“The fault lies not in our ties, but in our selves. In my opinion, RIM’s real problems center around two big issues: its market is saturating, and it seems to have lost the ability to create great products. This is a classic problem that eventually faces most successful computer platforms. The danger is not that RIM is about to collapse, but that it’ll drift into in a situation where it can’t afford the investments needed to succeed in the future. It’s very easy for a company to accidentally cross that line, and very hard to get back across it.”

Anyone interested in Product Management should read the whole article here.

I thought the most interesting aspect of the article was the focus on the Product Management as the solution.  Specific Mike’s 2 recommendations:

“To keep a platform viable, you need to focus on two tasks: Keep the customer base loyal, and add adjacent product categories.”

Very simple advice and focus that many Product Managers forget and Mike follows it up with more strategies for each.

Overall one of the best articles I’ve seen on RIM and excellent reminder of the importance of Product Management.

The changes are mostly minor with Facbeook but the most note-able visual change being the replacement of Facebook Tabs with a small menu on the Left Nav.  The menu includes all the pre-defined Facebook components including Wall, Info, Photos, Notes and Posts.  There is no option to add other menu items or areas.

A “jumble” of personal information is now included at the top of the below the user name, its not overly well formatted and the order seems to be clear.   The jumble seems to default to current job & employer, most recent education, current location, relationship status and partner,  home down, birthday.  I’ve also seen the Jumble show language(s) spoken so it might be related to the most recent changes to your profile.

The top of the profile now includes a 5 photo banner with your most recent tagged photos.  Photos can easily be removed/hidden from this banner section.

The Facebook profile data has also been updated to allow users to interests and activities from pre-defined Facebook Pages.  For example selecting “Rowing” or “Swimming” defaults to Facebook Page for these activities.  One small change is that you can select “with who” for many sports and activities.  This adds a nice social component to these pages but its not clear how to user these community pages effectively.

The other major change is the addition of spoken language to your Facebook profile.  As someone who speaks a little French and even less Japanese it fun to enable these as languages and notice how my Facebook advertising experience changed almost immediately.  You can even see a “Japanese ad” on my profile snap shot.

The new profile clearly has some interesting new features but its also very focused on getting users to self-select their own interests with the hope that this will provide better advertising targeting.  These advertising units are controlled exclusively by Facebook.  There is NO ability for third-party Facebook applications or Facebook Pages to create with a user’s profile pages.  Gone are Profile Boxes, Boxes Tab and Application Tabs.

The main focus of the guideline seems to be around focusing promotional activities on Facebook Applications and not core Facebook functionality.   In order to enter or qualify for a Facebook Promotion an application should be used either on the Canvas Page or a Facebook Page tab.   It’s prohibited for Facebook Promotions to use status updates, commenting on a wall or photo uploads as a method for entering the promotion.  This is very similar to the Facebook Policy against incentivized action for Facebook Applications.  The goal of both theses policies is to prevent companies from encouraging users to spam their friends.

Under the new rules promotions that involve photos will need to handle photo upload and management in a Facebook Application.  In most cases this is how most promotions handled photos anyways.  For example the Pepsi WorldCup Application “Paint Your Facebook”, copied your Facebook picture into a external application and applied your team colours.  The photo was then available for the user to download and manually upload a new Facebook picture.

The other major impact of the new rules are Quiz type contests where a Facebook Page will pose a Quiz Question on their wall and get user’s to response with the correct answer in the comments.  Under the new rules users should be directed with a link to a Facebook Application where they can respond.

While the new rules are disruptive, Facebook Promotions are still a great way to develop a long term engagement with users. After a user “Likes” a Facebook Page it allows the Page owner to maintain a relationship with that user. Posts and photos can appear in the user’s newsfeed and the Page can issue updates to the user. Facebook Promotions are still a key component to a Facebook Marketing campaign.

In the past most Facebook Applications involved considerable development. That’s no longer the case with several premade applications being offered, especially for Facebook Promotions. I’ll be providing a review of pre-built Facebook Promotion applications shortly.   Please send me any feedback you have on contest/promotion applications you’ve used.

If you’re not familar with the concept basically a Groupon is presented for a limited time period, usually 24 hours and a certain number of people have to buy the Groupon for the deal the activate.  In most cases the Groupon offers a 50% discount when you purchase immediately.  Most Groupon’s don’t have alot of restrictions on when they can be used but do have an expiry date.  Groupon also encourages additional Groupons to be purchased as Gifts.  This presents an interesting legal aspect, especially in Ontario, where Gift Cards and Certificates are regulated.

In 2007,  the Consumer Protection Act was amended to ban expiry dates and most fees on gift cards purchased after that date to ensure consumers get their full value, regardless of when they use them. The enhanced consumer protection measures now in force include:

1. Prohibiting expiry dates on gift cards and certificates
2. Restricting fees charged for gift cards to a) customizing a gift card, or b) replacing a lost or stolen gift card;
3. Requiring the clear and prominent disclosure of any terms and conditions relating to a gift card (e.g., any limits to redeeming a card).

Should this protection apply to Groupons?  Are they a gift card or certificate?

