by Josh Bernoff

I'm just curious -- corporate social strategists: Are you getting pushback in the face of the potential recession? Are your budgets being cut? Or maybe increased?

Add your comments here or email me at jbernoff (at) forrester.com -- I'd love to hear from you.

by Charlene Li

The 60 Minutes segment on Facebook is being well covered by the usual players TechCrunch, Silicon Alley Insider, et. al) and Kara Swisher has an excellent summary. Here's the video as well, so you can see it directly.

Reading the reaction to the video, especially from the peanut gallery of Facebook and fellow industry watchers, I have a few thoughts:

- Many people said they didn't learn anything new. Come on -- how many of you honestly expected that Facebook (who are notoriously not forthcoming) going to say something new and interesting on 60 Minutes?

- This was groundbreaking, not because of any new news, but because it was completely new for the mainstream. The vast majority of my social circle is *not* on Facebook, and there's now a fair chance that they know at least a bit more.

- Facebook won/lost from the additional exposure. You can say that Facebook came out looking pretty good, others will say that the dive into Beacon at the end potentially scared off potentially new users. I say it was a fair, balanced look at a company that has a lot going for it, and lot to figure out still.

- Google will be challenged by Facebook -- and LinkedIn, and Bebo, et. al. This was my very small contribution to the segment, so I think this deserves a bit of elaboration. Right now, Google is the search leader -- and there's no better place to go to look up *information* like the lyrics for a song, or a list of hotels in Maui. But when it comes to opinion -- such as the best places to visit in Maui for a family with young kids -- Google falls flat. What's better is getting advice from people who both have been to Maui with their own kids *and* also know the interests of my kids.

Here's another example: I recently asked on LinkedIn Answers the best programming language to teach my son (must be signed-in to LinkedIn to view). I received 28 answers, but more importantly, I can see the background for the answerers -- is the person a software engineer or a Web designer? That provides context, which is extremely important in the answer. Google is great at finding facts, not so great (at least today) at helping me make complicated decisions. For that, I need advice, and social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook provides the context for that advice.

- "Is Mark Zuckerberg the right person to run Facebook? Is he too young?" I was asked this question by Leslie Stahl, but it didn't make it on the air. I don't think it's an issue of age - as a first time entrepreneur, we'd be having this conversation regardless of whether he's 23, 33, or 43. He's made mistakes along the way, especially with Facebook Beacon, but remember, he also greenlighted Facebook Platform which has arguably reshaped the entire way we think about this space. That type of vision is what Facebook needs right now, especially if they want to take on much larger, aggressive players like Google. What they don't need -- at least not for a while -- is a "mature" CEO who lacks the vision but abounds in management experience. A better question to ask is if Mark and his team have the right level of judgment that's needed to succeed, especially when it comes to understanding user privacy and advertising sensitivity. This appears to be their repeated blindspot, and they would do well to learn from their mistakes. That's the core of judgment, which is gained only through experience.

- Is Facebook worth $15 billion? This was never a significant issue raised during the piece, and I think rightly so. There's a small group of people -- Microsoft and Facebook's other private equity investors -- who agreed to that valuation. Otherwise it doesn't matter. Lonely CEO Media put it well -- the more important question is does Facebook provide value to users and advertisers trying to reach them. As long as they focus and deliver on this, they can potentially be worth a great deal of money. But is it $1 billion, $10 billion, or $15 billion? I'm not qualified to run those calculations, nor do I have close to enough information to even begin.

Again, I'd like to hear your thoughts about the segment, in particular, what people *outside* of the industry are buzzing about it. After all, in the echo chamber of our industry, our opinion counts for much less than what is filtered by 60 Minutes to the mainstream.

 by Charlene Li

In December, I received a call from the producers of 60 Minutes, the longest running news program on broadcast TV. They were doing a segment on Facebook and wanted to know if I could provide background for the story.

Wow. I couldn't believe that they were doing an entire segment on Facebook. Note that 60 Minutes' audience isn't exactly that familiar with social technologies -- after all, the average age of its viewer is  around 50-60 years old (note: I couldn't find the exact age in time for this post, and this could be part of Les Moonves effort to move CBS News to a younger demo.) All the more reason why I jumped at the opportunity to try to explain the significance of  Facebook and social technologies to this audience. (Besides, who wouldn't jump at the chance to be on 60 Minutes! THE 60 Minutes!)

I was also intrigued about how 60 Minutes would approach the story. Coming from newspapers), I've always had a great deal of respect for 60 Minutes and the quality of reporting (Rathergate not withstanding). Would they try to "dumb" it down? Or would they dig into the intricacies of Facebook, its users, and the hyper-competitive, dynamic environment?

