Tag You’re It!Leveraging the social web for fun & profit

Brian Breslin @brbreslinInfiniMedia.com PubCon 2008

Your Objectives

• Build a community through the community

• Empower the community

• Change your way of thinking

The Social Web

• Social media sites are driving tons of traffic. TONS.

• Your customers are spending more and more time in them.

• The battle is for attention. Are you winning?

• 161 Million Unique (Facebook)

• 61 BILLION Page Views (Facebook)

• 117 Million Unique (MySpace)

• 73 Million in USA (MySpace)

The figures

Figures for September

Steps

• Step 1: Realize you have a community

• Step 2: Engage your community

• Step 3: Cast your nets

• Step 4: Let your community bloom

Its about community

WAIT!

Its ONLY about community

Your community is everywhere

• Stop thinking of your site as a single destination.

• Go to where the people are (lots of choices, you decide)

• Cast your net wide, because....

You can’t fish in a puddle

Where are you casting your net?

Old web

New Web

What this means to you?

• Harder to compete for attention on your own

• Harder to acquire new users (people are fickle)

• BUT People are spending more time online

• AND There are more people online

• so how can this help you?

Building a community from the community

@ theBoaters.com

An Ex: theBoaters.com

• Built a NICHE community

• Started seeding it with PPC acquired traffic (high costs)

• 500 users after 3 weeks ( low conversion rate on signups)

Theboaters + Facebook

• Created a facebook interface for their site

• Accepted facebook logins as their users (PRE- FB connect)

• Redefined what a facebook app was to them

• Grew to 20,000 users in 6 weeks!

So how can you play?

Does your site look like this?

Is your site a silo?

• Are you syndicating your content?

• Are you sharing your site?

• Can your users contribute to your site?

• Can they take the content with them?

What you can do about it

• What opportunities are out there?

• How do we leverage them?

• How do we measure ROI?

• How do we implement these things?

Facebook Connect

• Lower barrier to entry for new users

• They bring their friends with them.

• THEY BRING THEIR FRIENDS!

• Syndicate your site interactions to facebook

• Create a facebook “app” so you own 100% of the page views

• Distribute your content to 160 Million users

• Low customer acquisition costs

What FB Connect can do for you.

Distributed Logins

Social Graph API

Yahoo! Open PlatformMicrosoft Live loginGoogle Friend Connect

What OpenID means

• Dramatically lower your signup friction

• Millions of users (any Yahoo, MSN, GMail, MySpace, or AIM username)

• Paired with social graph = $$$$$

• Reduce spam/pre-authenticated people

Social Graph & You

• Social portability.

• Bring friend relationships in, and blow them out.

• make it dead simple for your users to share with their friends.

Social Graph API?

• POTENTIALLY amazing

• Map the relationships between people

• Use the map to find new connections and customers

Implementing it all

• Not trivial. No matter what they tell you.

• A good programmer can tie in your site to any of these platforms.

• But make sure you think about this stuff BEFORE starting a site

• Your community is key to your social media efforts

• Your community is everywhere (so you need to go to them)

• You can build any niche from the existing communities

Conclusion

Sharing is caring.

Contact me

• breslin@infinimedia.com

• http://twitter.com/brbreslin

• http://brianbreslin.com