I looked them up in our database and sent them a handwritten note and some brand swag, just thanking them for being a Facebook fans and customers.

The couple hours I spent on that was 100% worth it. One of them even posted an Instagram photo of my note on our brand page.

Every marketing manager, VP, or exec should try this.  But don't wait for a reason to apologize.

Sit down and thank 10 customers.  They'll love it.  Reflect on why you do your job, whether you really value their business,  and keep that moment close to you.  

Relatisonhips matter, and having a great relationship with every customer should be your goal.

I mapped my ride with the MapMyRide iPhone app.  After the ride, something crazy happened - I became a marketing opportunity. Hey, I just wanted to map my bike run! A women's antiperspirant had other ideas! 

Interesting- why in the lord's name would I tweet their hastag?  I'm dripping with sweat!  My legs are shaking!  I am a man, BTW, and I have never heard of your product!

I tapped "Close" on the ad  - and started looing at some of the details. I tapped "Route Details" and up came another ad.  Well, at least this one was for men...

As an athlete, I would never have wanted to see these ads. What could they be offering? However, being in marketing, I am accustomed to trying to find out. As my wife set about cleaning her bike, I lingered on the driveway, still dripping in sweat from an agonizing final climb. I tapped the Gilette ad.

Interesting. I signed up for a half marathon Training program...we'll see how they take it from there. Nice setting of my expectations on when the plan will arrive.

As an athlete, I can't think of anything I wanted less than those ads. The targeting for the first ad was hopelessly off, the second execution mystified me because I had to interact with what looked like an ad in order to egt what I want: content.

 The utility and content of MMF is what keeps people engaged - but what happens when all you see is ads?  When monetizing the "point of sweat" - content goes further than interruption.

Our Photos

#Runrocknroll hashtag Photos

The wedding app would manage RSVPs, tell guests where to be and when, make last minute announcements and adjustments and customize all this info down to the guest level. Obviously this would take a lot of the drab paper and social hand-wringing out of it.

Enter Wedpics. Check out their take on wedding photography, which couples can spend thousands of dollars to pay a professional, when most of the enjoyment is the Facebook album you create of the pics you get right away. I think this is the future of event photography - beyond weddings  - where the most meaningful photos are captured, viewed and showcased in real time.  

I wrote to colleagues in 2007, when Razorfish was in discusions with NewCo (the nascent NBC/Fox JV that would become Hulu) that fighting the desire of content to be easily available (even if not free) was not a viable business strategy.  

Then, as now, this is a matter of ideology, because the people with the biggest ideas about content are rarely in charge of setting its price or licensing terms.  

But in the multi-channel world, with connected devices now a threatening alternative to STB-connected distribution, content players should not forget the power of an engaged audience.  They are a monetizable asset, and even if watching for a far lower prixce, creating a low-price tier with identifiable audience members can produce email opt-ins, social discussions, merchandise/DVD/other revenue, and tune-in for other programs.  

Mr. Bilton quotes Holmes Wilson, co-director of Fight for the Future, in the article:

The hit HBO show "Game of Thrones" is a quintessential example of this. The show is sometimes downloaded illegally more times each week than it is watched on cable television. But even if HBO put the shows online, the price it could charge would still pale in comparison to the money it makes through cable operators. Mr. Wilson believes that the big media companies don?t really want to solve the piracy problem. "

"If every TV show was offered at a fair price to everyone in the world, there would definitely be much less copyright infringement," he said. "But because of the monopoly power of the cable companies and content creators, they might actually make less money."

Mr. Holmes is not wrong about the exciting power dynamic in play - it certainly could be empowering to do something the "man" doesn't want you to do. Nevertheless, exercising our inner Che Guevara is neither an effective mechanism of revolution against the industry nor a stricly pleasurable experience (corrupt and low quality BitTorrrent downloads mostly waste our time, if not our money).  Wouldn't a low-price on-demand stream or download just be...easier?

It's myopic to think that adding many more low-revenue streams is going to lose money; it certainly will if the HBO/HBO Go are your only revenue source.  The MSOs and the premium TV providers have to work together to create experiences and tiers whose scope is beyond the cable system, and where even if the price is lower, the experience is better than piracy, which is, after all, a pain in the butt.  But I'm just an idealist, I know.

Drawn to niche sites such as Foursquare and Tumblr, teens appear to be expanding beyond Facebook. According to market research firm YPulse, 18% of teens prefer to "check in" on Foursquare instead of Facebook, and 10% say Pinterest is a better site for browsing.

These behavior networks have experiences rapid growth largely because they ride atop identity networks like Facebook.  These networks do not challenge the core business of Facebook, particularly because: Facebook, and its advertising platform, are everywhere.  There are glimmers of what the Facebook Sponsored Stories will be on Zynga, while playing games like Words with Friends:

Debra Aho Williamson, principal analyst at eMarketer in Seattle, noted that when the firm published its most recent forecast for digital advertising back in February, it projected that Facebook revenue would probably double again this year to $6 billion, a number she said is likely now out of reach.

"Consumers have adopted social media a whole lot faster than advertisers," Williamson said. "It's taking them a lot longer to figure out how to fit social media into their plans. [TheStreet.com]

This gap in "monetization" should be viewed in the context of how all innovation takes time to conquer relevant adoption curves and settle into a business model that works for all participants.  With the pace of today's change, we have cases like Groupon, where the vectors of growth point one way, while the sustainiability of the business is highly questionable.  This phenomenon in the information sector is likely to continue as the flow of information between market participants becomes effortless.  It is even worthy of excellent satire from McSweeney's: Ponzify 

So it's not just about your 2 Million app downloads that net you some nice venture funding for "traction" in the marketplace.  Make sure you're paying attention to how your users behave, as well as how their behavior change when you add "monetization" strategies.  

Watch Facebook's Mobile ad product introductions carefully.  If the users hate the products, and find them annoying, intrusive, or unstable, that's bad for the Facebook ecosystem and engenders the kind of hatred consumers have for companies like AT&T, in which they stay with the company but hate it because they cannot easily leave.  Conversely, if the consumer ignores the ads,  and skps right through them, that's bad for advertisers, who need at least some user attention to get value out of the ads.  The holy grail for facebook is helping to identify the ads in the middle: the ads so content-like that consumers will see them as a net benefit.  

This is small thinking strategy for Facebook, at best.  Which are the two or three brands whose social engagement strategies you like as much as you do their products?  Those are the ads that will be premium inventory in your newsfeed.  The social experiences that consuemrs want, which are so attractive consumers will seek them out for their value, are the name of the game for Facebook, because these experiences will have to rent access to Facebook's identity network.  And that is where the money will be.

Look at the Facebook developer site: Build Facebook for Websites. Build For Mobile. Build Apps on Facebook. These are strategically important initiatives, all taking the Facebook platform and making the digital world more social, but also taking time and attention off of “Facebook”.

From Facebook's Developer Homepage: this is what Facebook is betting on, and consumers are flocking to it. I can't prove it with the data above, but if you're only looking at minutes on the site, that's what you'd see.

Behavior Networks like Pinterest are easy to start because the Facebook Identity layer is there for support - if Facebook were Microsoft it would probably have shut off Pinterest's access to the open graph; Facebook is a very different kind of company.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-facebooks-engagement-has-peaked-and-now-its-falling-2012-5#ixzz1vjRLWPry