So let me break it down for you in simple terms.

As a facebook user:
The new design means your apps will be able to have better experiences (more screen space for them to fill for you) on the canvas area (the space inside http://apps.facebook.com/whatever ).  The redesign also means your profile will be faster (not a billion boxes loading at once), which will make checking out your friends profiles less time consuming (less time = more profiles you can check out while at work).  It also means applications will be forced to engage with you, not just reward your friends for spamming you (sorry if that was your favorite aspect of apps).  So you should eventually get a richer experience out of the apps (the good ones at least).

As a marketer:
You now get more options on types of ads you can display to facebook users, you also get more engagement metrics to boot. But really the goldmine is in creating branding opportunities with the smart applications and application developers. Gone are the soft-touch applications that had a touch once and ignore forever relationship with their audience, you have to build truly engaging experiences to leverage the brand potential available to you.  The tabs on the user profiles are a perfect place for self-expression and brand affinity, you just have to grab it.

As a developer:
You unfortunately have the most work cut out for you, but who knows, maybe you can get renewed business out of reworking the apps you built before.  To a developer though, the changes are the most dramatic shift in the platform we’ve seen so far. You have to re-work the interactions and demands you are making of your users to build up something that has a more valid value proposition.  What incentive does your app have to bring its users back? What activities or enhancements are you offering them? Realistically good application design hasn’t changed much from the previous platform iteration to now, you just have less incentive to use BAD app design to promote yourself.  It also means this isn’t a real-estate grab as it once was, its an attention land rush. Attention we are going to learn is an incredibly valuable asset to possess in this new economy.

So what next? Where is this all heading? Well I think this all plays into my original theory of a multi-pronged approach, which I discussed a year ago. You need to use facebook as a net you are casting to engage users and drive their activities from wherever they are (in facebook our out) and figure out how to benefit from that traffic regardless of where it comes from.

I waited a week before writing this, why? Well I was busy, and I wanted things to settle a  bit before I kicked up the dust again. But the AOL buy of Bebo is a much bigger deal than we are all realizing or giving AOL credit for. So the $850 Million might seem like an obscene price to some (lest we forget some other large purchases of the last few years make this pale in comparison), and to others it is simply confusing. How could AOL plunk down the equivalent of $20/user on what is ultimately a 3rd place network in the US?

Why the numbers make sense.
AOL’s mostly cash deal gives them an instant boost on the social network scene where their AIM pages project died after not receiving much if any fanfare (AOL seemingly didn’t bother informing their AIM users about it).  It gives AOL a big foothold overseas, where it is still weak compared to its competitors. It also gives it a big chance to cross promote its newly acquired service via AIM, AOL.com, netscape.com and the hundreds of other content properties they own.  For AOL it might be a challenge to recoup the initial investment fast, but they have a much better ability to monetize those page views than most of the players.

Remember AOL owns advertising.com and its whole PlatformA initiative encompasses many advanced ad targeting services that were just waiting for access to billions more in page views to data mine.

What you are all missing.
So AOL now owns 40 million user profiles, now what? Well one thing that people are forgetting is that Bebo has built a fairly robust representation of the social graph on their site. This data which is a goldmine for marketers is probably the second best set of social graph data on the web behind Facebook’s.  So if you think about it, they got a data set about half the size of Facebook’s for about 1/15th the cost.

Stop looking at the battle, and focus on the war.
Folks, the issue isn’t about social networks directly, its about behavioral advertising. Understanding what people want by observing them and then serving both contextual and targeted advertising to them as they search/surf through their properties.  We as a collective whole keep forgetting this about Yahoo (don’t forget they have 400million user profiles, maybe more) being one of the kings at this, but thats another story entirely.  The behavioral battle is being waged on all fronts, but what it ultimately needs is enough  page view inventory to be truly useful to the data crunchers, and thats what a few billion page views a day will give you if you’re AOL/Bebo.

So where do we go from here?
Well I really see AOL trying to promote the heck out of Bebo, and hopefully working on improving their infrastructure substantially. But the first thing we’ll see is Bebo beating the 2008 earnings estimates they had set forth simply by having AOL up their CPM rates from $.50 to $2.  If Time Warner wasn’t such a bad fit with AOL, I would almost recommend buying AOL right now, but then again, maybe AOL + Platform A will be spun off, which would definitely change the game.

I remember getting all excited late last year about Virb, the social network that emerged from the guys at neubix/purevolume. This was supposed to be the anti-myspace with its CSS support and clean designs. So where are they now? compete says under 80,000 users a month vs 5 million on hi5 or bebo.

Does this prove anything? Not really. I was probably more curious than anything. But I am definitely wondering where they are going to play in this opensocial vs facebook platform war.