So off I flew to NYC for the shoot. I sat in the chair while they adjusted lights (for the curious, here are two photos of me on the set. And for the even more curious, I did my own make-up). In a little while, Leslie Stahl came in with a stack of papers with questions on them.  I have to admit, I do tons of media interviews, and I was really, really nervous. After all, this was 60 Minutes!

The tape started to roll, Leslie asked her first question, and then ensued the best media interview experience of my life. Leslie was completely prepared, totally on top of the subject, and followed up with poignant questions. It flew by in a blur and I had a blast.

The feature will air this Sunday, Jan. 13th at 7pm ET/PT on CBS is available online. I haven't seen the segment yet, but do know that I'm in it (my 15 seconds of fame). From my interview, I believe that 60 Minutes will do an admirable job boiling down a complex, dynamic subject into 15 minutes. I hope that some of you will watch it (or TiVo it) and come back to comment on this post. I'd like to know if you thought that 60 Minutes -- the epitome of "mainstream media" -- got it right. If not, what did they miss, and how can we as an industry tell our story better?

by Charlene Li

The Data Portability Workgroup (DPW) announced today that Google, Plaxo -- and the big surprise -- Facebook, will be participating in discussion on how users can "access their friends and media across all the applications, social networking sites and widgets that implement the design into their systems."

This couldn't have come at a more perfect time, especially given the flap over Robert Scoble scraping Facebook (and note that he's also a part of the DPW).

A typical day for me includes dozens of email notifications from each of the following services: new "friends" on Facebook, "followers" on Twitter, "connections" on LinkedIn, "business connections" on Plaxo, and the latest that has put me over the edge, "trust contacts" on Spock. Social networking fatigue has finally hit me.

That's five services where my business connections find me. Five services that all require me to navigate from the email to their respective Web sites and confirm the relationship. And it's four services too many.

The reality is I have one social graph, and up to now, it's been pretty content hanging out, in its limited fashion, on LinkedIn. Even with the advent of Facebook, it's been pretty manageable. But the new reality is that business social networking has finally caught on, and the proliferation of niche "social networks" means that these five social networks will likely grow to 10, 20, who knows how many. And the worst part about it is I don't have the time, energy, or patience to manage all of these relationships, yet I know it's crucial.

This is insanity.

Here's an example. Josh Bernoff and I are friends, connected, etc. on virtually every social network. I should be able to state in one place that we are co-authors, and it would be replicated everywhere else. It doesn't matter where I state it, but once I say it, please please please don't make me say it again again and again. And please don't make me have to invite Josh each time we, or our extended networks, join a new service.

And the way to solve it is to give me back control over my social graph. If 2007 was the year of the open social application platform, then 2008, I believe, will be the year of the "open" social graph. There' s a reason why I put parentheses around "open" because it's a pretty loaded word. I don't think MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, et. al. will make their respective walled garden social graphs freely available for people to use outside of their own sites. But if they are smart, they will make it much, much easier for their members to leverage their expressed social graphs.

And that's the reason why I think Facebook has joined the Data Portability Workgroup. By joining the workgroup, they haven't committed themselves to opening up their social graph. I admit, this is a potentially a pipe dream because anyone who is in the position of power -- like MySpace, Facebook, or LinkedIn -- have little incentive to open up their social graph vaults for start-ups to exploit. But Facebook et. al. are smart, and know that unless they participate, they can't influence the outcome to of the open social graph to their benefit.

But I think there are players missing from the table -- communication portals, Yahoo!, Microsoft. and AOL, as well mobile service providers. This is because they own a substantial piece of the social graph as expressed nominally through emails, address books, instant messaging buddy lists, and SMS activities.

I wrote about this waaaay back in July 2004 in my first social networking piece for Forrester. This is what I wrote, and the accompanying graphic:

Users map their relationships with other people, either by personally inviting those individuals into the network, as with Friendster or LinkedIn, or by using software like Spoke Software to scan emails and instant messaging (IM). In the future, social networking software will also work with mobile carriers — eager to retain and monetize users — by importing call detail records to track the frequency and length of calls between social network members.

Relationship Mapping Will Tap Into Technologies To Make Maintenance Easy

From "Profiles: The Real Value Of Social Networks", July 15, 2004.

The idea is we already have social graphs that are expressed in the activities that we do every day -- the emails we send, calls we make, and meetings we have.

Facebook Beacon was an attempt at this, at least in the online sphere. And it shows how ladden this space is with privacy and transparency issues. That's going to be a core piece of the work ahead of the DPW, trying to figure out who has control over what, when, and how it can be monetized. At the core HAS to be user control and privacy, but up for debate is who ultimately "owns" the social data that's created, either explicitly or implicitly through our actions.

Now it's your turn -- let's get specific about what the open social graph means to us, and how we as users want to see it develop. After all, it's *your* social graph -- let's make sure that we have a seat at the negotiating table as well. Comment below, or email me your thoughts.