Yesterday Facebook launched an upgrade to the Facebook Group functionality, the details of the new features are available here.   I think the more interesting thing is what is missing, the mainly one being the ability for groups to choose their own relationship and communication style.  There is still no good way to maintain a group communication system that scales.

Facebook Groups continue to degrade as users join them and the group owners essentially loose the ability to communicate with the group.  This is an excellent idea to control Facebook Group spam but it doesn’t allow users to engagement in popular groups and ideas that will quickly grow beyond the Facebook Group limits.  In way Facebook Groups should be renamed Small Facebook Groups because the functionality really favours smaller groups.  The Facebook Chat is great feature to chat with a small group but doesn’t scale well to larger groups.

In the end I think most groups are probably better served by something like Google Groups which allows a common mail listing and some basic HTML pages.

The key component to understand with Facebook search is the interaction relationship.  This means that content that the user has interacted with in the past will appear first and may appear in the auto-complete if they have Fan, Joined or Bookmarked the content.

Facebook search then will  display search results based on your friends involvement with content.  This means that individuals, groups, pages, or applications which your friends have interacted with appear at the top.  The next considertation is your network(s) and content types with more people from your network will be assigned priority.  Facebook has indicated they will removing networks but this logic is likely to be replace with geographic filters.

The next concept to understand is that Facebook assigns a priorty to different content types, assuming you have equal friend interactions or no friend interactions.  The priority is generally:

1. Individual user profiles
2. Facebook Pages
3. Facebook Groups
4. Facebook Applications
5. Facebook Events
6. Friend Facebook Posts
7. Everyone’s Facebook Posts

After these internal Facebook content types Web Search results will be presented from the Microsoft Bing search results.

The other major different between Facebook and other search tools is the keyword matching.  The matching seems to be much more strict that other tools and partial keyword matching is very poor.

Across all content types the depth of search seems to limited to the content title.    This is probably the most important tool for Facebook search marketing.  Creating an effective title can increase your placement in search.  Without partial keyword matching a long title will be difficult to match with user keyword and keyword stuff has limited impact because the title on most content sources is limited.

The other important consideration, especially when combined with paid advertising is to get maximum coverage across networks ( geographic, schools and employers ) and across as many friend clusters as possible.   Facebook allows for a number of geographic targeting options and good distribution here can help with Facebook search results.

Since Facebook launched Facebook Pages in 2007 alot clients have asked how their page is
performing.

Sysomos provides tools for measuring and comparing brand performance among across social media and yesterday released a report on Facebook Pages here:

http://www.sysomos.com/insidefacebook/

The report includes the Top 5 pages in each of the Facebook Page categories and includes a comparison between the different categories in terms of overall number of Facebook Fans.  The main advantage that a Facebook offers is the ability to communicate with your “Fan” based using the Facebook Page wall and update channel.   Facebook Pages can also be used with Facebook Applications to provide additional functionality and the basis for more interactive campaigns.

One of the more interesting aspects of the report is the owner generated content and fan generated content.   I believe the ratio between these is a great indicator of the level of interaction your achieving with your Fan base.  It also shows the impact of mass in social media with larger pages ( over 1 Million Fans ) having a much greater Owner to Fan content ratio.

http://www.ebayholiday.com/black-friday

If your not familar with Black Friday, its a mainly US phenomia where retailers enter into the “Black” for the year with the beginning of the Christmas holiday shopping. Most retailers offer significant discounts to get people shopping, and it seems that this trend matchs well with Ebay Transactions online.

Of particular interest is the number of Transactions that appear on the East Coast. Ebay original started as on the West Coast but it would appear to be much more widely penetrated across the East Coast of the US or prehaps East Coast retailers are more aggressive with their Black Friday sales/discounts…

Note: This post can also be found on refreshclassifieds.com

I think the biggest change is the consolidation of communications into the Facebook inbox.  Facebook Invites and Notifications are going away and communication will be divided into Inbox communication and Email.  It looks like both channels will feature an opt-in requirement, making app to user communications very challenging in the future.

I think the consolidation of communication is probably a good thing.  Everytime I see a screenshot of someone’s Homepage I always see hundreds of ignored invites and notifications.  I don’t know that the new system will fix that but it should allow users to find these types of communications centrally.

The other change is around the placement of Bookmarked Applications.  It looks like these will be moving from the task bar to right side bar where the feed filters are located now.  Its not clear where the feed filters will be going or how often they are used ( I suspect they are not being used effectively ).

All of these represent another UI change for users though and Facebook has indicated they want to roll-out the changes by the end of the year.  As always it will be interesting to see the reaction from users to these changes…

• New Group Page design with Tab Interface and strong wall presence.  This makes groups now very similar to Facebook Pages.
• Addition of a LiveFeed option to the Homepage.   This works similar to the Newsfeed but doesn’t allow the same type of content filtering and the Newsfeed doesn’t seem to update as often.
• Remove Feature Items, the featured items from the right hand side have been removed.  These were kind of random in any case.
• Friend Suggest now suggests contacting friends with incomplete or low-Facebook profile usage

The changes are all relatively small but the most significant is probably the LiveFeed addition and it seems users will be defaulting to this in most cases.